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=

High summer is traditionally the “silly season” for the press. When news is scarce, gay people—famous and obscure — become targets for journalists in search of easy copy. And because there’s so little competition in the news rooms, our sexuality is likely to end up in 200-point type on the front page.

You can almost imagine the relief among journalists, therefore, when a 13-year-old boy accused Michael Jackson of “abusing” him. Within 48 hours of the accusation being made the papers did what they’d been longing to do for several years now — they tore Michael Jackson into tiny pieces. Like sharks in a feeding frenzy they trawled the depths for any fantasy, innuendo or negative comment they could find and ran it all — true or false, they didn’t care. It became so bad that a thousand of Jacko’s fans felt moved to ask the Press Complaints Commission to investigate the treatment their hero was getting at the hands of the papers. They were, of course, sent away with a flea in their ear. “We only investigate complaints from people directly involved,” the PCC said feebly.

In the meantime, all kinds of strange people crawled out of the woodwork to testify in the kangaroo court which the tabloids had set up. They were anxious to reveal what they “knew” about Jackson. According to The Sun (September 6th) one of the singer’s “closest aides” who had worked at the Neverland Ranch was prepared to tell all for the modest fee of £170,000, This fact alone goes some way to explaining the queues of people offering the newspapers all kinds of weird and fanciful stories about Jackson. With so much money around, there are bound to be plenty of unscrupulous people trying to get a slice.

Think back to 1987 when Elton John was being put through a similar wringer by The Sun and remember that at the time the paper was paying liars, pimps and rentboys who were inventing stories that just happened to support their own Big Lie.

Despite his continuing world-wide popularity, the tabloids have been trying for several years now to knock Jackson from his pedestal, and their nickname for him — “Wacko Jacko” — should have told him that one day they’d get him, “Child sex abuse” was the perfect medium for their most savage attack.

The no-smoke-without-fire principle, on which the press operates, has already ensured that Michael Jackson has been found guilty by insinuation. What chance does he have of a real trial when all the “evidence” has already been splashed across newspapers, television and radio?

One interesting aspect of the press coverage of this appalling business has been that no one has said that Michael Jackson is gay. The word has not as far as I have seen — been used at all in connection with this case. This is unusual, as the scummy rags are usually anxious to infer that paedophilia and homosexuality are synonymous. (As The News of the World put it on September 5th under a story about child porn: “Rapist’s Gay Love: Child rapist James, Saunders is having a passionate affair in Broadmoor — with another man.”)

Why are the papers reluctant to say that because he allegedly chose boys as his sexual playmates, Michael Jackson must be gay? Is it because they consider that being gay is even worse than being a paedophile? Or is it that they consider the two things completely separately?

There is no doubt that sexual activity between adults and children is rapidly becoming the number one taboo in our society. The tabloids would have us believe that their present obsession with it stems from readers’ concerns, but the prurient interest in the details of the sexual acts (“he watched Jackson put his hand in a nine-year-old boy’s pants…he was also said to have kissed a seven-year old on the lips and caress a three-year-old” — The Sun, September 6th) seem to hint at something more sinister.

A more considered approach to paedophilia was attempted by Graham Lord in The Daily Telegraph (August 17th), when he wrote about the current spate of men accused of assaulting children. He cites, among other cases, that of a rector who was jailed for four months after admitting “assaulting” a teenager 20 years ago. The Bishop of Sheffield has said that the man should never have been sent to prison. Mr Lord is of the opinion that “we need somehow to deter potential gentle paedophiles” without shaming them. “Monsters who torture and murder their victims should be locked up until they can never hurt a child again.” he said. “But what of the men who are not monsters but simply weak and inadequate?”

He recalls his first headmaster who was convicted of “abuse” and was “so mortified by his prison sentence — and so ostracised afterwards —that he committed suicide. He had never used violence and none of his victims seems to have been damaged. Suicide was a tragic, unjust end for such a man.”

Reviewing a book called Seduction of the Mediterranean — writing, art and homosexual fantasy in The Sunday Times (August 29th), Gilbert Adair said of the Italian boys who became the objects of desire for ex-pat British gay men in the 19th century: “What did they think of all the homo-erotic attention they received? Most of the boys went on to marry and have children, and apparently suffered no loss of face among family or friends for their youthful indiscretions…Today, from our vantage point in a world in which homosexuality is no longer a crime but paedophilia is practically a blasphemy, where nothing could be less politically correct than the sexual exploitation of the underprivileged, it all seems so far away and long ago.”

Certainly Michael Jackson is learning that a calm, rational approach to his alleged relationships is an impossibility. “Child abuse” allegations now seem equivalent to McCarthy’s dreaded question in the fifties “Are you now, or have you ever been…”

Is it impossible now for Michael Jackson to recover from this affair — even if there is no trial, and even if the law finds him innocent? Or will he be for ever the “child abuse monster” of tabloid hysteria?

One thing is sure — if there is a trial, it will almost certainly be televised, and the boy will be mercilessly savaged by ambitious lawyers who think and act as though they’re on a film set. The whole world will be watching, anxious for all the juicy details, and there will be plenty willing to provide the melodrama.

***

It isn’t only superstars who are subjected to terrorism by tabloid, Social worker Terence Dunning found himself the centre of a press-created maelstrom earlier this year when his local authority refused to allow a mixed-race couple to adopt a baby because they were considered “naive” on the topic of racism.

The storm returned when The Daily Express revealed that Mr Dunning is gay. From that moment, the topic of the story changed from adoption rights into the suitability of gay people to be social workers.

Norfolk County Council foolishly called a press conference to try and stem the hysteria which was mounting. Mr Dunning told reporters that his judgement was in no way affected by his sexual orientation. His employers, Norfolk social services, backed him up. “We don’t want to make any judgement about his private life,” they said. “There is no doubt about his ability as a social worker. The director of social services is appalled at the way the two things are being linked.”

The press conference simply provided more fodder for another attack the following day.

The Sun said, in an editorial: “So what are his qualifications for acting like a little tin god? He ABANDONED his wife after 20 years because of his love for another man, He ADMITTED his homosexuality on a TV programme. It didn’t stop him getting promotion and a pay rise. He’s still sitting in judgment on ordinary couples. Terence Dunning’s bedtime habits are of course his own affair. A pity he can’t show the same tolerance to others that he expects for himself.”

Clause 15 of the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice states: “The press should avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to a person’s race, colour. religion, sex or sexual orientation…it should avoid publishing details of a person’s…sexual orientation, unless these are directly relevant to the story.”

So how does the press square its attack on Mr Dunning with the Code of Practice signed by every editor of every national paper?

And while we’re on the subject of Clause 15, can I ask The Daily Star, whose editor Brian Hitchen is chief apologist for the Press Complaints Commission, what it thought it was doing publishing a story on its front page (August 26th). headed “2 gay mums dump 7 kids to go on hol” and continuing it inside the paper with the heading “Dumped by gays”. The two women involved in this story may or may not have abandoned their children (there have certainly been no police charges) but what exactly does their sexuality have to do with it?

The story, as it developed over the following days, turned from being about neglecting children into whether or not lesbians were fit to be parents, The London Evening Standard (August 27th) carried a particularly unpleasant feature about the case, in which Walter Ellis reported from the Surrey estate where the women lived. He told a tale of suburban low-living and the neighbours resentment of the “lezzy house”. One woman is quoted as saying: “I feel that lesbians and gays shouldn’t have children. They live their lives as they want, but they don’t stop to think of the little ones.”

The whole sorry saga was played as a reassurance to heterosexual parents that, however badly they treated their children (and let’s face it, the vast majority of child abuse is committed by heterosexuals), at least they aren’t queer.

Then we have The News of the World (August 22nd), which ran a story about the manager of pop group Take That. The story’s one and only purpose was to tell NoW readers that the man is gay and that his lover died from Aids. The man involved told the paper: “I’ve no comment to make about my private life or my sexuality” — a clear indication that his sexuality was being paraded against his wishes.

What happened to all those reassuring noises about privacy which were being bandied about a little while ago? And what happened to the moral outrage expressed by the “News of the Screws” when a gay group threatened to “out” people a couple of years ago? And what happened to Clause 15?

Then came the case of the “Gay Girl Cop”. This unfortunate woman became involved with someone called Anne Wood-Wilson, who had embezzled thousands of pounds from firms she worked for. When the case came to court, the WPC, who had been having an affair with the woman, was cleared of any charges, but her sexuality became the main element of the story. Why?

The News of the World (August 29th) also outed Sally Becker, the so-called “Angel of Bosnia”, in a completely gratuitous way. What has her lesbianism got to do with the anything, and if she wants to keep it private why shouldn’t she be allowed to?

The Government is issuing a White Paper covering its proposals to tighten up controls on press invasions of privacy. From what has been leaked so far it seems that there will be little hope of stopping abuses such as the ones above. The Press Complaints. Commission is ineffective, serving only to protect the heartless tabloids from the wrath of the public.

***

There is something particularly unpleasant about seeing gay people betraying their own kind. A nasty example appeared in The News of the World (August 8th) when Keith Russell, who is described as a drag queen by night and a salesman by day, recounted how he had placed an ad in Boyz magazine and received a reply from a gay policeman. After meeting the PC, and having sex with him, Russell then went to the NoW and told them all the dirty details.

The paper then did what it does best —baited and humiliated the gay policeman by publishing the letter which he had written to Russell. No doubt his career will now be on the line as the NoW spitefully intended. I hope you’re proud of yourself, Judas Russell. You’re just the kind of person the gay community could do without. And I hope any cash you got from Murdoch’s filthy rag makes you very pleased with yourself.

***

The Sunday Times (September 5th), carried an article about the Rev Pat Robertson, the American politician and religious maniac. Apparently, Robertson is now well on the way to taking over the Republican Party. “He bought a run-down television station and became the most powerful figure on America’s religious Right,” says the paper, and now has a tight grip of the Republican’s “spiritual heart”.

Moderates are alarmed by these developments. “People should have no doubt that Robertson is pursuing his aim to be the most powerful political influence in America by the turn of the century,” said one observer. “If his success continues to snowball it would mean fascist measures, such as death penalties for gays, will eventually be debated by the Republican Party.”

Should we be worried by this, or should we rest easy, safe in the knowledge that Mr Robertson will eventually go into self-destruct mode as such people generally do. Surely even American voters wouldn’t allow such a nutcase anywhere near the White House?

***

The Mail on Sunday (August 8th) told us of “Death threats against a woman who fought to be heterosexual”. The story concerned Jeannette Howard, who claims that she was once a lesbian but has decided “on moral grounds” to give up her homosexuality and become heterosexual. She says that gay people have a choice and can renounce their “pre-pubescent emotional way of thinking”.

She is publishing a book this autumn called Out of Egypt in which she will tell her own story and give full particulars about how we can all stop being gay and become “normal”. She now claims to be a full-time counsellor (although, significantly, she doesn’t mention which organisation she belongs to). She claims to be persecuted by gay people who issue “death threats” to her and accuse her of being a Nazi. Naturally these nasty old gays throw bricks through her windows and have forced her to go ex-directory, etc. etc. The article was short on particulars that might have made it clear where Jeannette

Howard is coming from. There is no mention of religion, but I have a strong suspicion that Ms Howard may have strong leanings in that direction. When I say strong, I actually mean obsessive. Like so many of these “ex-gay” people, I suspect she is driven by a desire to prove the Bible correct on the matter of homosexuality, ignoring all social and scientific progress that has been made since the First Century.

