When I was thirteen years old a man was murdered in a park mere minutes from my front door. While in some cities this fact wouldn’t be so shocking, I grew up a sleepy wee Scottish one all but renowned for being quaint, elderly, and above all, boring. Murders don’t happen in Perth, Scotland. Or so I thought.

James Kerr was a fifty-one year old council employee when he lost his life — or rather had it taken from him in the early hours of the 22nd of April 2007. His murderers were three men — boys, really — one of whom was only fifteen years old at the time, even if he didn’t look it. I knew this boy, although not personally. He was mates with my brother. He went to my high school. A big guy. Friendly. Popular. Not really the type I thought would be involved in a murder later described by a judge as of a ‘callous and brutal character’.

I suppose that in the aftermath of any murder people always ponder what the motive was. However, in this case, the place where James Kerr’s body was found gave most residents of Perth a pretty good idea as to why he had been killed. His body was discovered on the South Inch, a park known, by night, to transform into Perth’s premier gay cruising ground. It remains an unfortunate reality that Perth doesn’t offer much in the way of nightlife for its gay population. So, compelled by discretion or shame or mere desire, men like James Kerr found companionship amongst the bushes of the local park. And, in doing so, left themselves vulnerable to the prejudices of people who found such behaviour abhorrent. Disgusting, even.

Lots of things tell young boys that being gay is unnatural: the sexuality of the superheroes they adore, the playground insults that equate being gay with weakness, the fact that no professional footballer could be gay and successful without spiralling into tragedy. But it is only in hindsight that we realise the things that affected us the most. The insults or silence that scared us into denial. For the most part this is a process that happens slowly: the insults pile up and the fear grows larger until eventually it feels like secrecy is the only option. However, most wee gay boys don’t get as obvious a message as I got when I was thirteen.

Being gay wouldn’t just get me bullied; it could get me killed.

***

For the first five years of my time at Caledonian Road Primary School — a sandstone Victorian behemoth just outside Perth’s city centre — my teachers’ had been universally wonderful: all of them smiley, kind and utterly devoted women who wanted nothing more than for their pupils to be both successful and happy. They were, in short, good at their jobs. In Primary 6, however, all of that was to change.

My new teacher had short blonde hair, a wrinkled mouth and the dress sense of a prison receptionist. While the rest of the teachers attempted to lessen the Victorian drabness of their classrooms by adorning them with modern comforts, she seemed unwilling to inject any of the kindnesses that had rightfully slipped into education over the past hundred years. The supposedly enjoyable tasks that Primary 6 classes were permitted to do, like the building of a small battery-powered wooden car, transformed themselves into dreaded hardships under her rule.

On the first day of Primary 6 it became clear that she did not discipline her pupils like the other teachers, either. I was eleven years old at the time and thought that punishments were only used when my classmates genuinely did something wrong. Michael would get sent out for punching someone in the arm, or Steven for throwing a tantrum and disturbing the lesson; but it didn’t mean that the teachers’ held it against them. They were invited back in and given a second chance to behave and be included in the lesson, which, most of the time, they took. In my experience even the most troublesome child could be made to behave if the teacher clearly defined the limits of what they would, and wouldn’t, accept. This teacher’s class didn’t work like that.

Her rule was both spiteful and confusing. She sent people out for the most minor transgressions; would make villains out of children who, for the past five years, had been ideal pupils. A mumbled answer or a case of stage fright in front of the class was enough to receive punishment. One girl, my best friend at the time, was so scared of her she spent the entire year in the hallway being taught by a classroom assistant.

It was in a music lesson on a drizzly morning that this teacher came for me. In it she would hurl upon me an insult that despite my best efforts I have never been able to forget. Even though I was a relatively stellar student — obedient, quiet, good grades — I was, like all children, prone to occasional distraction. My primary school class had been branded as ‘difficult’ by the faculty, largely because it contained numerous children with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder who, understandably, required additional attention and were liable to disturb lessons that did not keep them engaged. Perhaps, as a student without these additional needs, I was held to a different standard of behaviour; a standard that was unforgiving of childish distraction.

On that morning my usual obedience was apparently lacking. While we sat on the threadbare carpet waiting for the class to start, I was doing what eleven year-old children are apt to do in moments of idleness: playing. A girl called Freya and myself were doing a convoluted handshake stolen, no doubt, from some TV show or VHS cartoon. At some point our teacher had decided the time had come for silence. Whether it was purposeful neglect of this order or simply absorption in our game, for some reason Freya and I didn’t immediately submit to this demand. So, with more venom than I think was necessary, this teacher took the opportunity not only to silence, but to humiliate. In front of my classmates — the boys I played football with at lunchtime, the girls who invited me to their birthday parties — she decided it was appropriate to question something that I, myself, had never questioned: my gender.

