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=

Despite its unexpectedly poor showing at the Oscars, Brokeback Mountain, “the gay cowboy film” which is actually about bisexual sheep herders, has become a cultural phenomenon on to which just about everybody can hang their own meaning.

During the past month, everybody – from born-again Christians in Middle America to builders from Bristol – has had something to say about it. It is the most searched-for film on the internet at the moment, it has sparked an incredible number of parodies, including a New Yorker cover showing Bush and Cheney as the Brokeback heroes. You can see some more send-ups (affectionate and not so friendly) at http://www.dailysixer.com.

Christians in the United States tried to get themselves worked up into the usual gay-hating frenzy over this film, but somehow they couldn’t manage it. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops gave it an “O” rating – which represents “morally offensive” – and a cinema chain in the Mormon state of Utah refused to show it. But beyond that, there were no calls for boycotts or accusations of corrupting the young, just a few isolated incidents of the kind of spite that the American evangelicals specialise in. For instance, the school that Michelle Williams, one of the Oscar-nominated stars of the film, had gone to told her that she was not welcome ever to return. The school’s headmaster, Jim Hopson, said that the Santa Fe Christian School in California “didn’t want to have anything to do with her in relation to that movie”. He said: “Michelle doesn’t represent the values of this institution. Brokeback Mountain basically promotes a lifestyle we don’t promote. It’s not the word of God.”

Back in the world of sanity, the critics were overwhelming admiring of the film, but gay activists in the States have complained about the tragic ending. Why do gay heroes always have to die?

In Newsday, Jospeh V. Amodio did a survey of Oscar nominees from the past 15 years, excluding this one, and he counted four actors who have been nominated for best actor while playing gay roles. These were Javier Bardem for Before Night Falls, Ian McKellen for Gods and Monsters, Stephen Rea for The Crying Game and Tom Hanks for Philadelphia. Mr Amodio notes that “they are all dead by the time the credits roll, save for one, who’s in prison.” He notes that the mortality rates for women is the same – Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, Nicole Kidman in The Hours and Charlize Theron in Monster and Salma Hayek in Frida all “wind up dead, dead, dead, dead.”

Mr Amodio also wonders what effect Brokeback Mountain will have on gay youngsters who are trying to come to terms with their feelings. He recounts Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, telling how he felt when he saw The Boys in the Band at the age of 17. “That film was praised for its daring depiction of gay men as thinking, feeling individuals with a sense of camaraderie. They were also bitchy, self-loathing and howlingly sad. Sitting alone in the theatre in 1970, I said to myself ‘I’ll do anything to escape this. I’ll learn to think different thoughts’.”

But what message would today’s 17-year old get from Brokeback? Would it be the one that the producers intended – “Live and Let Live”? asks Mr Amodio, or would it be “Follow your heart, sure – but be careful. Follow in some directions and things could get violent.”

John Scagliotti, another critic, writing in Counterpunch, wanted to know why the director, Ang Lee, had chosen straight actors to play the roles of Ennis and Jack. “These cowboys are straight, and there is no helping it even though they do all those nasty gay sex things right in front of the camera. What Ang and his straight scriptwriters and straight actors know is that sex between men happens. What they can’t know is that little, defining liberating moment after sex between gay men who see themselves for who they are for the first time. Gay men in the sixties who were forced to live a straight life knew how to wear the mask of heterosexuality, but once together the mask fell. They were in on each other’s secret… Straight actors, no matter how deeply they believe they can play a role, have no experience of that mask or how to let it drop. They certainly haven’t the slightest chance of understanding it in a creative team as robustly heterosexual as this one.”

Jan Stuart, also in Newsday, wanted to know if Brokeback Mountain could even be defined as a “gay movie” at all. He had been listening to a discussion of the film on a radio phone-in show. One caller opined that it couldn’t possibly be a gay movie because the main characters and the homophobia they were responding to existed within the heterosexual world. Another caller also dismissed the “gay movie” tag, saying that the sex between Jack and Ennis came across as loveless, “prisoner sex: an alternative to the sheep they were tending.”

But then a gay man called in who thought “it absolutely is a gay love story, but the film’s implications of sexual identity and sex roles, of men not being able to express their feelings, is much more profound than just whether it is gay or straight.”

Andrew Sullivan, the gay, Catholic Republican, wrote in his column in The Sunday Times: “Brokeback shows gay men in America have families and have always had families. It shows them among themselves and among women. It shows them, above all, as men. For the first time it shows that homosexuality and masculinity are not necessarily in conflict, and that masculinity, even the suppressed inarticulate masculinity of the American frontier, is not incompatible with love.”

Whatever straight people might get from the film, it is rapidly becoming deeply significant for many gay people. I was particularly moved by a blog I read from a gay man living in the mid-West of America. Back in 1984, he had gone to see a film called Falling in Love which was about a married man discovering his homosexual feelings. At the moment the two male protagonists kissed, a wave of revulsion passed through the audience, and the young blogger was traumatised to the extent that he became phobic about going to the cinema.

It was not until Brokeback Mountain arrived at his local flea pit that he felt compelled to give it another go. He described in detail the apprehension he felt at the prospect of experiencing a similar reaction to the gay sex scenes. He was frightened that it might prompt a return to the depression that had kept him away from films for so many years, and he was also afraid that he might attack anyone who made a disparaging remark.

Inside the cinema, however, and during the film, there was utter silence. Although the audience was made up of mainly straight people, they took the story on its own terms. There was no adverse comment, none of the retching noises he had anticipated. He came out of the cinema floating on a cloud of relief.

What real significance Brokeback Mountain has – if any – only time will tell. It has certainly prompted a quite extraordinary reaction for what is basically an art house film.

Or, as, Andrew Sullivan puts it in his column: “It provides a story to help people better understand the turbulent social change around them and the history they never previously recorded. That is what great art always does: it reveals the truth we are too scared to see and the future we already, beneath our denial, understand.”

* * *

Satirical cartoons can prompt extreme reactions, as we have seen in relation to the Danish drawings of Mohammed that started a world-wide conflagration.

Newspaper cartoons can be vicious and satirical – the best ones are – to make a cutting or damning point in a few strokes of the artist’s pen.

We know that cartoonists sometimes have to resort to stereotypical images in order to make their point as economically as possible. But what are we to make of the series of cartoons that appeared in The Sun last month, which made no satirical point, but seemed to merely represent a crude insult to gay people. They were the work of Bill Caldwell, The Sun’s regular cartoonist. One appeared the day after the Bafta awards, at which Brokeback Mountain had triumphed. It showed the actors dropping one of their armful of awards and asking a male onlooker “Oops – would you pick that up for me?” and the onlooker retorting: “No way.” Funny? I don’t think so. Crudely insulting – undoubtedly.

Then Peter Mandelson was in the news for apparently wanting to put £15 extra tax on the price of shoes. Above the story was the Caldwell cartoon showing Mr Mandelson and his partner Reinaldo in a shoe shop, trying on women’s high heels. “I think these are worth the extra £15, don’t you Reinaldo?” says the Mandelson figure. Did that make a point about the tax, or was it simply an attack on homosexuality?

Then came the day that George Michael was found slumped in his car, reportedly out of his head on drugs. Mr Caldwell’s offering that showed George taking his dog for a walk at night on Hampstead Heath, dolled up in a leather thong, women’s high heeled boots and a gas mask. Two policemen are shining their torches on him, as he says: “What’s the matter? I’m just taking the dog for a walk, officer.”