You wouldn’t have suspected any of this from The Mail on Sunday. But then, truth ain’t very important when there is propaganda to peddle.

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=

When is anti-Semite not an anti-Semite? Answer: when it’s Peter Tatchell.

Mr Tatchell’s group OutRage!was accused of being anti-Jewish following a demonstration, outside a synagogue, against the disgusting anti-gay remarks made by ex-chief Rabbi Jakobovits. The most disturbing aspect, though, was that gay newspapers decided to carry the “anti-Semitic” accusations on their front pages.

Anyone who knows anything about OutRage!must realise that it would be the last group to set itself up as racist, sexist or anti-Semitic; its politically correct credentials are impeccable. So how did its perfectly justifiable challenge to the Jewish community end up with headlines like: “Calls of racism by Jewish groups as OutRage!targets synagogue” (Pink Paper, September 24th) and “OutRage!accused of anti-Semitism” (Capital Gay, September 24th)?

In these anxious times, the gay press has a special duty. Like the rest of the press, it must aim to report the news fairly and with balance, and to keep comment and news reporting separate. The rest of the press, as we know to our cost, fails in this duty, which is all the more reason why we should try harder.

At the same time, the gay media has a duty to report events from a gay perspective. Our newspapers and radio programmes must go some way to balance the sometimes ill-informed and hostile reporting of gay life by straight papers. This does not mean that everything gay people do is beyond criticism, of course, but it does mean that honest and well-intentioned efforts in the struggle for gay rights should be reported sympathetically and fairly.

OutRage!feels aggrieved at the drubbing it received from Capital Gay and the Pink Paper and, indeed, Capital Gay’s report of the event could well have been written by any straight journalist with a desire to discredit OutRage!

It was angled to suggest that the direct-action group had deliberately set out to offend and insult Jewish people, when in fact the intention had been simply to raise awareness of the homophobia of leading figures in the Jewish community.

Perhaps OutRage!’s placard comparing Lord Jakobovits to the Nazi Heinrich Himmler was a mistake, but only because its message (that both wanted to use genetic engineering to eradicate homosexuality) was not clear. But it was not intended to upset those who were in concentration camps as has been suggested. Remember, gays wore pink triangles in those camps, too.

OutRage!prides itself on its defence of persecuted minorities, so accusations of anti-Semitism got them where it hurts. But that tactic does not let the Jewish community off the hook. Lord Jakobovits’ remarks were disgusting and sinister, but judging by the ensuing correspondence in the Jewish Chronicle, many Jews agree with him. The Jewish community cannot avoid the nastiness in its midst simply by claiming that OutRage!’s challenge “offended their sensibilities”. What about gay people’s sensibilities? After all, the remarks that sparked this row came not from some barmy fringe group but from the very top of the hierarchy, and when the ex-Chief rabbi speaks, it is with the voice of authority.

This means that all Jews now have a question to answer: do you agree with Jakobovits or not? And accusations that I am anti-Semitic for suggesting this will not wash. Jakobovits’ comments sprang from his interpretation of Jewish law, so unless they say otherwise, we have to assume that the people bound by that law agree. Significantly, the current Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has not distanced himself from Jakobovits opinions.

We’re on similarly slippery ground over the growing threat of violence against gays emanating from the black community. The Independent (October 4th) reported on tensions between the predominantly white gay communities and the black communities in the south London districts of Brixton, Stockwell and Kennington. Increasing numbers of homophobic attacks are being reported, and the suspicion is that they are the result of the macho culture of young black men. This is expressed most clearly in ragga music which, according to The Independent “evolved out of Jamaican reggae and Afro-American rap and has lyrics that pay homage to macho virility”.

One song in particular is blamed for the rising anxiety, the notorious Boom Bye Bye. Buju Banton’s song contains the lethal line “Boom bye-bye inna battyboy head”, which translates as “shoot homosexuals in the head”.

The Indy reports: “Recent incidents include a young gay man followed by a black youth and beaten with a baseball bat; another had his trousers pulled down in the street and was beaten by black youths wielding a shovel; yet another was kicked to the ground and a road sign dropped on him. There have also been reports of assaults on lesbians.”

Someone at The Yard is quoted as saying: “Young blacks are being told in music that killing batty boys is culturally acceptable. It’s gone past fashion. Someone will be killed.”

There’s no doubt that black youths get a very hard time, and in some ways their violent reactions against white society are understandable. But the establishment of a kind of pecking order, with gays at the bottom, isn’t the answer. Black boys might well feel that they’re regarded as the lowest of the low, but then their thinking seems to say “at least I’m better than a battyboy”. It’s a dangerous reasoning and one which the black community has a duty to challenge. And if I say that this violence is a direct result of developments in black culture, am I going to be accused of racism? I’ll risk it, because if we are attacked by members of other oppressed minorities, we must not allow political correctness to get in the way of justifiable protest.

Even discussing political correctness is a minefield. Originally it had a benign and worthy intention – to change attitudes towards groups in society that have traditionally been marginalised or neglected. This I don’t object to. Britain is riddled with racism, sexism, homophobia and disregard for those with disabilities, and any effort to improve the lot of these groups is to be applauded. But then the zealots got to work and the whole thing went too far. Political correctness has become, in some quarters, a kind of religion with its own heresies and blasphemies that will be severely punished. You have to watch your language when talking about minorities because the permissible terminology used to refer to them seems to change by the day.

Those at the forefront of political correctness often fire their cannons with little regard for the target. Many people who are generally sympathetic to the aims of gay activists are alienated by aggressive attacks on their lack of political correctness. An example of this was given by Cynthia Heimel, reporting from Los Angeles for the Independent on Sunday. Ms Heimel had been invited on to an “Oprah-ish TV show” to discuss “Straight women and gay men: a wonderful blendship?” She was a panelist along with two gay men and their straight women best friends. During a commercial break she noticed that the other panelists were having a “fierce whispering tantrum”.

“‘They keep defining me as a gay man,’ said a guy with great socks. ‘Don’t they understand that I’m not just gay. I’m a person too, that my personhood is more important than my gayness?’

“‘I know,’ said a woman, ‘They don’t understand that it’s not about being gay or straight, it’s about friendship and empowerment’.

“Yeah, totally,’ I said, trying to be one of the gang. ‘Hey, nice socks,’ I said to the socks guy. ‘Oh, but they would be, you’re gay.’ The four panelists glared at me. ‘Hey, come on. It was a joke! Ha ha,’ I said feebly. “‘Don’t you see it’s wrong to stereotype like that?’ asked the sock guy’s best friend. “‘But it’s a positive stereotype and it’s true,’ I said. ‘Gay men look good, straight men look like they’ve just emerged from a trash bin.’ I got four cold shoulders. I shrivelled into a little ball.”

Poor old liberal straights. One minute we’re demanding they respect our difference, now we’re demanding that they disregard it. No wonder they’re confused. The Right-wing were quick to pick up this kind of excess and now political correctness has taken over from loony-leftism as the “reason” to resist change and progress. PC has become a powerful propaganda tool for reactionary pundits.

Take a couple of examples, the first from Richard Ingrams in The Observer: “The schedules of Channel 4 are usually a good guide to what is politically correct. So I was interested if somewhat alarmed last week to see a whole hour being devoted to promoting Ludovic Kennedy’s campaign for the legalisation of euthanasia. If I am right, it looks horribly as if euthanasia has now joined abortion, gay rights, doing away with nuclear energy and saving the whales as something we all have to be in favour of.”

Notice how Ingrams has craftily made it seem that all the above listed issues are the province of the politically correct (i.e. loonies) and can therefore be disregarded by sensible people.

And then we have Garry Bushell, writing in The Sun (September 29th) about the gay character in Casualty (BBC 1): “Inevitably Ken is painted as a sympathetic character rather than a sleazy khazi cruiser. This is because TV drama is life as Big Brother Beeb would like it to be rather than how it is, and ‘positive images’ are a must for all minorities.”

Bushell makes out that any attempt to portray gay people as whole human beings with a full range of emotions is nothing but “political correctness”, and in Bushell’s book PC is just one more left-wing conspiracy aimed at undermining the lives of “real” folk. Astute readers will know, of course, that Mr Bushell is peddling a political agenda of his own which is as dogmatic as that of any Socialist Worker, Take this which, believe it or not, appeared in his television review (October 6th): “Most voters want an end to immigration and a real crack down on crime – including the immediate return of the death penalty.”

The right-wing press has been full of stories about the “legions of the politically correct” who, they maintain, are stifling free speech. To hear them tell it you’d think it was no longer possible to criticise anyone with a black skin, a gay orientation or a disability. The only problem with their argument is that their pages are full of abuse for these groups.

I, for instance, was called a “liberal fascist” by a right-wing columnist when I won a Press Council ruling which said that words like “poof” and “poofter” should not be used as terms of abuse in newspapers. “We can no longer say what we like,” said The Sun and The Star. “The politically correct Nazis have stifled free speech.” I have seen no lessening of the newspapers aggression towards gay people since this ruling.

So, we should be careful about those who oppose political correctness – and remember that with their attempts to make it sound like a sinister undermining of “traditional values” they are creating a stick with which to beat reformers and progressives, a weapon to hold back change. At the same time, we should be cautious of those who take political correctness too far. The antics of a few extremists give our enemies a wonderful opportunity to oppose all our efforts to change things for the better.

Extreme political correctness also stands in the way of our vigorously fighting our corner when we are attacked by other minorities. I do hope that OutRage!will not be intimidated by this latest incident and will continue to make our supposed allies in the Rainbow Alliance face up to their homophobia.

***

“Raymond Burr was veritable giant of the small screen,” wrote The Daily Star in an editorial (September 14th). “What a shame that the tough, straight-talking star of Perry Mason and Ironside should turn out to be a gay ‘wife’ who liked nothing better than knitting and making strawberry jam. Ever get the feeling that there are some things you would simply prefer not to know?”

Yes, I do, actually. I’d prefer not to know the stinking opinions of the sleazy Daily Star.

***

For the real master of political correctness you have to go to the Vatican. Yes, his Holiness has done it again. The great dealer in Bull has at last published his enSlCKlicle, Veritatis Splendor(or, roughly translated, I’m a silly old prick). This document was widely leaked by The Times, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

The Holy Father tells us that homosexuality, birth control, sex outside marriage and artificial insemination are all “intrinsically evil”. And, what’s more, if any of the troops dare to disagree, they will be severely dealt with.

It’s tragic that a man with an obvious psychiatric condition should wield such power over so many people in the world. But then again, they have a choice. They can tell him to take a running jump.

***

Mary Kenny, that pathetic apologist for all things Catholic, returned to the subject of gay sexuality in her column in The Sunday Telegraph (September 19th). “Two young homosexual men who ‘came out’ on a local BBC radio programme will not be prosecuted, the Crown Prosecution Service has said, even though one of them, at 20, is technically under-age.”

She says this is a wise decision because sometimes it is better for the law to turn a blind eye to minor transgressions. “By far the most sensible option is to engage in a sensible act of hypocrisy,” she says. And she should know, being an expert on the subject.

Before you get the idea that Holy Mary has changed her tune about gay rights, we have to read on, because the crux of her article is an impassioned plea that the age of consent should not be lowered. “In London there is a thriving rent-boy racket, there are gay culture pubs, clubs, porn, artefacts – you name it you can get it. It is possible that this is something you will never suppress; but it would be darned foolish,” she says, “at a time when Aids is on the rampage, to endorse it, encourage it, and give it the Queen’s stamp of approval.”

