However, the flip-side is that there are some issues that ACE seems not to care about — like free expression. ACE now warns funded organisations that it will “monitor… artistic and creative output that might be deemed controversial” and requires them to consider “the views and perceptions of different stakeholders, including their appetite for risk”. On the next page of the guidance, there’s the threat of sanctions — from “increased monitoring” to “withdrawal of funding”. This is an object lesson in how to have a chilling effect on culture in Britain. The announcement by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer this month of a full-scale independent review into the organisation is welcome; the Arts Council’s role in limiting artistic freedom must be examined.

The review could highlight the poor treatment of dozens of artists. In 2022, for instance, the gender-critical ceramicist Claudia Clare was invited to exhibit at ACE-funded Burgh House, Hampstead — only for her exhibition to later be cancelled. The director of Burgh House, Mark Francis, emailed Clare to explain: “We respect the rights of individuals to hold their own beliefs, but once these have been made public by an individual, we must consider all stakeholders in the charity and their rights to feel included and safe.” This is ACE’s approach to free expression in action.

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While freelancers who work in the arts are often unwilling to go on the record about their experiences, for fear of losing work, Clare is far from alone. A number of programming staff at a major ACE-funded organisation recently described to me how they were investigated by its HR department after inviting a gender-critical artist to speak. Their jobs are now in doubt because they “exposed audiences to dangerous ideas”. Similarly, a dance company’s tour was cancelled in 2023 after several venues realised the production contained gender-critical feminist content. The people concerned don’t want to risk further damage to their careers by being quoted here.

The same hostility can be traced back to the Arts Council itself. In June last year, Denise Fahmy, an ACE employee of more than 15 years, won a harassment claim against the body. (She has co-founded Freedom in the Arts with choreographer Rosie Kay.) Her case related to another labyrinthine arm of bureaucracy, the London Community Fund, which had awarded an ACE grant — later suspended — to the gender-critical group LGB Alliance. After an internal meeting in which Fahmy was the only person to challenge the view that the LGB Alliance is anti-trans, colleagues circulated a petition which condemned “discriminatory transphobic staff” and claimed the LGB Alliance had links to “neo-Nazis, homophobes and Islamaphobes [sic]”. When she won the case, Fahmy said: “People in the arts, and especially women, are facing a tide of bullying with spurious accusations of transphobia… I hope my case has woken up leaders in the arts as to what’s going on.”

It’s certainly a shift from ACE’s early vision. When I first started working in the subsidised arts in 1996, ACE modestly described itself as “the key funding body for the arts”. And this was in keeping with its founding principles, dreamed up in the post-war moment of cultural democratisation. Growing out of the wartime Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the Arts Council was established by Royal Charter in 1946 to “develop and improve knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts”, and to spread them as widely as possible throughout the country. John Maynard Keynes chaired both CEMA and the new body, and his vision of great art for everyone remained unchallenged for 60 years.

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By the mid-2000s, though, something had changed. ACE had by then become “the national development agency for the arts”, and this heralded an attitudinal shift. Rather than a mere funding body, it began to see itself as the sponsor and patron of the sort of arts it wanted to see. Over time, aspirations towards artistic influence in turn morphed into activism. Last year, the body rechristened itself “the national development agency for creativity and culture”, and announced its new agenda in a 10-year plan, “Let’s Create”, which retreats further than ever from Keynes’s original principles.

Rather than its historical day-job — increasing access to dance, literature, music, theatre, and the rest — ACE now subordinates “the arts” within a grand, utopian social idea of universal creativity: “We aim to recognise and champion the creative activities and cultural experiences of every person in every town, village and city in this country.” And who could be against that? Unlike the more divisive “art”, creativity is a nice, unthreatening word. Some people aren’t into art, but being against “creativity” is like being against puppies.

Yet this dilution of ACE’s original commitment has been accompanied by the politicisation of its internal culture. The Nolan Principles (established in 1994 as an ethical code for public life) require ACE to be objective and “take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias”. But ACE’s impartiality is clearly under severe pressure from many of its own staff. Last year, for instance, ACE’s own independent Equality, Diversity and Inclusion review warned that some Arts Council staff’s perception of themselves as members of the artistic profession, rather than employees of a governmental body, was leading to a widespread failure to understand their responsibilities.

