Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The papers paid more attention to Pride this year than they usually do, perhaps because it now has the official designation of being “a parade” rather than just a protest march. Jason Pollock, chairman of Pride London, revealed: “Ken Livingstone wants us to build it up to compare to the Sydney Mardi Gras and we are working with Visit London to promote it as a major tourist attraction, which is a quantum leap.”

The usual confusion reigned about how many were actually there. The Sunday Times thought 30,000; The London Evening Standard thought 40,000 on one page and 100,000 on another; The Independent on Sunday said 50,000; while the following day its sister paper, The Independent, estimated 60,000.

Whatever the number, the question remains: what is Pride for these days? Jason Pollock explained to The Independent that in the early days of gay liberation it was a protest march pure and simple. “People would boo from the pavements and you could be arrested at the drop of a hat. Now it is a party by the gay community for everyone.”

Philip Hensher in The Independent on Sunday, on the other hand, thought the whole affair “a fake celebration that diminishes us all” because, although we’ve made progress in law reform, we have failed to challenge the “thinly veiled contempt” that society still reserves for us, and which is expressed in TV shows like Queer Eye. The Pride parade simply reinforces the idea that we are there to entertain heterosexuals with our campery and foolishness.

This confusion over the purpose of Pride encapsulates in many ways the wider debate within the gay community about whether it’s OK to relax now, or whether we need renewed vigilance against the creeping resurgence of our enemies on the right.

This year there was an attempt to put at least a bit of politics back into the day; after the “parade” there was a rally in Trafalgar Square at which luminaries made uplifting speeches. But as The London Evening Standard pointed out in its Londoner’s Diary, there was significantly no word from the supposedly gay friendly Tories or their fickle leader, Michael Howard: “How quickly the political landscape can change,” said ‘Londoner’. “Just a few weeks ago London politicians of every hue went flat out to attract the ‘pink vote’, even attending a special hustings event on the eve of the mayoral elections. Strange, then, that no senior member of any party [bar Mr Livingstone] could be bothered to join the 100,000 partygoers for Saturday’s Big Gay Out in Finsbury Park.”

Another sceptic is Mark Simpson, who wrote in his account of the day in the Independent on Sunday: “When it began in the early seventies, Pride was about visibility, radical politics and an antidote to shame and oppression – which involved running a gauntlet of abuse from some passers-by. Today they’re more likely to ask for styling tips”.

Simpson noted that the concert in Finsbury Park had been dedicated to the murdered Jamaican gay activist Brian Williamson. “Depending on your point of view,” he opined, “this is either a sign of international solidarity or of the desperation of some British gays to identify themselves as victims in a society that is no longer terribly interested in victimising them.”

But Pride gave the press an excuse to explore a few gay issues that they would otherwise not bother with. For instance, we discovered from The Independent that “The Metropolitan Police has established an enquiry to examine whether past prejudice among officers influenced its investigation of anti-gay murders.”

The Met intends to study six gay murders, going back to 1990, to decide whether those investigations were “compromised” by the homophobia of the officers involved, and if so, what lessons can be learned for the future.

The Sunday Times looked at the emergence of out and proud police and fire officers on the parade. “For the first time,” the paper said, “all the Scottish police forces gave leave to their officers to march in uniform.” Scotland Yard, British transport police, Devon and Cornwall constabulary and West Midlands police all had staff recruitment stalls in the park. However, Surrey police officers, who were given permission to wear their uniform on the march last year, were ‘strongly discouraged’ from doing so this year. Other forces have always refused. Naming and shaming them, Superintendent Steve Deehan, projects officer for the Gay Police Association, jibed: “We say in Hertfordshire and Hampshire homosexuals hardly ever happen”.

The Sunday Times also told us that the fire brigade was much more accommodating. “Ken Knight, fire brigade commissioner for London, gave his gay officers a champagne breakfast and organised coaches to take them to the start of the march in Hyde Park.”

According to Stuart Brown, a Glaswegian firefighter who heads a 250-strong support network for gay men and lesbians in the fire service, “The amount of people coming from the gay community to join the fire service is astronomical.” He said that half of the 38 female firefighters in the Lothian and the Borders region were openly lesbian.

The Independent told us that “for some on the parade, remembrance remained important. James Murphy, 24, marching alongside his rugby club team-mates, felt today’s generation of gays owed a debt of gratitude to their ‘forefathers’.”

The paper quoted James as saying: “Because of them, younger people like me can feel a better sense of equality than they experienced.”

To help us understand just how long and arduous the battle of our predecessors really was, Tania Branigan of The Guardian wrote about gay life in London in the 1920s and 30s and discovered that it was remarkably vibrant in some areas. She interviewed Matt Houlbrook, a lecturer in history at Liverpool University, who told her: “What’s remarkable about the 20s and 30s was how open and widespread [homosexuality] was in some places. In some circumstances it was very, very visible and strong and vibrant and rich.”

While researching for his book, Mr Holbrook had uncovered evidence of a wonderful world of weekly drag balls that were attended by between 50 and 100 men. While looking into legal cases against homosexuals – court records being just about the only places where our lives are recorded pre-1967 – he had pulled out of one old box an ‘Exhibit A’ which turned out to be a “carmine-pink sparkly kimono top” which had figured in a case against “Lady Austin’s Camp Boys”.

This case had gripped the nation in 1933, when police had raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue and discovered 60 men dancing together, kissing and having sex in make-up and women’s clothes. “Despite facing a lengthy prison term and disgrace, the organiser, ‘Lady Austin’ defiantly told officers: ‘There is nothing wrong in who we are… You call us nancies and bum boys but… before long our cult will be allowed in the country.” All the same, 27 of the men arrested that night were jailed for between three and 20 months.

“Lady Austin” was one of the tens of thousands of our ‘forefathers’ who had to fight and make incredible personal sacrifices in order for society to progress. I wonder if her ghost was marching along with the other feather-bedecked and glittery drag queens at Pride?

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, he of the “grey sexuality” has decided to downshift. He’s vacating his splendid palace (surely fit for a queen?) and going to live in a modest little vicarage in Ilkley, where he will surely feel at home as his new abode looks like something straight out of a fairy tale. (Announcing this momentous event, the papers couldn’t resist the headline: “On Ilkley Moor baht mitre.”)

Could it be that the wise Archbishop has decided to jump ship before the catastrophe that is heading the way of the Anglican Church actually hits? Does he sense that his own sexuality might become an issue if he hangs around and lets the homophobes attack? After all, poor old Jeffrey John in St Albans has been persecuted to hell for being a “celibate gay man”, while Dr Hope has become the second most influential figure in the Anglican communion with hardly a murmur – so far.

This is despite the best efforts of Peter Tatchell, of course, who has made several attempts to “out” Dr Hope (known affectionately by fellow students at his seminary as “Ena the Cruel”).

Remarking on Dr Hope’s resignation, The Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, Stephen Bates said that the worst time of Dr Hope’s term was when Mr Tatchell was “bullying” him to tell the truth.

Some of us, of course, are surprised that a man who purports to be a moral leader needs to be “bullied” in order to be truthful about something as fundamental as his sexuality. And even under pressure he refused to go any further than saying his sexuality was a “grey area”, although Peter Tatchell purported to have spoken to friends of Dr Hope who confirmed that there was nothing uncertain about it.

Anyway, the Lambeth Commission, the latest committee created by the Church to look at the “homosexual issue”, will report back with its findings in the autumn. The evangelical monsters are waiting breathlessly for the verdict, because if it is not suitably condemnatory of gays, they will carry out their threat to smash the Church to pieces.

The Lambeth Commission was established – like so many others before it – to buy time. But it will fail in its effort to take the heat out of this debate. As Bishop Gregory Venables told The Independent, that when the Lambeth Commission publishes its much-anticipated report, it will be a fudge, everyone will groan because it will say nothing of substance and might even recommend the formation of yet another commission to look again at the “homosexual question”. After all, this tactic has staved off disaster for years.