Do you want to be a girl! Get out!

I do not phrase this intended insult as a question because it was not treated as one; I was given no opportunity to respond. As much as it may seem precious to say so, I think those words haunted me until the very moment I came out as gay nearly seven years later. I had been batting off accusations about my sexuality from classmates for years, mainly because I had a lisp and most of my friends were girls. But never before had an adult aired this accusation, even if they might have thought it. To do so in the public forum of a classroom seemed doubly insulting; it allowed everyone who witnessed it to leap upon the claim with increased vigour. You’re gay! Even the teacher thinks so!

This teacher knew the one weak point of my life — the one thing she could laser upon that would make me feel self-conscious and fully submit to her malevolent rule. She knew the effeminate boy whose friends were mostly female was scared of being labelled ‘girly’ — was scared, in fact, of being gay. And so, despite the fact that Section 28 had been repealed a few years previous, she sought to do what, in a way, the law had once prescribed: to inform me — and everyone who witnessed my humiliation — that being gay was not just embarrassing, but unacceptable.

Which is why the news that LGBT education was to be rolled out across the entirety of the UK came as a great relief to me. Teachers like mine would be legally required to understand the importance of teaching children about different sexualities (and would surely learn a lot themselves, too). The tide was turning. While I may have left my school years in complete ignorance of what it meant to be gay, perhaps these new lessons would finally mean that children left high school knowing that their sexuality wasn’t shameful. Wasn’t something that should only be permitted to exist outside of school hours. Furthermore, it would teach all children to respect LGBT people (an evidently glaring hole in the curriculum).

However, amidst the mass of news stories regrettably overshadowed by the fuckery of Brexit, I discovered one that, I hope, will stand as an example of exactly what not to do in the face of protest to this new curriculum. In Birmingham, hundreds of parents whose children attend Parkfield School have been protesting against the teaching of the ‘No Outsiders’ program, which teaches children about LGBT people and normalises their alternative family arrangements.

The contestation over the teaching of these lessons has its roots in the apparent conflict between religious morals and homosexuality. Muslim parents don’t believe their children should be taught about something that is condemned by their holy scripture. Withered by the protests, Parkfield School has ‘paused’ the teaching of the program. In doing so, they profoundly highlight the dire necessity of LGBT education in.

The boys who murdered James Kerr did so because they had never been taught that his way of life was anything other than repulsive. After Kerr had approached one of them, they hunted him down, violently assaulted him and left him, bleeding, on a path by the boating pond. Later, on returning from a party, they would once again walk through the Inch and past Kerr, who was still lying where they had left him. One would steal his keys and cigarette lighter and throw them in the pond. A police source would later tell The Daily Record that the injuries Mr Kerr suffered, especially around the head, were among the worst they had ever seen.

That such a violent murder could occur in Perth shocked a lot of people, especially those who knew James Kerr. He was, by all accounts, a friendly and polite resident of the city. As one of his former colleagues told a newspaper after his murder: ‘We knew James was gay because he made no secret of it. He had a lot of friends because he was an outgoing and friendly guy. It just seems he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s hard to imagine anyone doing that to him’.

In reality, however, Kerr hadn’t just found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time; the risks of cruising have been well documented throughout the years. For instance, in 1995 three gay men were attacked in Queen’s Park in Glasgow — one of whom, a thirty-five year old named Michael Doran, was stabbed numerous times and beaten so savagely that every bone in his face and skull was fractured. He, too, died from his injuries. Or the case of Jody Dobrowski, murdered on Clapham Common in 2005, who was so horrifically beaten by two men his family could not recognise the body. Or the unsolved case of Geoffrey Windsor, found dead in the woodlands of Beaulieu Heights, London in 2002. All of these men — and many others I have not mentioned — lost their lives not through a quirk of circumstance, but because their murderers knew where they would find vulnerable gay men.

To shrink in the face of opposition to LGBT education is to dilute any promise that attempts to protect gay people from persecution. Regardless of how parents decide to inform their children in the confines of their own home, they cannot be permitted to water down a policy that will, undeniably, save lives. I, like most gay people, had to learn for myself that homosexuality wasn’t something to be ashamed of; wasn’t something worthy of my murder. Nobody taught me. I had to take the mockery of a teacher and the murder of a man and process that into a life that seemed worth living. I succeeded. Many others don’t.

To kowtow to religious zealotry or any other form of opposition is to permit the continuation of a dangerous ignorance. The boys that murdered James Kerr evidently must live with some personal culpability for what they did. Still, perhaps if they had been taught that a gay person’s life mattered just as much as anyone else’s, they wouldn’t have found themselves brutally murdering a man over twice their age.

LGBT education is a matter of life and death.

It should never be put on ‘pause’.