One has to ask: where is the wit? Mr Caldwell should thank his lucky stars that gay people aren’t as volatile as some Islamists are, or there is a danger that we’d been down at Wapping calling for his head.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH

“Brokeback Mountain seems to have flipped a switch. We have had a six-fold surge in interest”. (Andrew Roberts, who operates a gay cowboy holiday firm in the USA).

“The film industry in California is very old-fashioned. It’s very distressing to me that that should be the case”. (Ian McKellen on the dearth of openly gay movie actors in Hollywood).

“We live in a culture that pretends to accept and understand, but which doesn’t want to deal with the finer details of gay life. Just because you have a few queers in Emmerdale, there is this myth that the world has become more tolerant. It doesn’t understand us at all.” (Boy George).

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=

Gay Times itself was in the news last month in connection with our on-line poll asking: “Do you hold any religious beliefs?” More than 2,000 people clicked on the yes-or-no option, to reveal a perfect 50-50 split.

The Church of England Newspaper said in its report that the survey revealed “high levels of spirituality among gays in the UK”. It continued: “Leaders of Christian gay groups have highlighted the growing spiritual hunger that exists amongst the gay community.” Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude lesbian and gay network was quoted as saying: “I’ve no doubt that many people who might have expressed an interest in some sort of faith or attending church have been put off by all the things that have been reported about homosexuality and the Anglican communion. I’m sure many gay people would probably think twice about venturing through the door of an Anglican church, as they may wonder what sort of welcome they would receive. It’s a real tragedy for churches and these individuals who are being put off taking part in a faith journey.”

You can’t blame gay religious groups trying to spin this result, but underneath it all, what does it really mean? Does it mean, as Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement says, that: “spirituality is more important to members of the gay community than their leadership would often credit.”? Or does it mean that gay people are getting the message that religion is at war with them, and are running for their lives?

After all, if we look at the results of the 2001 census, we find that only 15% of the population at large consider themselves to have no religion. That means that there are more than three times as many non-believers in the gay community as there are in the rest of the country. This hardly indicates “a growing spiritual hunger” – more like a flight to reason.

Interestingly, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association conducted a survey about religious attitudes among gays at the 2000 Pride event, and got a similar half-and-half result for its question “Do you believe in God?” But there were other questions in that survey that told another story. For instance, “Are you involved in any church or religious organisation?” revealed that 17% said they were, while 83% said they weren’t. (See a full analysis of that survey here http://www.galha.org/survey/2000_07.html )

We also have to ask what exactly “spirituality” means in this context. Is reading your horoscope a spiritual experience? Some people think spending the evening in the backroom of a gay sauna is a spiritual experience. “Spiritual” is one of those elastic words that can be stretched to fit all circumstances and any definition you care to apply to it.

Much more importantly, though, is the question about why any gay person would want to be part of a church or a temple or a mosque. Tell me a religion that isn’t waging a vicious and sometimes lethal war against us. Even the traditionally wishy-washy Anglican Church is getting increasingly nasty. Only last month, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview with David Frost, said that he would put the survival of the Anglican Communion before any overt defence of gay people. Now The Daily Telegraph tells us that liberal US bishops are about to do a U-turn on gay rights. The paper reported: “Three years after consecrating Anglicanism’s first openly gay bishop, the American bishops appear close to bowing to international pressure and shelving their radical agenda at a conference in June. Leaks from a private meeting of the bishops… suggest that they will ‘repent’ for plunging Anglicanism into turmoil by consecrating Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. They are also likely to come into line with the rest of the worldwide Church by backing an indefinite ban on the blessing of gay ‘marriages’ and they may even apologise for having authorised them in the past.”

According to several of the bishops who attended the meeting, they would block the consecration of a second openly homosexual bishop if the diocese of California elects a lesbian or gay man. Three of the seven candidates for the post have gay partners.

So, even the liberals, who seemed to be issuing a long overdue challenge to Rowan Williams to stiffen his spine, have now turned out to be invertebrate themselves.

At least at the Vatican they don’t try to cover over their seething hatred of gays with the kind of impenetrable verbiage that the Archbishop of Canterbury uses. With the first anniversary of Pope Ratzinger the Vile, we see the unleashing and encouragement of a kind of anti-gay hysteria that is beginning to do deep damage not only to individuals but to whole communities.

The National Catholic Reporter covered this phenomenon in an article headed: “Boosting the anti-gay troops”. The report: “The church teaching is beyond dispute. The church holds no place for gay or lesbian couples and rejects the idea of same-sex parents.”

It tells of a conference on homosexuality at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, where a French priest, Tony Anatrella, who is a psychoanalyst and consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Family, said without qualification that gay couples “were unable to model the sexual difference essential to any child in developing his or her own sexual identity.” He asserted that 40% of children raised by homosexuals became homosexual themselves. He produced no evidence for this claim. He went on to say that children of gay parents could experience “such an altered reality that we could reach the point where we have violence, and what I call ‘civilised delirious behaviour’.” (No explanation of that gobbledygook, either).

At the same conference, David S. Crawford of the John Paul II Institute in Washington, said that tolerance of homosexuality and the giving of gay rights would lead to a society-wide form of “compulsory homosexuality” in which all relations would be “fundamentally homosexual… They all become in this sense, essentially, or at least for legal and social purposes, gay.”

These people may be wacko, but they have highly influential places at the Vatican table, and they feed the sick fantasies of the man at the top. This is the kind of stuff Ratzinger wants to hear. It helps him justify his crazed persecution of gay people inside and outside of his Church.

Meanwhile, in the world of Islam, the Grand Ayatollah Ali-Sistani of Iraq has told his followers that gay people should be killed in the most horrible ways possible. Sistani issued the fatwa on his website on 15 March when he was asked, “What is the judgment for sodomy and lesbianism?” The gentle Ayatollah replied, “Forbidden. Punished, in fact, killed. The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

“Spirituality? “Faith?” As my mother used to say to the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the door: “Not today thank you”.

Not today, thank you, not any day – ever. Thank you.

***

Irresponsible newspaper reporting can be extremely dangerous, as ten men in Northern Ireland found out recently. They were all arrested in Coleraine during an old-fashioned cottaging stake-out. The Belfast Telegraph printed not only their full names, addresses and ages but their photographs, too. Although the court only fined them, their real punishment started after the newspaper outed them.

All the men have been subjected to what was called “Ku Klux Klan-type vigilante attacks”. A burning car was pushed against the home of one of them, another has been – in the words of his solicitor – totally traumatised. David McCartney of the Rainbow Project took The Belfast Telegraph to task for its callousness. One of the men had “lost his job, suffered abuse and humiliation, and had been forced to flee his home and his town. He has been forced to seek emergency accommodation at a secret location because of threats,” Mr McCartney wrote. “His vulnerability and suffering was clear for all to see and for those too blind to notice all this, it was reiterated by the magistrate. The team at The Belfast Telegraph should be ashamed of itself. The action it has taken has ensured that all involved are now recognisable, and it has placed all those involved in greater danger than before. It was a totally unjustifiable action and served no purpose – these men prose no risks, as was made clear in the probation service reports.”

The irony of all this is that in the same issue of The Belfast Telegraph that the pictures appeared, there was also a report revealing that nearly two thirds of young gay men in Northern Ireland had considered suicide or had self-harmed.

The crude homophobia that is still rampant in Ulster drives gay people to distraction. It is cruel and anachronistic. It creates almost unendurable loneliness and isolation and that leads otherwise sensible and cautious men to risk it all cottaging. We all need the comfort of human contact, but how do you find it when the culture that surrounds you is dictated a bunch of Neanderthals led by Ian Paisley?

