Blue Jean: Georgia Oakley on creating a “conversation with the present” about Section 28

Newcastle, 1988. In the wake of Section 28, lesbian PE teacher Jean (Rosy McEwen) leads a double life, establishing boundaries between the sanctuary of attending gay bars with her queer friends and girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) and the escalating homophobia at work, in the family and on TV. Lines are blurred, however, when one of Jean’s students, Lois (Lucy Halliday), makes an appearance at the local lesbian haunt and threatens to expose her, disrupting the future of Jean’s relationship, identity and career. 

Based on research among gay activists and communities, and made with their support, Georgia Oakley’s feature debut Blue Jean depicts gay survival in north-east Britain during the Thatcher era with authenticity and care. Over Zoom, she tells us about the inspirational women behind the film and how the film also celebrates moments of joy.

Scary, in a word. But I also found it exciting, the prospect of being able to develop a character over 90 minutes. We watch many more feature films growing up than we do short films, so when I was making shorts it was a struggle, because the classic beginning, middle and end didn’t really work. It takes such a long time to get your first feature off the ground, and there is an immense amount of pressure, particularly on women, to get it right the first time. You feel like a lot of people have put a lot of faith in you, and it’s quite a lonely, scary prospect.

Rosy and I were very much pillars of support to each other. The fact that neither of us had led a feature like that before was really helpful, because we were feeling a similar pressure. Both of us found ourselves waking up at 4am every morning, unable to sleep any more because of the pressure to get through the day. It’s very intense shooting a feature on a lower budget and trying to keep everyone happy.

I wanted to make a film that was in conversation with the present, with things that are happening now politically. I didn’t want to make a film that felt like a time capsule of that moment. If you look at films shot in the late 80s, you often can’t exactly place them in the time.

It was always a film that was about one woman interrogating her life and her choices, but I also wanted to infuse it with some of the more joyful reactionary movements that came about as a response to Section 28. I wanted to be able to communicate that joy without leaning too heavily on colour as a crutch. A lot of films set in that part of the world haven’t really got much colour to them at all. So colour was important to us, and we used it in each of the locations differently. I was keen to try and steer clear of 80s stereotypes where I could, and to make a film that feels relevant today and doesn’t feel like it’s stuck.

We started by finding a handful of interviews with lesbian PE teachers who had lived similar experiences to Jean working in schools and cities in the north of England. They became a huge part of the process, finding the emotional heart of the film and what was really at stake for them. We ended up focusing on two women, Sarah and Katherine. They came on as advisors and were with us on set to speak to the actors and the costume department all the way through. It wasn’t so much about the more obvious stakes of losing one’s job if one was found out to be gay. It was about spiralling paranoia and how that led to unravelling mental health problems and failures in personal relationships. 

We spoke to activists from the time and members of the queer community who had experienced going to the bars we were setting the film in. We must have met at least 50 people that were in some way involved, and most of them probably came from the activism side of things: the people who started the Pink Paper, LGBT History Month, the people who started Stonewall, and the abseilers who’d abseiled into the House of Lords.

The bog fund [a lesbian co-op] that finds its way into the end of the film was from a conversation with a woman named Hafty who was a TV presenter in the northeast in the 80s. It came up with her very late, but we loved what it said about the different levels of activism.

It became quite clear after we decided to hone in on the experiences of Sarah and Katherine that our story had to be based in a city in the north of England. There was some disparity between the experiences of lesbian PE teachers that we spoke to depending on where they were based. If a teacher had been based in London, because of the politics and public opinion, they were more likely to have been able to have been honest about who they were. The women whose experiences were in line with the story we were trying to tell were, more often than not, based in the north of England and working in urban schools.

I have a lot of family in Newcastle, and I’d lived there for a few years so I knew the geography of the place. I knew the queer triangle as it’s known. I wanted to be able to imagine each of these locations based on my own experience. A lot of the women we spoke to had created physical barriers between where they lived and where the gay bars were, or where the school was that they taught, so that they didn’t run into the students as Jean does in the film. I had this idea right at the beginning that Jean would live on one side of the town and travel to work on the other side.

I came out in my mid-20s and moved to an area of east London, which had been made up of multiple lesbian housing co-ops in the 80s. I was living with my girlfriend and there were so many lesbians living on our street, even though they were now private homes. Gay bars were beginning to dwindle and then, very rapidly, started to decline. I was always thinking about community, the absence of queer spaces and the importance of found family.

I was interested to tell a story of somebody who was still in touch with her sister and explore the microaggressions that she endured, but I was aware that most of the people we spoke to didn’t have any contact with their families as a result of coming out. These spaces offered not only safety but this family and community that they were missing in other parts of their lives. It’s important as the queer community and our spaces begin to shape-shift that we look back at these moments and educate ourselves. I spent weeks in the LGBT libraries in London looking through photographs and reading newspapers. 

The legacy of Section 28, and creating this culture of silence and shame around sexuality for so long, not only meant that no one was able to talk about sexuality in schools or elsewhere but that books like The Well of Loneliness or others were completely swept under the carpet. It’s only now that I’m beginning to find all of the lesbian novels that I could dream of. But The Well of Loneliness is an interesting one because so much is put on the shoulders of that book. I felt almost the same when we were trying to make this film, because there aren’t so many films about lesbians. 

Sometimes someone would read the script and say, “I’m a lesbian and I don’t relate to Jean’s experience, and therefore this is not a worthy film.” I found that to be so problematic, but it’s understandable because there are so few stories about queer women. As soon as there’s one, it’s expected to speak for every lesbian, which is ridiculous. 

Blue Jean, backed by the BFI Film Fund, will be released in the UK on 10 February.