Kenny says that gay campaigners should be careful that they are not accused of “wanting to encourage pederasty, of being stalking horses for the cult of ‘boy love’, so assiduously pursued by such luminaries as, the late Michel Foucault, the influential French intellectual (the age he fancied was ‘13 or 14’).” Accused by whom? Well, by Mary, of course, who says that lowering the age of consent for gay men will “endorse a rent-boy culture by giving the law’s approval to teenage gay sex.”

Barbara Amiel in The Sunday Times (September 19th) launched a similarly vitriolic attack on gay rights. “Militant homosexuals want much more than their basic human rights to practice their tastes without legal sanction. They also want admiration and preferential treatment for doing so – as well as the redesign of basic institutions to suit their lifestyle.” She goes on to say that although she is a “profoundly liberal person” (cough! splutter! gag!) she “understands those hidebound conservatives who used to say that if you give these people equal treatment before the law, soon they will demand that homosexuality be taught as a desirable lifestyle in our schools.”

And so her profound liberalism leads her to believe that a lowering of the age of consent will result in the “sin” of “the militant’s demand for privilege and excess”.

These are the first shots across the bows as the age of consent debate gathers pace. We had better be ready for our opponents to trawl the very bottom of the sewer of slander in order to hold back reform. Sick bags at the ready, boys.

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=

Despite Stonewall’s efforts — including its high profile “Equality Week” — the age of consent debate seems to be simmering away on the back burner rather than boiling merrily for all to see. This is understandable, given there is still no guarantee that the issue will be a live one in the foreseeable future. Stonewall stresses the importance of our writing to our MPs, and I would suggest we start now; it may be the beginning of a long and acrimonious correspondence — especially if your MP happens to be Harry Greenway, Geoffrey Dickens or one of those other knuckle-headed backbenchers with the kind of knees that jerk at the merest mention of any liberal or progressive reform.

And talking of knees jerking, let’s see how the patella of Mary Kenny is doing this month (Ms Kenny’s knee jerks in a manner that would almost qualify her as a Tiller Girl). Her Sunday Telegraph column is usually silly and irrational, but it was much more than usually so on October 24th when she wrote: “Joan Bakewell in her TV programme about reducing the age of consent for teenage homosexuals… repeatedly alleged that the British were uniquely ‘homophobic’. This is simply not true. Until 1970, for example, the French had a regulation that someone who was openly homosexual could not be a school teacher or civil servant while the Russians executed homosexual men. Why don’t TV researchers ever do any proper research instead of just talking to propagandists?”

Can you believe this woman’s sheer brass neck in calling other people propagandists? Or is she just an ignoramus? There was never capital punishment for homosexuals in Russia, not even under the Tsars. And doesn’t she realise that France liberalised its laws some time ago — unlike our own fair land, which is still — as I’m sure she would approve — somewhere in the Dark Ages.

Perhaps Nigella Lawson was thinking about Mary Kenny when she wrote in the London Evening Standard (October 27th): “The well-worn arguments about lowering the age of consent were, and continue to be, trotted out by the family values brigade.”

Some of the arguments are wrong-headed, she says, while others are “simply mad”.

Ms Lawson is most perplexed by “the argument that says 16 year olds are too young to understand whether they are gay or not. The extension of this argument is that if they fall in with the wrong crowd they will somehow be entrapped in a sexuality which isn’t naturally theirs.” The problem with this, says Nigella, is that if it were true, “half the public schoolboys in the land would have been marching on Whitehall last week.”

If these malevolent commentators really believe that homosexuality is “unnatural, ungodly or generally unthinkable”, how, she wonders, do they manage at the same time to think that there is “something so attractive about it that it will tempt the weak-willed into a life of sad vice.”

Such reasonableness cuts no ice with Rev N J Holloway of Mid Glamorgan who wrote a letter to The Daily Mail setting out his ideas, “There should be no national age of consent,” he says. “In the Bible — His word to mankind — God gives no basis for an age of consent for sexual activity, either homosexual or heterosexual.”

The good Reverend says there is a “state of consent” which is “the holy and honourable state of marriage”. It follows that no-one — straight or gay — should have sex until they marry. And as gays can’t wed they shouldn’t have sex, full stop.

“Many loud voices will be heard championing the cause of the gay lobby,” thunders Mr Holloway. “The voice of the Christian Church should not remain hushed.”

Oh, it won’t. Even as we speak, the god-shouters are organising a campaign of distortion and misrepresentation that would make the editor of The Sun proud. The question is — are we prepared for the forthcoming fundamentalist onslaught? These right-wing Christians are becoming a serious force to be reckoned with.

An article in The Guardian (November 2nd) by Christopher Reed, explored the new and more sophisticated tactics being used by American evangelicals. They have begun to use tricks learned from the communists of old — assuming false colours and infiltrating influential committees and organisations in order to dictate the agendas.

“I do guerrilla warfare,” says Ralph Reed, executive director of Rev Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s all over until you’re in a body bag.”

These American strategies are being enthusiastically imported into Britain by the cannier holy rollers. More and more fanatical Christians seem to be making their voices heard in local authorities, on school governing bodies and even in the Cabinet. This is not paranoia, as the activities of John Patten and John Gummer illustrate. We had better beware and be warned, and start doing a bit of infiltrating of our own.

Which does not mean that everyone is beyond rational persuasion. In The Times Magazine (October 2nd), columnist “P.H.S.” (the journalist Michael Bywater) reported that he had been invited to oppose the idea of a common age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals at a Cambridge Union debate. He seemed a natural choice, having been previously nasty to several prominent gay figures.

He was paired (almost inevitably) with Stephen Green of the Conservative Family Campaign (“a wild-eyed man with teeth and a beard”). On the opposite side were (equally inevitably) Sir Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry.

“Sir Ian McKellen delivers a reasoned and objective address with the famous vocal pyrotechnics held in check until the end, when he recites a list of 23 European countries where a common age of consent is in force,” wrote Mr Bywater. “Then Stephen Fry stands up. The house is unprepared for the astounding display of rhetoric he delivers. He denounces the whey-faced adulterers and hypocrites ‘who have the astounding effrontery to stand up, in a seaside town, and demand a return to “core values’: He exults in his own nature and exhorts the audience to do likewise.”

Then it is Mr Bywater’s turn to speak and, to his own astonishment, he finds himself speaking in favour of the motion. He hears himself declare that he is going to sit with the faggots and advises everyone else to do the same. On crossing the floor he finds no room on the benches, so sits on Stephen Fry’s knee.

The result of the debate — a majority of 600-odd for the motion and about 30 against — is later discovered to be a record.

Michael Bywater says: “I spend the rest of the evening glowing with gay pride, until I recall with a little disappointment, that I am not gay.”

Another angry voice which appears to have changed its tune is that of Matthew Parris, ex-Tory MP and now a writer for The Times. Mr Parris has often been seen as an apologist for the disgusting activities and pronouncements of his former Conservative colleagues, but now even he’s getting pissed off with them. “Try and get anyone, anyone of political stature to speak against homosexual law reform at a debate or public meeting, or on television (and a hundred editors, producers and union presidents will bear me out) it is almost impossible. I could take this inertia from Mrs Thatcher, because she really was right-wing; but from John Major and Michael Howard I cannot, because I know they are not.”

“The argument is won,” he says, “and the government knows it: but still the cowards won’t move.”

He has heard the rumour that John Major has changed his mind and no longer intends to allow a free vote on the issue, He says his hunch is that Michael Howard “has decided to wait for the UK to lose a case at the European Court [of Human Rights], then reform the law and blame it on the EC. If so, it is despicable.”

He says that if the rumour proves to be true, then gay Tories (he claims that there are “millions of us”) “are going to have to decide for how much longer walking over us is to remain the path of least resistance.” He suggests that the European elections might be the place to start to teach the Government a lesson.

The magazine Public Policy Review— a journal that might claim the attention of the “decision-makers” — carried a detailed, five-page article by Mark Lowery, which went into all the arguments for and against reform in depth. The author obviously feels strongly that the law needs to be changed and, hopefully, any of his readers who are in Parliament will feel likewise when they’ve ploughed through his most persuasive and well-researched polemic.

“Equality Week” began with a “lobby” at the House of Commons (covered, as far as I can see, only by The Independent — and they didn’t include a report, only a picture of Sir Ian McKellen looking tired); and it ended with a glorious variety show at the London Palladium. A photographer from The Sun was there, and the next day the paper carried a picture of Julian Clary and Richard (Victor Meldrew) Wilson in their “Sticky Moments” sketch. Unfortunately, The Sun decided not to say what the event had been and referred to it simply as “a charity show”. A classic illustration of how the tabloids use their power to deny readers information about gay matters as well as to distort it when they do include it.

***

Paragraph 15 of the Press Complaints Commission’s code of conduct says: “The press should avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to a person’s race, colour, religion, sex or sexual orientation… It should avoid publishing details of (these issues), unless these are directly relevant to the story.”

Over the past few weeks I ‘nave made five complaints to the PCC about stories which clearly breach this paragraph, all have been rejected. A sixth complaint —which the PCC has yet to decide on — concerns, needless to say, The Sun. On October 20th the paper carried a headline, stretched over two pages, reading: “The Homo Provo”. Its subheading was “25 years for IRA bomber who cruised loos for men”.

The story began: “An IRA terrorist jailed yesterday for plotting Britain’s biggest bomb attack is a gay pervert who cruised public toilets for sex with strangers.”

Now can anyone tell me what relevance his sexuality has to this report of his trial for terrorism? When was the last time you saw a story about a “hetero IRA bomber” — even though most of them are? And as for “pejorative references” —the story contained many insulting quotes, some from a supposed “senior detective” along the lines of: “The IRA are normally very conservative about sexual matters and prejudiced against homosexuals. But they still recruited Kelly who was a practising homosexual for more than 20 years… They are now resorting to using a man of Kelly’s sexual orientation, whom they would not normally touch with a barge pole.”

I see, so instead of seeing it as a case of gays generally being too humane and sensitive to involve themselves with an organisation like the IRA, it seems we are considered “not good enough” to maim and kill innocent people. What kind of perverted, inverted thinking is this?

The kind that The Sun and its stinking crew excel in.

It seems that The Sun can’t make its mind up which is the worse crime — cottaging or attempted mass murder. If that isn’t a “pejorative reference”, then I’ll eat my hat. I’ll keep you posted.

***

Just how many gay people are there in Britain? The vexed question was addressed a couple of times recently. The first was in The People which, on October 24th, carried the results of one of its interminable sex surveys. According to Dr Vermin Coleman, who conducted the poll, “thousands and thousands” of People readers responded to such pertinent questions as “Have you ever bought sexy underwear?” and “Have you ever posed for nude photographs?”

Most interestingly, though, to the question “Have you ever had any sort of sexual contact with a member of the same sex?” 29 per cent of men replied that they had and so did 21 .per cent of women.

Dr Vermin qualifies these findings thus: “The figures regarding homosexual experiences are higher than I expected. But many of you included school encounters. Homosexual experiences between children, particularly those in single sex schools, are so common as to be quite unremarkable.”

Meanwhile another survey conducted by The Oxford Student, was reported in The Sunday Telegraph (October 31st). It revealed that “nearly one in seven Oxford undergraduates claims to have had at least one sexual encounter with a member of the same sex.” That’s nearly 15 per cent! According to the survey most of those were women, but “more men said they were involved in long-term homosexual relationships.”