Here’s a message to the editor of The Belfast Telegraph from me: the village stocks have been abolished, or perhaps you hadn’t heard. Or maybe you should take a turn yourself and see how it feels to be reviled by your own community.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

“This is not an anti-homosexual gesture.” – Australian premier John Howard, announcing that he intends to veto plans to give civil partnership to the country’s gay community.

“It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great city’s existing and established customs and traditions, such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need.” – Wording of a resolution unanimously passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

“In total disregard for the Constitution, homosexual activists in positions of authority in San Francisco are abusing their authority as government officials and misusing the instruments of government to attack the Catholic Church.” Robert Muise, Catholic attorney, launching a law suit against the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for passing the above resolution.

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=

Ever since the concept of a gay community was first thought of the issue of stereotyping has been high on the agenda. Who are gay men and, even though they have a label, can they actually be defined? Naturally, journalists will tend to take the easy way out by looking for a convenient opportunity to ascribe common characteristics to whole swathes of people who otherwise have nothing in common. In their hands we become little more than one-dimensional cartoons.

So, which stereotype do you fit? Are you the self-obsessed queen in the Will and Grace mold, or are you the drug-addled, out-of-control dysfunctional from the … well, the world of certain pop singers? Are you a screeching, limp-wristed nelly who can’t sit down without tightly crossing his legs? Or maybe you are just an ordinary bloke, doing a tiresomely repetitive job, trying to generate a wage and live a quiet life. Or maybe you are all or none of these things.

The debate continues and was put centre stage again last month by Simon Fanshawe in a BBC3 programme The Trouble with Gay Men, which caused some controversy. In this programme Simon rehearsed the age-old arguments about what gay men are. In the accompanying article in The Guardian he said that gay activists and gay hedonists “still think it is enough to be gay in order to be good. I no longer do. And in this programme I set out to expose the fact that we gay men are living the lives of teenagers, still obsessed with sex, bodies, drugs, youth and being ‘gay’.”

So, while we severely chide the straight media for making sweeping generalisations about gay people, Simon happily throws around the clichéd stereotypes as though they were newly-minted.

I suppose we have to cut Simon a bit of slack here because he’s a gay man himself and has been around on the scene for a long time, so he isn’t talking out of his arse like so many straight journalists do when on the topic of gay men. But one can’t help thinking that his ennui with gay life might just be something to do with his age. Indeed, at one point in the programme he asked: “Am I just a grumpy old gay man?” Well, yes, Simon, you are – which is not to say that everything in your programme was wrong. Just most of it.

The stereotypes you gave of the gay man eternally seeking sex, going to the sauna and having orgies and dangerous liaisons in woodland areas and thinking of nothing but nooky from morning till night is certainly true of some men – most men, I would say, at some time in their lives. The Sunday Mirror, for instance, reported that George Michael is (according to his cousin) “Hooked on cruising”. The paper luridly recounts how the “troubled singer” “roams the streets at night looking for casual gay sex.” But even that strays into Will and Grace territory when we are informed “He arranged a sex session in a luxury London hotel, but went to the wrong place and woke up an innocent guest.”

Yes, indeed, sex can be a pressing, inconvenient and occasionally ridiculous imperative for men of all orientations. It’s just that straight boys don’t have cruising grounds and saunas where, for the modest price of admission, lovely ladies are floating about waving their fannies and indicating that they are available for use free of charge. If such places did exist, straight men would be as rampant as gay men are. Indeed, because of the lack of equivalent opportunities, many straight men make use of the gay facilities to relieve the pressure. Take this example from The Sunday Mirror agony column: “I am a middle-aged man with a shameful secret. Despite being happily married with two children, I seek out random sex with strange men at night. There is a place in the local park where you can get sexually satisfied – often you don’t even see who you are having sex with…”

But even those gay men who might spend three hours a day at the sauna probably then have to go and earn a living and become another stereotype – maybe a gay builder or a nurse or a fireman. This previously sexually rapacious stereotype probably has to go to Tesco and cook the tea, and then conform to the gay housemaker stereotype, thinking about nothing but fabrics, colour schemes and designer furniture. Or maybe he goes to church and becomes stereotype number 15, or maybe he prefers football. By Simon’s reasoning, all these things would make him a stereotype simply because he’s also a gay man.

It is dangerous when the media folk get on the “all gay people are…” bandwagon and start pointing to some effeminate or ultra-camp member of the entertainment profession. We know better. The reason that people like Graham Norton, Larry Grayson, Kenneth Williams, John Inman and so on are comedians is because camp is fun. It makes people laugh. Indeed, in the programme Graham Norton said BBC bosses are forcing him to ‘camp it up’. Well, of course they are – that’s why he got that multi-million pound contract in the first place! It’s no use moaning about it now – you’re on the telly because you’re over-the-top and larger-than-life, Graham. Enjoy yourself and we’ll enjoy you, too.

But Simon Fanshawe pursed his lips and wagged a disapproving finger at camp comics and asked them “Aren’t you ashamed of bringing us all into disrepute with your foolishness?” But who really identifies with Julian Clary these days as anything other than as a funny entertainer? Are there really people sitting at home any more looking at old Carry On films and thinking: I must commit suicide because I’m doomed to behave like Kenneth Williams or Charles Hawtrey? Even Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey didn’t live like that! We know the difference these days between entertainment and real life.

Simon Fanshawe worries that the gay obsession with appearance is unhealthy. He says: “Our bathrooms look as though someone has dropped a bomb in a sample shop”. Do they? Mine doesn’t. Mine looks like the drug cabinet from Holby City. As my only concession to gaydom, it contains an unopened bottle of Old Spice that my granny gave me in 1984. Ben Summerskill of Stonewall revealed in one gossip column that his bathroom is likewise full of Head and Shoulders and TCP.

And this body fascism isn’t confined to the gay community; a lot of straight men are developing eating disorders, too. Young people of all sexual persuasions are living lives of hedonistic excess at the moment. It is just that young gay men do it a little differently, and there are actually some elements of gay socialising that are better than straight. The noticeable lack of violence, for instance, and the better maintenance of friendship circles.

Simon also laments the ageism that pervades our pubs and clubs – but why would young people want to socialise with people old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers? There comes a time when all gay people realise that they’ve had their turn on the meat rack and must move on to more sedate activities. It is not exclusion, it’s nature.

* * *

Journalist Nick Cohen has noticed that traditionally gay entertainment venues are being increasingly colonised by his straight friends. He recounts (in The London Evening Standard) going to a restaurant called Les Trois Garcons in Shoreditch, “a restaurant that is as camp as its name suggests”. But his fellow diners were “all heterosexual couples.” Then he took himself to a drag ballet and found the audience there similarly straight. He revealed: “Half the men I know have spent their stag nights with Madame JoJo’s Soho transvestites and then walked down the aisle – with a woman.”

Mr Cohen concludes that: “The straights have taken over camp London, which is perhaps why so many gays have decided to get married and have kids.”

When the new Equality Act comes into effect in October, this might become much more of an issue. As Lotte Jeffs pointed out in The Guardian: “Thinking that venues can continue to justify being ‘gay only’ is about as ridiculous as believing that lesbians really do sit around all day comparing biceps and talking about their cats. The Goods and Services Act [sic] will make it illegal for gay venues to dismiss people based on their real – or perceived – sexuality, and heterosexuals will be well within their rights to challenge harassment or discrimination.”