But not this time. The bigots – sorry, I should say the Evangelicals – who are trying to use homosexuality as a means of taking over the Church will make their move. They will call on all parishes that have fellow bigots… er, I mean, evangelical clergy… to withhold payment of their contributions to the central body of the Church. This will cost the Church of England – always pleading poverty, even though it has £4 billion in the bank – millions of pounds a year.

They’ve already been successful in persuading a number of parishes, some of which are already sending the money they would have otherwise have sent to the Church of England’s central funds to “gay cure” outfits like The Courage Trust.

Reform, the evangelical group at the forefront of this agitation has, according to the Daily Telegraph, sent out instructions to its 1,700 members to test whether their bishop is orthodox (i.e. anti-gay), and, if he is not, to reject his authority. These parishes will declare themselves “out of communion” with their liberal bishops and refuse to recognise them. The worldwide Anglican communion will begin to disintegrate as the African bishops, with their insulting talk of gays being lower than dogs, reign triumphant. (“Why has no-one told Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria that he is a bigot?” asks Stephen Bates. “Is it because he is black?”)

David Hope, I suspect, sees all this coming and wants to take shelter in Ilkley in his bomb proof vicarage. Rowan Williams has no such option and must stand before the Reform blitzkrieg with only his courage to defend him (so, not much protection there, then).

Paul Vallely in The Independent, like so many of us, is mystified as to why the Church continues to pull itself apart over an issue that affects so few of its members. “Why has the Church embraced change on a raft of issues once held to be biblically unquestionable – slavery, borrowing at interest, hellfire, the ordination of women, divorce – and yet unable to agree on homosexuality?” He proposes one reason being “visceral prejudice” and another that the evangelicals want the Church to be “a certain voice in an uncertain world” (which I take to mean a return to authoritarianism).

The result of this, Mr Vallely says, is that “a church once characterised by its broad-mindedness… is becoming characterised by narrowness. It is gripped by a culture of fear which ‘seems to take us back to the burnings of the Reformation’ in which those holding different opinions must recant.”

Damian Thompson in the Sunday Telegraph says the death of the Anglican communion is “not the big deal that it sounds”. He says the Church of England is held together because it is the established church, but the worldwide communion is simply a legacy of colonialism. It is “programmed to fall apart” he says, but “the sad thing for the 77 million members is that the causus bellishould have been a subject so tangential to most of their lives as gay sex.”

He reserves special criticism for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and his craven handling of the Jeffrey John affair. He says that John was on the “banned list” of the previous Archbishop, Carey, but was taken off it when Williams took up the office.

Twice Williams approved the nomination of Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, but then the evangelicals started their hate campaign against him. Instead of resisting this real bullying, Rowan Williams asked Jeffrey John to withdraw, which he did. Then he changed his mind, but it was too late. As Damian Thompson puts it: “Rowan Williams laid down his friend for his life, and his moral authority has suffered accordingly.”

To the unconcerned outsider this might all seem like a lot of silly queens trying to scratch each other’s eyes out, but let us not forget that the Church of England has 26 bishops in the House of Lords, and some of them were complicit in Lady O’Cathain’s ambush of the Civil Partnership Bill there. If the Church lurches further and further to the right, the bishops will become more and more politicised and they will exploit their privileged position in Parliament to our disadvantage.

The Church of England’s debate may seem arcane to many of us, but the outcome could have a big effect on our lives in the future.

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Richard (“I’m not anti-gay”) Littlejohn made the following “joke” in his column in The Sun: “All sorts of wackos and weirdos took to the streets of Manhattan to demonstrate against the Republicans. What unites them, apart from hatred of Bush, is a total lack of humour. My favourites were a bunch of lesbians wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan DYKES AGAINST BUSH. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? I can’t help wondering if I missed an affiliated group of homosexuals protesting about the Vice-President Cheney: GAYS AGAINST DICK.”

Now, as jokes go, it isn’t bad, I suppose. If it were told with affection, I might even laugh. But somehow it just isn’t funny when Richard Littlejohn tells it, because when he says it, it’s riddled with sneering contempt and is intended to humiliate.

So what should our reaction be? Be contemptuous right back? Ignore it entirely? Or complain to the Press Complaints Commission that it is ‘offensive’?

I ask this question, because last month some gay people complained to the television regulator, Ofcom, about a remark by Richard Madeley (of Richard and Judy fame), after he used the term “dyke” about one of his guests.

Now, Richard and Judy are just about the least homophobic people you could meet. They give a lot of space, airtime and sympathy to gay people on their show. Richard said he thought he was being “hip” by using the term, but others didn’t agree. Even though he apologised the following day, there were still some who would have liked his scalp – Kilroy-Silk style.

This sparked a lively debate about just what can and can’t be said about gay people by people who aren’t themselves gay. It kicked off in the Daily Mail, which helpfully gave us a brief history of the word “dyke”. “It is not clear where it originated,” the paper said, “but one theory is that it was derived from the name of the Celtic queen Boudicca (Bou-dyke-ah).”

If that doesn’t convince, then the paper offers: “Others surmise that it comes from the use of the word dyke as barrier and was used by men to describe women who did not want a relationship with men. The term has tended to be seen as offensive and is usually used in a derogatory way but it has recently become more acceptable as the gay community has started to use it.”

Ben Summerskill of Stonewall told the paper about the etiquette of using a word like dyke. “In some senses among people who are gay it can be appropriate and is used a bit like the term of affection ‘darling’. But if it is used by a stranger to someone who is homosexual then it could be seen as very derogatory and could cause offence.”

Angie Jezard expanded on the theme in a letter to The Independent: “As a dyke/gay woman/lady homosexual/lesbian/queer… I often don’t know how to refer to myself and friends never know what’s ‘in’ among the out. However, the reclaiming of words like ‘dyke’ and ‘queer’ by the gay community is similar to blacks using ‘nigger’ to turn a derogatory word on its head.”

Well, poor old straights, they don’t know which way to turn, trying to be right-on and simply putting the people they’re trying to connect with right off.

But Carol Sarler in The Daily Express doesn’t like this little game. She came to Richard Madeley’s defence. “His reportedly offensive remark happened in the same week that Diva, a new magazine for lesbians, is launched – with ‘dykes’ splashed across the cover in clearly clubbable appeal to potential readers… Integration of race, caste and sexuality is an admirable aim. But I have no time for those who protest against exclusion on the one hand while demanding exclusivity on the other. In language or anything else.”

(By the way, Carol, just for information, ‘new’ Diva has just passed the 100th issue mark.)

In The Independent, Martin Kelner was sympathising with Richard Madeley’s old geezerish attempts to connect with a younger generation that is rapidly disappearing into the distance.

Mr Kelner tells of the time that he was hauled in front of the Broadcasting Standards Council for saying the word “bugger” on air. In the North, where he comes from, he says bugger is a term of affection (in such phrases as “you daft bugger” for instance), but he was still made to justify his use of the word because some “pathetic, humourless loser” had complained about it. Eventually, after many wasted hours, the complaint was dismissed (just as it had been in the Madeley case). “I thought then,” wrote Mr Kelner, “that the way to get round this problem [of ‘piffling’ complaints] is simply for Ofcom and all the other regulatory bodies to employ someone specifically to tell all such complainants, irrespective of race, creed, disability, body shape or sexual inclination, to go boil their head (in those exact words).”

On the BBC News website, Jonathan Duffy was trying to make sense of terminology, what’s in, what’s out, what you can say and what you can’t. He first gives us a little glossary of lesbian-connected terms: Boy/boi – is a boyish gay man or boyish lesbian; Heteroflexible – is a straight person with a ‘gay’ mindset; Hasbian – is a lesbian who’s gone straight, and so on.

Mr Duffy explains that: “At the heart of these disputed words is what’s known as a lexical gap – where the official language has failed to keep pace with real life. Slang and sterile, academic words sit either end of the spectrum, with nothing in the middle.”

He quoted Tony Thorne, editor of the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. “These are contentious issues which have only started to be discussed in the last thirty years – not long enough in our culture for language to find fitting words.”

Some words have succeeded better than others at crossing over into the mainstream. “Gay” for instance in now almost universally used for homosexual, but some people still blanch when they hear the word “queer”.

