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=

I’ve just finished reading the press cuttings about the new pope and I’m fuming. So please, if you’re one of those Catholic gay boys who gets upset when people are rude about your church, stop reading now – because if you continue, you’re going to be really, really put out.

When it was announced that Cardinal Joseph Ratpoison (as Private Eye has so appropriately dubbed him) had been elected, my heart sank with disappointment. But, at the same time, it also fluttered with pleasure. It sank at the prospect of an unreconstructed, insulting, relentless fundamentalist bigot taking charge of the largest Church on earth, but it soared at the prospect of the damage he would inflict on that corrupt institution.

Ratzinger’s track record of persecution and defamation of gay people is well chronicled. It was he who wrote the condemnations of us as “intrinsically evil” and “objectively disordered” that were put out in the name of that other monster, John Paul (George and Ringo) II. It was he who described gay marriages as “the legalisation of evil”.

But as he came out on to the balcony – having assumed the rather camp stage name ‘Benedict’ – to acknowledge the cheers of the thousands of willing dupes in St Peter’s Square, there were already people on hand to say: “Well, he might be different now that he’s not the enforcer. Let’s give him a chance to show how lovely he is.”

Oh please. Someone who has stated categorically that the Church cannot change its teachings – one of which is that homosexuality is evil and must be opposed – is not suddenly going to become a gay-friendly nice guy.

Ask Sister Jeanine Gramick. She found herself on the wrong side of scary old Ratpoison when she, together with her collaborator Fr. Robert Nugent, were running a support agency for gay and lesbian people called New Ways Ministry. When Ratpoison – who was Grand Inquisitor at the time – found out about it he issued an order forbidding her, or Nugent, ever to minister to gay people again, unless they were prepared to do it his way.

Gramick told her story to The Tablet magazine, and still somehow she seemed anxious not to upset the new pope. “Both he and I are working in an institution that we believe in and where we have common goals, which is the spreading of God’s love,” she said. “I think we all have to give others the benefit of the doubt, to be able to walk in their shoes. It’s easy to demonise people.”

But Ratpoison doesn’t give gay people the benefit of the doubt, he makes no effort whatsoever to walk in the shoes of gay people. And he finds it very easy to demonise us.

Let us remind ourselves of what he wrote in his letter “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexuals” in 1986 (which marked the start of his anti-gay crusade). The letter warned of the “deceitful propaganda” of gay groups before referring to homosexuality as “an intrinsic moral evil”. At the same time, he began a campaign to censure or remove any Catholic Church leader who either accepted, or failed adequately to condemn, gays. Gramick and Nugent were only two of the victims of that. Another was the Archbishop of Seattle, Raymond Hunthausen, whose work with gay people Ratpoison also put a stop to.

And there is no sign that he is going to halt this persecution.

Almost as soon as he had taken up office, the Vatican threw down a challenge to the Spanish government, which has taken the first steps towards permitting gay marriage (it isn’t there yet, and despite newspaper reports, it has a long way to go and severe obstacles to overcome before it becomes law).

The pope’s placeman, Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo (the man who made the wacky claim that HIV could pass through the rubber of condoms) immediately went into that curious hate-speak that the Vatican specialises in. He said that the Spanish had “changed and falsified the very definition of marriage” and said that permitting same-sex couples to adopt children represented “moral violence” against them.

Not content with vilifying gay couples, he called on civil servants in Spain not to co-operate with the law, in fact to actively undermine it. “Christians, even if they are state employees, are asked to become conscientious objectors because the laws we are speaking of are deeply offensive to morality.”

Although the Vatican knows nothing about democracy, it is an old hand at interfering with the laws of democratic states. The attempts to undermine Spain’s elected government should set alarm bells ringing for anyone who treasures government by the people for the people, and who despises governments run by cruel, unelected, unaccountable clerics.

But that is not the only new piece of papal homophobia. There is a renewal of Ratpoison’s campaign to “purge” gay people from Catholic seminaries so that none will find their way into the hierarchy of the Church. The message is clear: the gigantic child abuse scandal that has had such an impact on the Roman Church is all the fault of gay people and taking them out of the picture at an early stage will stop that.

So, the Vatican is conducting an “evaluation” of seminarians. The New York Times reported: “Church officials conducting the review will inevitably take up complaints that gays are enrolling in large numbers in the seminaries and their sexual activities are tolerated at the schools… Some contend an atmosphere of sexual permissiveness – for straight and gay seminarians – was a factor in the child abuse crisis, which has led to more than 11,000 abuse claims in the last five decades.”

The paper reports that the “exact number of gay seminarians is not known. Estimates vary dramatically from one quarter to more than half of all priest-candidates.”

This blaming of gay priests for the sex abuse scandal was most plainly put by J. Grant Swank Jnr on the fundamentalist Christian website MichNews.com. “There is a righteous contingent within Roman Catholicism that has been utterly embarrassed and disheartened at the practicing homosexual presence within their own clergy. They have been sickened by children abused by such ordained priests. The Voice of the Faithful in particular has been in the front of the cleansing request, exposing especially child molestation cases nationwide. Voice of the Faithful has been particularly vocal in wanting sexual dysfunction, that is, sexual orientations not in keeping with Scriptures, to be dealt with promptly.”

Mr Swank Jr. says “It could be known as the ‘Homosexual Cleansing.’”

On another conservative Christian website, WorldNetDaily, a report tells us that the reason that there are so many homosexuals in the Catholic hierarchy is because the previous Pope “refused to believe reports that potential clergy held that orientation – a mistake that will not be repeated by Pope Benedict XVI”.

Apparently, “Whenever Vatican investigators brought the results of their vetting process regarding an individual’s candidacy for bishop, cardinal or other office, and they revealed he was a homosexual, John Paul II would refuse to believe it. He did so because accusing someone of homosexuality was a standard practice of the Communist government in his native Poland regarding anyone it regarded as an enemy of the state… Karol Wojtyla witnessed this personal destruction repeatedly. So traumatised, he summarily dismissed such accusations as pope, and would approve the elevation of anyone so approved.” That”, according to the author Jack Wheeler, “is why the Church is riddled with homosexuals today.”

But Ratpoison is inconsistent in his approach to child abuse. He has played his part in trying to suppress investigation into it. He even tried to blame the media for the crisis, saying: “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offences among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower.”

Oh, so that makes it alright, does it?

But now The New York Times reports that Ratpoison has re-opened an investigation that he had previously stamped on into the founder of a Mexican Catholic order who is alleged to have molested many boys under his care. The Rev Marciel Maciel Degollando, now 85, founded the influential Legionaries of Christ.

The original accusations were dismissed by Ratpoison because “Father Maciel was a person very loved by the pope and had done so much good for the church.”

But as John Paul II lay on his death bed, Ratpoison suddenly reactivated the case and sent out investigators to interview the men who had made the accusations.

Nobody knows why he suddenly changed his mind. But it seems pretty obvious that for someone as ambitious as him, the prospect of having this sleazy cover-up hanging over him would do nothing for the prospects of his election as pope. And where is his statement of concern for the victims of this crime – or for any other victim of the crimes of the Catholic Church?

Ratpoison is a man who will do his damnedest to hurt and damage gay people all around the world. He will damage not only Catholics, but all of us who have to constantly justify ourselves and see our hard-won legal and civil rights under attack from an institution that purports to be holy but is as corrupt and conniving as it could possibly be.

The Vatican has declared war on gay people. It’s time for us to stop being respectful and get out the big guns to fire back at Pope Benedict the Evil.

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=

When you put the patients in charge of the asylum – as has happened with the American government – you get an awful lot of irrational actions and decisions.

The man in charge of this mayhem, George W. Bush, made the issue of gay marriage into a central plank of his election strategy. The idea behind this was to bribe the other nutcases who had, hitherto, been kept under control by the rules and regulations, (known as the Constitution of the United States). These rules and regulations, that were originally designed to protect the vulnerable and keep the mighty in check, are now being challenged – particularly the one that separates religion from the state.

You see, many of the American psychos presently running the asylum are suffering from religious mania and its accompanying delusions. They believe in angels, demons, Armageddon – but mostly they believe that gay people are the wilful spawn of the devil and must be punished.

This mental illness is, it seems, infectious and hatred of gay people is growing in America. Discrimination and acts of petty prejudice are becoming commonplace. It seems that the loonies have been freed from any self-restraint in this respect by their great leader, who’s every word and deed suggests that it is OK to make life miserable for gay people, to insult them, take their rights away and generally blame them for all the ills of society.

Looking at the American press, it’s clear that up and down that enormous land, nasty, spiteful, petty discrimination is burgeoning. Every tin pot religious fruitcake now feels empowered to heap abuse on gay people.

One of the larger organisations that it is hyperactive in its homophobia is the American Family Association. The AFA has demanded that the food manufacturer Kraft drop its corporate sponsorship of the Gay Games in Chicago.

Kathryn Hooks, AFA’s “director of media” said: “We believe that many of Kraft’s customers would be offended to know a portion of their finances from Kraft purchases is being used to sponsor something they oppose, and we also believe Kraft Corporation would also want to hear from its customers.” The AFA is calling on all its claimed 500,000 members to make a personal call to Kraft and “tell them to pull their financial support from the 2006 Gay Games.”

The AFA regularly calls for boycotts on companies that show even the slightest bit of gay-friendliness. (The latest is the Ford Motor Company which has spousal benefits for gay employees). It harasses companies that advertise on such shows as Will and Grace and Desperate Housewives.

Fortunately, Kraft are standing firm (at the time of writing) with its sponsorship of the games.

In Buffalo, New York, meanwhile, The Jewish Review newspaper refuses to carry ads for the local Gay Men’s Chorus because “it might influence young people to experiment with a sexual lifestyle that could be harmful to their health.”