The paper quoted Dr Glenn Wilson, a senior lecturer in psychology at London University, as saying the results reflected the current insecurity about heterosexual relationships. “A lot of men are frightened to touch women because of cries of rape,” he says. “To avoid this, they must either ask a woman directly if she wants to have sex — a notoriously unsuccessful courtship procedure — or have a homosexual relationship.”

Co-editor of The Oxford Student, Rob Hands, thought that remark was “absolute rubbish”. I’ll go further and say that Dr Glenn Wilson is talking through his arsehole.

Anyway, although these surveys were not scientific samplings, they do call into question the ludicrous statistic, propounded last year, that gays make up only one per cent of the population. I always thought there was an element of vested interest in that one.

***

The Guardian (October 28th) carried an article by Richard Smith — a name familiar to readers of Gay Times— about the present preoccupation of gay men with body culture. “Take a straight person to a gay club these days,” wrote Mr Smith, “and the first thing they’ll comment on is all the muscle on show —the well-developed young men taking their tops off and getting their tits out for the lads. All those bulging biceps can come as quite a shock. Especially if you’d been expecting a load of limp wrists.”

Indeed, for those of us with a less than perfect physique, the present obsession with body sculpting is somewhat alarming. Gay clubs and pubs — which have always been ruthlessly competitive anyway — have now become almost gladiatorial in their philosophy. “Survival of the fittest” hardly covers it.

“Marty Mark, Right Said Fred, Take That and Bad Boys Inc are the first pop acts since Samantha Fox who’ve been sold on the size of their tits,” says Richard Smith, The culture of the gym has become something of a mania with some gay men and it isn’t difficult to see why. Let’s face it: if you ain’t got much muscle upstairs, you can always get your share of attention by developing it downstairs.

This is all very well, but beautiful bodies tend to decay, and what do you do when the passage of years takes its inevitable course and those oh-so desirable tits start to sag?

Peter Burton, features editor of this very magazine, is quoted in The Guardian article: “The Body Beautiful thing has been around for a long time in the States. I spent a lot of time in the Seventies there and it was always a relief to get home to the diversity of British male bodies. I’m 48 and the body’s all over the place, but I’m happy being me.” How many of the muscle boys can say the same?

In The Observer (October 31st), Roger Tredre was also ruminating on the cult of the over-developed physique and the way that male bodies are being used in advertising in the same way that women’s were it the past few decades. “Provocative image of the naked male can no longer be catalogued under homo-erotica,’’ he says. “The truth is that male nakedness has gone mainstream.” He maintains that Britain will follow the Californian model of “male vanity”. Over there you can have “pec implants”.

Half a million men are regularly “working out” in Britain. Daniel Singer — a male model — says in The Observer: “The Americans are more obsessional, but my friends in London are definitely getting more concerned about keeping in shape.”

The article says that the emergence of the male sex object is no cause for rejoicing. Insecure men who have big problems in their life are using exercise and body building as “therapeutic narcissism”. Psychologists are reporting the first signs of conditions usually associated with women, like anorexia and bulimia. “Images of macho men are going to have the same effect on men as pictures of thin female models have on women.”

But there is yet hope for us Lucien Freud types. According to The Daily Mirror (October 27th) “Hunky models are being inched out of the limelight — by wimps.” The Mirror contends that suddenly it’s “in” to be thin. They cite as an example Nick Moss who has modelled for Calvin Klein and who is “all skin and bone”.

The paper says that leading fashion experts think “There is a spiritual look in fashion reflected by these thinner models… Twenty-somethings aren’t going to the gym any more… they’re all going to the coffee shops and they’re interested in losing weight for the new fashions. It’s a new era out there.”

Oh God. Fat, thin, beefy, scrawny —what is a girl to do? The simple answer is to get off this mad carousel and do something useful with your life.

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=

“Five years ago, one scientist began to question whether the causal link between HIV and Aids was proven,” said The Independent in an editorial (December 2nd). “The overwhelming majority of specialists now believe that it is; as our knowledge of medicine has grown, many of these doubts have been laid to rest. Valid though it is for a specialist to ask such a question, at least one newspaper has seized on it and turned it into a story suggesting that an overzealous Aids ‘establishment’ driven by a variety of crusading motives, has invented the ‘myth’ that HIV causes Aids. This reassuring message sells papers. Unfortunately, it may also cost lives.”

And yet still The Sunday Times peddles its line that HIV is not the cause of Aids – but that “lifestyle” factors, such as gay sex, are. Despite constant barracking from those who spend their lives studying this virus (and whom The Sunday Times dismisses as the “HIV bandwagon” or “the legions of the politically correct”), the paper continues to insist that it is right.

It is easy to be wise after the event, of course, and it is right that the voices of sincere “dissidents” should be heard. But I am suspicious of The Sunday Times’ motives. Its editor, Andrew Neil, is backing a long-shot with this. He hopes that one day, when everyone comes round to accepting his paper’s contention that there is no African Aids epidemic and that the “public misinformation campaign” was a big conspiracy, he will be lauded and acclaimed as a prophet among fools. He hopes that his paper will regain some of the glory and prestige that it had when it successfully campaigned against the drug Thalidomide. But Aids is a horse of a different colour, and there are grave dangers in the ST’s chosen course.

No one has all the answers about Aids, so it would be foolish to set any theory in stone. That goes double for The Sunday Times, which is pushing its own theory as though it were incontrovertible truth. In the process, it is managing to convince many people that they are in no danger from HIV.

Creating complacency in this epidemic is woeful and wilful. Until we know better, the most conservative like is the safest. Stick to condoms.

***

Outrage!’s attack on the anti-gay comments of Lord Jakobovits has served its purpose of getting the Jewish community to discuss its homophobia. The Jewish Chronicle (November 26th) carried a front- page lead on OutRage! and also a comment feature by Jack Gilbert of the Jewish Lesbian and Gay Helpline.

Mr Gilbert rejects the idea that there is a “hierarchy of oppression” within minority groups. He still thinks that OutRage!’s attack on Jakobovits was a display of “latent anti-Semitism” and is forcing Jewish gays into a crisis of loyalties. In an attack on Gay Times, Mr Gilbert says that my views on the topic, as expressed in MediaWatch, are “noxious” and that the whole Jewish community cannot be held responsible for the views of one man. He says that OutRage!’s demo and my opinions remind him of his experiences in American universities when he battled against “campus and Left anti-Semitism” which were characterised by claims of “disloyalty” and “collective responsibility” and the “demonisation of Jews with Holocaust imagery”.

I feel affronted that what was intended as a serious and sympathetic contribution to the debate should be presented by Mr Gilbert as anti-Semitic. It cannot bode well for the development of this debate if every time someone utters justified criticism of events in the Jewish community they are branded as racists. Mr Gilbert should beware of providing a handy escape route for those homophobic Jews who have a case to answer.

I accept that Jewish gay people need to reconcile their ethnic identity (as opposed to their religious beliefs) with their sexuality. But why should other homosexuals remain silent while prominent figures within the Jewish community – and not just Lord Jakobovits – feel free to issue the most abusive anti-gay tirades? OutRage! is an equal opportunities irritant – it chooses its targets on the basis of their homophobia, not their race. Anti-gay feeling is a problem for the Jewish community – just as it is for the population at large.

As gay playwright Tony Kushner – author of Angels in America – put it, in an article on the same page of The Jewish Chronicle: “I doubt if Jews are more homophobic than anyone else, but there is a particular quality to Jewish homophobia that is difficult for gay Jews to accept. One would think that the history of the Jewish people would teach one the tremendous evil of bigotry and prejudice. It’s very distressing when one comes across Jews who haven’t learned that lesson.”

The theme of a “hierarchy of oppression” was also the subject of a speech by Peter Tatchell at a human rights conference organised by Liberty. Mr Tatchell began by reminding his audience that oppressed groups seem to spend almost as much time hating each other as they do fighting the. common enemy. He cited the Buju Banton affair as an example of how homophobia was accepted as natural by many in the black communities.

Reporting reaction to the speech, The Voice, a newspaper for the black community, quoted Lee Jasper of the National Black Caucus as saying: “I think Peter Tatchell’s anti-Jamaican feelings need attention drawn to them. I have talked to a number of Black gays and he should also realise that racism is alive and well in the gay community as it is anywhere else.”

We know there are racists in the gay community – and it is an issue on which we cannot be complacent – but that still doesn’t justify homophobia. And that is the crux of the problem. When does the “I’m more oppressed than you are” rhetoric end and proper dialogue begin?

Tatchell proposed that there should be an Equal Rights Act to protect all minorities. “Instead of campaigning separately around narrow and specialist agendas, such as race and sexuality,” he said, “it makes more sense to forge alliances to unite everyone suffering injustice around a common campaign to challenge all forms of discrimination. An inclusive and broad-based agenda of ‘equal rights for all’ is more likely to maximise support and minimise opposition.”

But Anne Kane of the Anti-Racist Alliance responded in The Voice by saying it was “difficult enough to gather support around a single issue let alone forcing people to take on board a whole range of other views which they might not agree with as well.”

Other views they might not agree with? What does this mean – that it’s OK to be a black homophobe and that anyone who points it out is automatically a racist?

I still hold to the view that a pecking order of oppression exists, and that gays are at the bottom. But that does not mean that all hope is lost. If we can provoke discussion among other communities that suffer discrimination, then maybe one day they’ll get the message that Peter Tatchell put so succinctly: “Some people believe that there is a hierarchy of oppression – that some groups, are more deserving than others. That can’t be right. All victimisation should be opposed.”

***

Masochism must be more widespread in the gay community than I thought. What else could explain that the most popular newspaper among readers of Gay Times (according to our recent readership survey) is The Sun?

Thirty-six per cent of you read Mr Murdoch’s homophobic rag, whereas only nine per cent of you read The Independent, which has been consistently supportive of the gay struggle. (The Guardian, thankfully, is the most popular daily broadsheet – 30 per cent).

On Sunday, our favourite read is Murdoch’s other flagship, The Sunday Times, (the survey says 33 per cent of us have looked at it in the past four months) and The News of the World is the favourite Sunday tabloid with 22 per cent of us taking a peek.

I find it sad that so many gay people are prepared to put money into an empire which is waging a relentless war against them. Every pink pound in Murdoch’s pocket will help him continue his campaign of vilification.

Every time we buy one of his papers or subscribe to one of his TV channels we give him the resources to pursue gay people with an almost obsessive hate. Commenting on The Sun’s cruel persecution of stricken star Michael Jackson, Auberon Waugh in The Daily Telegraph (November 20th) said: “The manhunt for Jackson is conducted with a sadistic relish which only the born-again Murdoch could inspire… (The singer) is said to be suffering from total nervous collapse and breakdown, which is easy to imagine. Is there to be no pity for this poor hamburger victim?”

Pity? Such weakness is alien to Murdoch. And besides, it doesn’t make money.

***

To get to the heart of the Government’s somewhat unconvincing “back to basics” campaign, The Independent commissioned a poll to find out the nation’s real opinions on personal morality. It was surprised to find widespread support for single mothers, which was a gratifying poke in the eye for the creepy Peter Lilley.

Several questions about homosexuality were asked in the survey. The paper concluded that attitudes have “softened” (although not as much as we would have liked). Twenty-five per cent of the survey thinks sexual relations between two adults of the same sex are “not at all wrong” – in 1983 the figure was 17 per cent. Homosexuality is always wrong according to 35 per cent as opposed to 50 per cent in 1983. Disapproval is greatest among the over-55s, Conservative voters and those in lower income groups.