Tony Thorne thinks that “dyke” has such a long history of “negative connotations” that it will fail to make the transition into everyday language. For lesbians in New York, says Mr Thorne, the term ‘dyke’ is already passé – the preferred term among them is “boys”.

So should we – as the members of the gay community – relax now, and stop getting upset about straight people using “our” words about us? Have we come far enough for it not to matter if a straight TV presenter – who, let’s face it, has a fag hag for a wife – says ‘dyke’ or ‘queer’ in order to seem (God help us) ‘hip’?

Perhaps the answer is given in an article in The Times by Patrick Neate, who was commenting on the present hoo-ha over dancehall singers singing homo-hating lyrics. Everyone thinks it’s terrible – or at least they do when gay activists point out to them that it is terrible. If Outrage! hadn’t drawn attention to these incitements to murder, most straight people would simply have accepted them without demur.

Mr Neate says that: “I’m guessing here, but … while I would swear it’s true that most British people don’t believe in attacking homosexuals, I would also swear that a huge number (perhaps even a majority) are more or less homophobic.”

Mr Neate says he is intrigued by the way a ‘perceived consensus’ may not be the majority opinion at all but that of a ‘cabal’ of successful pressure groups. Therefore, whatever people may say when under pressure to be politically correct, the fact is that “taunts like ‘poof’ and ‘queer’ are still in the playground top ten.”

So, perhaps words are important after all. But perhaps we should cut a bit of slack to our well-meaning straight friends – like Richard Madeley – while continuing to give Beenie Man and his murderous mates hell.

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The war that religion has declared on homosexuality is intensifying around the world. Wherever gay rights are progressing, religion is reviving itself on the back of opposition to them.

The Anglican Church is about to detonate another bombshell, the Eames Report, that will convert the Anglican Union into the Anglican Disunion overnight. If preliminary reports are correct, it will also represent the greatest betrayal of a minority (gays) by a religious body since the time Pope Pius XII decided to throw in his lot with the Nazis against the Jews.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has been a big disappointment to gay people. Despite early promise, he has now firmly sided with the evangelical bigots who are pushing to take over the Anglican Church, and who have ruthlessly used homosexuality as a means of doing it.

Indeed, the former Bishop of Newark in New Jersey, John Spong, was reported in The Sunday Telegraph to have said of Williams: “His actions have revealed a fatal character flaw. He has no courage, no backbone and no ability to lead. He is now destined to be a long-serving but ineffective and empty man who has been revealed to be incapable of carrying the responsibility placed upon him.” I think that is a fair summation of the invertebrate occupant of Lambeth Palace, who is about to sell us down the river to his hate-filled fundamentalist friends.

Over in Rome, the repulsive old geezer tottering on the Throne of St Peter is even worse. But at least he is straightforward with his detestation of homosexuals. His brutish campaign against us is open, upfront and as raw as sewage.

In Spain, however, there is a fightback against the Vatican’s political ambitions. The new socialist government there is trying hard to wrench the ‘Holy See’s’ grip from the country’s throat. The Spanish cabinet has agreed to bring forward plans for gay marriage (not the inferior civil unions that we’ve been offered, but the real thing).

This has given the Catholic Church the opportunity to vent all its seething homophobia.

The Times reported the Spanish house of bishops as saying that if the Gay Marriage Bill is passed it would be like “releasing a virus into Spanish society”.

The Guardian quoted priest, Father Antonio Seijas of Galicia, as saying “This government is disgraceful, pornographic. It is not just Catholic values that are being destroyed but human ones,” while on Ireland Online, the Vatican’s “top official for family issues”, Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo said: “They present [gay marriage] as if it were a conquest of modernity and of democracy, but really they are falling into deep dehumanisation.”

So there we have it, gay relationships are not even human.

But the government of Spain’s handsome Prime Minister Zapatero is determined. The Guardian also quoted the justice minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar as saying: “Our constitution guarantees the right to marriage… We’re going to extend that right to people who historically have been discriminated against: homosexuals.”

The Churches in Spain now have an issue around which they can unite in righteous hatred, and they have promised that they will bring the population onto the streets in protest. They may find it difficult, though, as polls show that 70% of the population support the government’s plans. That’s democracy for you. But what does democracy mean to the Pope? Answer: nothing.

The Pope was quick off the mark in New Zealand, too, when the government there announced it wanted to introduce civil unions for homosexuals and heterosexuals. The pontiff said, in The New Zealand Herald-Sun, that such arrangements “violated God’s plan”. So, now not only are we sub-human in the eyes of the Church, we are also a violation of divine will. And just to make sure New Zealand gays understand their inferior status as Christians, the Guardian reported that the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church “voted to bar from leadership posts people living together in gay or unmarried relationships.”

In Australia, Bishop Christopher Prowse was complaining about the “prevalence of gay characters on prime-time television”. He told The Sunday Herald-Sun that showing gay relationships in a positive way could “undermine society”. A Catholic colleague, Babette Francis, called on viewers to campaign to have gay characters taken off air completely.

In Canada, where “gay marriage” is legal in three provinces and one of the territories – and may soon be legalised throughout the country, the debate has caused endless religious opposition. When the new Canadian ambassador to the Vatican, Donald Smith, met the Pope for the first time, he was given a lecture about the “evils of homosexual unions”. (That’s right, add ‘evil’ to the list).

Over in the United States, the Pentecostal churches must think all their birthdays have come at once since the President made “gay marriage” a central plank of his election campaign. All over the country there are court cases raging, mostly brought by religiously-motivated politicians, trying to outlaw gay marriage or civil unions.

Then came the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who said on one of his nightly TV rants: “I’m trying to find the correct name for it … this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. … I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I’m gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.”

Despite the general senselessness of the statement, the message that Braggart wants to convey – that he hates gay people enough to kill them – came over loud and clear. The uproar was such that he was forced to apologise, but there is little doubt the apology was made through gritted teeth (and he probably had his fingers crossed behind his back in the way that superstitious people do). We shouldn’t forget that Swaggart is trying to rehabilitate himself after he was caught visiting a prostitute in 1988 and was also found to have a prostitute in his car when stopped over a traffic violation in 1991.

Meanwhile, the man at the centre of the Anglican hurricane in America is Gene Robinson, who was consecrated as Bishop of New Hampshire, despite being openly gay. He has remained steadfast throughout all this, maintaining his dignity and refusing to accept that he is the sub-human the evangelicals have tried to portray him as. On the Radio 4 Sunday programme, Robinson said: “The God I worship doesn’t ask me to sacrifice justice to achieve unity and I would be highly surprised if, in my prayer life, God was asking me to do so.”

Of course, God always seems to tell Christians to do what they were going to do in the first place, so it is assured that Gene Robinson will not resign.

But he could certainly be kicked out. Now, as he waits for the slug from Canterbury to come for his head, he has received no support from the other gay priests in his diocese. The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement even went so far as to call on the episcopal closets of New Hampshire to make themselves known. “When Gene was consecrated we expected other bishops to put their heads above the parapet”, said LGCM spokesman Martin Reynolds in The Observer. “We’re dismayed that Gene has been left to stand alone.”

Perhaps this is a job for the American branch of Outrage! And maybe the British branch ought to get its “outing” boots on, too, and show the cowardly queer acolytes of the blessed Rowan just what shits they are for staying silent.

Come on boys. Time to remove the velvet gloves and show the iron fist.

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

It was Deborah Orr in The Independent who put it in an interesting way, when she wrote: “It is much easier to be unlucky – as far as the ill-luck of being a victim of a random hate attack is concerned – when you are gay, than when you are straight.”

She was referring to the brutal killing of David Morley by a gang of youths on the South Bank in London. David Morley – Cinders to his friends – was a gay man who had been working in the Admiral Duncan pub on that fateful day in 1999 when it was bombed by a loony fascist by the name of David Copeland. On that occasion, Cinders had escaped with cuts, bruises and post-traumatic stress. His second brush with such seething homophobia, however, proved fatal.

The murder of David Morley, and the frenzied attacks on other people in the vicinity on the same night, were just an extreme example of what is happening on a daily basis around the country. The low-level bullying, the routine beatings, the frightening intimidation, the cat-calls and insults don’t generally make it into the papers. The people on the receiving end have to put up with it as best they can.