Jewish Review editor, Rita Weiss, told The Buffalo News: “On a very practical basis, there is the possibility of influencing some young people whose sexual development is not yet complete. They could get AIDS. They could try out a lifestyle that is life-threatening.”

Meanwhile, in Congress, the right-wingers are busy thinking up ever-new and more outrageous legislation aimed at restricting gay rights and defaming gay people. With echoes of Section 28, The Hill newspaper reported that Republican Representative Walter Jones has launched proposals for a law that would restrict access to children’s books that feature gay characters.

The paper reports: “After reading news articles about a 7-year old girl borrowing a children’s book from her school library about two men marrying, Rep, Jones began to craft legislation that would give parents a significant role in reviewing literature before it can be accessed by young people.”

The book that caused the fuss was called King and King, which starts out with a queen urging her son to marry and ends with the prince tying the knot with another prince. The book, which is advertised as for 4-8 year olds, shows two men kissing, their lips hidden behind a heart.

The book also triggered a fanatical reaction in Oklahoma, where the state Legislature threatened to withhold funding for libraries if they did not remove books about gay people from the children’s shelves. Republican Representative Sally Kern said: “Restricting children’s access to books is common sense. It doesn’t risk unconstitutional infringement of free speech and still respects the rights of parents and families.” (But try restricting access to other dangerous books like, say, The Bible and see what the reaction would be.)

In Massachusetts – the only state to have gay marriage – an outfit called The Article 8 Alliance claimed that “schools have become more active in pushing homosexuality with students”. The group claims that criticism of homosexuals has been made just about impossible by the politically correct authorities, although Brian Camenker, the director of the group, had no problem getting his own opinion into the public arena – including that “Our Legislature and governor continue to support gay clubs in our public schools, which draw young people into this dangerous and destructive lifestyle.”

In Washington, Catholic colleges and universities were under fire from the ultra-right Cardinal Newman Society for “giving honorary degrees to and inviting pro-gay and pro-women’s rights advocates to speak.”

One of those dissenters who upset the Newman gang was a liberal theologian called Sister Margaret Farley, who teaches at Yale University Divinity School. She delivered the commencement address at Saint Xavier University in Illinois. She was immediately denounced by the Cardinal Newman thugs. “Farley has attacked Catholic teaching on sexual ethics, asserting that homosexuality is not disordered, homosexual and heterosexual relations that are not open to procreation can be ethical, and homosexual marriage should be allowed. She has misled Catholics and caused scandal by claiming support for her arguments within Catholic teaching despite her clear dissent from the Vatican and the bishops.”

Also on the Newman hit list was former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. “As mayor of New York and later as US Senate candidate, Giuliani was very public about his support for abortion rights and special rights for homosexuals. He endorsed domestic partnerships and took steps to extend special benefits to gay and lesbian couples employed by New York.”

In Kansas (and no, Dorothy doesn’t live there any more – in fact, she wouldn’t be welcome, what with her dubious friends and all), the dreaded religious nutcase Rev Fred Phelps has created a storm by objecting to a local school awarding a prize to a child who wrote an essay about the gay comedienne Ellen DeGeneres. A flier produced by the Rev Fred’s whacky Westboro Baptist Church denounces the school – Englesby Intermediate School – as “a homo-fascist regime”. And that’s one of the less extreme pieces of invective on the leaflet. The school awaits with dread Phelps’s threatened visit. He has also threatened to picket the Lexington High School’s graduation day because, he said, the school recognised such groups as the Gay-Straight Alliance.

Over in Dayton, Ohio, the Gay People’s Chronicle reported on a spate of “pretty police” style agent provocateur arrests of gay people. Gay men are also reportedly “pulled over” if they have rainbow stickers on their cars. The paper says: “A complaint filed with Metro Park police by Dale Rogers says that he and his partner, John Adams, were pulled over by park ranger Erich Witterich and ‘detained for 45 minutes to an hour’ and harassed because of gay pride and anti-Bush stickers on their car.” The police officer told them: “The bumpers stickers have got to come off.”

In Maryland, the Advocate reports that “Christian and conservative activists are pushing to overturn four bills that broaden gay rights”. The first two bills – to establish domestic partnership registration and to grant tax exemption to gay couples who make their partners co-owners of property – have already been vetoed by the right-wing governor, Robert Ehrlich, but the other two – extending hate-crimes legislation to gays and another requiring schools to report bullying incidents – have passed the first stages. The religious opponents now have to gather 51,000 signatures in order to have these laws put to a referendum, effectively putting them into mothballs for a long time. The Republicans made clear that “we cannot and will not let up”, and nor will they until the measures are thrown out.

Then there was the Catholic priest in St Paul, Minnesota who, according to The Billings Gazette, “denied communion to 100 people, saying they could not receive the sacrament because they wore rainbow-coloured sashes to show their support for gay Catholics… Last year, some conservative groups in St Paul kneeled in church aisles to block sash-wearers from receiving communion.”

Mind you, if you ask me, the loonies are doing gay Catholics a favour by kicking them out of the club. Who wants to be a member of an organisation that hates you?

This is just a small sample of recent displays of the pure, unadulterated homophobia that Bush has unleashed with his irresponsible election campaign.

Thankfully this isn’t the whole story. America is a much-divided nation, and there is still a sizeable rump of liberalism in some parts of the country.

But what the American experience illustrates very clearly is that gay rights are fragile. We cannot take them for granted. Our gay brothers and sisters over the water thought that progress to complete equality was inevitable and unstoppable. They have been disabused of that idea in a very unpleasant way.

We should always bear that in mind for ourselves.

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=

Barring any last-minute glitches, Canada, Spain and New Zealand will, by the time you read this, have joined the growing band of nations that are offering their gay citizens marriage – or some version of marriage.

No doubt Pope Ratpoison is hopping up and down in his bunker at the Vatican because his “children” aren’t doing precisely what he tells them. And no doubt his Evilness will be waging a ceaseless behind-the-scenes campaign to have this legislation repealed at the earliest opportunity.

Indeed, in New Zealand it has started already. When the NZ ambassador to the ‘Holy See’ (the fake state created by the Vatican to get it political influence) was presented to the pope, Ratpoison told him that NZ must get rid of “secular distortions of marriage” immediately. Only traditional models of the institution could possibly “protect women from exploitation”.

But fortunately Ratpoison is not without his critics, even within the Catholic Church. Bernard Ratigan wrote, in a letter to the Catholic magazine The Tablet: “Does Benedict really think that recognising same-sex relationships diminishes heterosexual marriage? Has he met many, or any, Catholic gay couples? I think if he had sustained contact and saw the sheer ordinariness of their lives he would never come out with such hurtful words as ‘anarchy’, ‘libertinism’ and ‘pseudo-freedom’. Such language does a disservice to empirical reality and, I would argue, demonstrates not the fruits of his anthropology and theology but of prejudice.”

The Church of England, too, has got itself into a right twist over the issue. Not only has the Anglican Communion sent the American churches with gay bishops to stand in the corner until further notice, they have also had to come to terms with the Britain’s “Civil Partnership” legislation as it affects its own numerous gay priests.

Here’s the story so far. The Anglican Church’s official policy is that hard core gay relationships are forbidden to members of its clergy. They’re OK if they remain soft-core, with only flaccid genitals, air kisses and the purest thoughts of unsoiled friendship. Any involvement of the nether regions in a vicar’s gay marriage will immediately incur… well, that’s the problem, you see. What will it incur?

The CofE’s Archbishops’ Council has now reportedly been forced to promise guidelines saying that it will be OK for its vicars to enter into a (perfectly legal) Civil Partnership, but they will have to visit their bishop and sign on the dotted line that there will be no hanky-panky.

Picture the scene. “You may be married to your boyfriend now, my lad,” the bishop will say sternly, “But you must sign this form to promise that you will not bum him or suck him off or even give him a little J. Arthur. Nor will he do any of the aforementioned genital activities to you. Now, how about a nice sherry?”

Of course, what will happen in reality is that the blushing bishop will say: “Do you promise to observe church teaching?” and the vicar – who will still have the confetti in his hair – will say “Of course.” And then go out and say to his waiting spouse: “I read the Bible differently to him, so as far as I’m concerned it’s OK for us to enjoy a few conubials.” They will then pop off to Gran Canaria for their honeymoon which might involve a threesome if they’re lucky.

In the same vein, in the Church Times, the Revd. David Rogers said: “My heart sinks at the thought of the stiff and embarrassing atmosphere that will pervade the episcopal interview. It will be as if the quality, longevity and uniqueness of the same-sex relationship, in all its beauty and passion, were as nothing, and the detail of sexual activity will be everything. Were marriage preparation conducted with such an imbalance, the interviewer would be thought of as unhealthily obsessed… If I were a diocesan bishop, I should be more concerned to know why my lesbian and gay clergy didn’t avail themselves of the Civil Partnership Act.”

Andrew Carey, son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was quick to latch on to the ludicrousness of all this. “Our capacity for self-deception in the Church is unrivalled,” he wrote in the Church of England Newspaper. “In reality, anything but an absolute ban on civil partnerships for clergy will introduce homosexual marriage to the Church of England without any proper theological discussion and debate in the Councils of the Church whatsoever…. In future the Church of England will have effectively changed its policy and teaching on marriage without even admitting it.”

However, outside the deluded churches, many gay couples are now finding that they have a security and a status that they could never have imagined, even five years ago. The Methodists have even (however patronisingly) voted to consider “blessing” gay unions in some way. Hip, hip hooray!

But wait. There are other people, besides the religious bigots, who aren’t entirely happy with these developments.

