Nine in ten children are being excluded from arts and cultural education due to a lack of funding in state schools. That’s the striking statistic from new research that raised important questions for me: are we seeing an even more stark class divide emerging? And could it be particularly damaging for queer youth?
Learning about this issue felt uniquely disquieting to me as someone from a working class background.
While I may not have gone on to become a musician or an actor, having access to drama and music in school inspired an interest in the arts that led to my professional and academic endeavours in writing.
As I, like many of my working-class peers, battle the odds to try and get a job in the creative sector, the next generation of children are being excluded from even participating in the arts.
It has been shown that those with the lowest incomes in a community are 1.5 to 3 times more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other common mental illnesses than those with the highest incomes.
Add in the context that half of LGBTQIA+ people have experienced depression, and three in five had experienced anxiety, and you can start to see how this extra layer of marginalisation is going to squeeze queer youth’s chances to be creative.
There is a unique intersection of queer, working class people who could hugely benefit from access to the arts to improve their mental wellbeing. They also stand to suffer the most from losing it.
Not only can the power of art and storytelling improve our mental health, it can advocate for societal change. The queer community benefits greatly from spaces that encourage our self-expression at a young age, particularly if we don’t have those resources at home.
It was in these very spaces in school that I made queer friends who encouraged me into the spaces I now inhabit and the causes I now fight for.
Allowing this squeeze on creative budgets to continue seems like yet another demonstration of targeted cruelty from a government which repeatedly indicates it does not care about protecting the LGBTQIA+ community.
This will remain an issue only if we do nothing about it. If we put our energy into ensuring all queer youth have access to the arts going forward, we can protect our joy and our creativity together - like we always have.
This is not the only concerning trend we’re seeing in access to arts. The UK parliament is currently debating about the fair use of art in training AI models - some of which are already using creatives’ work without compensating them.
It’s a sector we’d be fools not to contend with - a new generation has already adopted it. As many as eight in ten teenagers aged 13-17 in the UK use generative AI, often for creative purposes.
But put these two trends side-by-side, and the picture we paint starts to reveal some big questions. Access to the arts is being removed from most state schools, but the creative spark inside young people still needs an outlet. Should they be encouraged to turn towards technology that copies, exploits and profits from queer artists’ work without remunerating them?
Allowing our art to be coldly imitated in order to further a new corporate technology would be another blow to our community, at a time when we have been made so vulnerable by anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric the world over. It would take control away from us telling our own stories - but on a whole new level.
Our queer, working-class creativity, both in education and after, should be allowed to be ours. Ours to build community with, to further our expression and our livelihoods. This is what schools should be providing. We all deserve a creative outlet to express ourselves without exploiting others.
We deserve good news too.
When there is so much hate out there, it's easy to get swept up in the doom.
QueerAF doesn't do that. We sprinkle in the joy that is the lifeblood of why being LGBTQIA+ is so simply wonderful.
And in the newsletter where this was first published, there was actually a bunch of positive news to celebrate. It shows me that despite the headlines knocking us down, we're getting right back up again and using our anger to fuel our fight.
While the rest of the media cashes in on hate about us, we can focus on queer joy - because you drive us. The community. QueerAF readers - not advertisers.
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