All attempts to measure the extent of anti-gay hate crime show that it is increasing. One government report showed that 38 per cent of gay men and women had either been victim of or had witnessed crimes committed by homo-haters. A report from the Metropolitan police showed a 15% rise over a year.

Whether this is because recent police initiatives have encouraged more people to report attacks, or whether it is simply that more attacks are taking place, is yet to become clear.

Take the case of the playwright Alan Bennett, who now regards the situation as so awful that it has prompted him to finally come of out the closet. Mr Bennett revealed in The London Review of Books that he and his partner, Rupert Thomas, were set upon by two youths while on holiday in Italy in 1992. After being beaten with steel scaffolding, Bennett and Thomas sought shelter in a cafe until the ambulance came, and Mr Bennett was taken to hospital where he received 12 stitches to his head.

He was later interviewed by the caribinieri, who like the doctor and the cafe owner, immediately assumed that Mr Bennett and Mr Thomas had been soliciting. “There is no longer any doubt about this crime in either of their minds,” wrote Mr Bennett, who is 30 years older than Mr Thomas, “this oddly matched couple have been up to no good; what this sorry-looking, middle-aged Englishman is not saying is that on that seedy promenade some advance had been made, a gesture even, and the honour of the Italian male impugned. The wound I have received is virtually self-inflicted, an entirely proper response to Italian manhood.”

Alan Bennett says he has found it hard to write about the assault until now. “To be attacked, beaten up or otherwise abused, and to find the police response one of indifference, is a not infrequent experience of homosexuals, and blacks, too. But reluctant to be enrolled in the ranks of gay martyrdom, reluctant to be enrolled in any ranks whatsoever, I kept quiet about this adventure.”

Alan Bennett’s perception of the police reaction is not uncommon. He was not doing anything provocative or illegal, but still he felt he was being regarded as the criminal rather than the victim. Imagine then the hesitation of those who are beaten up or robbed while they are cruising or cottaging. How can they be sure that they won’t get a hostile or humiliating reception from the police from whom they are seeking help?

Naturally the police have tried to offer reassurance. Whenever the boys in blue want information from the gay community they always pledge that no questions will be asked about why we were in a particular place at a particular time. We are told that the victims of violent homophobes will be treated sympathetically. But how sure can we be of this? How effectively do the politically correct pronouncements that come from police authorities filter down into the ranks?

According to a report in The Times, “a national assessment centre rejected more than 1,200 out of 6,300 potential police recruits because they failed crucial tests and so were suspected of being racist, biased against other minorities or sexist.”

This should be reassuring. It suggests that many of the police recruits who would formerly have sustained and reinforced the notoriously macho “canteen culture” in police stations will never now make it into uniform. But the apparently rigid selection procedure is less reassuring when you open The Liverpool Daily Post and read that the Assistant Chief Constable of Merseyside is investigating 22 constables and support staff over “abhorrent” material found in their workplace emails.

The Press Association reported: “Offensive emails about blacks, gays and women sent by police officers range from ‘disgusting’ to ‘minor jocular stuff’. Thirty-five police officers and support staff from Merseyside Police face the sack after the discovery of the racist, sexist and homophobic emails.”

It’s a difficult business but, to be fair, there are great efforts being made in some police forces to eradicate homophobia – or at least make it an unacceptable part of the way officers work.

Reporting these efforts in the BBC Online Magazine, Tom Geoghegan revealed that “All new applicants to police forces in England and Wales are now given the option to declare their sexuality, in a move welcomed by gay campaign groups.”

But is it safe to do so?

The article quotes PC Andy Hewett of Lambeth Police in London who is not only an out gay man, but has also revealed his HIV status – the first policeman in this country to do so.

“There has definitely been a culture change since I joined 11 years ago,” he says. “The language and the terminology evident in the canteen among senior officers would not be tolerated today.”

Andy spends two hours with every new police officer and council warden in the borough to “discuss and challenge stereotypes around lesbians, gays and HIV”. But even he admits that his experience is not necessarily typical, and some forces in other parts of the country still have a long way to go. Even so, there has been rapid progress.

Tayside police have invited a retired police constable, Vic Codling, to teach its Human Resources department about being more inclusive. This invitation is quite a surprise to Mr Codling who says he would probably have been sacked if he had come out when he joined Durham Constabulary in 1971. “There has been a dramatic improvement,” he is quoted as saying. “But it’s still not right. There are still forces where no-one is openly gay. And there are still a number of examples of prejudice. Officers have had their property damaged by colleagues because it was suspected or known they are gay.”

Andy Hewlett thinks that the perception of the police as being unsympathetic to gay victims of crime is lagging. “I talk a lot to gay groups and their perceptions are still 10 years behind what the police are actually doing,” he says.

Let’s hope he is right and that the gay people most in need of their support can feel absolutely confident that the police will be on their side.

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Are British newspapers totally amoral? Do they not care at all about the effects their stories have on innocent people?

I ask these questions in connection with the story carried both by The News of the World and The Mail on Sunday (and subsequently by just about every newspaper in the world) about the young man who was alleged to have “cured himself of AIDS”. I can imagine the surge of hope that went through the minds of all those millions of people – gay and straight, black and white – who are infected with this virus. At last, a glimmer of hope. A straw to clutch at.

But was it? Or was it just a young man on the make and newspapers desperate for a sensational headline?

Andrew Stimpson’s story is unusual, but in the history of medical testing, not unique. He is an openly gay man with a partner who is HIV positive. He says that he first went for a test in April 2002 after a condom that he and his partner were using split. He tested positive, but it was too early to be certain. He tested again in August that year and got another positive result.

The Daily Mirror informed us that “although he knew there was no cure, he took a daily cocktail of vitamin supplements”. He was being tested regularly, and in October 2003 his test came back HIV negative. He was convinced there was a mistake, and he got his local health Authority, Chelsea and Westminster, to test him twice more, and twice more the tests came back negative.

Andrew then threatened to sue the Healthcare Trust for negligence. There is no doubt that he suffered severe stress after the positive result – as everyone who receives one must.

It was all over the papers now. “Is this the man who holds the secret of an AIDS cure?” In African newspapers the news spread like wildfire. People who have no access to proper treatment must have leapt for joy at the prospect of a non-drug cure.

But within days, the doubts started to kick in. Some papers reported that Andrew was refusing to return to the hospital for more tests, while others were quoting him as saying he couldn’t wait to get back. He wanted to be the cause of a world-shaking medical breakthrough.

The Guardian’s Ian Sample explained: “HIV tests, like any other, can produce false positives, incorrectly indicating that someone has the virus. But in this case it seems unlikely: after testing positive for antibodies to the virus, Mr Stimpson had a second test to examine the amount of virus in his bloodstream. This was also positive, although the viral count was exceptionally low. Two false positives can occur in tandem, but the chances are low.”

Mr Sample said there might be rare genetic mutations that confer immunity on some people, but, again, this was unconfirmed.

Then The Daily Mirror informed its readers: “The clinic that told Andrew Stimpson he had cured himself of the HIV virus yesterday said he may never have had it after all. Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust said: ‘It is probable there was never any evidence of him having the virus.’ But it admitted later: ‘We don’t know exactly what has happened’.”

Then The Irish Examiner’s Terry Prone cast even more doubt on the whole business. “The hospital believe Andrew may have encountered an HIV virus or two and had a lively immune response that triggered a positive test, but actually infected? Not likely. Certainly not proven. Andrew Stimpson’s 15 minutes of fame constitutes a lot more than a disappointment. It contributes to a watering-down, in the public mind, of the threat of the HIV virus. The head of one of the major AIDS charities in Britain likened the damaging effect of the media coverage of Andrew’s ‘cure’ to the bad outcome of earlier stories promising that a new HIV vaccination was on the way. ‘They led people to believe that a cure was just around the corner,’ she said, ‘when, in reality, vaccine development is at least ten to 15 years away.’”