Kenji Yoshimo ruminated in the Village Voice in New York about why and how the topic of gay marriage had suddenly vaulted to the top of the gay rights agenda. After all, he said, gay Americans don’t even have a statute protecting their rights at work yet, and 87 per cent of respondents to a recent Gallup poll said they would support such a measure. Whereas, for some reason the big deal is gay marriage, which is only supported by 39 per cent. So, he says “why not start in the hiring hall rather than the banqueting hall?”

Well, says Mr Yoshimo, the gay community wants to re-write its biography, to take it out of the tragic mould – often represented by the musty closet or rampaging AIDS – and put it into the joyous mould, represented by jolly same-sex weddings and happy-ever-after contentment.

There is, he says, an idealised and a banal approach to gay marriage. The idealised approach is the one where activists demand that nothing short of marriage will suffice, that we must not be fobbed off with “marriage-lite”. Proponents of this philosophy say that civil partnership-type arrangements “deprive gays of the symbolic capital of the word ‘marriage’. It is social expectations created by the word that explain marriage’s near magical ability to create kin out of thin air, to turn passion into commitment, to make people healthier and happier.”

Another author, calling himself ‘Gay Shame San Francisco’, doesn’t like it at all. Gay Shame wrote in a recent anthology of essays on the topic that marriage is “violent, racist, homophobic – serving as one of the central institutions necessary for organising a misogynist, sexist and oppression-ridden world.” So why do we want it?

Others, like Meredith Mann argue that marriage is simply boring: “We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Married. Yawn.”

But Mr Yoshimo says there is something to be said for the banal approach. Rather than arguing whether marriage is a good thing or not, or whether it’s the real thing or not is beside the point. Simply getting on with it, in all its traditional banality, makes it a fait accompli. It starts to become an everyday part of life, rather than a topic for political debate or activism, and that robs the arguments of their passion.

And, indeed, on the first anniversary of the legalisation of gay marriage in the state of Massachusetts, Deb Price wrote an article in USA Today headlined: “The sky didn’t fall in.”

She found that in that first year, the number of voters prepared to accept gay marriage had rocketed from 35% to 65%. She explains this amazing turnabout by the fact that 6,000 same-sex couples had got married without incident. The apocalyptic warnings from religious fundamentalists about the collapse of Western civilisation simply didn’t come true. It was, in fact, the sheer banality of it all that convinced people that there was no threat.

Kenji Yoshimo ends by saying: “Gay rights activists should not underestimate the power of banality. I’m reminded of a friend who wrote his grandfather a 14-page, single-spaced coming-out letter. After saying all the right things, the grandfather added: ‘And by page eight, I have to say that I was thinking ‘All right, all right, I get it. You’re gay.’”

Mr Yoshimo says that coming out is now a cliché and gay marriage is headed in the same direction – and that’s something we should celebrate. “For,” he concludes, “if we cannot persuade our opponents with high-minded argument, we can still bore them into submission with wedding pictures.”

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=

Elton John famously did it, and most of us have friends or acquaintances that have done it.

I’m talking about the gay guys who – on their first few forays from the closet – feel the need to assure everyone that they are not gay but, in fact, “only” bisexual. It’s a defence mechanism that permits them to test the water before taking the full coming out plunge.

Now a new study, published in America, seems to suggest that all men who claim to be bisexual are really just gay men who haven’t reached final destination yet.

The claim certainly put the cat among the pigeons when it was reported on the front page of the New York Times under the rather provocative heading: “Gay, Straight or Lying. Bisexuality revisited”.

The study was conducted by Northwestern University and Toronto’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health which recruited 101 men. Thirty-three of them said they were bisexual, 30 said they were straight and 38 said they were gay. They were each attached to a “penile plesmythograph” (a small harness that fits around the knob and detects any tiny fluctuations in its tumescence as a result of a variety of mucky stimuli). They were then shown pornographic images, straight and gay, and their arousal patterns were matched against their self-defined sexual orientation.

As expected, the straight men in the study group got aroused by images of women, and the gay guys responded to images of men. The unexpected finding was that three-quarters of the self-identified bi men responded only to images of men. This led the reporter on the NYT to conclude that bisexuality as a distinct sexual orientation doesn’t exist.

Dr Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender study at the University of Utah (who wasn’t involved in the study) was reported as saying that the discrepancy about what’s happening in people’s minds and what’s going on in their bodies is a puzzle. “We have assumed everyone means the same thing when they talk about desire, but now we have evidence that that is not the case.”

One danger of the study was pointed out by Dr Randall Sell, of Columbia University. “That last thing you want,” he said, “is for some therapists to see this study and start telling bisexual people that they’re wrong, that they’re really on their way to homosexuality. We don’t know nearly enough about sexual orientation and identity.”

The NYT claimed that previous studies had also been unable to find a difference between arousal patterns in men who call themselves gay and those who call themselves bisexuals. And in 1984, the gay magazine The Advocate conducted a survey that showed that 40 per cent of gay men had said they were bisexual before they admitted that their true orientation was, in fact, gay.

The gay and bisexual support and pressure groups were quick off the mark to rubbish the research. The NYT was flooded with letters from angry people of all orientations criticising the scientific validity and the methodology of the study and the bona fides of the man heading it.

In a statement, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF): said The NYT article “fails to note several serious and obvious questions about the study’s methodology and munderlying premises; fails to report the serious controversies that have plagued one of the study’s authors in the past; misstates some of the study’s conclusions and fails to reflect the views of any leaders in the bisexual community.”

On the other side of the fence was Chandler Burr, author of  “A Separate Identity: The search for the biological origins of sexual orientation”, which claims that homosexuality is genetically predetermined.

He wrote: “Some gay and bisexual advocates are condemning ‘Straight, Gay or Lying?’ regarding a study suggesting that bisexuality may not exist among human males – something those of us familiar with the scientific literature have known since, basically, forever. Compare this hysterical – and anti-science – reaction to the conservative Christians’ anti-science reaction to studies showing that homosexuality is an inborn orientation like left-handedness. They’re identical. The right hates science because the data contradict (in the case of homosexuality) Leviticus; the left because the data contradict the liberal lie that we’re environment-created, not hard-wired in any way. These particular scientific facts are making these advocates scream like members of the extreme right, though it’s they who always tells the right to let go of concepts that are contradicted by science.”

Whatever you think of Mr Burr’s analysis, the opportunistic religious gay bashers were quickly on the case. The VirtueOnline.org website (“The Voice of Orthodox Anglicanism”) used the study to batter the gay Christian group Integrity (roughly equivalent to Britain’s Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement). “Integrity… is finding itself increasingly marginalised by newer scientific studies that show that sexuality preferences can not only be changed, but some sexual orientations might actually be fraudulent,” the website gloated.

VirtueOnline hates and detests gay people because our existence not only contradicts their inconsistent “Holy Book”, it also threatens to break up their beloved “Anglican Communion”. Consequently, they keep forming groups that claim to change people’s sexual orientation through prayer and brainwashing. This is their Final Solution to the Homosexual Problem – eradicate all gay people through exhortations to the bogey man in the sky.

The controversy set off debates on message boards all over the USA. On The Village Voice site, bisexuals got to speak for themselves. One wrote: “It is entirely possible that bisexual men tend to feel more attracted to one sex or the other on any given day or hour – a pattern I have observed in myself. But, hey, maybe I am just another gay man in denial.”

On the same site, ‘Girl Bi Fan’ admitted that she loved “watching straight (or marginally straight) guys kiss and fondle each other. It gets me so excited. The only reason I don’t rush off to date bi guys is because – in my experience – bi guys turn out to be just plain gay.”

‘Bisexual and Annoyed’ spoke for many when she wrote: “Bisexual is a word one often uses to define one’s sexuality when one just doesn’t fit in a gay/straight box. I also consider myself bi, because I am a woman who finds women attractive, but not most men. I am also happily married and monogamous, and I like sex with men. How can I call myself straight and then spend hours drooling over the hot girl in the sunglasses shop? How can I say I’m a lesbian when I love bonking my husband? Human sexuality is never that simple, and it would be nice if everyone could stop pretending that it is.”

In relation to all this, what are we to make of the gay men who get married and have children and then decide that they’re gay after the family structure is all in place? This can lead to dreadful agony all round. Were they bisexual men, or simply gay men who couldn’t face the pressure and decided to try to be conventional instead?

Ananova, the Press Association news site, reported that an Austrian couple with 12 children (yes, that’s twelve) have split up after the husband admitted he was gay. The wife in this scenario, Alina, said: “He told me he only had sex with me so I would get pregnant and it would give me something to do. I can’t believe we had so many children together, my whole life has been a lie.”

The Indianapolis Star carried an article about gay spouses which tried to discover why so many apparently ordinary husbands are suddenly declaring their gayness and moving on. “Gays and lesbians who perhaps felt pressured to marry are now emboldened to drop the façade and embrace their true identities,” the paper said. “The gay and lesbian rights movement has wrought major changes in American society. While social stigmas persist, the culture has become much freer for those outside the heterosexual mainstream. Today when gay and lesbian people ‘come out’, they typically find themselves wrapped in the welcoming arms of their respective communities.”

Mmm. I’m not sure there would be many ‘welcoming arms’ for a middle-aged or elderly gentleman with no experience of gay life emerging on to Old Compton Street or Canal Street. Reality would bite pretty quickly. The ‘welcoming arms’ are generally reserved for those under 25.

Which brings us back to the original question: is bisexuality real, or is it simply a mechanism for avoiding the truth?

The author of the study at the heart of this hoo-ha is Gerulf Reiger. He guesses that men who are really straight, but say they are bisexual, might do so because “it’s so much easier for a male to have quick sex with another male than with a woman. But their true sexual feelings are still for women.”

The gay literary giant Christopher Isherwood once said that you knew if you were gay if you could fall in love with someone of the same sex, rather than just have sex with them.

Is this the true definition of a bisexual, then – someone who can fall in love with, as well as shag, both men and women?