Most disappointing was the question about the age of consent. Only 12 per cent of the survey thought it should be 16. Fifty-six per cent thought it should remain at 21. But, as the paper pointed out, much depends on how the question is asked. Last year Stonewall also commissioned a poll on this, but their question was phrased more “positively” (“should the age of consent be the same for everyone” rather than “What do you think the age of consent for gays should be?”). On that occasion 74 per cent were in favour of equality.

The Independent editorialised that “People tend to react cussedly when politicians preach at them” and welcomed these signs of more tolerant and liberal values.

While we’re on the subject of surveys, The Daily Telegraph (December 2nd) reported the International Social Attitudes poll had found that “easier going sexual attitudes do not extend to homosexuals” with only 12 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women agreeing that homosexual couples should have the right to marry.

***

Stephen Fry repeated – in The Spectator – his oft-quoted assertion that the present Cabinet contains six adulterers and “at least two homosexuals” and so should be careful in pontificating at the rest of us about morality.

This outraged John Junor in The Mail on Sunday (November 21st). “Is he just making a wild, unfounded allegation?” grunted the curmudgeonly columnist. “I very much hope so. But if it is otherwise, and Mr Fry does have information denied to the rest of us, then why having quite gratuitously raised the matter, doesn’t he have the guts to name the two ministers? There are 20 men in Mr Major’s Cabinet. Each of them is married. Which two of them then, according to Mr Fry, are leading double lives? Isn’t it damnable that, thanks to Mr Fry, even the 18 innocent ones are from now on going to be under suspicion?”

“Innocent?” asked Allison Pearson, a new columnist in The London Evening Standard (November 23rd). “Of what are the other two supposed to be guilty?”

“Why can’t MPs be glad to be gay – if they are gay?” she goes on to lament. “One reason is that people like Sir John Junor find it repulsive… Making love isn’t a crime. But, as long as we are encouraged to think that homosexuality is base, those who practise it in high places will also be forced to practise hypocrisy – family values or no family values.”

Simon Hoggart in The Observer was ruminating on the use of sexual blackmail in Parliament as a weapon to bring recalcitrant MPs into line. “At the moment,” he says, in regard to newspaper exposés of private lives, “the unspoken rule seems to be that anything goes as long as it’s heterosexual…for now gays seem to be protected unless their behaviour is egregious.” He says that everyone at Westminster knows who Stephen Fry is talking about. “One is the victim of a smear campaign touted round the papers by a disturbed youngster he and his wife helped. He is trapped, unable to deny a rumour which has yet to become public.”

Labour will not use this information because, of course, they have secrets of their own. The whole thing rests on a “balance of terror”, where all parties agree not to start the “outing” process which might have a devastating snowball effect in Westminster.

Meanwhile, the whole “moral crusade” nonsense will, most commentators agree, be a flash in the pan. “Senior colleagues of the Prime Minister recognise that these are dangerous waters,” wrote Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer (November 14th). “Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Clarke, for whom liberalism is not a dirty word, are confident that they can dissuade Mr Major from wading in too deep. They are confident that Moral Majorism will not last long, perhaps only as long as it takes for one of the tabloids to debag another of his Ministers.”

***

When Channel Four announced its plans to make Christmas a little gayer this year, the reactionaries went into an apoplectic spasm. John Blackburn, MP was wheeled out by The Daily Mail to say that it unforgivably “tarnishes” Christmas, while the Bishop of Peterborough urged advertisers to boycott Channel Four. Most grotesque of all was the Archdeacon of Aston who claimed that the gay Xmas programmes were part of the story of a sick society. (“It is the story of the man in Cardiff who was killed for trying to stop youths stealing traffic cones.”) He even tried to make a connection between Camp Christmas and the murder of James Bulger.

The tasteless churchman and his revolting ranting did not impress Libby Purves who, in her column in The Times (November 29th) wrote: “I shall tune into Quentin Crisp, prefacing the broadcast with a short, emotional address from myself to the effect that what you are about to see is a man and a brother and that it behoves us today to love him, Martina Navratilova, Julian Clary and all gay celebrities, however annoying they may be. And to blame gay showbiz for the murder of a child by children is stupid and rather obscene; and there is no clear evidence that sexual deviation causes youths to steal traffic cones, either. So here’s to tolerance and yah boo to the bishop.”

Claudia Fitzherbert in The Daily Telegraph declared herself totally mystified by the reaction of the churchmen to the programmes. “Having sat down at my desk and pondered the puzzle for some hours.” she wrote, “I still find the observations utterly incomprehensible.”

Dillie Keane, in The Mail on Sunday (November 28th) didn’t think the gay Christmas was a good idea either. Not because it would cause civilisation to crumble, but because it marginalised gays instead of integrating them. “Surely Christmas is a time for unity, not division?” she wrote. “Gays, it seems, are being sidelined to a channel that nobody will be watching.”

Ms Keane wants to know why gay celebrities aren’t being invited on to “a cross section of festive programmes, which cater to all people, majority and minorities alike?”

This is an excellent question, but I wonder why she isn’t objecting to the fishing programme or the football match or the interminable church services – all of minority interest. I wonder why she imagines that gay people don’t need to have programmes about issues specific to their lives?

The gay programmes are on a public network available to everyone, so the real issue is not that gay people will be watching them, but that straight people won’t. Integration is, after all, a two-way traffic.

***

The British Medical Association’s News Review carried a “Head-to-Head” feature putting the case for and against gay law reform. Dinesh Bhugra a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London put our argument in a mild and rational manner.

Speaking against was Gregory Gardner, a Birmingham locum GP and a member of the “interest group” Family and Youth Concern. “Why is the homosexual lobby seeking this change?” he asked, and answered with the standard Family and Youth Concern claptrap that because homosexuals “don’t reproduce” they must “recruit” new people into their lifestyle. “The second part of the homosexual philosophy,” wrote Gardner, “is the attempt to persuade society that homosexuality is neither perverted, nor dangerous. An example of this is the link between homosexuality and paedophilia… As with spoiled children, gay demands are insatiable. Victims to the core, the more they have the more they want. Homosexuals learn to enjoy activities that would have sickened them as children and then expect special protection and status… Allowed free rein, homosexual values will trash any society in which they are allowed to flourish… Under no circumstances ought homosexuality be regarded as anything other than a destructive habit system… homosexuality is a personal tragedy and a social calamity… etc. etc.”

The BMA News Review received a large response to this feature, and so did I. They will carry a two-page special to air some of these views in the January issue.

This is one that will obviously run and run.

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=

By the time you read this, the matter of the age of consent will probably have been decided. The huge amount of comment, conjecture, speculation and opinion which has appeared in print will, therefore, be irrelevant. But some things should not be forgotten.

In an argument as highly charged as this, people get desperate. Those with the biggest axe to grind are tempted, if they can’t win the argument fairly, to employ distortion, exaggeration and outright lies. This has been apparent in the press during the run up to the parliamentary debate.

Naturally the “we must protect the children” argument was trotted out repeatedly. This is a sensitive area, and consequently was played for all it was worth by “family” groups and other politically and religiously motivated opponents of change.

The News of the World carried an exposé (January 16th) of a kiddie porn ring which it promptly proceeded to link with the age of consent controversy. “Any MP tempted to lower the age of homosexual consent to include schoolboys will benefit from reading today’s News of the World,” it editorialised emotively. “What chance does a 16-year-old boy stand against a confident, adult paedophile set on corrupting him?… Nobody knows for certain what the causes of homosexuality are. But a physical introduction to homosexual behaviour must be among them.” It then goes on to say: “The lobby for reducing the age of consent to 16 argue that parity with girls is fair. They forget that women are protected by a law imposing possible life imprisonment for the dangerous practice of anal sex. No such law protects boys who are more likely to be a target for that particular perversion.”

The idea that girls are “emotionally mature” at 16, while boys are still “children” always strikes me as suspect. The “exploitation” of schoolgirls by adults is an everyday occurrence in this country (as the number of teenage pregnancies proves). The girls-are-fair-game argument is an insidious one that devalues women.

Being such an effective lie, Garry Bushell pushes it like crazy. Using his TV review of “Prime Suspect III” (the theme of which was the exploitation of rent boys), he asked: “Is this why slimeball MPs are keen to lower the age of gay consent?” (Sun, December 22nd).

The Daily Express, meanwhile, distorted the British Medical Association’s support for a lowering of the age of consent to 16 by headlining it: “Teenage Aids scourge” (January 14th). The paper rightly reported that the BMA had found that “those aged 15 to 24 account for nearly a fifth of HIV cases”. But the point of the BMA’s action in calling for reform in the law —that it would be easier to educate younger people about the dangers of Aids if they were not deemed criminals — was difficult to ascertain from The Express’s report. Amid the obfuscation, however, they managed to find room for Tory MP David Shaw to compound the confusion by saying “the move would only encourage homosexuals to approach children outside schools.”

The Sunday Telegraph — surely the last refuge in the British press of so many reactionary old fogies — published a piece by Lynette Burrows entitled “A licence to deprave” (January 2nd). The article was illustrated by a cartoon that Goebbels wouldn’t have been ashamed of. It showed lock gates imprinted with the word “consent” being opened ready to engulf the unsuspecting people below.

Ms Burrows, a woman of extraordinary fanaticism, alarmingly claims in her article that “a homosexual lifestyle reduces life expectancy from 75 to 42”. Where on earth does she get such a statistic? Why, from the Family Research Institute of Washington. And, of course, the Family Research Institute couldn’t under any circumstances be biased could it? After all, other groups with the word “family” prominent in their title are all models of moderation and reason. Take, for instance, Family and Youth Concern or The Conservative Family Campaign. You wouldn’t find them distorting or inventing statistics, would you?

This latest gem about the reduction of life expectancy has been repeated at least twice over the radio by members of these “family” groups, and in neither instance was it challenged. All that needs to be asked is: how on earth could such a statistic be arrived at? Think about it.

Back at The Sun (January 13th), Richard Littlejohn said that “the only argument for keeping it at 21 would be that it would upset professional sodomites such as the odious Peter Tatchell — who holds recruiting drives outside schools.”

This comment is arguably libellous, but I doubt whether Peter Tatchell has the tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of pounds necessary to mount an action against The Sun or Richard Littlejohn to find out. And The Sun knows it, which is why it can afford to be so bold in its insults and slanders.

Such is the hostility surrounding homosexuality that newspaper lying about our lives, is allowed to pass unchallenged. Some of the lies are difficult to pin down, some of them arise from simple ignorance. But some are carefully and deliberately constructed.

During the Back to Basics farrago, it was strongly insinuated that Tory MP David Ashby and his friend Dr Kilduff were lovers. It was discovered that they had shared a bed in a French hotel. On January 11th, most papers carried a photograph of the room in which the alleged congress had taken place. It was the same picture in every paper. Today ran it with the headline “Back to Basics in pink room with a bed called a queen”. And the picture seemed to confirm it. The room was definitely pink: pink walls, pink bedding, pink curtains and, looking through the window, a pink sky. A pink sky?

Let’s look at the same photograph in The Daily Mirror and The Sun. Lo and behold, in each of those papers it is a yellow room, with yellow bedding, yellow curtains and a blue sky.

The fact is, in order to support their headline, Today had doctored the photograph to give it a “gay” feel. In other words, it was an outright, carefully premeditated lie. Once again, it may be actionable, and as Mr Ashby is a millionaire (as well as being a buffoon), I hope he’ll pursue it.