Mr Prone’s opinion was that Mr Stimpson’s story – sold by him for considerable amounts of cash to the Sunday papers – was irresponsibly handled. It raised not only false expectations among the desperate but had the potential to create lethal complacency among those who are likely to need little persuasion that unsafe sex is OK these days. After all, they reason, a cure is on the way. Maybe only months away.

But a new report from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) shows that the number of people in the UK living with HIV is now around 58,300 – an increase of 5,000 in a year. The agency also recorded a steep increase in other sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis and chlamydia.

Nick Partridge, Chief Executive of sexual health charity Terrence Higgins Trust, stated: “It will be the same story year after year unless prevention efforts improve and the recent Government funding to improve sexual health services is spent wisely. We’re at a crossroads – if we don’t concentrate on prevention and access to services for communities now, we will continue to have ever-increasing rates of HIV and the worst sexual health in Western Europe.”

Have the media helped this situation by rushing into print with Mr Stimpson’s unlikely and unchecked story? Or is the British media totally exempt from any moral responsibility?

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Usually it is immigrants or people from minority religions who are the subjects of the tabloids’ regular fits of outrage at “political correctness gone mad”. But recently, gay people were on the receiving end when it was discovered that Liverpool register office had removed a painting of Romeo and Juliet and replaced it with a Victorian landscape – apparently so as not to deter gay couples using the office to register their marriages.

The Sun tracked down an old friend from whom we have not heard in yonks – the swivel-eyed rentagob Dr Adrian Rogers. Dr Rogers, described as “ex-director of the Conservative Family Institute” (a deeply influential organisation he used to run from his front room). Dr Rogers delivered his soundbite in time-honoured fashion: “This is ludicrous and the worst example of political correctness. This is an insult to every heterosexual couple that has ever been married at Liverpool register office.”

Call me sentimental, but I think Dr Rogers should put himself up for re-election to the Conservative Family Institute. It hasn’t been the same without him.

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There seems to have been a bit of a joust between our two leading agony aunts over the last few weeks to see who can include most gay “problems”.

Dear Deirdre (Sanders) at The Sun and Dear Miriam (Stoppard) at The Mirror have had loads of people writing in with all kinds of complications over sexuality. One day Deirdre had “Hubby has a gay secret” which was from a woman who had discovered that her husband had been having “phone sex” – but with other men, not women.

Over at Miriam’s gaff, an 18-year old lad wrote that he was in love with his brother’s 21-year old flatmate (“I’ve worshipped him from afar for years”). Anyway, in this instance dreams came true and when he caught the flatmate alone one day, they had “fantastic sex on the sofa”. So, what’s the problem? He’s worried his brother might not approve.

Another worried woman wrote to Miriam, saying that her boyfriend of two months “got a bit drunk” and said he once thought he was gay and had even had a same-sex relationship. This, understandably, left her feeling insecure. Miriam’s advice? He might be going through an “experimental phase”, but “if you’re the first woman he’s ever gone out with, you may have justifiable cause for concern.” (I hope this gentleman isn’t sharing a flat with someone who has a gay brother).

Then in The Sun, Deirdre heard from a lady who had landed her “dream job” as a receptionist. Her female colleague was helpful and then invited her out for a drink. They both got tipsy and, as the colleague’s husband was away, they went back to her house and, well – in the immortal words of all letters to agony aunts – “one thing led to another”. Soon they were having “crazy, mind-blowing sex”. The colleague wants to continue seeing our heroine, but there are those pesky husbands to think of. Deirdre advises her not to risk her marriage and “turn your attention to your husband”. She suggests that the woman should read a book called “How to have Great Sex for the Rest of Your Life”. I would think that was simple – keep shagging the colleague.

Miriam has more teenage angst, as a 17-year old tells of his pain at having a secret crush on his best friend. “If I tell him, it could ruin our friendship and I couldn’t bear it if he never spoke to me again. Should I give in to my feelings or bury them?”

Miriam sensibly advises him not to risk it, but to “decide what qualities in him you most admire and go looking elsewhere for a relationship with somebody similar.” That’s sound, but oh, the agony.

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Just when you think you’ve got people pigeon-holed, they go and muddy the water. I thought the matter of Michael (Polly) Portillo had been settled. He eventually admitted he’d had gay experiences, but that was “all behind him”. We all thought, yeah, right – Polly should compare notes with Kevin Spacey.

Now The Sunday Mirror has done a hidden camera jobbie on him and leads the front page with the incredulous headline: “Portillo cheating on wife – with a woman!”

Maybe Miriam or Deirdre can offer some assistance.

QUOTES:

“Let’s put it this way – Enrique’s mouth appears to be the only big, fat thing he’s got”, – (Ross von Metzke, gossip columnist, after hearing Enrique Iglesias was promoting a line of condoms for the ‘smaller man’)

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

In the early days of the gay movement, there was a campaign to “reclaim” figures from history as gay. Shakespeare, Edward II, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Tchaikovsky, Cicero, various Roman emperors and Greek philosophers – the list is endless. 

Sometimes there can be an element of wishful thinking in this. I once saw a suggestion that Jane Austen was gay because she slept with her sister (which seemed to completely overlook the fact that it was bloody cold in those big houses before the advent of central heating). 

This is the problem in trying to sort out who was gay and who wasn’t at times when the modern concept of “gay” was unheard of. We need to take into account the conventions of the times- when affection between men tended to be more overt but less sexual. Nowadays, two men writing passionate declarations of love to each other would be regarded as prima facie evidence of homosexuality, but in the early 19th century conventions were different – and they were different again in earlier eras. 

Even so, the whole issue of “outing” figures from history has surfaced again, with a new book claiming that Abraham Lincoln was gay. The sexuality of the 16th President of the United States has been the subject of speculation for a long time, but the debate has been revived in a book called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln by C A Tripp. 

It would seem a legitimate subject for historical research, but these days in America there is another agenda at work, as exemplified by Dr Ruth Reisman of the Institute for Media Education, which is described in The Sunday Times as “an anti-pornography think tank”. 

She is reported as saying: “They want to claim that everyone you have heard of in history, from Jesus Christ onwards, was secretly gay or something similar. This is patently untrue.” 

Well, we can put Dr Ruth right on one point straight off – our claims for gay historical figures start long before Jesus Christ. In fact, let’s begin with Alexander the Great, who has been much in the news lately because of Oliver Stone’s film starring Colin Farrell as the bisexual hero. The film got off to a bad start when a group of misguided academics in Greece threatened to sue Warner Brothers for suggesting that Alexander swung both ways. How they thought they would achieve this – what witnesses they would bring, what evidence they would produce – is still a mystery. They say they dropped their action because the film wasn’t as explicit as they thought it was going to be. 

What piffle – there isn’t a court anywhere in the world (except perhaps in the Deep South of the US) that would entertain such a stupid case. 

But, by then, word was out that the film was all about Alexander’s relationship with his (male) friend Hephaestion and so, naturally, the Religious Right swung into action. 

On the ghastly Christian website WorldNet Daily, Benjamin Shapiro wrote: “A large part of Alexander’s downfall is attributable to the moral distastefulness of the subject matter…. During the course of the movie Farrell kisses a eunuch full on the mouth and exchanges numerous lingering glances with boyhood chum and grown-up love Hephaestion (played by eyeliner-wearing Jared Leto). Anthony Hopkins, playing Ptolemy, intones: ‘It was said… that Alexander was never defeated, except by Hephaestion’s thighs’.” 

The director of the film, Oliver Stone, was exasperated by this wilful misrepresentation of his work. He told Reuters: “The homosexuality thing was a buzz word and got all around. It was a hot-button issue and it got overblown. ‘Alexander the Gay’ – I mean, it’s ridiculous.” That, he says, is what kept the punters away from his expensive floperooni. 

Allan Massie in The Independent tried to get to the… erm, bottom of Alexander’s true sexual nature. He wrote-. “There is no doubt they were close, and that Alexander was wretched when Hephaestion died in 324BC, but whatever they had been as youths, it is highly improbable that they remained lovers when grown up. Greeks disapproved of sexual relations between adult men and despised those who practised them. Although, as a Macedonian, Alexander was not a pukka Greek, this was not a convention that he was likely to flout. It was another thing for a soldier to be a paideka (which Robin Lane Fox translates as ‘sex-boy’). That was quite acceptable. Relations with a boy, such as the Persian eunuch, narrator of Mary Renault’s novel The Persian Boy. where he is the paideka of Darius and then Alexander, are far more probable than with an equal such as Hephaestion.” 