She doesn’t mind. She welcomes their ‘open-mindedness’ and challenges gay people to match it. But her views are not shared by others. Writing in response, Linda Calver of Sale in Cheshire asks when Lotte Jeffs last experienced Canal Street. “A lot of straight men I have encountered there certainly aren’t ‘putting their open-mindedness into action’. Indeed, quite a large number seem to have gone there for the express purpose of harassing lesbians and gay men. This all seems to me a very good argument for gay venues having the right to exclude heterosexuals. It’s a matter of feeling comfortable and safe and having a space that is ours.

Maybe we could learn something from the Christians here. In all these anti-discrimination laws, religionists have argued that they are special and must be exempted from certain aspects of the law, so that they can continue discriminating. Maybe we should also argue for an exemption on the grounds that the presence of heterosexuals, particularly religious ones, would destroy the “ethos” of any gay pub or club – just like gay teachers are supposed to destroy the “ethos” of faith schools and must therefore be kept out.

Or maybe we should just relax and demonstrate that we are better and more open hearted than the petty-minded religionists. And besides, some of those newly-minted Catholic priests – especially the Italian ones – are very easy on the eye.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH

“I really can’t see why the government couldn’t just say gay people can get married – that would have been true equality and so much simpler. But that hasn’t been done because they couldn’t face the furore.” – Sir Ian McKellen.

“It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture. That love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement is not our fault. In everybody, the anus is as capable of sexual excitement as the lips.” – Sebastian Horsley, Observer Magazine.

“Homosexuality has become, whisper it, a little bit boring and workaday.” – Kathy Foley, The Times

Terry Sanderson’s 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=

Well, we’ve had all the romantic bit – the confetti and the cake, the champagne and the honeymoon. Now, after a brief period of walking on air, some civil partners are coming down to earth with a nasty bump. It turns out that “gay marriage” is not, after all, just a bit of fun around which to build a party. Turns out it’s a heavy, legally binding contract, and getting out of it isn’t quite as simple as walking away, like we used to when we decided that relationships weren’t working out.

Yes, gay divorce is upon us and, I’m afraid, it’s just as unpleasant for us as it is for straights. And just to make this easier to read, I’m going to use the term ‘marriage’ for both marriage and civil partnerships because to all intents and purposes they are the same.

Anyway, The Daily Mail got great pleasure in reporting “The First Gay Divorce”. Liz King and Daphne Ligthart tied the knot in February and split up in April, after having previously lived together for several years. The Mail was delighted to report that Miss King left the marital home for another woman – who had been a guest at the ceremony. It was all terribly sad, really, but it no doubt provided a few titters for The Mail’s ghastly staff and a few tutting I-told-you-so’s from its army of self-righteous readers.

A few days later, The Sun was also revelling in reporting the next catastrophe. Girl soldiers Sonya Gould and Vanessa Haydock had become the Army’s first civil partnership, undergoing the ceremony with much hoo-ha and howdy-do in the papers. But now they’ve split up – and with such acrimony that the police had to be called.

The Sun quotes “a pal” of the pair, saying: “It is no surprise – they are the most mismatched pair you could ever meet.”

The two 19-year olds, were both privates in the Royal Logistic Corps when they met two years ago. They registered their partnership in January, and at the time, Sonya said “It seemed so right”. But four months later the police had to be called to their base in Catterick, North Yorkshire after they got into a fist fight. One was cautioned for assault.

A couple of days later, Vanessa sold her story to The Sun, revealing that Sonya had dumped her by text message. In a fury, Vanessa went berserk and smashed up the home they shared, slashed Sonya’s clothes – including her uniform – and cut up her shoes. Sonya claimed that she had sent the text while she was drunk. Vanessa, however, says that she made “a stupid mistake” by going through with the ceremony and that she would now seek a divorce.

But that won’t be easy – or cheap.

No doubt we are going to see much more of this in the coming years. We don’t seem to have learned from the experiences of impetuous heterosexuals who rush in and then find they can’t rush out again quite so easily.

As Julian Ribet, a divorce lawyer, wrote in a letter to The Times: “Although Civil Partnerships are not marriage in the technical sense… on the dissolution of a civil partnership, in most cases there are likely to be serious financial consequences for the parties.” The Civil Partnership Act gives almost identical rights in applying for financial orders on dissolution as those that divorcing straight couples have.

Mr Ribet made reference to two very high profile straight divorce cases that had made the front pages last month, in which the women had been granted very generous settlements. Melissa Miller who, prior to her marriage was earning £85,000 a year, and is expecting now to resume her career, received £5 million from her husband’s £17.5 million stash – after a marriage lasting less than three years. Julia McFarlane was married for 18 years and got half the £3 million assets that she and her husband had accrued in their marriage. She was also awarded £250,000 a year out of her husband’s pay for the rest of her life.

Mr Ribet said that although there wasn’t any case law yet, it was likely that gay couples could expect similar treatment. “In theory,” he said, “the court will be guided by equality and will seek not to discriminate – between the civil partner who is ‘home maker/child carer’ and the civil partner who is the ‘breadwinner’. In reality, the duration of the partnerships (and pre-partnership cohabitation, if any) the respective contributions of the parties and whether there are children, will be relevant factors.”

So, if you’ve got a bit of dough, you can expect a civil partner – however long the partnership lasts – to have some kind of claim on it. And although prenuptial agreements have been feted as the answer, they have no legal standing. The court might consider them but are under no obligation to do so.

After the McFarlane case, the lawyer representing the semi-traumatised Mr McFarlane offered this advice: “One: don’t marry. Two: if you do, make sure your other half is as wealthy as you are. Three: do a prenuptial agreement and keep your fingers crossed.”

This seems to suggest that if you’re a big earner, or you’ve got a big cash stash, you shouldn’t marry.

But soon even that won’t protect you. The government is now considering giving something similar to marriage rights to unmarried couples, and that includes gay couples who haven’t registered their partnership.

The Daily Mirror reported it like this: “Under these proposals…. lower earners could win a share of the home, even if they had made no mortgage contributions, and they may also be entitled to a cash sum, maintenance or a pension.”

Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times was depressed by all this. She saw it as the last nail in the coffin of marriage (and civil partnership, even though we’ve only just got the hammer out). What’s the point when being married or not being married is the same thing? “No-one should embark on a serious relationship without taking a very sober thought for the morrow,” she said ruefully.

But rather than killing marriage off, the man who is leading the enquiry into giving rights to the unmarried, Sir Roger Toulson, thinks it will stimulate more people to take the plunge. After all, there would no longer be any financial benefit for them to stay single.

Indeed, one of the proposals is that cohabiting couples will be treated as married unless they actively opt-out of the system. In other words, egairram (that’s marriage backwards) – you have to sign a contract saying you’re not married, rather one that says you are! Living in sin is the new default position!

What on earth are the bishops going to make of this? Fetch the smelling salts! I can see a bout of collective swooning coming on among their reverences.

But need they worry? Not according to Adrian Hamilton in The Independent. He sees no future for marriage as a “sacrament” among the population at large – fewer and fewer are opting for church weddings. But he does see that it still has meaning for the religious. “For them, marriage is a sacrament of their faith before it is either a legal contract or financial settlement. Marriage in its centuries-long tradition, will survive among believers because it springs from their deep conviction. Perhaps as more and more of us opt for a civil service or none at all, it may be that the real meaning of the marriage service is about to reassert itself.”

Perhaps, eventually, then, the English churches will come to their senses and do what the Church of Scotland has done, and permit those ministers who want to, to bless civil partnerships and allow into the fold those gay people who – for some reason that eludes me – want to be part of the church.