Meanwhile, bouquets to The Guardian and The Independent both of which were deeply supportive of change. Their reports were fair, balanced and devoid of deliberate distortion (although, of course, mistakes were made). I know it is no less than we should expect, but in the light of the behaviour of the rest of the press, The Guardian and The Indy deserve an honourable mention.

***

“Sixty gay MPs face being ‘outed’ by militant homosexuals,” announced The People angrily on its front page (January 2nd). “Various gay groups are threatening MPs who they know are gay,” an unnamed, but “furious” backbencher is quoted as saying. But who exactly are these “militant groups” and individuals? It’s apparent from reading the story that The People doesn’t know and nor, it seems, does anyone else. Could it be that they are a figment of journalistic imagination, invented so that the rumours about gay MPs can be trotted out all over again?

Meanwhile, The Independent (January 15th) editorialised that “Outing is wrong… It would be a bad day for democracy if MPs’ voting decisions were affected by fear of unwarranted intrusion into their private lives.” (Noble words, but am I being naive in thinking that this is a technique frequently employed by Government whips to bring recalcitrant MPs into line?)

But back to “outing”, and who is responsible. Well, let’s take David Ashby, for instance, the MP whose bed-sharing activities with various other men were the subject of speculation during the Back to Basics row. Who outed him? Why, his wife, of course. “The Tories suffered a fresh blow this weekend when the wife of David Ashby… claimed that he had left her because of a friendship with another man.” reported The Sunday Times (January 9th). And when the ST returned to the attack with further evidence of Mr Ashby’s indiscretions (January 16th) it turned out to be his sister who had tipped them off. I don’t think either of these women would take kindly to being described as “militant homosexuals”.

There are rumours, as I write, that further revelations are on the way. I suspect that they will not, however, be emanating from gay magazines or groups, but from straight newspapers. Taking this into account, the newspapers’ moral indignation rings hollow when you realise that although they are always accusing us of being ‘outers’ it is, in fact, they who are guilty.

In the light of all this, the pathetic Press Complaints Commission is said to be on the verge of appointing “leading academic” Professor Robert Pinker, as a “Privacy Commissioner” in order to “bolster the effectiveness of newspaper self-regulation”. This is another attempt by the. PCC to stave off the statutory controls that the Government repeatedly threatens but never delivers.

According to The Guardian (January 10th), “the privacy commissioner will have powers to initiate inquiries into high profile cases… he will also be able to summon editors to explain their conduct and ensure a quick response from the watchdog body. His recommendations will have to be endorsed by the full 16-member commission.” (Many of whom, The Guardian omits to mention, are newspaper editors —their own among them.)

It soon becomes apparent that despite the hype, the so-called Commissioner will have no real powers. He can’t impose fines but can only “urge publishers” to take disciplinary action against erring editors (what kind of action hasn’t yet been specified; probably a smack on the wrist with a feather duster).

All it amounts to is another meaningless plastering over the cracks. The sooner the Press Complaints Commission is given the heave-ho the more confident the public can feel that the Government means business over intrusion into privacy.

And to anybody who says: “Yes, but look what’s happened in France — you can’t say anything about anybody there, there’s no freedom of speech because of their privacy laws,” I will reply: Nonsense.

It’s true that if Tim Yeo or David Norris or Paddy Ashdown had been French politicians they would not have had to endure the public dissection of their private lives. The rigidly enforced right to privacy would have seen to that. Passed in 1970, it bans the publication of words or images which violate the secrecy surrounding an individual’s private life or the life of a family and is especially hard on the use of hidden tape recorders or cameras. None of the exposés of the last few weeks could have happened in France.

According to a report by Patrick Marnham in The Independent on Sunday (January 16th): “The (French) privacy law is founded on the conviction that an equal importance should be given to the freedom of all personal life. As far as the newspapers are concerned, the hotel bedroom is as sacrosanct as the home, because freedom of personal life also requires respect for privacy… As long as there is no issue of legitimate public interest, prominent people in France know that the press will almost always respect their privacy. It is, of course, a different matter where public money is involved, since that can lead to a criminal investigation which will be widely reported and, in subsequent proceedings, the full truth about an individual’s private life may well emerge.”

As Patrick Marnham says: “The French attitude is based on a profound tolerance of human frailty, as well as a profound cynicism about human motives. Which is why the Suffolk woman who departs on a crusade with the ‘moral majority’ for high standards among leaders of the nation, will always seem so foreign to the man in the streets of Paris — who sees no more than voyeurism mixed with good, old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.”

Like so much of French culture, this seems civilised and sane, but rather like the baguettes and croissants, it probably can’t be successfully exported.

***

Statistics Corner: This new feature will bring you the results of some of the many surveys and polls that are being conducted at the moment in relation to homosexuality.

The Sun conducted a “Back to Basics” MORI poll and asked under what circumstances a Government Minister should be required to resign as a Minister. 61 per cent thought that he should NOT resign if he was a “practising homosexual”, whereas 32 per cent thought he should. Similar figures applied to back bench MPs.

More importantly, under which astrological star sign are most gay people born? Well, according to The News of the World’s Mystic Meg, who received 25,000 replies to her recent “Astrosex Survey”, 5 per cent of Aries and Leo men said they liked to make love with both sexes, as did Leo women. Signs with the strongest preference for their own sex were Scorpio men (8 per cent), and Pisces men (7 per cent).

It’s all tripe, of course, and I don’t believe a word of it —even though I am a Scorpio.

***

Christmas seems a long time ago now, but do you recall the furore in the press over Channel Four’s modest gay programmes over the festive season? Strangely, despite predictions that this was the end of civilisation as we know it, the country seems to have survived the appearance on TV of Quentin Crisp, RuPaul and Julian Clary. Some of the critics actually liked it. Victor Lewis-Smith in the London Evening Standard (December 22nd) objected to the three programmes being presented as a “season”, given it only represented 150 minutes in total. He was also surprised at press reaction, saying: “It is tempting to dismiss all this as petit-bourgeois ranting of a fatuity too intense to bother with: to point out perhaps that whereas millions have been killed in the name of Saturday’s birthday boy (Jesus), few, if any, have been slaughtered in the name of Danny la Rue.”

And replying to John Junor’s opinion that “gays are taking over our culture”, Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times said: “… people who fulminate a great deal about the need to protect other people from awareness of homosexuality are at least halfway to conceding that the notion is so attractive that anyone who encountered it would be tempted to succumb… But anyway, I hope Sir John had a gay Christmas Day.”

A much more familiar account of Christmas for a gay person was written by John Lyttle for The Independent (December 27th). John described how he brought his new boyfriend home to meet his family on Christmas day: “‘And you must be Richard?’ my father says to my significant other. Planted in the doorway, Dad proffers a sweaty palm and flashes the fixed smile of a chat show host. How strange to witness my father attempting to act normal. That used to be my job.

“I don’t know why I say what I’m about to say, but I say it. I say: ‘He prefers Dick’, Freudian or what?”

There followed a catalogue of disaster as Mum tips the sprouts on Dick’s trousers and Dad spills beer on his new shirt. Little sister tries to seduce him and younger brother tells queer jokes. John begins to think about such classic psychological terms as “unconscious hostility”. John Lyttle makes the point that parents’ expectations of their gay children are different to those of their straight ones. “Parents of gay children often expect their homosexual progeny to return automatically to the nest for the Yuletide season, an obligation seldom visited upon their heterosexual siblings.” The reason? Well, the heterosexuals have real lives. “Responsibilities: babies, neighbours, and friends popping in, turkeys to stuff, in-laws to thaw. The unspoken assumption about the gay child is that you have nothing better to do, that you live a marginal existence, that otherwise you’ll be…lonely this Christmas. So you have a partner? So what? It’s not like having a husband or wife, someone you’d mind being separated from.”

The piece had such a familiar ring to it that I found myself not only amused but angry, too.

***

The fact that serial murderer Colin Ireland decided to plead guilty to all charges spared us a long trial with days and days of sleazy tabloid gloating. The families of the victims did not have to endure the final indignity of having their loved ones’ lives and deaths made into fodder for morbid Sun readers.

Brian Masters in The Mail on Sunday’s magazine (January 16th) refuted Ireland’s explanation that he murdered those five men in order to become famous. “Most people have been prepared to take him at his word,” he wrote, “which demonstrates an extraordinary abnegation of thought.”

In fact, Masters says, Ireland was a man who’s “soul was diseased” and who was “an incomplete human being”, a mad man who could not control his impulse to kill. The people he destroyed were not, in his own mind, real. They were objects. Any attempt to explain his behaviour as logical (“I wanted to be famous”) is nonsense. Other serial killers have had to release some of their intended victims because, once they had seen in them human qualities, they were unable to transform them into objects. Ireland killed all his victims within hours of meeting them, before he could get to like them.

Maybe there was another element in this particular serial killing. The gay element. Did Ireland simply choose gay men because he knew they were vulnerable and easy to pick off? Or did he choose them because they were easy to transform in his mind into the non-human objects that became so easy to kill. Was he, in fact, taking society’s profound homophobia to its logical conclusion?

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=

Rumours have been circulating for months that two Government Ministers have been involved in “sordid gay goings-on”. There has been talk of “gagging writs” to stop newspapers naming them. Everyone was fascinated, but there was no evidence.

Then, for a moment, it seemed that gay (or bisexual) ex-soccer star Justin Fashanu was about to put flesh on the bones of those rumours. The People (February 6th) reported that he was trying to sell them his story of “three-in-a-bed sex romps” with high-ranking Tories for £300,000. The newspaper did not name names (“for legal reasons”) and did not pay the fee requested (although a smaller amount did change hands).

Then came the “scandalous” death of Tory MP Stephen Milligan from a solo “sex romp” that went wrong and suddenly Justin was there again, this time in The Sun. “Kinky MP: Cops Quiz Gay Fashanu” screamed the front page on February 9th. Fashanu claimed to Sun reporters that he knew the dead MP, and described him as a “weak man”. In The Daily Express he was quoted as saying: “I knew him and I knew that he was homosexual.”

However, the following day — after a visit from the police — Fashanu was backtracking and saying he didn’t know Milligan and that his tales of sex with Tory MPs were a total fabrication. “Fash the Trash” said The Daily Mirror (February 10th). “For years he touted to the highest bidder the tale of his claimed affair with a Government Minister. He has demanded money — usually £5,000 — to name the senior Tory who gave him a tour of the Commons, during which he jumped on the Speaker’s Chair. He also said he shared a bed with a married Minister.”

It seems Justin Fashanu has made a real mess of his life. His greed has ruined his football career, he has sacrificed his claim to be a hero for the black community and he has done nothing to endear himself to the gay community either. With the age of consent debate pending, we needed this kind of undignified sensationalism like we need a hole in the head. In his attempts to screw money out of the scummy papers he has played right into their hands. And if there is any truth in the stories of ministerial hypocrisy over gay sex, then it has surely been buried under this torrent of lying and money-grubbing.

In The Guardian, Martin Woollacott wondered why there is such an appetite in our press for these sordid and cruel tales of sexual misdemeanour or difference. “Why is it that at a time when tolerance or understanding of different sexual preferences is supposedly greater than ever before,” he asks, “should there be such a fearsome taste for stories of sexual irregularity in the Western world?” He says that the nature of coverage of these matters has changed from “prurience posing as Puritanism” into “sadism masquerading as entertainment”. He says: “At the centre of the sort of popular exposure which is becoming a regular feature in Anglo-Saxon countries is an element of cruelty, delight at seeing a person twist in the wind.”