Having sorted out Alexander, let’s get back to Abe Lincoln, the man who fought the American Civil War and was instrumental in abolishing slavery. He’s a hero we would definitely like in our gallery. 

C A Tripp – who, incidentally, was a prominent gay writer – died at the age of 83 a couple of weeks after finishing his book on Lincoln. He is reported in the New York Times to have “subjected almost every word ever written by and about Lincoln to minute analysis” in order to reach the conclusion that the iconic president was indeed gay. 

Besides those already identified as possible same-sex partners for Lincoln – including a youthful Joshua Speed, a neighbour with whom he shared a bed for four years – Tripp now points to the Captain of his bodyguard, David Derickson. An excerpt from the regimental history of the guards reveals: “Captain Derickson in particular advanced so far in the president’s confidence and esteem that, in Mrs Lincoln’s absence, he frequently slept in the same bed with him, making use of His Excellency’s night-shirt!” 

In Washington of the 1860s this made excellent gossip. The diary of an officer’s wife says: “Oh, there is a soldier devoted to the president, drives with him and when Mrs L is not at home, sleeps with him. What stuff!” 

Now much of this rests on how you read that last exclamation, is she clapping her hands in glee at such a juicy titbit, or is she huffing her disapproval of such nonsense? 

Harvard professor David Herbert Donald, another biographer of Lincoln, told The Sunday Times: “Victorian men often shared beds and used flowery language in an asexual fashion. If Lincoln were having affairs, he would have hidden them better.” 

But, of course, it isn’t only real historical figures who create speculation – now we have a new film of The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino, which contains a gay kissing scene between two of the fictional characters, Bassanio (played by Joseph Fiennes) and Antonio (Jeremy Irons). There has been speculation whether this kiss should be read as gay or just friendship. The director of the film Michael Radford told Reuters it was important to emphasise Antonio’s love for Bassanio because of the play’s final act, in which Antonio’s feelings for Bassanio and Portia are tested.” 

One character from recent history who was definitely real, and whose sexuality we don’t have to doubt, was Radclyffe Hall, the lesbian whose book, The Well of Loneliness, was banned in 1928. Newly released official papers show that the Government’s advice was that the book needed to be prosecuted for obscenity because it would lead to “a social and national disaster”. How so? It would encourage women – who would never have thought of such a thing for themselves to become lesbians. 

According to The Observer, the raciest line in the book reads: “She kissed her full on the lips, like a lover”. Nevertheless, Stanley Baldwin the Mint Minister and his Chancellor, Winston Churchill, went to extreme lengths to suppress the book. The Observer revealed: “Documents show that Archibald Bodkin, Director of Public Prosecutions, feared that the publishers would mobilise eminent writers to defend the book. He wrote to several doctors asking for a clinical analysis of what he called ‘homo-sexualists’“.

In a letter to one of these doctors. (the Dickensianly named Sir Farquhar Buzzard), he wrote: “I want to be able to call some gentleman of undoubted knowledge, experience and position who could inform the court of the results to those unfortunate women {as I deem them) who have proclivities towards lesbianism or those wicked women (as I deem them) who voluntarily indulge in these practices – results destructive morally, physically and even perhaps mentally” (sic). 

Old Radclyffe herself turned up to court looking superb (as I deem it) in a leather driving coat and Spanish riding hat. The book was, as expected, banned and all copies pulped, and it didn’t see publication until 1949, after Ms Hall’s death. 

Whatever America’s Religious Right says about whether it’s legitimate to look at the sex lives of historical figures (and to claim them if they are ours), it’s reassuring to know that gay people have been around a lot longer than their religion has, and we’ll still be here long after it has gone.

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Chris Smith’s decision to come out as HIV-positive after quietly living with the virus for 17 years made headlines around the world. The immediate reaction was admiration for his action,  as exemplified by an editorial in The London Evening Standard, which lauded Mr Smith’s “act of courage”, and hoped that it represented “a landmark in people’s attitudes to those with HIV and AIDS… We hope that his example helps draw attention to the considerable difficulties still experienced by HIV/AIDS sufferers, and wins them greater public understanding.”

But then the doubts started to emerge.

Chris Smith says that he was inspired by what Nelson Mandela said at the funeral of his son who recently died from AIDS: “Let us give publicity to HIV/Aids and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and to say somebody has died because of HIV/Aids”.

Mr Smith told The Sunday Times: “Let’s take a lead from Mandela and face the injustice, and ignorance and prejudice that give rise to it, head on.”

But Peter Tatchell was less happy. He pointed out in an article in The Independent that Mandela has not always practised what he preaches. “On HIV, President Mandela let down his own people,” Tatchell wrote. “He ignored the pleas of HIV-positive activists, many of whom were members of his African National Congress (ANC). They survived the bullets and beatings of the apartheid regime, only to be, in effect, sentenced to death by the inaction of their own ANC government.”

Then, Private Eye, claimed that Chris Smith had been pushed into making the admission when he discovered that the Mail on Sunday was about reveal his health status.

In a classic spoiler tactic, Chris decided to pre-empt the tabloid exposé and do the deed on his own terms. But that begs the question: would he still be in the HIV closet if The Mail on Sunday hadn’t knocked on the door?

Certainly there was an element of bitterness from The Mail when it reported the story “Brave or just a cynical ploy by a grey man who craves praise?” its headline asked, and then laying on the spite with a trowel.

Peter McKay, the paper’s relentlessly homophobic commentator, wrote: “Mr Smith didn’t tell voters he was a homosexual when he stood for parliament in 1983. (He announced it afterwards.) Neither did he mention that he was HIV-positive when he was offered a seat in the Cabinet. He announces it after deciding he’s not standing for parliament again.”

McKay says that what he imagines Nelson Mandela had in mind with his plea was that “those with HIV and AIDS should say so even when it’s inconvenient to them. By waiting until he has nothing to lose, Mr Smith emphasis rather than removes the stigma of HIV.”

Deborah Orr, however, in The Independent, took issue with this line of thinking. She says that Smith’s declaration has probably made him “the most senior politician in the world to have declared himself HIV positive” which is, in itself, an achievement. But then she asked what would have been achieved by coming out at a time of raging AIDS-fuelled homophobia.

“Firstly,” Ms Orr says, “he would have been under even greater pressure to become what he did not want to become – a single-issue politician. As a gay politician, anyway, Smith had plenty of opportunity to be involved in shaping policy on AIDS, and in fact served on the all-party Aids Parliamentary Group from 1987 until he became culture minister in 1997. Had he been openly HIV [positive] all of that work would have taken on a personal emphasis that might have been counterproductive.”

But if it did nothing else, Mr Smith’s announcement got AIDS back on to the front pages for a brief while. And boy, oh boy, does it need to be on the front page.

The Scotsman reported that a record number of positive tests last year now brought the total number of people living with HIV in Scotland to something like 2,800. The numbers throughout the rest of the country are also rising at an alarming pace.

Consultant Professor David Goldberg, said: “The message that people should not have causal unprotected sex has never been more important.”

Yet, strangely, that message has never been less visible. And this is perhaps a much more important negative effect from Chris Smith’s coming out. He has been kept well by the use of combination therapies. He wants everyone to know that HIV is a manageable condition – you don’t have to die from it any more. That’s OK then, why bother with condoms when you can take a pill to keep you well?

But the reality of living with HIV, with its relentless regime of extremely powerful drugs, is not being spelled out sufficiently. Because Chris Smith looks so well, and dismisses his condition so lightly, he may be inadvertently sending the signal to youngsters that infection with HIV is not serious.

