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=

Mr Blair’s wind of change, we are told, is blowing at gale force throughout Britain. Since Diana died, leaving us her legacy of compassion, and the Labour Party was re-born on promises of fairness for all, this a general feeling that things are moving irrevocably our way. Every other day there seems to be a development which indicates that the battle for gay equality will soon be won.

This feeling was reinforced by a media blitz on those MPs who have chosen to be honest about their sexuality, and one had the distinct feeling it was being carefully orchestrated. The stories were uniformly sympathetic and strategically placed for maximum impact.

Dorian Jabri, the partner of Chris Smith, gave his interview to Mary Ann Sieghart, assistant editor of The Times (and, coincidentally, a Blairite). In the interview Mr Jabri revealed that he and Chris Smith lead a cosy life of hearth, home, shared dinners and the affections of an “incredibly demanding” Tibetan terrier. The only thing missing in this picture of domestic bliss is the approval of Mr Jabri’s parents. All the same, there was little to outrage the upholders of convention in Dorian’s description of the home life of our own dear Culture Minister.

Stephen Twigg was next up, with a remarkably non-judgmental interview in The Daily Mail. Twigg told of his long-term relationship with Benjamin Till, a “composer and director”. Once again, nothing to frighten the horses in this tale of two rather likeable men living and loving together. The only spanner in the works was provided by Stephen’s mother, who never forgave him for telling her that he is gay.

Then came Angela Eagle, and her now-famous interview with The Independent in which she became the first-ever voluntarily-declared lesbian MP. Only slight controversy ensued. The Daily Express even wished her well!

After that, Ben Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian that, as an MP in Mr Blair’s House of Commons, his homosexuality was a non-issue.

Indeed, that was the over-riding message from them all — homosexuality is no longer a terrible stigma in Parliament. That all went with the Tories. All of them receive nothing but support and approbation from their colleagues. Now, the message goes, it’s perfectly OK to be gay at Westminster.

Is that so? But wasn’t it only last year that the disgraced parliamentary lobbyist Ian Greer opined that there were as many as 40 gay MPs? And yet here we have only four of them out of the closet. If everything is so hunky dory, how come the other thirty-six are still too terrified to be honest? (Make that 35. We must take into account the tragic, self-inflicted demise of Gordon McMaster — see last month’s Mediawatch for details.)

The Daily Express was of the opinion that this sudden flurry of personal publicity around the gay MPs was part of a softening-up process. Look out for a raft of pro-gay legislation, the paper warned. Right on cue, the following day’s Independent announced that a free vote on the age of consent would be offered to MPs. “Legislation could be introduced in just over a year” the paper said.

Then came the triumphant Lisa Grant judgment, which might prove even more significant in the long run. [Note: South West Trains had refused to give a travel pass worth £1,000 to the partner of clerical officer Lisa Grant in 1995 – even though unmarried heterosexual partners qualify for the passes. Those concessions are available to what are described as common-law spouses – provided there is a meaningful relationship, and the partners are of the opposite sex. The case was eventually lost in the European Court of Justice]

There was even an officially-approved gay night at the Labour party conference — who could ask for anything more? All we have to do is sit back and watch it happen, right?

Or could it be that we are becoming fatally complacent at this decisive moment?

Writing in The Independent on the day after Tony Blair’s conference speech, Donald Maclntyre thought he felt “a creeping sense of relaxation among the faithful” which seemed to annoy the thrusting leader. I detect a similar it’s-all-over-bar-the-shouting mood developing among some in our own ranks who have, so far, fought most bravely for equality.

For instance, in an interview with The Independent Magazine, Sir Ian McKellen is reported as saying “Blair and his government know that the world they’re encouraging and imagining will be one which includes lesbians and gay men and they must not be disadvantaged by the law of the land. We have in this country an equal age of consent now, bar the Government actually announcing it. So my contribution is probably history.” Farewell, then, Sir Ian, and adieu. Let’s hope you’re right.

Ben Bradshaw, the gay MP who caused such glee on May 1st by humbling the foul Dr Adrian Rodgers of Exeter, wrote in The Guardian that he was almost affronted when it was assumed he would be going to the aforementioned gay night at the Conference. He chides “the gay lobby” for “not fully understanding the revolution of May 1st”. Gayness is now mainstream; why behave as though we’re still in a ghetto?” Mr Bradshaw berates. He also says that he will not become a gay crusader because, after all, “nobody can ever again say that being gay is a bar to success in public life.”