The Government is once again muttering about a privacy law. But the press feels reasonably safe that it will never happen. After all, they have the power to stop it.

***

In Statistics Corner this month we have the ultimate gay number: 1.1 per cent! “The Gay Myth and the Truth” crowed the front page headline of The Daily Mail (January 21st). “The most exhaustive survey ever conducted into British sexual habits has buried the claim that one man in ten is gay… the key finding is that only 1.1 per cent of men had a homosexual partner in the year prior to the interview,” said the paper, and you could almost hear the champagne corks popping. It revelled in what it regarded as a “setback” for the age of consent campaign. The other papers were quick to take up the clarion call. “We’ve been conned by the gay lobby,” said The Sun, “For years they’ve told us that one man in ten is homosexual. Governments pump millions into AIDS propaganda as gay actors mince into Number Ten. Teachers tell children homosexuality is normal. A campaign grows to make gay sex legal at 16. But now the truth is out: a survey shows that barely one man in 90 is gay. The loud-mouthed luvvies should belt up.” While The Star said it was “Glum for Gays” because “there aren’t many of them.”

As the week progressed, more consideration was given to how the figures had been arrived at. What The Daily Mail and its even more dishonest rivals had failed to tell readers was that even the authors of the survey had said that the figures should be regarded with caution and be seen as only very conservative estimates. It took Peter Kellner in The Sunday Times (January 23rd) to point out the significance of the numbers who had refused to take part in the survey. Sixty per cent of those men approached had agreed, while an incredible 40 per cent had refused. “Imagine you are a gay teacher, army officer, Tory MP or a married man with a gay lover. Would you be part of the 60 per cent or the other 40 per cent? And if you join the 60 per cent would you tell the truth? All of it?”

Perhaps the most telling comment on the whole affair was by AN Wilson in The London Evening Standard (January 28th). “What are we to make of the idea that less than one per cent of the population are practising homosexuals?” he asks. “If this is true, I think I know all of them, plus a handful of ‘straights’ masquerading, for their own perverse reasons, as gay.”

Lady Olga Maitland who, among stiff competition, is probably the most absurd parliamentarian — went even further in the numbers game (Independent January 20th) by saying that she had seen a survey done at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford which showed that only 0.2 per cent of the population is homosexual. Keith Refson of the Oxford Lesbian and Gay Centre was quick to retort (Independent January 24th): “1 find it hard to believe than an organisation such as ours would attract more than a fraction of lesbians and gay men actually to join. And yet our current membership stands at approximately 0.4 per cent of Oxford’s population. Can any of your readers suggest how I might identify the 50 per cent of our members who are heterosexual?”

***

Most newspapers let us know their editorial stance on the age of consent, and for the most part it was entirely predictable. (Independent and Guardian supportive, Daily Telegraph and tabloids against). However, a mini-shock wave greeted the London Evening Standard’s decision to come out in favour. “Sexuality is private,” said the paper (January 24th). “It is our own business — not that of the Crown Prosecution Service. And as long as it remains consenting, and does not cause offence to anyone else, it should remain our business. But the current differential between ages of consent is a legal inconsistency which criminalises perfectly honest members of the community — while leaving others free to lead their private lives with impunity.”

The paper recognises that “some readers will disagree” (something of an understatement if the ensuing garbage in the correspondence column is anything to go by), but the fact that The Standard has taken this progressive stance is quite astonishing. After all, the Evening Standard is consistently homophobic in all other respects, often originating anti-gay stories that reverberate mightily through the rest of the press (witness its part in the Jane Brown saga).

Meanwhile, the commentators continue to explore every highway and by-way of logic and illogic to find ways to slander gay people. Mary Kenny in The Sunday Telegraph (January 23rd) tried to play the “unnatural” card. She says that although there is evidence of homosexuality in the animal world (“pygmy chimpanzees have a lot of same-sex orgasms”) there is no evidence of exclusive homosexuality in any other species except man (“the chimpanzees… don’t stop being heterosexual at the same time”). She says that biologists are always “drawn back to the evidence of Natural law” to conclude that exclusive homosexuality is not “natural”. She then scuppers her argument (which, as usual, is written from her Catholic perspective) by admitting that the Pope says: “the proper study of mankind is man”. (Actually, that’s Alexander Pope).

What animals do should ‘not be used as evidence of what is “natural” for people to do. There is, after all, much in human life that has no equivalent in the animal world, so why is she making an exception for homosexuality?

Meanwhile, Janet Daley in The Times (January 27th) gives the “children must be protected” line a new spin. She says that young men are at “psychological risk” from “the more strident activist voices” who are “turning homosexuality into a commitment which locks people into what might have been a transitory stage of their emotional development. A commitment which, as it happens, cuts them off from parenthood —one of the major satisfactions of adult life.”

She says that to be gay now is to be part of a “movement” and that gay activism takes away the freedom to move away from “the gay community” if that is what your feelings dictate.

She says that “gay activists” want young people to believe that “what you do in bed is what you are: that your sex life is not an incidental fact about you but your essence.”

What this argument fails to accept is that a homosexual sex life cannot just be “incidental” — heterosexual society will not let it be. If it were to be taken for granted, as is heterosexual orientation, then there would be no need for the fuss, no need for the shouting and agitating for equality. People would express their sexuality as it took them at the time. Gay people would then be able to parent more easily, if that’s what they wanted. It is not “gay activists” who kick up all the fuss about adoption and fostering or artificial insemination for lesbians. When an uptight heterosexual like Janet Daley can regard her much bragged-about gay friends as just other human beings, then there might be progress.

Sorry, Janet, the ball is in your completely heterosexual court.

***

When Jane Brown refused those tickets for the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet, she could not have realised that she was soon to become the latest victim of tabloid witch hunting. Her action in branding the story “too heterosexual” gave the right-wing press all the ammunition they needed to launch their attack. Here was a heady brew to sustain the fantasy world they have created: political correctness gone mad; a loony left-wing council and — the icing on the cake — a lesbian in charge of “our” children.

The political correctness ticket was played for all it was worth. “Romeo, Romeo, where art thou Homo?” was The Sun’s front-page announcement of the story.

“Don’t laugh at political correctness. It could seriously damage your freedom,” wrote Brian Hitchen, pig-like editor of The Daily Star. “There is always somebody eager to explain to (our kids) why the act of buggery is romantic and acceptable in a society gone mad. Cherished books of childhood are scorned as racist or sexist. Black dolls are outlawed by muddle heads who see nothing wrong in smoking dope but go batcrap over golliwogs. Potty politically correct teachers have even changed the words of the nursery rhyme to ‘Baa Baa, white sheep’.”

They haven’t actually. That little tale was a newspaper fabrication, as are so many of these ‘amusing’ loony left/politically correct tit bits. Richard Littlejohn, The Sun’s self-pro-claimed “irritant of the year” (wouldn’t His Master’s Voice be more appropriate?), was quick to take up the cudgels. “She is almost certainly anti-American, considers African wood carving a higher art form than anything Michelangelo ever turned out and believes disabled lesbian mud wrestling more ‘relevant’ than Beethoven. Otherwise she would never have been appointed. Jane Brown is what you get from job adverts in The Guardian — where strict adherence to the doctrines of political correctness is more important than an ability to actually do the job.”

Mr Littlejohn is unimpressed by Ms Brown’s record of improvements at the school in the face of overwhelming disadvantage, and seems unaware of the esteem in which she is held by the people who really know whether she is doing a good job or not — the parents. For it was they who threw this poisonous slander back in the face of the press. Instead of forming a lynch mob, as the sick tabloids were encouraging them to do, they stood shoulder to shoulder with the embattled headmistress and told the Fleet Street muck merchants to eff off. “She must be sacked immediately,” said Littlejohn. “She should be kicked out of her present job on her non-heterosexual ear and never allowed to teach again,” said John Junor in The Mail on Sunday.

“Get lost,” said the parents and school governors by way of response.

Just as it had broken the original story, The London Evening Standard (January 27th) was the first paper to confirm that Jane Brown was, indeed, a lesbian. (“a hatchet-faced dyke” as Littlejohn put it) and then the hunt was on for the dirt about her private life.

Jane Brown was besieged. The street where she lives was so cluttered with reporters and photographers that no traffic could move on it. Her neighbours were harassed and abused when they refused to supply the titillating details. The children at the Kingsmead School, where Jane Brown works, were “wound up” by all the attention. Years of valuable work on tolerance and understanding were blown out of the window.

Then the hate mail began. From all over the country — indeed, all over the world, for this had become an international controversy — the anonymous, green-ink brigade began bombarding Jane with threats to her life. It became so bad that at one point she needed police protection.

Meantime, the Education Secretary, John Patten, was in something of a cleft stick. A rumour was circulating that the story had been planted in The London Evening Standard in order to distract attention from the fact that, in the same week, he had had to “stand down on just about every recommendation he has made”. Government embarrassment over the failure of Patten’s half-baked schools’ policies needed to be minimised.

The story’s “political plant” theory was given further credence when it was revealed that the original remarks had been made last September. Where had the story been since then?

Now Patten’s much-vaunted legislation to put power into the hands of parent-governors has also backfired on him, because the very people he has empowered are refusing to suspend a woman whose “politically correct” philosophy he detests. (“We should be in no doubt about either the scale or danger of the PC advance, It is dangerous and if allowed to spread without challenge it could alter the nature of British life,” Patten wrote in The Daily Mail (February 11th).

The Times Educational Supplement took a calmer look at the issue (January 8th) and said: “The affair has highlighted the dilemma common for any teacher working in a multicultural, cosmopolitan borough, over where to draw the line between sound equal opportunities policies and political correctness.”

Ah yes, political correctness. Suzanne Moore in The Guardian (January 28th) was calling the bluff of the rampaging right-wingers: “Change is what it is all about. And that’s why I ask what the opposite of political correctness is… it is not tolerance. Instead, PC is being used to lunge at the heart of anyone who suggests that there is something wrong with the status quo. There are many things wrong with the notion of political correctness, chief of which is that it mirrors so precisely the faults of its opposition. Both understand that language is a vehicle for ideology. Both camps seem to think that language, literature, indeed culture is a fixed rather than a fluid entity, that the substitution of one word, one text, one sentiment for another somehow changes everything. Both are appallingly literal, concentrating on text at the expense of context. Why else, for instance, have we had to endure another spirited defence of Shakespeare, one of the ‘dead white males’ least in need of resuscitation?”

Over the next few weeks, in the run up to the local government elections, we can expect a glut of loony left/PC stories. Like this one from The Sun (February 11th): “Now you can’t even ask for a black coffee!” Apparently, “loony” Nottingham City Council has banned the use of the term “black coffee” and “black eye” because they are racist. Careful examination of the story reveals it to be a complete fabrication. It is based entirely on the testimony of an unnamed social worker. A council official says it is not the council’s policy. But by now the whole thing has passed into the mythology.

Or, as Suzanne Moore puts it, it appears that those so vehemently opposed to the concept [of PC] are doing very nicely thank you; the world may be full of kikes and dykes and whingers of all descriptions who want a piece of the action, but that’s tough. The fact, though, that some of them may even be getting it means something has to be done.”

That “something” often leaves a trail of broken lives: Jane Brown being just one.