As one enquirer asked of The Village Voice agony uncle: “Am I morally bound to be true to a girl I’ve been in a loving relationship with for three long years if I have bisexual curiosity? I want to see what it is like to be with a man! She would be devastated, so I can’t tell her. But I want to do this!”

The agony uncle replied: “You’re morally bound not to be a total shit. If you can’t bring yourself to tell her you want to smoke some pole, at least have the decency to break up with her. Once you’ve satisfied your curiosity, you can go running back to your girlfriend – if she’ll have you back, that is.”

I think it’s unlikely that this young man would want an emotional commitment to the guy who’s pole he smoked in the same way he would with a woman (whether his present girlfriend or not). Would he therefore be truly bisexual? Or just someone who wants to have a bit of horse-play on the side with a well-hung fuck-buddy, no questions asked, no big love deal?

The question remains open.

Who is the most appalling preacher in America? Competition is stiff these days, but in the race to be most appalling, the overall (and, some might say, the perpetual) leader has to be the Rev Fred Phelps, of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. His title as biggest gobshite of all time was momentarily in danger last month when the Rev Pat Robertson called publicly for the assassination of a democratically elected leader – the President of Venezuela, no less. Robertson was forced to pull back and apologise, but that’s not Fred’s style.

No, Fred isn’t happy with merely causing simple offence – he’s not happy until he has caused all-out unrestrained, blood boiling outrage. If there is misery for innocent bystanders, so much the better.

However, sensing that he might be upstaged by Pat Robertson, Fred has pulled out all the stops and staged some even more grotesque stunts. These included picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq, welcoming Hurricane Katrina and subsequent inundation and loss of life in the gulf states of America, and then calling the King of Sweden a fag.

The motivation for Fred’s current crop of hatreds is prompted by the fact that “America worships at the fag altar and spits in God’s face”. (In other words, he doesn’t like the fact that some parts of America grant human rights to their homosexual citizens).

He’s got it in for King Carl Gustav of Sweden because a Swedish court ruled that a fundamentalist minister broke the country’s hate-speech laws by verbally attacking gays.

Fred Phelps and his twisted family came to prominence in 1998 when they demonstrated at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a young man who had been beaten to death by queer bashers. The Westboro Baptist Church thought Matthew got what he deserved and announced that he would burn in hell for all eternity. Since then, Fred has made a whole career out of hating all and sundry, especially if he can make even the remotest connection between them and sympathy with homosexuals (or “fag-enabling” as he so prosaically puts it).

The Rev Fred’s OI (Outrage Index) rose to new heights when he decided that American soldiers killed in Iraq got all they deserved because they were defending a nation that had been “turned over to fags”. He and his ragbag family of misfits turned up at a funeral for two dead GI’s from the Tennessee National Guard in the town of Smyrna.

“I’m saying these parents killed their kids,” ranted Phelps, “And they want someone to go warn their loved ones to repent, lest they joined them in hell.”

The families of the dead soldiers were, understandably, horrified to see the Phelps’s were on the way. To their aid came Pamela Brown, a local woman who was determined that Phelps would not disrupt the funeral. She told the local newspaper The Leaf Chronicle, “I thought about [the dead soldier’s] 12-year old daughter. I thought it would be an awful thing during this sad day, she would have to see them and read their signs.”

Ah yes, their signs. “God hates fags, and God hates you,” was one of the more moderate ones. Ms Brown started phoning around other concerned citizens and eventually she assembled a sizeable crowd that was able to stand between the grieving family and the evil family.

It took only thirty or so of the Westboro Baptist “congregation” to generate huge amounts of publicity, and now Fred finds he can get publicity without actually doing anything. He just has to threaten to do something and he gets all the front pages he could ever dream of.

It takes a particularly perverse frame of mind to think up these stunts. I wonder how many ideas for outrage he rejects before he finds one that will cause maximum hurt to grieving people? How long can it have taken him to finally light upon America’s Achilles heel and then stick a knife in it?

Can anyone imagine anything more ghastly than burying a loved one and having to listen to a bunch of crackpots shouting that they deserved to die and that the insurgents who killed them were to be praised.

Phelps brings so much disgrace on religion that more moderate church people are anxious to denounce him and distance themselves from his message. Such is their despair at the light that Freddie throws on Christianity that one religious conservative actually thinks he might be a “gay plant”. This particular conspiracy says that Fred’s anti-gay message is so extreme, it forces people to condemn it, even though they are anti-gay themselves.

Peter LaBarbera of the Illinois Family Institute (no mean homophobe himself) told the Christian Life Site News.com that, “Politically and culturally speaking, Phelps and his protesters serve as a crude caricature of pro-family traditionalists who oppose the normalisation of homosexuality. Fred makes an easy target for the media and secularists who are tempted (partly by their own prejudices) to paint any opposition to ‘gay rights’ as hateful. For this reason, I have sometimes wondered if Phelps and his clan are ‘gay plants’”.

Lifesite News, though, thinks there might be another explanation for Phelps’s behaviour – simply that he is “unbalanced”. They point to this statement from the godhatesfags.com website: “Thank God for the bombing of London’s subway today… wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured… Wish it was many more.”

Fred’s aberrant behaviour knows no bounds – literally, nothing is unsayable. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it was hallelujah time for Pastor Phelps. “It is entirely appropriate that these heathen, God-hating Sodomites should be flooded out of their homes, surrounded by disease, and attacked by their own bloody, lawless fellow citizens,” he said. “It is entirely appropriate that bodies are floating down the streets of New Orleans, receiving that burial which is appropriate for them, to wit ‘He shall be buried with burial of an ass’ (Jeremiah 22:19). Let us pray that God will send a more hurricanes to totally devastate the North American continent with more and more category 5 hurricanes!”

But, hey, don’t think that Fred is alone in attributing Hurricane Katrina to God’s anger – after all, we had the perfect Sodom and Gomorrah scenario here. The fact that the New Orlean’s big gay party – unfortunately called Southern Decadence – was imminent was a perfect excuse for the God’s judgment brigade to jump on the bandwagon.

Another right-wing religious group called Repent America described the annual gay event as “homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets”. Its spokesman Michael Marcavage announced: “Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city. May it never be the same.”

It seems God is eventually getting Fred’s message and sending the fire and brimstone of which he’s so fond

Which means the King of Sweden had better watch himself because Fred is on his case, too.

Fred calls Sweden “a land of sodomy, bestiality and incest.” He first took against the country when a preacher called Ake Green, who is almost as nutty as Fred himself, was tried and convicted in Stockholm for inciting hatred against homosexuals. This prompted Fred to “celebrate” the deaths of 500 Swedes in the Boxing Day tsunami. He also charmingly opined that “The King looks like an anal copulator & his grinning kids look slutty & gay.”

Under pictures of the royal family, Mr Phelps wrote on his website: “You jackass Swedes just don’t get it. Once you have laws to chill Bible preaching, we don’t give a rat’s tutu whatever else you do or say. You are drippings from the Devil’s own penis – a veritable sperm bank for Satan’s queers.”

I’m sorry, but I laughed when I read that. A rat’s tutu? What the hell is this man talking about?

But worse was to come. The Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that Fred was on his way to Stockholm to “hunt the King down”. “It don’t make no difference where he tries to hide.”

Of course, anyone with a grain of sense knows that Fred Phelps daren’t set a foot off American soil. It is only the US constitution’s protection of free speech that keeps him from being torn limb from limb. He hasn’t got the guts to carry out his threat to go to Sweden in order to “get the King wherever he may be”. He is well aware what would happen.

The Swede’s, however, foolishly took the bait and questions were asked of the American ambassador in Stockholm, and the royals looked into launching some kind of legal action.

Fred must have been rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of a court case with European royalty on the witness stand justifying their ‘fag enabling’ activities.

A columnist in Expressen, Lars Lindstrom, wrote: If he were a cartoon character, I’d laugh. But now I just feel ill. Phelps has eleven lawyers fighting for his constitutional rights to cast the objects of his hatred into the fires of hell. To dismiss him as the village idiot is to take the easy way out.”

But Fred Phelps is the village idiot. An offensive, attention-seeking idiot, admittedly, but an idiot all the same. And, as Lars Lindstrom said: “With friends like Fred Phelps, Ake Green doesn’t need a single enemy”.

Mr Green’s appeal will be heard in the Swedish Supreme Court in November. You can bet Fred Phelps will be threatening to picket. You can also safely bet that he’ll be a no-show.

Did you know that gay men and paedophiles are the same thing? That gay people cannot be trusted to tell the truth and are incapable of sympathising with people who feel differently to themselves? Did you know that gay men simply cannot obey rules and have absolutely no control over their disordered sexual impulses?

It’s true. How do I know it’s true? Because the pope told me so, and he’s infallible. Who says he’s infallible? Why, he does, so it must be true.

The pope has a direct line to God, you see (the only person outside of an asylum who has) and knows precisely what our Saviour wants. Which, by some amazing coincidence, always seems to be the same as what pope Ratpoison wants.

Now, it seems, Our Heavenly Father has told Ratpoison personally that he wants all gay men expelled from the Catholic priesthood, and so Il Papa is sending his Inquisition heavies round to the seminaries (these are the colleges where misguided young men are trained to throw their lives away in the service of an institution that hates them) to root them out. The “apostolic visitations” as these witch hunts are called will attempt to identify the closet cases and make a note of the liberated – and then shown them the door.

These victims should count themselves lucky; a few centuries ago the Church would have gladly introduced them to other faggots – wooden ones that would have made a nice big bonfire underneath them.

The gay boys are not wanted in the Church any more. Or, as leader of the Catholic League said so charmingly on Fox News recently: “Too many sexually active gays have been in the priesthood, and it’s about time they were routed out.”