However, in the next sentence he says that “gays and lesbians are the only adults in Britain discriminated against in law. We have no protection in the workplace. The loved ones with whom we share our lives have no rights of inheritance, no rights to our pensions, life assurance pay-outs and tenancies. There is a hypocritical ban on gays and lesbians fighting for their country when thousands died in both world wars, and many continue to serve in the armed forces — in the closet — with distinction. State-sanctioned injustice against gay and lesbian people goes deep. This is wicked.”

Surely there is some contradiction here. Mr Bradshaw says that he doesn’t intend to fight exclusively, or even mainly, for gay rights, yet acknowledges that anti-gay discrimination represents one of the greatest injustices in the country. Would William Wilberforce have distanced himself from the fight for the abolition of slavery simply because he didn’t want to be seen as a one-issue politician? Some causes are noble and worth putting at the top of the agenda. If gay rights cannot be the priority of a gay MP, then of whose can they be?

The same could be said of Angela Eagle. She, too, was anxious for it to be known that she would not become a spokesperson for gay rights. “That’s just one aspect of what I’m about,” she says. “I’ve always supported gay rights to the extent that I believe that people should have the same civil rights, equal rights, partnership rights and be as free from irrational discrimination as everyone else. I’ve always voted that way whenever such issues arose. But then again, my sister [who is also an MP] feels the same way and she isn’t gay.”

But perhaps I’m being too harsh. Maybe just their presence in the House of Commons is enough. But then again, maybe it isn’t. There is something a little unsettling about these gay MPs all being so anxious not be too closely associated with the battle for full equality. If they really think the war is over, they may have a nasty surprise in store.

Certainly it isn’t over as far as the press is concerned. The Sunday Telegraph, for instance, carried an extraordinarily mean-minded and ill-informed article by Mark Steyn, ranting at length over the fact that Chris Smith will attend a ‘do’ at Buckingham Palace, to which Dorian Jabri has been officially invited as his partner. “There has always been a gay coterie among the courtiers, of course,” moans Mr Steyn. “But for these popinjays, gayness didn’t involve a full-scale round-the-clock ‘lifestyle’. The conventional establishment gay view was put last year by Sir Hardy Amies, the Queen’s couturier. He had the same partner for over two decades, but insists: “If someone rings you up and says ‘Can you come to dinner?’ the worst thing you can do is say ‘Can I bring my friend?’ It is just too common for two men to go around together.”

We’ll leave aside the fact that Mr Amies’s frocks are as crap as his opinions, and send sympathy to his partner, who has been so slightingly dismissed by the man who purports to love him.

All this pro-gay ballyhoo brought the inevitable reaction from the religious fanatics who have somehow come to believe that they have sole proprietorship of “the family”.

The Rev William Oddie issued his usual doom-laden prophecies in The Sun, going on at inordinate length about how Tony Blair’s proposed gay reforms would destroy everything that “we” hold dear. By “we”, I assume he means him and his wife, Cornelia. She is “deputy director of Family and Youth Concern” which is yet another of these religio-political groups, like the Conservative Family Campaign, which have big gobs and small membership lists.

It was in that official capacity that Mrs Odd(ie) was quoted in The Daily Mail as saying that a proposed education campaign for young gays, to be run in Manchester, was “dangerous and inadvisable”. She was joined in her alarm at these developments by Dr Adrian Rodgers and Nicholas Winterton, MP. If you then add Mrs Valerie Riches, Paul Johnson, Lynette Burrows and the editor of The Daily Mail to this list, you more or less have the family Values brigade in its entirety.

We will, I’ve no doubt, get our legal equality in due course, but there are other issues, much more fundamental to the quality of gay life, that will need to be tackled, and which aren’t even on the horizon yet. The issue of marriage rights, for example.

Writing in The Daily Express, Mary Kenny did an amazing volte face on this one. She says she can see no reason why “the State shouldn’t consider the social contract of marriage between same-sex partners.” (Has she suffered a Damascene conversion? Or has she been reading Virtually Normal?)

She makes the point that if the Government “plans to allow homosexual immigrants to bring their partners into Britain and is widening pension rights for gay couples, it is probably necessary to establish a legal basis for such partnership, which marriage would do.” Turning the William Oddie argument on its head, Mary Kenny wrote: “Gays who want to be married are, in their own way, paying homage to family values, which are the enduring basis for social and economic stability.”

“And,” she says, comparing the relationship of Chris Smith and Dorian Jabri with that of Robin Cook and his newly-abandoned wife, “some gays are a lot kinder to their life partners than some heterosexuals.”

***

Tory leader William Hague is, apparently, in trouble with his party’s “blue rinse brigade” because he insists on sharing his double-bedded conference hotel suite with his fiance, Ffion Jenkins. Mrs Thatcher is said to be outraged.