Denise Fahmy saw this first-hand in her time at the body. “The Arts Council struggles with being a mere funder,” she said, “they see their jobs as much bigger than this”. She explains how the Arts Council developed a new environmental responsibility policy, initially requiring funded organisations to supply straightforward data on fuel use to contribute to the Net Zero government policy. This was then developed into a new “investment principle”. Applicants for funding are now required to consider “how creation, programming and partnerships can help support your commitment and provoke debate”. Fahmy says: “If you’re wondering why there are so many shows about climate change, check organisations’ funding requirements. Arts organisations increasingly see themselves as activists, and the Arts Council is driving this through its funding criteria.”

I contacted ACE to ask where I might find an Arts Council policy on free expression. I spoke to a helpful ACE staffer, but he couldn’t find anything. He promised to consult colleagues “to see if anyone has any info tucked away”. In fact, it turns out that there are just two sentences about free expression in the guidance for organisations: “For the avoidance of doubt, we expect all NPOs to support freedom of expression. We see this as essential for a thriving cultural sector in this country.”

The consequences of such half-hearted support aren’t hard to glean. As the need for a government review attests, the original organisation is being pulled apart by the competing demands of political fashion, a levelling attitude to art itself, and the increasing dominance of activist staff. Ultimately, ACE isn’t just ignoring the developing crisis in artistic free expression — it appears to be actively fostering an intolerant culture. “Do not think of the Arts Council as a schoolmaster,” wrote Keynes in 1945, “the arts owe no vow of obedience” — by which he meant obedience to government. What he didn’t anticipate was that, nearly 80 years later, the Arts Council has become the schoolmaster and the disciplinarian, dishing out orthodoxies from on high.

To put it rather crudely, some consider themselves to be “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book argued). By which I mean they want nothing more than equality before the law so that that they can get on with living lives which are pretty much — except in the bedroom — just like everyone else’s. Others, though, consider themselves to be outlaws: their experience of same-sex desire placing them outside of mainstream, “heteronormative” society and they (at least in the case of gay men) would never be so bourgeois as to restrict sexual activity to the bedroom.

It’s the conservatives versus the radicals: the former position is the traditional “equality” argument; the latter is the more “liberationist” one.

But this good-natured debate is as nothing compared to the division that has opened up in lesbian and gay communities following Stonewall’s 2015 decision to re-formulate homosexuality around the nebulous concept of “gender identity”. Its policy today, which it has promoted through its Diversity Champions scheme, is that biological sex is less important than self-declared “gender identity” — an inner feeling of being either man or woman, male or female, which, according to Stonewall, is an identity we all possess. It follows that biological males can be lesbians, and biological females can be gay men. To disagree is transphobic.

It has riven us like never before, and only now is society waking up to this as a slew of private and public institutions pull out of the Diversity Champions scheme. Ofcom is the latest to quit stating that taking part “poses a conflict or risk of perceived bias”.

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The breadth of support Stonewall enjoyed until now was predicated on its small-c conservative agenda; lobbying for legislative equality and wider social acceptance of LGB people, and seeing legislative equality and social acceptance as linked. Its consensus-seeking agreeableness enabled buy-in from politicians of Left and Right. In particular, the issues of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage enabled socially conservative politicians to be absorbed into the equality project.

For radical liberationists, a background of legislative equality was tacitly welcome as a precondition to a more disruptive ultimate goal. On the whole, whether you wanted assimilation or a radically “queer” reshaping of society, Stonewall’s activities were largely uncontroversial among lesbian and gay people.

But the gender identity handbrake-turn fractured that consensus. Stonewall’s strategy for dealing with the fallout has been to insist that there can be “no debate”, characterising entreaties to discussion as equal to debating trans people’s very existence.

The “no debate” strategy was intended to delegitimise opponents’ views while the charity worked behind the scenes with the Government to drive through its preferred changes to the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act before critical voices could get a public hearing.

Today, the “no debate” shield is starting to fail. This is largely down to all those women who refused to concede that a man who claims to to “identify” as a woman counts as a woman in exactly the same way as a biological female does. Stonewall’s stance on gender identity, and the public consultation on the GRA in 2018, created some powerfully angry grassroots women’s organisations, such as Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play For Women. It also produced the LGB Alliance, founded by seasoned lesbian activists Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. (Full disclosure: I was involved in the early planning of LGBA.)

