Making Excuses For Homophobia?

Today, the BBC is carrying an article as the lead of its Entertainment section about an opera which was cancelled after a school decided that - to quote them -

it was still deemed as unacceptable for four to 11-year-olds to be exposed to.

Let's get one simple thing out of the way straight off the bat: the opera company can't be blamed for the collapse of this show. It was due to open in 10 days' time, and it was not their disagreement with the script that led the school to pull its 300 pupils from the production. The company, Opera North, has clearly been driven to make the decision by the school's ultimatum regarding a specific line in the script which the writer refused to alter. Therefore, implying in the article's headline that the opera company has any case to answer whatsoever is greatly misleading. But what of the line to which the school took such offence?

"Of course I'm queer/That's why I left here/So if you infer/That I prefer/A lad to a lass/And I'm working class/I'd have to concur."

Wow.

The writer, Lee Hall (who also wrote Billy Elliot) insists that this is the only part of the script on which he and Bay Primary School couldn't reach an agreement. The school asserts that it is not the simple presence of homosexuality that irks them, but instead the tone and language of the work. Quite how they got involved to start with is beyond me, but the BBC article and interview make it abundantly clear that Hall agreed to change everything but that line.

So, basically, the school has pulled out of a production happening in 10 days' time because of the word queer.

Queer.

Queer can mean strange, but it usually doesn't any more, and certainly not in the playground. It's actually quite true that the word is often used by bullies and in homophobic name-calling, and in that context, yes, it's a bad word. But here, the word is not being used in that context. It's being used by a character to describe himself and because it needs to rhyme with here.

It's quite evident from the writer's protests as to the cancellation of the show that he's not the homophobe in this situation, and so you'd have to assume that the use of the word queer here is not derogatory in any sense. And yet this is the school's excuse. And because of all these things, that's what it smacks of: an excuse. They have pulled their 300 pupils from the production of Beached on the grounds that a - frankly - painfully banal line from the script includes a word which sometimes has negative connotations but in this case definitely doesn't.

At the least, it's cowardice; at its worst, it reeks of actual homophobia, of the literal kind: fear of homosexuality.