* * *

Excuses, excuses. Really, some of them are nothing short of pathetic. Mark Oaten started the trend when he was shat on by his rent boy (once literally, for £80 and then again metaphorically for £20,000 when he sold his story to the tabloids). Mr Oaten gave a long, maundering interview to The Sunday Times explaining why it was that he couldn’t stop himself going to rent boys. It was all to do with his hair falling out, apparently.

After that little justification, he was roundly joshed by the papers who couldn’t help laughing at the feebleness of it. If he’d just said – I was feeling incredibly randy and wanted a bit of man on man action, everyone would have accepted it as a normal human impulse, albeit one that he was stupid to act upon. But really – “I went to a prostitute because I only need to buy economy sized shampoos these days.” Can you credit it?

And then comes the grandly named Reverend Mugerwa Smith Wilkinson of Stockport, who wrote a letter to The Independent, explaining why Ugandans are thoroughgoing homophobes. Apparently, it’s all because the King of the Buganda (as Uganda was called in pre-colonial times) had 52 page boys for his sexual gratification. “Homosexual activity was a normal activity in Buganda society,” the Rev reveals. “The British missionaries taught the page boys that homosexuality is a sin. When the boys refused the advances of the Kabaka (king) he had them wrapped in faggots of wood and burnt. These 52 boys are feted as Uganda Martyrs and the Church of Uganda is founded upon their martyrdom. Because of this, homosexuality is seen as an icon of oppression by many Africans and abhorred for this reason.”

Oh give me a break Mugerwa, old boy. If homosexuality was common in Buganda then, it is common in Uganda now. People don’t stop having the kind of sex they want because of stories like this. The reason the present-day population of Uganda is homophobic is because your lousy church has encouraged them to be.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

“I am only too happy to believe that Jesus was married. I know that the Catholic Church has problems with gay people and I thought this would be absolute proof for them that Jesus was not gay,” (Ian McKellen at the launch of the Da Vinci Code)

“Gay partnerships are congruous with the deepest biblical truths, about faithfulness and stability.” (Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford.)

“I can just about accept a Minister who, in the name of her God gives herself a good thrashing before setting off for the office. What I find more difficult to accept is that her new job is about promoting equal opportunities for gays when her religion says they are all sinners, and her duty is to spread that message.” (Carole Malone on Ruth Kelly, Sunday Mirror)

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

In my years working for the gay press, I have seen some pretty nasty and spiteful cases of discrimination against gay people. A recent example was the couple who were turned away from a B&B in Scotland because they wanted to share a double bed.

Some registrars around the country have been reluctant to conduct civil partnerships, even though they are civil servants and supposed to serve the whole community equally. Thousands of cases of petty-minded prejudice are practised against gay people every day. And the hard thing was that there was nothing we could do about it. The law provided no protection. So, if a pub wanted to turn us away because they didn’t want “our sort” defiling their premises, or a local community centre decided it didn’t want to host a gay group, there was nothing we could do.

That will soon change. The Government is proposing to bring forward in October regulations aimed at protecting gay people from this sort of humiliating treatment. The Sexual Orientation (Provision of Goods and Services) Regulations will also make discrimination against gays illegal in the same way as it is on the grounds of race or sex. The proposed legislation will make it a duty on private and voluntary organisations not to discriminate if they exercise a function on behalf of a public authority.

At last! Another important step towards equality, you say. But wait, what is this posse of shrieking old women, galloping round the corner with their frocks blowing in the wind, and knickers in a twist? Why, it’s the Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England, no less. And they do not like the idea of homosexual people being protected from unfair treatment. They do not like it at all.

In a response to the Government’s consultation on the Regulations, the CofE says that religion must be exempted from the obligation to treat gay people in a civilised way. They want to retain their age-old right to trample on us, insult us and humiliate us in so many little ways. In its response to the consultation, the Church says that it is concerned that Church Schools will be included in the regulations. (“Church Schools”, you might like to know, represent almost a third of our education system and their running costs are paid for entirely with taxpayers’ money. Despite this, the churches regard them as “theirs”, to do with as they please (including refusing to hire gay teachers).

The CofE fears that the new regulations might require it to teach about homosexuality in sex education lessons in a way that contradicts church doctrines. That is to say, the church wants to teach its pupils that gay sex is wrong, wrong, wrong and they will go to hell if they do it. The Archbishops, though, being the gentle people that they are, put this less bluntly. They claim that “behaviour”, not orientation, is their main concern.

This is an outright lie, as everybody who remembers the Jeffrey John affair will know. Canon Jeffrey John was offered the post of Bishop of Reading, but when it became clear he was gay, he was quickly given the bum-boys rush by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan (weedy) Williams. (And this was after Jeffrey had sworn on the Bible that he was celibate and did not mank about with his boyfriend in any way that would disturb the vicarage tea party)

The Church also wants the right to refuse to hire “its” schools’ premises to gay people for use outside of school hours. It says that “Faith schools might be required to make their premises equally available to groups that… could give considerable offence to the conscientiously held beliefs of staff and parents.” So, you see, your very existence is offensive to decent, church-going people. They don’t want you going into their children’s school and polluting it in some, yet to be identified, way.

The Scottish Catholic Cardinal Keith O’Brien came to Westminster to join in the gay-bashing. He told MPs: “A fundamental principle has to underpin any proposal for regulation is that freedom of conscience of individuals must be respected. It is not licit to force an individual to act contrary to his moral belief. It is a well-established and reasonable moral position to regard homosexual acts and the promotion of moral equivalence of heterosexual and homosexuals as wrong.” [Note: Cardinal O’Brien resigned in 2013 after The Observer revealed in its 23 February 2013 edition that he had engaged in inappropriate and predatory sexual behaviour with junior priests and student priests and that he abused power. He admitted that he had acted inappropriately with male youngsters throughout the whole of his career in the Catholic Church. He had been doing this even though he had said homosexuals were “captives of sexual aberrations”and homosexuality was “moral degradation.” Even the Vatican’s conveniently blind eye couldn’t overlook O’Brien’s own moral degradation!].

Of course, the Church’s demand to be allowed to continue practising its bigotry against gay people (when everyone else, without exception, cannot) created a lot of comment. Simon Sarmiento in The Church Times says the Church’s case is undermined when it admits in its document that “a range of views is held on that moral issue within the Church”. But the voices of those who don’t want to be spiteful to their fellow citizens – who happen to be gay – don’t get a voice in this response. It seems the bigots have well and truly taken over the Church of England to the exclusion of all others.

Michael Hampson, author of “Last Rites: the End of the Church of England” (published by Granta in October), wrote in The Guardian: “Gay clergy are invited to speak about their experience, but if it involves a committed relationship they will be summarily dismissed, unless they swear the relationship is celibate. This ought to be illegal. In other organisations it is. The church alone has the exemption from human rights law, carefully negotiated by Lambeth Palace, that the church alone might continue, unhindered, in its oppression of its own gay members and staff.”

But, of course, there were supporters for Dr Williams and his increasingly repellent cronies. Take Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday (yes, please take Peter Hitchens). In his usual hyperbolic way, Mr Hitchens makes the Regulations into something that will compel him to approve of homosexuality. “Having justly accepted that what people did behind closed bedroom doors was their business, we are now being ordered to step inside the bedroom and applaud. Or else,” he claims. He says it is the Thought Policeman’s Dream. “It pretends – and this is at the heart of all this rubbish – that choosing to do homosexual acts and declaring homosexual tastes is the same as being black. This is simply false.”