Writing in The Guardian, Colin Richardson, an NHS health promotion worker and former editor of Gay Times, gave some idea of the truth. “A typical comment on Chris Smith’s self-outing was ‘It just goes to show that an HIV diagnosis is not a death sentence.’ Indeed, and nor is diabetes, another incurable but manageable condition. But who on earth would be happy to have diabetes? Infection with the human immunodeficiency virus, even in the era of anti-HIV drugs, is not without consequences. The virus itself, even when kept in check by medication, can damage the body, making HIV-positive people more susceptible to certain cancers, for example. Almost as problematic at the very drugs used to combat the virus. Everyone who takes anti-HIV drugs experiences side effects, most of which pass in time, but some can linger or be so unpleasant that people abandon their medication altogether. HIV-positive people are as likely to be hospitalised because of bad reactions to their medication as they are from HIV-related illness. In the rush to congratulate Chris Smith, we are in danger of overlooking the reality of HIV in the UK.”

I don’t suppose we’ll be hearing about Mr Smith’s problems with drug regimes or side effects, but others are more forthcoming. In The London Evening Standard, Gus Cairns told of his experiences living with HIV for the past 19 years.

“It was only when I became seriously ill in 1996 that I thought I would die. I got an awful AIDS-related illness called MAI, which is related to tuberculosis. I even went to see my mum’s vicar to talk about a funeral.”

He was put on a combination drug therapy which revived him, although he still suffered side effects – extreme tiredness and nausea, and eventually anaemia which required blood transfusions. Now he takes four drugs a day.

Gus doesn’t recommend coming out at work, and says he isn’t surprised Chris Smith took so long to take the plunge. “In an ideal world everyone should feel free to tell people they have HIV but you can suffer a lot of prejudice.”

So, perhaps Chris Smith was right – on purely pragmatic grounds – to keep his status quiet all those years. He has achieved much more by being silent than if he had “done the right thing” in those times of panic and blind prejudice. His career would almost certainly have ended overnight. In his place, I would almost certainly have done the same thing.

But now he has the opportunity to really make his decision count. He can make clear to the upcoming generation of young gay people that any notion they may have harbour that getting HIV is “no big deal any more” is simply not true. He may have lived with HIV for seventeen years, but what has been going on behind the scenes for those 17 years?

Chris Smith has big plans for the future. And, of course, telling the world that not only do you have HIV, but that it – and the drugs you take to control it – make you ill from time to time, will be no recommendation to potential employers.

But if no-one ever challenges that, when will the prejudice and discrimination ever end?

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

So, the vanguard happy couples will be throwing their confetti (registrar permitting, and not many of them do) on 21 December this year. That’s the first date on which it will be feasible to register a same-sex civil partnership in Britain. The law actually comes into effect on 5 December, but there is a fifteen-day notice period. After that you can sign an official document in front of the registrar and two witnesses and then enjoy all the rights and privileges that we have fought for over the past three decades.

If you can’t wait that long to make a start, you can always announce your intentions. If you’ve got the requisite consenting boyfriend, you can get engaged right now, this very minute. That’s what Mark Jones and John O’Connor have done, going fully traditional and announcing it in The Times. The Times, in its turn, made a big number out of it, with a prominent feature about how this was the first same-sex “forthcoming marriage” that had been announced in its columns in the whole of the paper’s 220-year history.

The ad rather grandly reads: “A period of engagement is announced between Mr John Christopher O’Connor and Dr Mark Bryan Jones, both of Islington, London. Following the enactment of the Civil Partnership legislation expected later this year, the couple will announce the time and location of both the civil union and subsequent church blessing ceremonies to interested parties.”

Coincidentally, Dr Jones had already made another announcement in the Times – in 2002 he had promised himself to a woman, but then John came along and… well, the rest is history.

It seems that register offices in Brighton, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham and Camden, north London have already had enquiries from gay couples.

Of course, as far as the tabloids are concerned, it’s celebrity gay weddings they’ll be looking for – especially that of Elton John and David Furnish. These two indicated some time ago that they intend to take advantage of the new law, but all of a sudden there are clouds on the horizon.

For some reason, David Furnish felt it necessary to make a statement on the celebrity website Popbitch that all was well between him and the Rocket Man. Cynical hacks immediately took this to mean that everything was far from well.

Kathryn Knight in The Daily Mail gave voice to the “new rumours” of “tantrums, rows and estrangements” and even that “Sir Elton, famously volatile, had told Furnish to move his things out of the houses in Windsor and London.”

It seems that David is fed up of the long periods of separation that their lifestyles dictate and has been “socialising” rather too freely for Sir Elton’s taste. The pair denied the rumours to The Daily Mail, and I for one hope that all is well between them, and they manage to get through to December to do the deed.

Not, of course, that being civilly partnered is a guarantee that you’ll find enduring happiness or be together till death you do part. In Switzerland, 215 gay and 54 heterosexual couples have taken advantage of the partnership law set up by the canton of Geneva in 2001. About seven per cent of those have now “divorced”.

The Geneva law is mostly symbolic, though, carrying few rights and is open to gay and straight couples alike. It follows that getting separated under the Swiss law is rather simpler than the British version. All that is necessary is that both parties send a letter to the chancellery saying they want to end it, and bob’s your uncle, ariverderci mon amour. It won’t be like that here. As the government repeatedly tells us, with rights come responsibilities, and the separation process under our new law will be very similar to heterosexual divorce.

So, there are no guarantees, but it seems that gay people all around the world are anxious to take the plunge and accept the attendant risks, both emotional and fiscal.

The almighty scrap in the USA about whether gay marriage should be permitted is extremely complicated, with the battles being fought state by state. There are currently 21 states seeking to change their constitutions to make gay marriage impossible. But it isn’t all bad news. An opinion poll from New York showed that 51 per cent of the electorate were in favour of permitting it.

In Canada, the march towards legalising gay marriage seems unstoppable. In Brazil a young lawyer is trying to use a constitutional anomaly to push the Government into granting equal marriage rights to gays, although he anticipates that it could take up to ten years to complete the process.

And in Europe, the Czech government recently rejected – by one vote – a package somewhat similar to the one we are to enjoy in Britain. Its proponents say they will keep trying until they succeed. In Greece, the Government is about to consider – in the face of hysterical religious objections – proposals for a partnership arrangement.

The German government is also looking to extend the partnership scheme that is already in place there – once more in the face of religious resistance. And Spain has promised its gay population that it will get the full Monty – gay marriage – even though the pope has just published a book saying that such arrangements are part of “the ideology of evil”.

In all these places, the fly in the ointment is the church. In Britain, though, there has been an extraordinary complication that has alarmed traditionalists and cheered liberals in the Church of England.

At the Church of England General Synod there had been all kinds of mutterings about homosexuality and the Windsor report. But then it had to be admitted that some gay clergymen may try to take advantage of the civil partnership register and then demand that their partners are recognised by the church.

Certainly, the Reverend Stephen Coles told the Radio 4 religious magazine Sunday that he might enter into a civil partnership and was prepared to go to the European Court of Human Rights if the Church tried to evade its responsibilities to his partner.

The House of Bishops has revealed that it has received a raft of questions about where gay clergy stand in the light of this new legislation, and they will issue a statement later in the year “clarifying” the position.

But nothing is going to be clear about this particular situation. As Andrew Carey wrote in the Church of England Newspaper: “We have a situation whereby in future it will be almost impossible to regard the small number of openly gay relationships amongst the clergy as anomalous and going against official church teaching. Instead, those relationships will have to be officially accepted by the Church of England and supported financially and in other benefits.”

It seems that the civil partnership will solve the Church’s problems for it and the African bishops, with their voodoo-version of Christianity, won’t be able to do a thing about it – except perhaps stick pins in dolls of Tony Blair and Rowan Williams.

And, of course, the Simpsons will not be left out of the equation. If there’s a controversy, you can be sure that Homer and co will send it up.

In an episode to be shown on Sky One in May, entitled “There’s Something about Marrying” Homer becomes an ordained minister through a dubious website. Then Springfield unilaterally legalises same-sex marriage in order to increase tourism, and Homer finds that he can make serious money from officiating at gay nuptials.