Innocent or guilty, sexually active or celibate, loyal or questioning, it’s all the same to Ratpoison. He just wants someone to be punished for what, in effect, are his own failings. Or, as William Saletan put it in Slate magazine: “The one thing everyone knows about the Roman Catholic Church is that you’re supposed to confess your sins. Everybody, that is, except the church’s leaders. First they failed to come clean about sexual abuse by priests. Then they failed to come clean about having covered up the abuse. Every time they assured the public that nothing else would come out, something else came out.”

News of the persecution plans had been circulating for years, but now the Vatican is said to have prepared a document to be used as the witch finders make their progress around the 229 seminaries in the United States. The New York Times obtained a copy of this document, which has not yet been officially approved by the Vatican. There is a suspicion that it was leaked to the NYT in order to test public reaction to it.

Among the 96 questions in the 12-page manual are “Is there a clear process for removing from the seminary faculty members who dissent from the teachings of the church?” “Is there evidence of homosexuality in the seminary? Are there signs of “particular friendships?”

The prelate overseeing the American pogrom (the Witch Finder General, I suppose), Archbishop Edwin O’Brien told the National Catholic Register that “men with strong homosexual inclinations” should not be enrolled in seminaries even if they have been celibate for years.

O’Brien did not make clear how the “strength” of gay “inclinations” is to be measured. Is there an official Vatican “gayometer”, perhaps?

Debbie Weill, executive director of the gay and lesbian Catholic group DignityUSA said the bishops were “scapegoating” gay people. “For the Catholic Church to now suddenly ban gay priests, it would be a very foolish decision and harmful to the church overall,” she said. (So, it might have some positive side effects, then.)

Estimates of the numbers of gay priests in the USA range from 10% to 60%. Imagine if the latter were to be the true number, and vengeful Ratpoison kicked them all out. The Church is already desperately short of priests to carry out its arcane practices – imagine if it now had to get rid of more than half of the remainder. The Church in the West would die. (I’m suddenly warming to this whole thing).

In an effort to reassure those liberal Catholic appalled by developments, the Vatican Correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, John L. Allen, wrote in the New York Times that the Vatican didn’t always mean what it said. “Although it is difficult for many Anglo-Saxons to grasp, when the Vatican makes statements like ‘no gays in the priesthood’ it doesn’t actually mean ‘no gays in the priesthood’. It means ‘As a general rule, this is not a good idea, but we all know there will be exceptions’.” Mr Allen argues for the acceptance of a spot of hypocrisy to oil the Vatican’s wheels. The Holy See may present a stern face to the world, but in real life it’s a cuddly bunny, he seems to be saying.

But this won’t do. Another New York Times report was about a woman called Brenda Oliver, who was “depressed and desperate for spiritual sustenance”. She visited a church near her home in Brooklyn. She was OK until the priest started talking about “the men of Sodom”. What he didn’t know is that Ms Oliver is a lesbian lady. She revealed: “The preacher said that if a bunch of gays went to his house, he’d start shooting and killing them”.

And this surely the problem with the “it’s all just bluster” argument. When a world figure such as Ratpoison persistently issues defamatory and condemnatory statements against a minority, it is bound to unleash violent feelings among his followers, feeling that would otherwise be kept under control. We need to ask, how many others are watching this anti-gay hatemongering and beginning to feel that it’s OK to shoot gays – after all, dear Papa Ratpoison hates them, and he literally cannot be wrong.

Andrew Sullivan, the gay Republican apologist and Catholic commentator, put it this way on his blog: “What does this document say to the gay laity? It says: you’re so sick in the head you cannot lead moral lives. God may be able to forgive you but our job is to protect every other Catholic from your disorder.”

Sullivan is of the opinion that the pope’s actions are “evil” and “will become accepted, as Benedict’s church continues to retreat from modernity into the superstitions and bigotries of earlier times… As every beleaguered politician has found, bigotry works. It may well work as a strategy for Benedict, especially in the Third World, where hatred of homosexuals is more common. But to rebuild a church on the basis of hate is a truly odious strategy.”

But what of the gay priests themselves? The New York Times tracked a few down and asked for their reaction. All demanded to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions. “I do think about leaving,” said one Franciscan seminarian, “It’s hard to lead a duplicitous life, and for me it is hard not to speak out against injustice. And that’s what this is.”

Another commented: “I find I am becoming more and more angry. This is the church I’ve given my life to and believe in. I look at every person I come in contact with as someone who’s created in the image and likeness of God, and I expect that from the Church I am a part of. But I always feel like I’m ‘less than’.”

Another said he felt like a Jew in Nazi Germany and was thinking of donning a pink triangle badge in protest.

But the Reverend John Trigilio, president of the Fraternity of Catholic Clergy welcomed the clear-out. He said the ban on gays would be rather like the previous ban on epileptics. “It’s pretty much the same thing,” the raving Reverend said. “The work and ministry of the priesthood is going to be too demanding and will put a strain on them. He’s going to have to spend five to eight years in a seminary where he’s going to be with men.”

Andrew Sullivan has also carried photographs on his blog of Father Mychal Judge, a pastor for New York City firefighters, an openly gay priest who died with those he served in the rubble of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. “According to the new pope, Father Judge should never have been ordained,” Mr Sullivan notes. “The idea that gay priests somehow cannot serve straight congregants, when you have this priest working with one of the most stereotypically macho organisations – and he gave his life to them – captures some of the cruelty and bigotry we see in the Vatican now.”

Father Judge was – and indeed still is – one of the most loved Catholic Priests of recent history. Indeed, there is a campaign afoot to have him canonised (http://www.saintmychal.com/ ) and the leader of that campaign, Burt Kearns, told the New York Times: “If you look at the life of Mychal Judge, this is a man who should be on the recruiting poster for Catholic priests. He was a great priest.”

Pope Ratpoison has, indeed, painted himself into a corner with his, and we all know what cornered rats do.

However, the stupidity of his hatemongering was pointed out nicely in a letter to the International Herald Tribune from Rey Buono in Kuala Lumpur: “I hope Pope Benedict will complete his exorcism of gays from the Vatican by sandblasting Michelangelo’s blatantly homoerotic ‘Creation of Adam’ from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.”

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=

We are living in a society in transition. The new values are beginning to overtake the old at a rapid rate, and not everyone is happy about it.

Perhaps this is no better illustrated than in the approach to gay people in this country. On the one hand we are about to be given something that I never thought we would see in my lifetime – gay marriage. On the other hand, we have a rising tide of violence and hate being directed at us by a section of the community that simply cannot come to terms with us.

As some gay people prepare to celebrate and enshrine in law their precious relationships, others are being beaten to death with such ferocity that even their own mothers can’t identify them.

We may be approaching equality in the law, but will we ever be free from the violence directed at us by the hate/booze/drug-fuelled Neanderthals?

Maybe not, but more generally things are going our way. The queues are forming at register offices up and down the country in anticipation of December 21. Touching stories are emerging in the local press, such as the one in the Oldham Advertiser which concerned Judith Tomlinson and Mary Harrison who, by serendipitous coincidence, discovered that their 31st anniversary as a couple will fall on 21 December. They will tie the knot on that significant date. Mary said: “We are happy. Neither of us wants to be without the other – we can’t function without each other.”

Judith added: “There has been nothing keeping us together all these years other than the fact that it’s what we want and I can’t see it changing. The only thing that will change will be legal rights the partnership gives us.”

But it is the celebrity weddings that the papers are rubbing their hands about. The parliamentary gays are in the forefront. According to The Sunday Times, South Ribble MP David Borrow says that he and his partner will be taking advantage of the new law “at some time in the future”, while Ben Bradshaw told The Evening Standard that he intends to do the deed with his boyfriend, Neal Dalgleish. Chris Smith and Dorian Jabri are “thinking about it”

Perhaps the granddaddy of all the gay nuptials will be that of Elton John and David Furnish. Although they haven’t officially announced their intentions yet, there is plenty of speculation that they will opt for a ceremony that’s as over-the-top as so many of their widely-reported parties are.

Kathryn Knight in the Daily Mail purported to have the inside track on Grandma Elton’s plans. She wrote: “The date has been reserved in the most A-list diaries. The venue for the nuptials has been lovingly prepared. Elizabeth Hurley and Victoria Beckham are to be bridesmaids, and while the exact specifications for the flowers and wedding cake have not been finalised, the happy couple have settled on a figurine of two Action Men decorated with Swarovski crystals for their table decorations. It will not, it is safe to say, be the most modest or conventional wedding. But then, ‘The Eltons’ are not known for their unassuming tastes.”

There is talk of negotiations with Hello magazine and that the guest list will include “the usual suspects” – Lulu, Sting and his wife Trudi, the Osbornes, Naomi Campbell, Sam Taylor-Wood and, of course, the Beckhams.

I don’t envy their task of having to buy presents for the man who has everything – three times over.

The inexorable spread of gay marriage is going to lead to all kinds of whacky situations because some people are bringing with them an awful lot of baggage – such as the detritus from a previous heterosexual marriage. In Belgium, for instance (where they didn’t mess about with this “civil partnership” lark and got straight on with proper marriage for gays), a divorced woman is to be a “best woman” at the gay wedding of her ex-husband. (Take a moment to work that out). Pink News reported that Tanya Van Rysselberghe will play a prominent role as her former hubby, Guy, gets married to her hairdresser Dany. Ms Van Rysselberghe explains that at first she was furious with Guy but she came to terms with the situation. “I would have been more ashamed if he had fallen in love with another woman. I saw how happy he and Dany were. They were like Yin and Yang. That’s why I want to be at his wedding as the best woman.”