So, if a gay couple were to be turfed out of their digs because their landlord had suddenly discovered the nature of their relationship, and they washed up at the local Christian-run hostel, desperate for somewhere to pass a cold night, would it be OK for the shelter to turn them away, simply because they were gay and won’t hide the fact that they are perfectly legal civil partners? Would a black man and his wife be treated like this? Of course not. That, on the Hitchens’ reasoning, would be truly outrageous. After all, a married couple consists of real people, not gays who, in Mr Hitchens’ world have no authentic feelings or needs and are immune to injustice.

Then came Melanie Phillips, The Daily Mail’s prize poison-spreader. She repeated the completely nonsensical mantra that the law will force “a priest, a rabbi or an imam to fall foul of the law by refusing to bless a sexual union between same-sex couples.” The Church is already completely protected from having to do this. If lying is the only way she can make her argument stand up, then what kind of argument is it?

Ms Phillips says that the regulations will “turn our very understanding of prejudice and discrimination inside out.” She claims that the law will promote discrimination against religions.

This is how she sees it: all major religions (indeed, all religions) are homophobic. It is part and parcel of their very core. Therefore, any legal requirement to act against those tenets will cause Christians to act against their conscience and therefore amount to discrimination against them and their faith.

This is all fine and dandy. But what about Harry Hardcastle, who drinks in the Dog and Bigot and likes to hold forth on the evils of homosexuality? He thinks “them pansies” should be sent to an island and shot. He wouldn’t give them the snot off his nose. He thinks homosexuals should be made outcasts from society. And after his sixth pint he will tell you plainly that if any of them come into his shop, trying to buy the Radio Times, it wouldn’t be a dick they’d have up their bum but his boot. He holds these opinions with enormous sincerity. He feels them deeply. They are part of his personality, his very core. He is an atheist.

Now, given that Harry and the Archbishop appear to share very similar opinions about gays, and both claim that those opinions are a necessary and immutable part of who they are, then why can’t Harry have the right to denigrate and discriminate against gays? Why can’t he have an exemption, too? Why can’t he put a notice up outside his newsagent’s shop saying “Rooms available for all functions – no poofs or lesbos, no dogs”, just like church halls can? Indeed, why bother having any protection at all. Leave us at the mercy of every shaven-headed (or dog-collared) bigot going?

The fact is, the churches want us to believe that their fairy stories give them some special right to be disgustingly unjust and not get punished for it. Well, it’s time for someone to say it – they shouldn’t.

And that person is Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, who told the Press Association: “Schools are not the place for religious moralising about sexual orientation. Religious organisations need to understand that they must save that for the pulpit, not the classroom.”

It isn’t clear yet how far the Government will go in complying with the Church’s demands. But last time round, when the Employment Discrimination Regulations were being formulated, the Church of England came along after the consultation had closed and demanded massive exemptions. And guess what – the Government gave them. Are we about to see a repeat here?

QUOTES OF THE MONTH

“People are not born gay, it is something they choose” – Peter Kearney, spokesman for the Scottish Catholic Bishops Conference.

“I am not an abomination before God” – Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire

“Homophobic bullying happens in every school in the country and crosses every social boundary” – Andrew Mellor, Anti-Bullying Network.

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=

Before you start reading this, I want to reassure you that you are still living in the 21st century, even though the developments I will describe might convince you you’ve been transported back to the Dark Ages.

The Gay Police Association (GPA) is under investigation by its own constabulary colleagues for allegedly committing what has been described as a “faith crime.” Yes, a faith crime! The local rozzers, it seems, have been given the job previously undertaken by the Spanish Inquisition of rooting out heretics and blasphemers.

It all started with an advertisement in The Independent, when the GPA announced a new report they had assembled which suggested most of the homophobia in this country is at present emanating from religious sources. “In the last 12 months, the GPA has recorded a 74% increase in homophobic incidents, where the sole or primary motivating factor was the religious belief of the perpetrator,” it said.

You wouldn’t have thought there was much to argue about that – what with the Pope frothy-mouthed every time he hears mention of gay marriage and the Archbishops’ Council lobbying to keep its right to discriminate against gay people in employment and in the provision of goods and services, and various Islamic clerics issuing fatwas indicating the kind of execution that is appropriate for homosexuals, and deciding the most gruesome is best.

The main trouble came with the illustration in the ad, which showed a Bible with a pool of blood beside it. This infuriated the usual band of militant evangelical Christian agitators, who are constantly scouting round for issues to be outraged about. The purpose of these constant offence-takings is, of course, to rally the brain-dead congregations of the evangelical churches. If you can convince these zombies that their faith is “under attack”, you can get them to do almost anything in its defence.

At the moment this amounts to just letter-writing and demonstrating, which is fine. But if you keep firing up over-emotional people, one day they’ll go pop. We saw this with the Danish Cartoons debacle and the Muslim activists who whipped up a lethal world-wide riot about it. Now the “muscular Christians” are trying to hop on the same bandwagon. They look on in envy as they see the success of the Muslim extremists in achieving “respect” for their religion by terrifying everybody into silence. And what better issue could the Christians have chosen to be on their high horse about than homosexuality? It worked in the USA, so why not pull the same trick here?

So, the GPA’s advertisement was reported to Scotland Yard by a cleric from Operation Christian Voice, a supposed political party that regularly contests elections and invariably loses its deposit as it counts its votes in the three and four hundred category.

That’s fine, so far. They’re just exercising their democratic right to complain and demonstrate and protest.

But what’s this? The Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship (LCF) is inciting Christians to add to the complaint at Scotland Yard. It provides email addresses and telephone numbers of the police officers who are dealing with the case.

Andrea Minichello Williams of the LCF has sent a circular to her fellow fundamentalists advising them that the inquiry has been transferred from Scotland Yard to Holborn Police Station, and so Christian complaints should be redirected there. “All complaints are still being recorded so it gives the police an extremely useful indicator of the strength of feeling on this issue simply by the number of complaints being made.”

But how accurate would that indicator be? These are not spontaneous expressions of offence – they are orchestrated from religious dead-heads who will – as I said – do anything if their church leader tells them to.

Ms Williams writes in her circular: “Whether or not the CPS decides to prosecute, the clearer our complaints, the more likely disciplinary action will be taken against the Gay Police Association to prevent further blasphemous advertising. It is therefore important to register your complaint.”

This same crew of evangelicals is also lobbying hard to be exempted from the new regulations aimed at protecting gay people from discrimination in the provision of goods and services – another perfect issue to fire up paranoia among the thought-free faithful. A letter to The Daily Telegraph signed by 176 of these politicised pastors said that the new anti-discrimination laws actually represented discrimination against Christians in order “to appease minority groups”. “The regulations force Christians in churches, businesses, charities and informal associations to accept and even promote the idea that homosexuality is equal to heterosexuality. For the sake of clarity, this is not what the Bible teaches, and it is not what we believe to be the truth. In our view, these regulations are an affront to our freedom to be Christians,” wrote the clergymen, under the banner Coherent and Cohesive Voice (although what is cohesive about wanting to retain the right to hate-monger against your fellow citizens is unclear).

Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement responded to the attack by writing his own letter to The Telegraph: “Reforming the law should help create a greater degree of Christian – and humane – behaviour among those who fall short of it. The reason the law needs to be changed is because that is the only way lesbian and gay people can be protected from discrimination by their intolerant co-religionists.”

Back at the Gay Police Association, there is another complication – the ongoing argument it is having with the Christian Police Association. When a gay police officer applied to join the Christian police group he was told in no uncertain terms that he would have to give up sex first.