If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. The supposed controversy is obviously the creation of spin doctors, anxious “to quell earlier rumours that William Hague knew all the words to old Judy Garland numbers” (as Nigella Lawson put it in The Times).

Far from reassuring everyone, this transparent ruse just fans the flames of speculation.

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=

Abortion is on the political agenda once more, as is euthanasia, single parenthood, divorce and, of course, homosexuality. It’s rather like reliving the sixties. All we’re short of is a revival of flower power.

Leading hippie this time round is Tony Blair, who heads a government that apparently wants to create a compassionate, progressive society, free from the fetters of that strangling “tradition” that has for so long stifled the lives of so many people.

Even the opposition leadership perceives that this approach could be a winner and has tried to steal a bit of the glory. Mr Hague and Mr Portillo assured us at the Tory conference that their party is now “inclusive” and “tolerant”. According to the new Tory leader, it would be good will to all men and women (straight and gay, married and unmarried) from now on.

They might as well have been talking into thin air as far as their troops were concerned. The legendary blue-rinse brigade sat stony-faced at all this talk of kindness. They hadn’t hauled all the way to Blackpool to hear such lily-livered, pinko sentimentality. Hanging, flogging, castration and bigger, harsher jails — that was what they had come to hear about.

The Independent’s Polly Toynbee went among the Conservative activists during the conference to test their reaction to the change of heart of the leadership. Her observations reinforced the opinion that the soft and cuddly approach of Mr Hague doesn’t find favour with the grass roots.

“Have all those votes for beastliness just evaporated in a new, compassionate, caring, giving Britain?” Ms Toynbee wrote. “Are Blair and Diana-ism really triumphant for ever? Almost certainly not. Or not yet. Most people still read the same beastly newspapers packed full of the same beastly xenophobic views and prejudices. The Mail, Sun and Telegraph have not turned kind and generous overnight. Nor, presumably, have their readers. The beleaguered, ageing rump of the party may look a sorry sight now, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t got their finger on the pulse of the nation’s old mean streak. They are not history, or not quite yet.”

And it is the “traditional” Tories, with their “traditional” family values, that could still pose a serious threat to the progress of gay rights. Even many old-time Labourites are social conservatives. Ask Joe Ashton, MP, who is leading the rebellion within the Labour Party against lowering the age of consent.

He took a Panorama documentary team, who were covering the age of consent debate, to a working men’s club in his Nottinghamshire constituency. There they would hear what “real people” (i.e. those who don’t live in London) had to say. What they had to say were things like “Ninety per cent of them gays want burning. And I mean that, they want burning.”

A poll on Teletext asked viewers: “How should your MP vote on the subject of lowering the age of consent for homosexuals?” Of 2,096 votes, 45 per cent were for the change, but 55 per cent were against. A NOP telephone survey for the aforementioned Panorama programme showed only 35 per cent were in favour with 53 per cent against and the rest unsure.

And it isn’t just the lumpen proletariat who are opposing our progress. The Sunday Telegraph revealed that “William Hague will be backed by no more than a quarter of his shadow cabinet when he votes in favour of lowering the age of consent for homosexuals.” The paper had conducted a survey which showed that “only three of the 18-strong team would vote for a reduced age of consent”.

And when the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd Richard Harries, revealed that he now believes the age of consent for gays should be lowered to 16, The Sun reacted with a large, reversed-out headline saying that he was “Morally Evil”. According to The Daily Mail, the Archbishop of Canterbury was quick to “slap down” the bishop. A spokesman for Lambeth Palace was reported as saying: “The Archbishop has made it clear that he would not support a lowering of the age of consent for homosexual practice and would be worried by the signal that it would send out that homosexual practice is on a par with and equal to heterosexual relationships.”

Yes, the forces of reaction are gathering as never before. They are queuing up to tell Messrs Blair and Hague that their support for homosexual rights will destroy the country. Or even, as George Brown in The Daily Telegraph would have it, “the whole of Western civilisation”.

Mr Hague then took a kicking from the ex-Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovits. According to The Express, he said: “I’m saddened that a party that stood like a rock for certain values, family values, should now surrender those for political gains.” He wanted to know also why Tony Blair was bothering with gay rights when “only four per cent” of the population is homosexual. (Can we assume that Lord Jakobovits would not disapprove if restrictions were placed on the practice of Judaism in this country, given that only one per cent of the population is Jewish?)

Then Cardinal Winning, leader of the Scottish Roman Catholics, laid into Tony Blair by saying (on Radio 2 and in The Daily Mail): “Lowering the age of homosexual consent, opening up the idea of gays in the armed forces, giving unmarried and homosexual partners immigration rights does nothing to strengthen the family unit.”