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This means that there are now two lobbying charities aiming to represent lesbian and gay people. Stonewall, which argues that the policies and principles of LGB Alliance (prioritising biological sex over gender identity) are transphobic, and LGB Alliance, which argues that the policies and principles of Stonewall (prioritising gender identity over biological sex) are homophobic.

Nothing represents the extent of this schism more powerfully than the intervention of Simon Callow — a gay man who came out publicly in 1984, five years before Stonewall was founded, when gay and lesbian people were commonly hounded by the tabloid press, and when the age of consent for gay men was still 21. Earlier this week Callow pointed out Stonewall’s “strange turn to the tyrannical” regarding self-identification. And described the “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” that surrounds its current position.

As for the charity’s ideological shift, he said: “When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”

This must be discussed, he pointed out reasonably.

But reason is in short supply. The last few years of gay and lesbian politics has turned the consensus which held for thirty years upside down. Our most reliable lobbying charity, within which most of us used to be able to see at least something of ourselves, has become radicalised and divisive, igniting and reframing that discussion which had simmered in the background but never seemed existentially important in the way that it now does, namely — what does it mean to be gay or lesbian? Who are we?

For many of us, Stonewall’s position conflicts profoundly with how we feel about our gay or lesbian nature. Let me put it bluntly; I experience sexual desire for men, not human beings of either sex who claim to identify as men. My sexual orientation is towards male bodies — and yes, that means male genitalia too. If you explore this on Twitter (and I don’t recommend it) you will encounter people minimising same-sex desire to “genital preference”, arguing that it is inherently transphobic. Stonewall has avoided endorsing this view — but it has also avoided speaking up for specifically same-sex desire.

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Why I can't trust Stonewall any more

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For three decades, Stonewall was broadly representative of the majority of people for whom it lobbied. There was only occasional dissent — a minor kerfuffle over whether or not it should follow up its successful campaign for civil partnerships with lobbying for same-sex marriage, for example. But now, through the fog and noise, one thing is becoming clear; Stonewall’s legitimacy is eroding, and with it the illusion that there is one LGBT community, to which the vast majority of us affiliate.

The journalist Sara Myers disagreed and accused Bailey of racism. She initiated a petition calling for cancellation, which attracted over 22,000 signatures, and co-ordinated a protest outside the venue. The Barbican did what it could to keep the production open, but the protesters were determined to physically prevent people from gaining entry to the work. The police advised closure on safety grounds, effectively abandoning their duty to uphold the free speech of those involved with Exhibit B, leaving the Barbican feeling it had no alternative but to cancel.

A few days later, Bailey wrote: “Do any of us really want to live in a society in which expression is suppressed, banned, silenced, denied a platform? My work has been shut down today, whose will be closed down tomorrow?”

Fast-forward six years.

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Why I can't trust Stonewall any more

By Jonny Best

Tate Modern, along with three American galleries, recently announced the postponement by four years of a long-planned exhibition of Philip Guston’s paintings because of concerns over a series of images depicting hooded Klansmen. Rather than open in spring 2021, the galleries have chosen to delay “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted”.

But there have been no protests — not even a petition. The postponement is entirely pre-emptive and driven by Tate Modern and its three US partner galleries in Washington DC, Boston and Houston.

The policing of artistic free expression has traditionally been carried out by external actors; self-styled morality campaigners, politicians and religious organisations. But today it is just as likely to be arts professionals themselves who self-censor, and, what is worse, attempt to censor or silence each other.

Jenny Lindsay is a Scottish poet. She performs her own work and produces regular events showcasing the work of fellow poet-performers. In June 2019 she tweeted her objection to the view that violence against “terfs” (women who don’t believe that trans women are literally women) is justifiable. For this, Lindsay was denounced on social media as “transphobic” and there began a campaign of vilification and attempted censorship that continues today. The Dark Horse, a respected Scottish poetry magazine, has just published an essay by Lindsay, “Anatomy of a Hounding”, which details how other writers and arts professionals were active in the campaign against her.

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The Scottish Poetry Library, concerned at continuing attempts to censor poets including Lindsay, issued a statement which affirmed its commitment to diversity and equality: “What we do not support, and will no longer ignore, is bullying and calls for no-platforming of writers in events programmes and in publishing.”

In response, Scottish Pen — an organisation founded to champion writers’ free expression — issued a mealy-mouthed statement that scolded Scottish Poetry Library for failing to “address equality issues”. What Scottish Pen did not do is defend Jenny Lindsay’s freedom of expression, despite claiming to “challenge all efforts to silence writers”. Not all writers, apparently.