Let’s hope Guy and Dany are not planning to go on a honeymoon to North Devon, where they might happen upon the Pine Lodge guest house, where – according to a report in the Independent on Sunday – landlady Mrs Davies doesn’t want gay couples as customers. In fact, she turned David Allard and Bryn Hughes away because she said their presence would “upset” her other guests. She, and others like her, are still allowed to get away with this sort of thing at the moment, but that may change if the government keeps to its promise to outlaw discrimination against gays and lesbians in the receipt of goods and services. Mrs Davies and her pursed lips might have come along at just the right time as a solid illustration of how unpleasant and mean-minded anti-gay prejudice can be.

But rock singer Melissa Etheridge found a way round it. She and her “domestic partner” (as gay spouses are called in California) Tammy Lynn had taken their two children on a trip in a trailer. According to a profile in The Sunday Telegraph magazine, the family arrived at a restaurant in Texas where a waitress refused to serve them. “At first, Etheridge says, you don’t want to believe it’s because you’re gay, but then you just let it go – and that’s unfortunate. Of course, the waitress who did wait on us – we gave her $100 tip. And we hope that the word spreads.”

Ms Etheridge and Tammy Lynn, like all the other gay people around the world who have formalised their relationships, haven’t been able to do it in church. But that may be about to change for some of them.

The Methodist Church in this country is considering making some kind of blessing available for civil unions. It has set up a committee to decide what it should do, but it won’t decide policy (according to Christian News Service) until its annual conference next year. So that might be a start.

In Ireland, Dr Robert McCarthy, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, said that his church (The Church of Ireland, not the Catholic) needed to “recognise reality”. He told The Irish Independent: “People now tend to get married when they have children and that marriage becomes the official recognition a relationship exists. In this context, it is probably right that same-sex relationships, which are perfectly natural for some people, should be recognised by the State and why not by the Church?”

In Sweden the state church is way ahead of this and has endorsed a proposal to create a liturgy for the blessing of same-sex unions very soon. To receive the blessing service a couple would have to have signed a civil partnership agreement. Sweden, like Britain, doesn’t permit same-sex marriage it has a form of civil union where couples sign an official registry – and get limited rights.

But the Swedes are thinking putting that right. The Swedish parliament has also set up a committee to examine the possibility of upgrading to full marriage rights for gay people. Which should give hope to those of us in Britain who think we’ve been short-changed with “civil partnerships”. The Swedes show progress is possible. Let’s hope Mr Blair is watching.

In this country, evangelical Christians (don’t they ever sleep?) said, according to Virtue Online that “it would be inadvisable for Christians to enter civil partnerships if only to avoid causing scandal”.

The latest group of religious maniacs to jump on this bandwagon is “Anglican Mainstream” which sent a letter to the Church of England’s House of Bishops saying they were “concerned” about the bishops’ decision to allow vicars to enter civil partnerships on the proviso they don’t have any rumpy-pumpy with their partners. They say the bishops are naïve to imagine that vicars married to their same-sex partners will “eschew sexual intimacy”. The Sheffield branch of Reform – another lot of right-wing holy joes – issues a statement calling on “all authentic Bible-believing Anglicans in the diocese not to take Holy Communion with or from clergy who register under the Civil Partnership Act.”

Other than that, all seems to be on track. Local authorities have been told by central government to promote the new law, and some have done so more enthusiastically than others. Even the old-style Tories in Bromley have backed down on their ban on ceremonies at the local register office, and now the Northern Ireland town of Lisburn (which has a similar ban) is under pressure to lift it.

But no doubt there are others who will be throwing brickbats rather than confetti. We have heard reports of po-faced registrars who say they will refuse to carry out gay registrations because of their religious convictions – although a register office is quite definitely a secular space where religion plays no part. Registrars are civil servants, not servants of the church, so no formal accommodation must be made for them to opt out.

Naturally, we don’t want some whingeing Wally casting clouds over our big day, with face that suggests he’s been licking the toilet bowl, but at the same time dissenting registrars mustn’t be let off the hook. It would be a profound insult if civil servants were permitted to be exempted from dealing with us because of their own narrow-mindedness.

All that aside – if you are doing the deed this month, I wish you every success in your future lives. But please remember – this law is not a toy to play with, it’s a binding, legal contract that is very difficult to get out of. It is something that needs to be undertaken only after a great deal of thought. Optimism on its own is not enough.

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=

When Mary Whitehouse used to say, “I don’t like sex on the television”, the traditional response was, “Well, why don’t you try it on the kitchen table, then?”. If she were alive today, she’d be turning in her grave. Sex on the television? When isn’t there sex on the television? I’m waiting for the first dogging session on Teletubbies – during which Tinky-Winky can let us know once and for all what exactly that handbag represents.

Most people I know quite like a bit of rumpy-pumpy with their viewing and, in these days of equal opportunities, gay people aren’t denied their fair share of broadcast sex.

Not that it pleases everyone, of course. The Daily Star has been having a fit of the 1970’s-style vapours over the Corrie gay story (see news item). “Get this filth off TV” screech its headlines between pictures of bare-breasted women and sordid exposes of film stars’ love lives.

Last month saw a plethora of gay love over the airways. As well as Todd and Karl on Corrie there was Adam and Ian going at it in a polytunnel on The Archers, and then King James I and his friend, the Catholic fanatic Thomas Percy in Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, took time out from blowing up Parliament to blow each other off. There was also Noah and the rent boy on Footballers Wives (conveniently condemned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who doesn’t seem to have anything better to do than watch rubbish on the box). We also received news that there was to be a black gay Christian character on The Bill (Christian? Now that is pervy).

All this is music to the ears of Liz Hoggard, who wrote in The Observer about her enjoyment in watching gay sex and her desire to see more of it – only hornier. “Why are male gay sex scenes on TV so disappointingly vanilla (Queer as Folk and This Life being honourable exceptions)?” she wanted to know. “Women love to watch decorative men tumble between the sheets together (remember, 60% of viewers tuning into Queer as Folk were female). It’s not exactly rocket science. If you appreciate the unclothed male form, then two at once is even better.”

Ms Hoggard says that a lesbian couple that she knows spends many happy hours downloading gay male porn from the internet. “PC lesbian videos are so tame,” they complain. “It’s all hand-holding and brushing each other’s hair. Gay male sex is hot!”

This opinion is shared by Lauren Henderson, an American gal writing in The Guardian magazine. “If I want to watch sizzling gay-on-gay action these days I hardly need to rent porn any more. Hooray! All that money and video store embarrassment saved.”

She’s noticed a huge rise in gay-themed shows in the United States, too. “It seems every time you turn on your TV here in New York, there’s another insanely hot gay couple getting off with each other.” She can’t help noticing a bit of an anomaly, though. “Fascinatingly, this explosion of gays being presented sympathetically on TV comes just as America is busy debating the pros and cons of gay marriage… And as every talk show host has put it ‘Gays should absolutely have the right to make each other as miserable as straights.”

Back in this country, even our own mumsy Lorraine Kelly used her column in The Sun to tell critics of Coronation Street’s gay story line to stop carping. “I believe the scriptwriters, producers and young actors will portray these difficult and controversial scenes with honesty and, above all, a bit of humour mixed in with the angst.”

Lorraine had to acknowledge that one in five voted in a Sun poll to say they didn’t want to see a gay kiss. She retorted: “I don’t particularly want to watch ANY Corrie characters playing tonsil tennis. I am still haunted by scenes of Ken and Dierdre in bed together which were screened years ago. Todd and Karl will have to work really hard to be as disturbing as that.”

Which brings us neatly to the gay kiss on The Archers. Before it happened, fans of the show were wondering how the embrace would be made explicit, given that its portrayal would depend on sound alone. In other words, how do you do aural sex?

The Sunday Express’ radio critic, Ruth Cowan, was waiting with great anticipation to find out how it was to be brought off (so to speak). “If the sound effects are anything like as realistic as the farmyards noises chances are we’ll mistake it for Linda Snell’s waste disposal unit going haywire.”

In the end it was described by Robert Hanks, the radio critic of The Independent, “When the boys finally found themselves alone in the polytunnel, the kiss was a quiet and tasteful affair – none of the prolonged ‘Mmmm-ing’ that used to be the best indicator of passion.”

I didn’t hear the episode myself but presumably the familiar tum-ti-tum-ti-tum theme arrived just in time to cover any embarrassing unzipping sounds or “you like that big dick, dontcha”-style dialogue. Overall, Mr Hanks was pleased with the result. “Broadcasting House wasn’t struck by lightning. Presumably the Almighty gave up on Ambridge morals in about 1989, when Shula had sex on a picnic rug in a field with a journalist from the Borchester Echo. If Shula goes, anything goes. At any rate, it’s nice that the Archers can now do gay without doing camp. Heavens, it’s almost grown up.”

Indeed, the actor who plays Adam, Andrew Wincott (happily heterosexual father of a 10-year old daughter, of course), told The Mail on Sunday that he didn’t know what the fuss was about. “Adam is not an effete queen – he is a rounded character – a hardworking farmer, but sincere and kind. I don’t think a gay man in love feels any different from a man who loves a woman.”

The Sun, in the meantime, kept on in its infantile way, tutting like crazy over a three-second sequence deleted from Footballers’ Wives in which anal penetration is supposed to have taken place. “Outrageous,” gagged the paper, as it told of the usual “storm of protest”. “The scene will never be broadcast,” the paper predicted, before revealing that the bumming would be shown in what is described, without a hint of irony, as a “behind-the-scenes special.”

So why this sudden surge in homo-sex? The Mail on Sunday thinks it has the answer. And it is, of course, the good old “gay mafia” – this time in the form of Shed Productions, an independent company that makes Footballers’ Wives (“with its brutality and displays of lesbian sex”).

“Shed Productions is establishing itself as the leading purveyor of prime-time sex,” wrote Angello Johnson, in The Mail on Sunday, “indeed, its next project will further cement this reputation. The aptly named Bombshell is an ITV drama about Army life which promises to expose widespread homosexuality in the ranks.”