These are influential voices and are only the tip of the iceberg. Those who think the battle is all over bar the shouting may be in for a shock. Or, as Polly Toynbee put it: “The Tory tiger still has teeth. I came [to the Tory conference] to gloat, but I came away chastened, remembering how deep and strong Tory values are, even when the Tory Party is weak. The battle to change Britain has only just begun.”

And meantime, beavering away in the background are right-wing religious pressure groups like Family and Youth Concern (FYC). This group provides much of the information on which papers like The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph base their anti-gay stories. Its spokesperson, Valerie Riches, has taken on the mantle of right-wing rent-a-gob for these papers, after the passing of so many of the Tory backbenchers who used to fulfil that function. FYC’s autumn newsletter (which has been distributed to all MPs and many sympathetic journalists) contains an article by Dr Trevor Stammers, a trustee of the “Family Education Trust” (yet another religio-political propaganda outfit) and “a tutor in general practice at St George’s Hospital Medical School”. He says that “homosexual acts pose much greater risks to health than straight sex.” He then advises us that “about two thirds of male homosexuals have the virus for anal warts.”

Now how does he know this? Given that nobody is actually certain how many homosexuals there are in this country (the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles says one per cent, while Lord Jakobovits says four per cent and the Kinsey Report between five and ten per cent) how can anyone possibly know what percentage of them has the virus for anal warts?

Similarly, Dr Stammers says that 40 per cent of gay men have had “a major depression” compared with three per cent of other men. Apparently 51 per cent of gay men use drugs compared with only seven per cent of men generally. How are these figures arrived at? Or how are they invented?

Although this rather crude propaganda is easily discredited by those with a mind to do it, there can be no doubt that it does have an impact on the people who read it uncritically. Take Sunday Telegraph columnist Minette Marrin, for instance. She falls for Dr Stammers’ bait, hook, line and sinker. In the October 26th edition she quotes all the “statistics” from the FYC newsletter — even the preposterous ones that say that “overall life expectancy of a practising male homosexual is about 30 years less than that of heterosexual men” and “80 per cent of the victims of paedophilia are boys molested by adult males” — without question.

Family and Youth Concern’s “research” — much of which emanates from right-wing religious groups in the USA — provides ready-made ammunition for people like Anne Atkins, the piously dire “agony aunt” of The Daily Telegraph and the over-agitated Tory MP Julian Brazier.

Oh yes, indeed, battles may have been won, but the war for gay equality is far from over.

***

A reader has sent in a clipping from his local free sheet in East London, called “The Yellow Advertiser”. It is a column by Edward Case, which makes the familiar argument against lowering the age of consent. “If Parliament were to pass such legislation, it would be acceptable for a boy still at school to be sodomised yet that same boy would not be allowed to drink in a pub… Teenagers go through a stage of experimentation… Imagine the trauma of someone who was not sure of themselves. It’s common for adolescents to question where they fit in. To push someone, maybe needlessly, into a situation which. could mentally scar them for life, would be catastrophic…” etc. etc.

My correspondent says that if he wanted to read this kind of garbage he would buy The Daily Mail — he certainly doesn’t want it shoved, unsolicited, through his door. “While free papers stick to adverts about double-glazing and car boot sales, they are harmless enough,” he says.

I would have agreed with that, except for the fact that another reader, this time in Cornwall, sent in a full page advertisement which he had clipped from The Cornishman.

The ad was ostensibly for Trago Mills Shopping Centres, but on closer examination it contained not only the price lists for convector heaters and Wilton broadloom, but also an amazing diatribe from someone who is obviously influential in the store’s hierarchy. “The greatest insult to the English language was when ‘gay’, a beautiful word describing our joy and happiness, was adopted by homosexuals and lesbians…” he wrote. “When immature youngsters and innocent children become their prey, there is only one effective answer — castration!”

He continues in the best tradition of the bar room bigot for a quarter of a page, railing not only against Mr Blair and his liberalism but also against the plan to “surrender our precious little country to Hitler’s successors” (or get further involved in Europe, to you and me). There are blasts not only at “revolting perverts” but also foreigners, who are such a threat to our beloved, beset little island of love.

To see such ranting in an advert for a shopping centre comes as something of a shock. Fortunately, as well as complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority (which someone has done), we can vote with our feet on this one.

Trago Mills Regional Shopping Centres are hereby boycotted by this column. I’ll never buy another Swish Curtain Pole from that store until the author of that stupid and impertinent tirade has been crushed to death in the shop’s revolving door. Nothing less would change my mind.