The blocs of power challenging today’s artists and arts organisations are not just the government or organised religion (with which artists have sometimes rather enjoyed clashing) but social justice movements — with which many in the arts affiliate themselves. From this internal conflict has arisen a widespread collapse of confidence in the validity of universal free expression.

This collapse was in evidence when London’s Royal Court Theatre cancelled its own 2018 production of Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue, and Bob Too at the height of the #MeToo moment, and in the wake of the news that Max Stafford-Clark, founder of Out of Joint, the company staging the play, and also a former artistic director of the Royal Court, was accused of making lewd comments to several members of his staff. The Royal Court and Out of Joint issued a statement saying that “the staging of this work…feels highly conflictual”.

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“Conflictual” feelings are a product of tolerance; accepting something we find disagreeable comes at psychological cost. We feel the dissonance. The Royal Court’s artistic director, Vicky Featherstone, quickly accepted that the discomfort she felt at the thought of continuing with the production was the price of the artistic free-expression rights of everyone involved with Rita, Sue, and Bob Too. She reversed her decision to censor the show.

But toleration finds little place in the lexicon of today’s activist movements, which tend to see it as tacitly reproducing oppression. As a result, submission to social justice orthodoxies is increasingly the price of artistic free expression. Jenny Lindsay is refusing to submit — whereas Tate Modern is doing so in advance, in the hopes of appeasing future objectors. 

The prospects for Philip Guston in four years time don’t look promising, given that the director of Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art — one of Tate Modern’s collaborators in the exhibition — has already condemned the artist by stating that his work “appropriates black trauma’”. This amounts to a curatorial determination that Guston’s exercising of his artistic free expression was morally illegitimate in the first place.  

When pressure is brought to bear on artistic free expression, arts organisations and artistic leaders have a vital role to play as a bulwark against those who seek to tighten restrictions. But this responsibility exists in tension with the conviction of many arts professionals that their rightful role is as progressive social actors, at the forefront of current activist movements. The tendency towards intolerance and literalism within these movements coexists uneasily with the principle of universal artistic free expression, and, increasingly, artists, writers and cultural leaders are dealing with the resulting dissonance by seeking to restrict free expression.

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The line between legitimate curation decisions and actual censorship is often fuzzy; Manchester Art Gallery arguably put itself on the wrong side by responding to #MeToo with the removal of a popular Victorian painting depicting adolescent girls. Nervousness about commercial risk often mixes with the politics; Hachette was just as surely thinking of its balance sheet when cancelling Woody Allen’s memoir as the board of Tate Modern was when postponing Guston.

McCarthyite punishments are on the rise; Mslexia, a magazine of women’s writing, disapproved of views expressed by the novelists Amanda Craig and Lionel Shriver, removing them from judging panels in response. The theatre producers London Artists Projects removed Julie Bindel from its self-proclaimed celebration of free speech, Truth to Power Cafe, following protest from other performers — prompting Index on Censorship to withdraw support for the production.

Jenny Lindsay has everything to lose, but rather than perform contrition in the hope of an easier ride, she stands her ground and gives hope to other, perhaps less courageous, writers. In contrast, four major international art galleries collectively quake in anticipation of possible future challenges to their work — and, in so doing, they insult their audiences and dishonour the artist they should be championing.

Most damagingly, their actions teach all artists a bitter truth about much of today’s arts world; if you deal with controversial ideas, expect to be abandoned if the going gets rough.

I was 18 when the infamous Section 28 became law in May 1988, prohibiting the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities. I don’t know where all this promotion was taking place but it wasn’t at my Cleethorpes comprehensive, which had covered sex education in one baffling, strictly science-only lesson. Homosexuality wasn’t mentioned, let alone advertised.

In 1989, Stonewall was founded and, thanks in large part to its careful, determined work, British society began to change for the better. Life became gradually easier and happier for lesbians, bisexuals and gay men. It was a slow process.

Fast-forward to 2006. I am 35, the artistic director of Queer Up North International Festival, and I have commissioned an educational theatre production addressing the issue of homophobic bullying in secondary schools. Stonewall is co-producing the project and I have been spending hours on the phone to teachers up and down the country, trying to persuade them to let Queer Up North and Stonewall into their schools.