When the episode was shown in the USA it caused the usual outcry from the religious right. L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Parents Television Council blasted the Simpsons for tackling the issue of gay marriage. “At a time when the public mood is overwhelmingly against gay marriage, any show that promotes gay marriage is deliberately bucking the public mood. You’ve got a show watched by millions of children. Do children need to have gay marriage thrust in their faces as an issue? Why can’t we just entertain them?”

I sometimes wonder about the sanity of these people. They seem almost infantile in the triviality of the targets they choose – last month Spongebob Squarepants, this month the Simpsons. Aren’t there any serious issues they can concern themselves with – like the war in Iraq or world poverty and starvation?

Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Did you realise how important you are to politicians, psephologically speaking? In the desperate fight for votes in what is predicted to be a closely-run general election, you have been de-individualised and become, instead a member of “the gay community”. As such, you can be targeted, appealed to and – as the spin doctors put it – “reached.”

Evidence of this comes in the interviews and articles given by party leaders to the gay press recently. I have never seen all three party leaders so enthusiastic to get themselves looking good in gay magazines.

There are other demographic groups, of course, who like “the gays” (and, perhaps “the Borg”) are perceived to have but one mind between them, which can be persuaded with rash promises.

“The Muslims” are another demographic that politicians imagine are unable to think for themselves and always slavishly do what their “leaders” tell them. And so, the Muslim Council of Britain announces that it will instruct “the Muslims” not to vote for Labour, and Cardinal Murphy O’Connor tells us that “the Catholics” will vote for whichever party offers the hardest line on abortion.

But, of course it’s all tosh. “The Gays”, like “the Muslims”, and “the Catholics” are in fact a group of individuals with minds of their own, and often they vote in ways that are unpredictable and seemingly against their own interests. Look at the number of gay men who supported Thatcher, for instance. It drove some of us mad, but it goes to show that the “gay vote” cannot be corralled.

It has never been more true than it is this time. All three parties are offering “the gays” a whole raft of goodies, so let’s stop for a moment and see just what each has told the media it can do for “the gays” of Britain.

The Labour Party says that it has done wonderful things for gay rights in this country. And, indeed, it has. But mostly it had to be pushed into it. The age of consent has been lowered, yes, but only after a long and acrimonious battle in the European Court of Human Rights (remember the Euan Sutherland and Chris Morris cases?).

Yes, gays can now openly join the military – but once again, it was not given willingly. As Christopher Anton put it in The Independent: “Despite Mr Blair’s supposed pride at the ending of the ban on gays in the military, his government spent its first two years fighting tooth and nail to retain this ban through the European Court of Human Rights. It was only when the court found against them that they had a change of heart.”

Yes, Labour gave us protection from discrimination at work, but only when a European Directive ordered them to do so. And even then, they took the heart out of it by granting ridiculous religious exemptions.

Yes, Labour repealed many of the discriminatory laws that governed gay sexual activity, but once again it was only because of pressure from Europe.

To be fair, they took a political risk to eventually rid us of Section 28 and they voluntarily gave us civil partnerships, but even that was less than equality (unlike the Governments of  Belgium and Holland that gave their gay citizens full marriage).

And Labour is promising a single equality body that will include the rights of gay people for the first time. The problem is that the legislation to go with this new body will give legal protection from discrimination in the provision of goods and services to people on the grounds of race, gender, disability and religion – but there will be no legal protection for gay people, only advice and encouragement.

The Mail on Sunday also reports that New Labour is “drawing up an offence of incitement to homophobic hatred” which would carry a penalty of up to seven years in jail. Labour may think it is doing us a favour with this, but I am deeply worried about the effects it – together with the “incitement to religious hatred” proposals – will have on open debate and free expression in this country.

Meanwhile, the Lib Dems are heartened by polls among gay people showing that the majority of us are going to vote for them this time. Gay.com tells us that the Lib Dems even have a “pink manifesto”. This includes “The scrapping of provisions within the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act which restricts fertilisation treatment to male/female couples only”; a promise to make “homophobic incitement” a crime, and to increase “sexual education to include diversity and HIV issues”.

The Tories, in the meantime, are trying desperately to shake off their image as a party of blue-haired bigots and frothing homophobes. They face an uphill struggle, though, because they are lumbered with Michael Howard as their leader, a man with not only the most irritating speech impediment in the whole country, but also a history of parliamentary homophobia second to none. It was he, after all, who pushed through Section 28 when he was Home Secretary to Mrs Thatcher.

However, according to the Independent, Mr Howard is repentant about his nefarious past. When the paper’s Johann Hari interviewed him, Howard said: “I’ve changed my mind on that. I was wrong.”

Mr Hari wrote of his encounter: ““What about the core idea contained in Section 28 – that it is possible to actually promote homosexuality? Wasn’t that always bizarre? ‘Well,’ Howard said, ‘I think there are some people who could be influenced. Who could go either way. I think there is a question about the extent to which people can be influenced.’ And, if they could, would it be better to stop them becoming gay? ‘It would be better not to…’ He paused. ‘When you’re talking about very young children, I thought it was wrong to expose them to that sort of literature and those kinds of issues.’”

Mr Hari can’t help wondering after his encounter just how reconstructed Michael Howard really is.

Well, I think we must be cautious. A little story in The Times gives a small indication that the Tories haven’t really changed their spots. It concerned the lottery fund, and its apparent effrontery in making grants to “politically correct” organisations (i.e. anything not approved of by The Daily Mail). The Tory Shadow Arts Minister, Hugo Swire, said the lottery fund had “got so far away from people” by daring to give grants to organisations other than churches and sports groups.

Well, we all know what that means. Although Mr Swire did not mention gay support groups specifically, the point has been driven home often enough in the tabloids. The truth is that gay groups hardly benefit at all from the lottery, but even that is too much for many Conservatives.

Meanwhile, according to The Guardian, Stonewall has issued a voting record of MPs on gay issues and, surprise, surprise, Tory MPs come right at the bottom. Stonewall chose seven parliamentary votes on issues such as adoption rights, Section 28 and civil partnerships.

So, let’s name and shame the 13 MPs who failed to support a single one of the gay issues: Christopher Chope (Con), Patrick Cormack (Con), Michael Fallon (Con), Adrian Flook (Con), Nick Hawkins (Con), Gerald Howarth (Con), Edward Leigh (Con), Andrew Robathan (Con), Laurence Robertson (Con), Andrew Turner (Con), Angela Watkinson (Con) and David Wilshire (Con).

Least gay-friendly Labour MP is Jim Dobbin and least friendly Lib Dem is Colin Breed.

There were 119 MPs with 100% record – 16 of whom were Liberal Democrats, one Plaid Cymru (Adam Price) and all the others Labour.

If you’re pissed off by all three of the main parties and are looking for somewhere a little more radical to put your X, then maybe the Green Party would fit the bill. In London, its representative on the Greater London Authority is the openly gay Darren Johnson. He makes much of the Green’s impeccable pro-gay credentials. You can’t go wrong voting Green as far as gay rights are concerned.

At the other end of the scale, for those of a fascistic disposition, there was an extraordinary letter in The Sunday Telegraph from a leader of the National Front, which said that it wished to distance itself from the British National Party because it was not racist enough. The BNP, said the National Front with hardly concealed distaste, was even inviting open homosexuals to join and had a prominent Sikh in its hierarchy. However, I expect (or, I certainly hope) that few, if any, Gay Times readers will be looking to support the tin pot Hitlers of either the BNP or NF.

This election for gay people is one of the most extraordinary ever. None of the parties is conducting a homophobic campaign as in the past – in fact, quite the reverse, they are falling over themselves to court us.

Compare and contrast this election with the one conducted last year in the United States, when gay marriage was worked up into a make-or-break issue for candidates. Where religion dictated the agenda and consequently gay rights were set back decades.

Here religion has been put firmly in its place. The Catholics made a stab at getting abortion on to the agenda but has had few takers. Mr Blair openly said in a speech to an evangelical organisation that he did not favour mixing party politics and religion (although he does it all the time in his covert way).

So, we are safe. As Johann Hari put it in The Independent: “All three leaders agreed: there’s no going back. Gay rights are banked and secure. This is a remarkable moment. I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore, Toto.”