Shed Productions, the paper reveals, is run by four “proudly and openly gay friends” – Eileen Gallagher, Brian Park, Ann McManus and Maureen Chadwick. All had worked at Granada Television with the man who came up with the idea for Footballers’ Wives, Paul Marquess, now head of drama at Thames Television. “Together they form an influential clique whose imprint is visible across commercial television. They have been involved in writing and producing many soap operas, including Coronation Street, Brookside, Family Affairs and The Bill – all of which have introduced gay storylines.”

Mike Hollingsworth, a former director of programmes at TV-am and a critic of the present pushing of boundaries, is quoted in the article as saying “It’s no surprise to hear people say that Shed is putting out its own sexual agenda. All sorts of groups are selling their views on television and I don’t know where it will end if drama continues on this road.”

Of course, some people think it doesn’t go far enough. Gay storylines make great drama. Gay life, lived to the full, is intrinsically dramatic and incident-packed. Could it be that producers are only now latching on to the endless possibilities and starting to explore them?

But even that doesn’t suit some people. Rupert Smith in The Guardian wanted to know why gay characters in soap always arrive with “a vast amount of baggage.” The truth is that all soap characters are weighed down with about 50 suitcases-worth of past mistakes. Without all those forgotten children, missing relatives and dark secrets, the story wouldn’t be sustainable over the long haul (remember, soaps extend for decades and sometimes, if the Archers goes on much longer, centuries).

Mr Smith makes a more apt point about Will & Grace, which started off as a comedy about a gay man living with a straight woman, and now seems to be about something else entirely. “It’s so hell-bent in involving its characters in stories that don’t revolve around their sexual preferences that it seems to have lost the plot somewhat,” he wrote.

Whether the current obsession with gaiety in broadcast drama is a flash in the pan, or whether homos are here to stay, we will have to wait and see.

But certainly, it’s nice to see our lives – in all their magnificent messiness – reflected back at us from the rackety box in the corner.

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=

Naturally there was a lot of media interest in the launch of the Civil Partnership Act last month and I found myself on Radio Five Live locking horns with a lady called Lynette Burrows.

Ms Burrows is a woman of breath-taking unpleasantness and a long-standing foe of gay rights. A sneer enters her voice and she does not hesitate to express some pretty offensive opinions (in this instance she said that it was self-evident that gay couples should not be permitted to raise a child because… well… you know what they are, you just can’t trust them!).

Callers to the programme were as horrified as I was at the rawness of her bigotry, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise – she’s been at it for years. Mediawatch has reported many articles by Ms Burrows in the past in which she has casually slandered gay people. I remember one in particular, which was published at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which she gleefully announced that we needn’t worry too much about gay rights because “soon there won’t be enough of them to squeak.”

I hate everything that the hateful Lynette Burrows stands for, but having said that, I also passionately defend her right to carry on expressing her bigotry in any way she wants.

I make this point because after the Radio Five Live programme, Ms Burrows was paid a visit by the local constabulary who had received a complaint from an offended listener.

The Daily Telegraph reported it like this: “Scotland Yard confirmed last night that Fulham police had investigated a complaint over the radio programme. A spokesman said it was policy for community safety units to investigate homophobic, racist and domestic incidents because these were ‘priority crimes’. It is standard practice for all parties to be spoken to, even if the incident is not strictly seen as a crime. ‘It is all about reassuring the community,’ said the spokesman. ‘We can confirm that a member of the public brought to our attention an incident which he believed to be homophobic. All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed.”

Naturally, old Ma Burrows was disturbed by this development, as were several commentators in the right-wing press.

Ann Widdecombe in The Daily Express: “Democracy is about free speech… I would die in a ditch for the right to sound off across the airwaves because if we cannot debate what is right and what is wrong, then we might as well live in a soviet republic and be told what to think.”

It has surely come to something when I find myself agreeing with Ann Widdecombe, but I share her fears about the escalating threats to free expression in this country. Where is this hypersensitivity to criticism leading us?

I’m not talking here about inciting violence against individuals or sections of the community. I’m talking about engaging in vigorous debate on areas of difference without having to watch every word. The difference between these two concepts is beginning to disappear. Now you only have to “offend” someone (and who isn’t offended by something or other every day of the week?) to have your collar felt.

In Fleetwood, Lancashire, devout Christians Joe Roberts and his wife Helen, didn’t like the way the local authority “pandered” to gay people. They particularly objected to the way that gay magazines were distributed around the council. They wanted Christian literature to be distributed, too, so they wrote to the council opining: “If gay people make the decision not to think gay, they would not act gay. Whatever they are giving attention to will eventually mould them into its image.” As an opinion it doesn’t stand up to much examination but, as we used to say in the old days, it’s a free country.

However, within days of their sending the note, the police were on the Roberts’ doorstep, trying to establish whether a “crime” had been committed or was likely to be committed. A Lancashire police spokesman said: “Hate crime is a very serious matter and all allegations must be investigated thoroughly.”

Hate crime? I thought hate crimes related to beating people up or murdering them or threatening them with violence or harassment. But no – it seems now a “hate crime” can potentially be committed by those expressing a rather eccentric opinion.

It’s clear that Mr and Mrs Roberts are motivated by an over-enthusiastic attachment to their religious beliefs. That’s up to them. I don’t like their religious beliefs, in fact I despise them. Am I now going to get a knock on the door from the local constabulary accusing me of a religiously-motivated hate crime?

Indeed, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill muddies the boundaries even further. Can we criticise religion when it behaves horribly or can’t we? If the Islamic Republic of Iran hangs two teenage boys in public because they are gay – which it did recently – are we to stand by and say nothing in case other Muslims are “offended”? Have we reached the point where religion is completely beyond censure and anyone who objects to its murderous impulses becomes a “racist”?

We need open debate, argument, examination of each other’s attitudes – even if sometimes that debate hurts our feelings. We do not make progress towards a truly free society if some people – whether they are religious adherents or advocates of gay rights – are trying to silence their critics.

Lynette Burrows says some pretty despicable things, but I want her to have the right to say them, just as I want the right to say despicable things about what she holds dear – even on Radio Five Live. How can we correct the lies that she, and others like her, tell if we cannot confront them openly?

Let us not forget that it is only a few short decades ago that gay people had no voice. There was a time, within living memory, when if gay people spoke out in defence of their lifestyle they would have been sacked or kicked out of their home or even imprisoned. We had to struggle every step of the way to have our voice heard in the face of those who wanted to keep us silent.

Now we seem to have embraced that bullying censoriousness ourselves.

Free speech is not free speech unless it is available to everyone – even to ghastly Lynette Burrows. As Lord Dahrendorf was quoted as saying in The Daily Times of Pakistan: “Free speech is immensely precious, and so is the dignity and integrity of humans. Both require active and alert citizens who engage with what they do not like rather than calling for the state to clamp down on it.”

There must be some restraint, of course – you don’t shout Fire! in a crowded theatre – but this must be kept to a minimum. People who are so easily “offended”, and who want the authorities to protect their hair-trigger sensitivities, are turning into tyrants who want only to hear what is pleasing to them. They are leading us into an abyss of restriction, suppression and self-censorship.

You might think Lynette Burrows should be silenced. But then, maybe she thinks that you should be, too. One day those who support her view may be in power again, and the thought police will be knocking on our doors instead of hers.

We need robust protections for free speech. Instead we have a government that seems hell-bent of curtailing it.

***

Elton John and David Furnish well and truly hijacked the big launch day for Civil Partnerships. Despite the fact that something like 700 couples tied the knot on 21 December, the press seemed only to have eyes for the Windsor bash.

Unable to get photos of the actual signing of the register, some of the papers carried a spoof set of snaps, posed by look-a-likes. They showed what appeared to be Elton arriving at the register office in a big, floaty wedding dress. Pardon me for not finding it hilarious, although I’m sure it gave a chuckle to those macho men at the picture desks of Fleet Street.

But Elton is wise to the wiles of journalists looking to spoil the big day. According to The Sun: “The public lavatories in front of which Sir Elton John and David Furnish did their post-nuptial walkabout at Windsor’s Guildhall were closed for their wedding. The sign saying “Ladies” was also taken down. This was to spoil the chance of photographers getting a shot of the happy couple together with the sign prominent behind them and to thwart headline writers who might be tempted to apply the Little Britain catchphrase “I’m a laydee!” to the new Mrs Elton.”

The Sunday Mirror unearthed a woman, Linda Woodrow, who almost got Elton down the aisle way back in 1970 when he was “small-time musician Reg Dwight.” Linda gave a sob story about how Elton had insulted her in subsequent interviews, telling how horrible their relationship had been. But even so, she was happy that “he has found the man he has been looking for all his life.”

Even The Daily Mail managed to leave off the anti-gay abuse for the day to wish them – and everyone else who did the deed – well. “Yesterday was a celebration of the live-and-let live tolerance that marks our society, a signal moment in our social history and the righting of a long injustice… we wish all those couples good fortune.”, the paper said.

Yes, folks, this was an editorial in The Daily Mail. I might cut it out and frame it for the loo.

But don’t let your guard down. This was just a temporary truce – hostilities have since resumed, and The Mail is as nasty as ever to its gay victims.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

“Civil partnerships are hugely important as a move towards equal rights, but I wish the press would stop describing them as ‘marriages’. It carries none of the baggage of an institution that for so long relegated women to the status of a thing to be given away by one man to another.” – Jenni Murray, Guardian.

“The Civil Partnership Act (CPA) has caused very little distress to anybody apart from a few religious fanatics – and even they get a warm, righteous glow from their distress.” – Tom Uttley, Daily Telegraph

“Ordinary people will be revolted by the sight of these couples embracing and the recognition in our law of what the Bible describes as an abomination and ‘vile affection’.” – Stephen Green of Christian Voice.