Vic Codling, national co-ordinator of the Gay Police Association (are you still with me?) was outraged about this and reported the Christian Police Association to the governing body, the Police Federation. He told the BBC: “Black or female police officers wouldn’t be asked to be ‘less black’ or ‘less female’ in order to join staff associations, so why should gay or lesbian officers?” Reasonable, no?

No, says Ann Widdecombe in her Daily Express column. She put the Christian grievance this way: “What we are now faced with is not equality but a hierarchy of equalities. When any human right comes up against homosexual rights the latter must always win.” She then went on to make this threat: “Hitherto, Christians have fought with argument and protest and the powers that be, including the government, the BBC and police, have brushed us off. The time has come to use the very weapons that have been so successfully used against us. We should complain formally of hate crimes and stirring up of religious hatred and demand our human rights to religious freedom and to religious conscience.”

I wonder if Ann could pinpoint any human right that gay rights trample over – besides the supposed “religious freedom” (which amounts to a freedom to persecute) demanded by Christians? The battle here is not between gay rights and everyone else, but between religious rights and everyone else. For instance, last month a blind woman won a discrimination case against a Muslim taxi driver who wouldn’t carry her guide dog because his religion regards dogs as “unclean” in the same way it does pigs. Gay people don’t practice such discrimination against other people.

As for “stirring up religious hatred” – it seems that any adverse comment about religion, however carefully framed and however well researched, now constitutes a “faith crime”. We are on very dangerous ground here. The free speech that underpins our democracy is beginning to crumble under these assaults.

The confrontation between the Gay Police Association and the Christian Police Association is, in microcosm, the fate that will befall the proposed new Commission for Equality and Human Rights when it comes into existence. This body will supposedly oversee all the human rights legislation covering discrimination on grounds of age, race, sex, disability, religion and belief and sexual orientation. It has become quite clear over the past few months that gay rights and the newly-politicised religious rights are completely incompatible. I don’t think Solomon is available to lead this body, but whoever does get the unenviable task will need his wisdom if they are ever going to reconcile the rights and wrongs of these ever-conflicting communities.

Ann Widdecombe says there is a hierarchy of equalities. She is right. But it is gays who are at the very bottom of that hierarchy. The religious exemptions already granted in discrimination law, and those which will be granted in forthcoming law, mean that religion will be permitted to continue its spiteful discriminations against gay people.

The battle is only just beginning, but the fundamentalists are becoming increasingly aggressive and threatening. They have declared war on us, but we must be ready to fight back with reason and compassion, not with bans and demands for censorship. Let the religious bigots have their say, let them rant and rave. We should not seek to silence them, but to engage with their arguments and demolish their petty-minded demands with reason.

If we don’t win the debate with justice on our side, then the newly-amassing Christian soldiers are going to trample our newly-minted rights into the ground.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH

“Children need to understand the society they live in, and that various types of family exist: ones where there are two parents, a single parent or homosexuals, To deny it is to deny reality, no matter what controversy it causes.” – Spanish Education Minister Alejandro Tiana.

“I think gay marriage is wrong. I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.” – Media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

“If my oldest Italian friend, a devout Christian, who came to our civil partnership with her husband and children, could say in tears after the ceremony that she found it beautiful and that nothing in it offended her Italian Catholic consciousness, then I fear the church is in danger of being left on the wrong side of history” – Ben Bradshaw, MP.

The gay and straight worlds are not separate universes. Homosexuals and heterosexuals are not different species. In fact, the connecting door between gay life and straight life is now swinging so far ajar these days that it is falling off its hinges.

To get down to fundamentals, Matthew Parris in an article in The Times challenges the idea that sexuality is fixed and that there is no choice in whether we are straight or gay. “I think sexuality is a supple as well as a subtle thing, and can sometimes be influenced, even promoted; that in some people drives can be discouraged and others encouraged; I think some people can choose.”

It’s a confused sort of article that has a grain of truth in it. On the one hand Matthew Parris says that there are people who are completely straight and completely gay (himself included), but that there are thousands of others who are wavering, according to circumstance and opportunity.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. But Mr Parris thinks that it is being resisted by gay activists because if we didn’t have clear blue water between “gay” and “straight”, then it would give succour to those who claim that homosexuality needs to be challenged, treated and eradicated.

“We gays have lived in a transitional era,” he writes, “in which we very much wanted to believe the claim that ‘God made us like this’ and ‘we can’t help it’. Whether or not this is true, it is comforting for those troubled by suppressed guilt, and has proved a knock-down argument against those moral conservatives who say we could choose, and therefore should choose, not to be gay. It has also seemed to rebut the complaint that homosexuality could be ‘promoted’ or that gay men might ‘corrupt’ potential heterosexuals.”

Mr Parris says that equality – true equality – will only be arrived at when we are as “careless as a blond or redhead might be whether we were made that way.”

“Does ‘I can’t help being black’ strike you as a self-respecting argument against racism? That ‘I can’t help it’ is a subtly self-oppressing argument for acceptance does not seem to have occurred to supposedly liberated gay activists, for whom it has always been an easy way of ending the argument.”

What Mr Parris doesn’t tell us, is what we do to oppose those religious activists who are determined to create the impression that homosexuality must be eradicated, because they believe it can be. If ‘God made us’, then God can unmake us, in their view.

But there are some of us – and Mr Parris is self-confessedly one of that number – who really don’t have a choice. Those of us who are right at the far end of the gay spectrum and don’t have the ambiguity of a Mark Oaten or a Ron Davis in our approach to the opposite sex. Where do we stand in this worldview? And how do we defend ourselves against those who tell us that we are simply being contrary, and that we really don’t have to live the kind of lifestyle that we do? If Matthew Parris thinks I have the option of saying: ‘Yes, maybe on day I’ll perhaps settle down with a lady friend and have kiddies and the whole damn thing” he has never paid a visit to the inside of my head.

Another writer for The Times, Iris Scott, told how “A week before my wedding I discovered that my partner had been cruising gay saunas for the past couple of years.” When she challenged him about this, he insisted that he wasn’t gay and begged her to give him a chance to “sort himself out.” He subsequently started therapy and his psychiatrist told him that, indeed, he wasn’t gay, but a sex addict.

Printed alongside her piece was another piece from a gay man who said he found it “odd to read of a woman’s shock of ‘discovering’ that her male partner likes men” because gay bars are full of so-called straight men. Iris was told by a gay friend of hers: “Of course gay trumps straight every time”.

Iris then asked Times readers what she should do. Their verdict on her dilemma was: no doubt about it, he’s gay.

But in a follow-up article, Iris Scott told how the story had developed. She had agreed with her partner – whom she called B – that the story should be printed. But she felt guilty that she had exposed him to public criticism. “But my guilt was misplaced,” she wrote. “As was my assertion that he must be homosexual. Unbeknown to me, three weeks earlier, before I’d even decided to write the article, B had slept with a prostitute, or a ‘tart’, as he calls them, and then slept with me the next day. There he was all over the papers, found guilty by a public jury of being a closet homosexual, and all the time he knew that a week ago, he knew he’d been having sex with a female prostitute.”

So, what is going on with B? “Looking back on everything that has happened,” writes Iris, “I don’t think B is gay; he’s a sex addict. He finds sex with strangers irresistible, a need as much as a pleasure. It doesn’t matter who they are – a sauna, a magazine, a grotty flat, a website – as long as it’s illicit, he doesn’t know them and there’s no intimacy.”