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The calumny that LGBT people are a risk to children is alive and well, and I don’t want what I write here to give succour to those who perpetuate it. But here’s the thing: the Stonewall of today is not the Stonewall I so admired a decade ago. If I were on the phone to those teachers today, I’d advise them not to have Stonewall in their schools.

The government also appears to have spotted that something is wrong. It has issued guidance prohibiting schools from working with external organisations that “reinforce damaging stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear”. The government doesn’t say which organisations it has in mind, but several established LGBT organisations — including Stonewall — produce materials that would appear to fall foul of the new rules. 

The original Stonewall proceeded from a premise which gradually found support across the political spectrum: that the experience of same-sex desire is morally neutral and therefore not a just basis for discrimination. Stonewall’s campaigns to equalise the age of consent, overturn the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, and secure civil partnerships and equal marriage, all gathered social and political support on this basis.

But since beginning to campaign on trans issues in 2015, Stonewall has faced more complex, specialised questions than in its first 26 years, during which it campaigned solely on matters relating to sexual orientation.

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The foundational proposition of modern trans politics is that sex — boundaried, binary, and stubbornly unchangeable — should be replaced with the more malleable concept of ‘gender identity’ — the belief that we all have an innate, irreducible (and unverifiable) sense of our gender, unrelated to biological sex.

The marginalisation of sex in trans activism sits uneasily with the centrality of sex to lesbian and gay activism. I’m a gay man which means I experience sexual desire for male bodies — not for people who ‘identify as’ men (who could be male or female). But the solidarity between LGB and T people has tended to mean more to us than any underlying conceptual frictions; Queer Up North had this solidarity at its heart and trans artists and performers were central to the work we did. 

But when Stonewall decided to campaign on trans issues as well as sexual orientation issues, these conceptual frictions had to be resolved into a coherent policy platform. Stonewall’s response to these complexities was to adopt wholly the precepts of trans politics; the de-emphasis of sex and the promotion of innate gender identity. This has led to some contorted positions with damaging real-world effects.

For example, it has led Stonewall to reconfigure homosexual desire. This is not immediately apparent from Stonewall’s glossary, which, for example, describes a lesbian as a woman who is attracted to other women. But the glossary doesn’t offer a definition of ‘woman’ because Stonewall is keen to dodge the implications of its replacement of biological sex with self-reported gender identity — namely that a woman is a person of either sex who ‘identifies’ as a woman.

It follows inexorably that lesbians must now accept that — to use the phrase beloved of trans activists and their woke allies — “some women have penises”. You don’t have to know much about lesbianism to appreciate that the absence of penis is fundamental to the concept. When a group of lesbians protested at London’s Pride parade in 2018, Stonewall showed them no sympathy. This issue is causing distress and anger for many people, including young women just finding their feet in the lesbian community.

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Its new policy platform has also led Stonewall to look both ways on the issue of gender stereotypes. On the one hand, Stonewall produces excellent materials encouraging young people to explore their lives beyond the boundaries of gendered expectations. On the other, its promotion of gender identity reinforces those same gender stereotypes; a biological male who reports having the gender identity ‘woman’ cannot explain the claim without gender stereotypes. This is not a problem within the specific domain of trans politics, but Stonewall now claims that everyone has a gender identity, and therefore everyone identifies, in some way, with gender stereotypes. While Stonewall continues to make this claim it will continue to be on the wrong side of the government’s new schools guidance.

Having adopted such radical, far-reaching new policies, rather than seek to persuade wider society of their value, Stonewall has sought to silence opposition and enforce submission by labelling heretics — such as women who want to retain the sex-based rights secured by the 2010 Equality Act, and lesbians who reject the concept of the ‘female penis’ — as ‘transphobic’, placing them on the same moral level as racists.

A substantial, and increasing, number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people have had enough of Stonewall’s dogmatism. The founding in 2019 of the LGB Alliance, a grassroots, lesbian-led lobbying group which rejects gender identity, is responding to the demand for alternative thinking.

Stonewall’s brand is powerful — but brands are illusory, and Stonewall’s masks the socially divisive and damaging effects of its current policies. Politicians, schools, NGOs and major corporations routinely subcontract their judgment on LGBT issues to Stonewall, persuaded that whatever Stonewall says is ‘best practice’ must be right. But they should learn to be more cautious, because the new Stonewall is a vastly different organisation from the one which gradually earned their trust.