“Concerning persons that have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, we are deeply concerned that these hinder them from relating correctly with men and women”. – Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, Vatican Radio.

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 fate that has befallen MPs Mark Oaten and Simon Hughes is familiar – over-familiar, some would say. How many times does this melodrama have to be played out before politicians understand the rules? If you’re a gay MP and you’re in the closet, the tabloids will one day come knocking on the door (won’t they, Mr Mandelson?). If you remove the door of the closet and come out voluntarily (a la Ben Bradshaw, Alan Duncan, Angela Eagle, Stephen Williams et al), there is nothing that the tabloids can do to you, except occasionally humiliate and belittle you in the gossip columns (but they do that to everybody in public life, straight or gay).

Simon Hughes was a perfect example of the old school of tabloid outings. “Everybody knew” about Simon, we were told after the event. Yet it took these people who “knew” nearly 25 years to say anything. If Mr Hughes had not denied the facts of his sexuality three times in the week prior to his outing by The Sun, then it might not have been so bad. But these outright denials gave the papers all the righteous indignation they needed: Simon was a hypocrite and a liar and therefore, fair game. This was almost a re-run of the Michael Portillo case, when the papers pursued Mr Portillo relentlessly until eventually he admitted that he had had homosexual relationships “in the past”.

It was, therefore, rather bizarre to see Mr Portillo on the This Week political show on BBC, commenting about the Simon Hughes case and managing to do it without any reference at all to his own experience.

Mark Oaten was the other style of outing: the dark secret exposed. There have been numerous MPs who have been indiscreet with prostitutes, both male and female, and even more indiscreet about covering it all up. Harvey Proctor, Clive Betts and Ron Davis were three of those whose sexual peccadilloes led to their downfall.

Traditionally, commentators have been split into two camps. At the liberal end, the line has usually been that a politician’s private life is his own and the tabloids have no business exposing it in public unless there is an over-riding public interest in doing so. This was represented by Bruce Anderson, a columnist on The Independent, who wrote: “I cannot see that Mark Oaten has done anything very wrong. Nor can I see why his sexual peccadillo should destroy his career, but it probably will. Although we need a law to restrain the red tops’ bestial behaviour, many more careers will be shattered and many more families reduced to misery before one is passed.”

To such arguments the tabloids respond that lying, cheating, behaving immorally and generally being “ambivalent” about who you really are, raise questions about your suitability for high office. It’s all big-time hypocrisy, of course. The tabloids are not motivated primarily by serving the public good. They want scandal, exposé – the more salacious the better. That’s the way to shift papers.

From their point of view, the Mark Oaten case, with its three-in-a-bed romps and “a bizarre sex act too revolting to describe”, was far superior to the Simon Hughes episode, with its rather sad admission that he didn’t want to come out because he was scared of his deeply Christian old mum.

At the moment, Simon Hughes is officially bisexual (or, as Richard Littlejohn put it from his new perch at The Daily Mail: “Simon’s not gay, he just helps them out when they’re busy”). Stories that have appeared in the Sunday scandal sheets about him (“I had a one-night stand with Simon 1 hour after we met in gay Net chatroom” as The Sunday Mirror had it, and “Simon says: I’ve not paid for sex” – as The Sun revealed) were pretty anodyne, compared to those Mr Oaten had to endure.

He, too, is, I suppose – in the confused world of sexuality – bisexual. He is married with children, but his compulsion to seek out male company for sexual jollies (not once, but many times) has brought disaster upon the straight section of his compartmentalised life. In The Daily Mail, Geoffrey Levy wrote: “To measure the catastrophe that so suddenly enveloped Mark Oaten yesterday, the place to look was not Westminster but the house he shares with his wife and two young daughters” where there are “poignant signs of a happy and loving family life speaking volumes for the stupidity of man.”

Given the present interest in the film Brokeback Mountain, it was almost inevitable that the Lib Dems would be renamed the Brokeback Party by the crueller elements of the press. But there are striking similarities between Mark Oaten’s story and the story of the two sexually confused sheep-herders in Ang Lee’s film (except, of course, there was nothing of real love between Mr Oaten and the treacherous rent boy as there was between Ennis and Jack in the movie). And then there was the survey in The Observer that showed that 15% of the population has had “same sex sexual contact” (which, given the way people lie to these pollsters, probably means it’s more like 30%).

So, now we come to the other perennial question in cases like that of Mark Oaten and those who have gone before. Why do they do it? Why do successful men with so much to lose both professionally and personally, behave so recklessly?

In the Times, Dr Thomas Stuttaford, explained: “Illicit sex with a prostitute is said to satisfy three drives: sex, aggression and a love of danger, motivating forces that are not unknown to politicians. Journeying along the corridors of power leading to Downing Street is like traversing a hotel corridor studded with tempting rooms and other diversions along its length. To reach No 10, or any other great office of State, successful politicians are likely to be testosterone-rich, goal-oriented risk-takers – why else would they have left their safe jobs? – and rather more ruthless than their contemporaries.”

He quotes psychiatrist Anthony Storr, who says that elderly people tend to become self-righteous and often forget how strong the sexual urge was in their youth. He maintains that “Those men who claim to be able to control it entirely and suppress the expression of sex, while they are still in the first half of their life, are actually undersexed.”

Derek Draper a psychotherapist and ex-Labour spin doctor, who has some experience of gay MPs being put through the tabloid wringer by his (professional) association with Nick Brown and Peter Mandelson, wrote in The Daily Mail: “Oaten would have been in a state of constant anxiety about being discovered. People under great pressure can often ignore their fears and worries – but only for a while. Eventually it overwhelms you. The odd thing, though, is that such a high-octane, high-risk existence can be perversely exciting. To be acting so recklessly can be the only thing that makes you feel really alive. It’s similar to the rush of dangerous sports.”

But Mr Draper advises other politicians: “make sure you sort out your personal demons before you seek high office. You owe it to your voters, your families and yourselves.”

A small crumb of kindness and understanding was offered to Mark Oaten by the novelist Francis King, who wrote to The Independent in response to a rather unkind article by the paper’s gay columnist, Philip Hensher.

“It is entirely possible,” wrote Mr King, “that love was the reason why Oaten married his wife, and that the same love continued to sustain the relationship until a rent-boy decided to blab to the press. When a man destroys his career and possibly his marriage through an act of crazy aberration, then surely the appropriate response, particularly from homosexuals like Hensher and myself, should be of compassionate regret, not of disdainful schaudenfreude.”

That was a small spot of comfort for Mr Oaten in a huge morass of finger-wagging and sneering. The Sun continued its leering headlines: “Lib Dems tell rent boy MP: we’re right behind you”, and other such homophobic sludge. The commentators went for both Hughes and Oaten without mercy.

Sue Carroll in The Daily Mirror opined that “Oaten’s deceit should cost him his seat”. Vanessa Feltz in The Express said: “Anyone trying to do an important job with the constant spectre of blackmail or ‘outing’ hovering over them must find their concentration wavering under the strain. Anyone capable of lying to their wives is obviously more than capable of lying to voters.” Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent: “Mr Hughes evidently believes… that it isn’t morally wrong to lie to protect one’s privacy. What else, if he attained power, would he think justified deceit? Experience suggests the list would be long. But now we have learned just in time that Mr Hughes is a shameless liar. I profoundly hope that he will fail in his attempt to lead the Liberal Democrats.”

John Gaunt in The Sun advised readers not to buy the PR that these were good men brought down by a cruel press. “Oaten is no Oscar Wilde, he is a hypocrite and his morals make Jodie Marsh look like Mother Teresa. And remember, with him it’s not a case of Free Willy but three willies.”

Perhaps the most shocking comment, though, came from someone who claimed to “love my gay friends”. Lowri Turner says that most of her friends are gay “I work in the media, for goodness sake” and because of her intimacy with so many gay men she has concluded that we should never be allowed anywhere near high office. In The Western Mail she wrote: “Their lifestyles are too divorced from the norm… Gay men face challenges of their own, but they do not face those associated with having children which is a way most of us live. I have gay friends whose biggest headache is whether to have a black sofa or a cream one. If they have a child it is a dog. My gay friends have not sat in accident and emergency with a small child. They have not had to make the decision over whether to give them MMR. They have not struggled to get their child statemented or gone through the schools’ appeals process. Without these experiences at the sharp end of our public services, they do not know how they function. This makes them completely out of their depth in administering them…. I love my gay friends, but I don’t want them running the country.”

It seems that Britain is not yet ready to be quite so laid back about gay politicians as we’d like. Indeed, if these two episodes have shown us anything, it is that we seem to be going backwards.

QUOTES:

“Some critics have argued that Brokeback Mountain is less daring or progressive than it might at first appear… Nonsense! The film, far more affecting than any made by the tart-tongued avant-gardists of the early 1990s New Queer Cinema movement, is a dagger in the heart of all those who think that homosexuality is a disease confined to Democratic states” – Sukhdev Sandhu, film critic, Daily Telegraph.

“Alan Hollinghurst has written something utterly damaging to the gay cause. Here is Alan’s gay world: gay men who will have sex with absolutely anyone; gay men who are hysterical, treacherous, backstabbing, cruel, duplicitous and desperate to sleep with a straight male” (Virginia Blackburn writing about the BBC’s dramatisation of The Line of Beauty in The Daily Express)

“Emmerdale used to be a favourite with me but recently it has become obsessed with gay and lesbian storylines and I find myself switching to another channel” – (Readers letter, Daily Express)

“I am perfectly willing to say I have had both homosexual and heterosexual relationships,” – Simon Hughes in The Sun, after having previously denied it three times.