Iris wonders whether B’s attitude to sex is any different to the “gruesome” attitudes of the men he works with. B’s psychiatrist says that all men would be as promiscuous as some gay men are, if they had the chance. The only thing stopping them is women.”

Perhaps this is the explanation for the appearance of former defence minister Ivor Caplin putting himself on a “kinky website” “looking for orgies with men in uniform”. Caplin was uncovered (so to speak) by The News of the World which revealed that although he is the father of two sons and a daughter and only recently divorced from his wife of 20 years – he wants “group sex and other activities” with men in military and medical uniforms. He is quoted as saying: “My sexuality has been known to family and friends for some time.” But the question is: how long has heknown about it?

And, I suppose, we can insert George Michael into the equation here. There was a lot of tabloid tutting over George’s carryings-on on Hampstead Heath, but he was unrepentant, and insisted that it was part of his “culture” to go mooching in the bushes at midnight for a bit of disconnected cock. Johann Hari, writing in The London Evening Standard, said that George was “part of an older generation of gay men, and the fact that he comes from a very conservative immigrant community locates him even further back on the long road to progress. He didn’t come out and find a lover – as opposed to a shag – until he was in his thirties. He is closer psychologically to his uncle – one of the countless generations of gay people lost to homophobia – than he is to the generation of gay men I belong to, who find the idea of having sex in a lavatory or behind a bush pretty grim. He belongs to a generation that couldn’t adjust to open homosexuality, who preferred to remain in the shadow in the night rather than the lingering romance in the lights.”

But it’s not always sex that causes the confusion in the increasing cross-over between gay and straight culture. For women this cross over is far less problematic than men. Women with gay best friends are frequent, but straight men who like – even prefer – the company of gay men, but not the sex, are less obvious. One of them surfaced in the agony column of Salon.com, an on-line magazine. Its advice columnist Cary Tennis received a plea from a straight man – styling himself as “I-less in Gayza” – who just likes being around gay men but feels a bit funny about it. “I-less” had been divorced twice – and was no stranger to relationships with women before then, but “I just couldn’t get along with them. I was too critical, not attentive enough, just plain ornery, whatever.”

But the one thing that all these women had brought into his life was gay men. They all had gay friends and he had come to enjoy socialising with them. “I-less” found them such a relief from the straight men “who have too much focus on sports scores and cars, too much bluff and testosterone. I don’t find them relaxing to be around.”

He wants to make clear that he isn’t gay (“I’ve always been a pussy hound”) and finds the idea of “kissing a man, sucking dick or sharing a poop chute” a “total turn-off”. He’s convinced he isn’t suppressing anything – he just likes gay company. “What’s going on with me, Cary?” he asks.

Mr Tennis is a wise old owl who hits the nail straight on the head. “Maybe this isn’t about gayness at all; maybe it’s about friendship.” he tells his enquirer. “Maybe you like gay men because they exhibit a talent for friendship: concern for your well-being, discretion, wit, compassion, intelligence, good manners, discernment.” Gay men represent an antidote to straightness – not in the sexual sense, but in an emotional sense.

Cary says that he – and probably a lot of other straight men – need a relief from the narrow world of machismo. “Who wants to sit around with boring, rigid, frightened men, closed off and incurious? Yikes.”

This is getting interesting. Cary says that: “Some of us straight men grow up with only one way to be intimate with other people, and that’s by having sex with them. The only people we can have sex with is women, so the only intimacy we have is with women. So, if our relationships with women fail, we have no intimacy at all.”

So, Cary says: “But gayness – that is, your idea of gayness – performs an essential service to your psyche. It lets you off the hook, insulating you from the pressure to perform as a macho, heterosexual man. If you were with women, you might feel you had to play the aggressor or suitor or hotshot; and if you were with straight men you might feel pressure to play your role as competitive male. Being with men you regard as gay, with whom you are not competing for women, and who you don’t fear will look down on you if you show an occasional vulnerability, frees you from expectations, so you can just relax and be yourself.”

I think there are many straight men who would benefit from that advice.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH

“When I was a kid, I asked my mother: ‘Mum? What’s a transvestite?’ She said: ‘That’s your father, son. I’m over here.’” – Adrian Poynton, comedian, Edinburgh Festival

“For all those guys who posture and rant about the pleasure that condoms deprive them of, I have this question: Have you ever had an orgasm worth dying for?”- Dr. Monica Sweeney, State University of New York Health Sciences Center.

“George Michael claims it’s how gays behave. It’s not. It’s simply how he behaves.” – Simon Napier-Bell, former Wham! manager.

The Daily Mail loves “gender bender” stories. If there’s any hint of anyone crossing ‘traditional’ boundaries of male and female, you can depend on The Mail to be on the doorstep within minutes, with mouth open and eyes popping.

So, the story of fifteen-year old David Birch seemed a natural for the paper. According to The Mail (and its demonic sister, The Sun,) David was elected “Carnival Queen” at the annual fete in Axbridge, Somerset, beating several village girls for the title. He subsequently took up his title, they said, and paraded through town in a tiara, lilac dress and high heels. The Mail reported grannies up in arms at this break with tradition. “How can you have a boy carnival queen?” asked one unnamed oldie, “It has to be a girl, just like it’s been for years. It’s political correctness gone mad.”

No, actually, it’s The Daily Mail telling lies.

The Axbridge carnival queen was a girl, and her name was Kaylee. In fact, David was simply invited to “have a bit of fun” by the carnival organisers and put himself up as the “alternative carnival queen”, which he did with enthusiasm.

Maggie Stanley, one of the carnival’s organising committee, said: “David came forward at the local church fete when the carnival queens were chosen and we agreed to let him line up with the girls who had entered. We admired his pluck for putting himself forward, so after Kaylee had been chosen we asked David if he would like to have a bit of fun and enter the carnival as an alternative carnival queen. This role was never intended as a replacement for Kaylee – and she and her ‘royal party’ headed the parade as is the tradition”.

Maggie says that the organisers arranged a yellow sports car to ferry David in the carnival procession – he was about halfway along, flanked by two gladiators (the theme being Up Pompeii)

“When we asked David to take part we had no idea he was gay as it was not relevant, we admired his charisma and personality,” said Maggie Stanley. “At every stage we asked David if he was still OK with what was happening. He could have pulled out at any time he wanted to. We also contacted local agencies to ensure there was help and support if he needed it at any time. At all times we did everything we could to support David and on the day the crowd cheered the royal party – and David.”

Even though the tabloids embroidered the story beyond recognition, David’s part in it illustrated how dazed and confused the British are about what “men” should be. A Mr Pope wrote to The Mail saying that he was “sickened”! He invoked “our brave troops storming the beaches of Normandy” and asked what they would think, 60 years later, of the “tawdry” Britain they had given their lives for.

But Belinda Thomson thought David’s appearance had been “refreshing”. “Most of the 2,000 townsfolk who saw him smiling and waving supported him,” she wrote, “good on them. David is surely a role model for all of us who fear the worst for standing up for our beliefs. I’m sure he had a ball on the day, and long may he reign.”

Vanessa Feltz, in The Daily Express took the whole thing at face value and wrote: “Just because David, who carries a handbag and wears make-up even off the float, fancies being a carnival queen, it does not give him the right to assume the title. Why didn’t the committee have the guts to say ‘no!’ If we lack the cojones to stick to common sense and instead give in to the most vocal minority, we’ll find all we hold most dear bastardised and wrecked.” I trust Vanessa will next week be writing to chastise The Mail for misleading her? And apologising for subsequently misleading her own readers? Don’t hold your breath.