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=

The Sun used the fire at the Dream City “gay porn cinema” as an excuse to run several extremely unpleasant headlines. ‘Gay Porn Club Victims Died in Dresses” was one of them (February 28th). The whole sorry catastrophe, in which eight men died, was transformed into just another titillatory thrill for barbarous tabloid readers. The message was clear: these weren’t real people only poofters. (Garry Bushell even managed to make a “joke” out of it when he wrote “Actress Teri Hatcher is hotter than a cinema full of Kentucky Fried transvestites.” — Sun, March 2nd)

“Less than a week after the… debate in the Commons we have a graphic response to the fact that gay men remain second class citizens,” wrote Gareth Clumo in a letter to The Guardian (March 1st). “I predict that over the next few days there will be more outrage expressed over the possibility that men can actually stoop so low as to have sex with one another in a public place, than the fact that these men were murdered.”

And right on cue comes John Junor (Mail on Sunday, March 6th): “One would have thought there would have been a national wave of sympathy for the dreadfully burned survivors and the relatives of the dead. Isn’t it extraordinary that there has been none. One would have thought there would have been a wave of revulsion against whoever set the place on fire. There hasn’t even been that… Coming just a few days after the unsuccessful attempt to lower the legal age for buggery to 16, the news of this fire in this sleazy cinema did not do the homosexual cause much good. How could it after the disclosure that a fire exit had been boarded up to stop homosexual patrons from using the unoccupied area for casual sex with complete strangers?… Are these really the sort of people whom Sir Ian McKellen and Mrs Edwina Currie want to hold up as men to respect?”

Reeling from the almost unbelievable callousness of those remarks, I returned to Gareth Clumo’s letter: “Society should ask why gay men have to recourse to finding sexual pleasure with strangers in less than appropriate places. Could it be that the reasons lie in the inability of the law to equalise the age of consent, and more importantly that gay sex is intricately tied up with such laws as the Public Order Act 1986 and Sexual Offences Act 1956? While these laws remain on the statute book, gay men will be sexual outlaws and victims of murderous campaigns of which the Holborn case is only the most extreme.”

***

[Note: Legislation to lower the age of consent for gay men to 16 – equal with heterosexuals – was amended in the House of Commons to 18 as part ofthe Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. When the result was announced a mini-riot ensued outside Parliament].

Paul Johnson, the prominent right-wing “historian” and Catholic apologist was thumping his familiar tub in The Spectator (February 12th) about what he considers to be the gay stranglehold on the media. During the age of consent debate, he asserted, the opposition never got a look in. Every time an editor speaks out, he says, he is inundated with angry letters and his offices are invaded.

“As a result of this campaign of intimidation, this putsch to reduce the age of consent for male homosexuality to 16 has met virtually no resistance from the media. I have counted a dozen articles in the national papers written by members of the homosexual lobby, putting their case. I have not seen a single forthright statement of the case against, though some editorials have made caveats and one or two readers have managed to get letters of protest published. There is no question, of course, of broadcasting anything critical of homosexuality on radio or television. Quite the reverse.”

Ten minutes after reading this, I switched on the television to hear an elderly woman on the BBC news screaming that homosexuals “ought to be sent out of the country and shot”. I wonder if this was “forthright” enough for Mr Johnson? Or does he want more.

“The homosexual lifestyle is inherently sterile and the very promiscuity which goes with homosexuality is an attempt to stifle the void at the core of the homosexual’s existence,” wrote Chaim Bermant (Jewish Chronicle, February 18th). “Momentary gratification, frequently repeated can, in its crude way, add up to a form of satisfaction, but the constant search for physical gratification is in itself a proof of unhappiness.”

If that isn’t strong enough for Johnson, what about The Daily Star (February 21st), which thought it was wrong that MPs were even considering the issue. It said that a survey showed the majority of Britons would be “outraged” at a reduction in the age of consent. “If they win it will be a disgrace… They should stick to matters that affect us all, like jobs and wages. Not pander to a bunch of pansies and perverts.”

Under the heading “Don’t let gays make us lower our standards”, Philippa Kennedy in the Daily Express said: “What I hate to see, and what reinforces prejudice against gays, is the kind of performance we witnessed outside the House of Commons on Monday night, of painted transvestites, weeping men of all ages, strident intolerance and surging anger bordering on violence. At a time when reasonably-minded people are genuinely willing at least to be persuaded to drop the age of consent to 16, they behaved like a bunch of stereotyped screaming queens which only served to underline that MPs made the right decision.”

Over to Simon Heller in The Daily Mail “If liberal opinion — and this government—worried a bit more about the freedoms of families to get on with their lives… and a bit less about legalising sodomy with schoolboys, it might achieve something useful.”

Melanie Phillips, in The Observer (February 27th) was commenting on criticism which had been directed at Labour front benchers David Blunkett and Ann Taylor, who had voted against 16. She said they were entitled to their opinion, and should not be vilified or punished for them. She thinks that gays should be free from “prejudice or discrimination” but then confusingly goes on to say that the age of consent should not be equal. “The agenda underlying the consent at 16 controversy,” she wrote, “is to equalise not just treatment of individuals, but homosexuality and heterosexuality themselves. To gain acceptance by the majority, the beleaguered minority claims it is not deviant, that gay sex is as natural as heterosexuality. Those who tell the truth, that this is a lie, then have to be suppressed by social or political ostracism. The very word normal has to be air brushed out of existence, along with David Blunkett.”

Ronald Spark (ex-leader writer on The Sun) penned an article for The Mail on Sunday in which he claimed that prejudice was a good thing. He said political correctness had now put a stop to the free expression of good old English hatred. His piece was a straightforward defence of racism, sexism and homophobia.

Over in The Sun, Richard Littlejohn began his diatribe by reassuring us (February 24th) that “My view of homosexuality has always been that I couldn’t care less, provided that I don’t have to watch, participate or pay for it through my taxes.” Fair enough, you might think, but the easy-going tolerance is rather superficial, for within another couple of paragraphs he is writing: “Homosexual activists say [the vote] was a cop out and there should be equality… That depends on whether you believe normal sex is the same as your 16-year-old son being buggered by a wheezing moustachioed leather boy two or three times his age.”

He says a sizeable number of those supporting equality were actually “interested solely in increasing the supply of fresh ‘chickens’ on the sordid gay meat rack”.

From his indifference, Mr Littlejohn rapidly descends into schoolboy fantasy, probably acquired behind the bicycle shed, of what homosexuality is about (“And another one bites the pillow”). He says that Edwina Currie has been “the most vociferous MP in favour of… schoolboys barely past puberty legally to have anal sex — even though it is the surest and quickest way of spreading AIDS.”

He concludes by saying that “I think my views on this issue are a fair representation of what most reasonable people in Britain think.”

He might be right. They might all be as frightened, thoughtless and ill-informed as he is.

So, Mr Paul Johnson, despite your protestations that adverse comment on homosexuality is verboten in the media, I think you will find that the few examples I have cited here (and there are many more) prove what a wilful idiot you are.

Johnson’s real point, though, seems to be not that there is no criticism, but that the criticism is not vituperative enough. There isn’t enough loathing for his liking. So who better to turn to for more of that than Johnson’s all-time hero (as quoted in Today, February 21st): “The Pope denounced homosexuals as ‘deviants’ yesterday as MPs prepare to vote on setting the age of consent for gay sex. Homosexual relationships were a ‘moral disorder’ and must never be made legal, he said.”

Paul and John-Paul — what a shame they can’t marry. They’d make such a perfect couple, richly deserving each other.

Not that the naziness stops there. We haven’t even started yet on the personal abuse that was heaped on those at the forefront of the campaign.

On Edwina Currie: “She is such a dreadfully vulgar woman. I would have been against reducing the age of consent for homosexuals anyhow. But with her brazen hussy hectoring added to their camp and insensitive clamour, the cause, as far as I was concerned, never had a chance.”—Peregrine Worsthorne (Sunday Telegraph February 27th).

“Now that she is associated with the screaming deviants who besieged the Commons on Monday night, Edwina Currie is in trouble. Her chances of winning the Bedfordshire Euro-seat were never strong. Now she is regarded mainly as a fag-hag, they are receding. So what do you think she should do next? Learn to write? Become an Anglican woman priest? Edit a new edition of Baden Powell’s Scouting for Boys? Run ChildLine?”—Simon Helfer (Daily Mail, February 24th).

“There’s something about the tone of Edwina Currie’s voice that gets right up my nose. It’s a prim smugness, a Miss Clever-Clogs attitude that brooks no argument” — Philippa Kennedy (Daily Express February 20th).

On Ian McKellen: “Chris Serle included excerpts from a programme about lowering the age of consent on Radio 4. We heard an unnamed man say he found homosexuals an abomination. Sir Ian McKellen, the age-of-consent activist, told the caller he was little better than a Nazi. Serle said it showed the extraordinary prejudice that still existed. Perhaps so. The caller was indeed an unenlightened man. But what he said didn’t seem quite so repellent as the smart, right-on assumptions of Ian McKellen…” — Peter McKay (Sunday Times February 20th).

“Just how the hell did he ever come to get a knighthood?” wondered ‘Sir’ John Junor (Mail on Sunday, February 27th) “The answer, of course, is because he is a Shakespearean actor. Isn’t it odd how as a society we give high honours to what are termed ‘serious’ actors, no matter what their personal lives are like, when so many talented performers, like Norman Wisdom, end up without even an OBE?” (Junor, incidentally, got his knighthood for services to Thatcherite arse-licking.)

Enter the demon king himself: “Peter Tatchell and his disgusting allies in Outrage! peddle gay propaganda to confuse vulnerable youngsters outside school gates,” said Richard Littlejohn (Sun February 24th). Poor old Pete, he (by virtue of his high-profile association with OutRage!) was made the whipping boy for the riot-ette which occurred outside the House of Commons after the vote was announced. Talk about “anything you say will be taken down and used against you” — Peter Tatchell’s words were twisted at every opportunity. Several papers had asked him whether OutRage! intended to “out” slimy gay MPs who voted against 16. Peter measured his words saying that no decision about future tactics had been decided. Nevertheless, The Daily Star managed to make a front-page story out of it (February 23rd). “We’ll ‘out’ top MP storm gays” it said, claiming that “a top politician is to be named as a homosexual by gay activists.” All the same, it’s four weeks later, and we’re still waiting.

The paper produced no evidence that anyone had ever made the “outing” threat, but that didn’t stop it demanding that the police “take action”. “They should hunt down the leaders,” thundered an editorial, “which should not be too difficult considering how strident they are — and prosecute them. Blackmail is a serious crime, punishable by imprisonment.”

That’s true. False accusation and distortion by newspapers, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly acceptable.

Peter tried to defend himself in a letter to The Independent on Sunday (March 6th) which had, the previous week, carried a somewhat unflattering profile of him. “I have never threatened to ‘out’ MPs,” he said. “It seems that whatever my style of campaigning, I cannot win. While pursuing conventional lobbying tactics I am described as sour and dull. When prompting humorous and imaginative forms of protest, such as the OutRage! ‘Kiss-In’, I get accused of trivialisation. It all goes to show that anyone who rocks the boat for queer freedom will always be wrong and will be branded an extremist.”

He’s right, of course, and the papers had a field day with the disturbance outside Parliament. The Daily Express (February 23rd) had no doubt who was responsible. “A militant gay group called Outrage! was behind Monday night’s siege of the Commons,” it announced. MP Peter Bottomley even claimed that the commotion — or “rampage” — (which he said was caused by “a bunch of screamers”) had swung the vote against us. He said that he would think twice about supporting us again after being “pelted” outside the Commons.

He’s what I think they call a non-conviction politician.

Did the demonstration have any effect upon the outcome? Would it all have been different if we’d stayed at home?

Before the vote was announced, it was a peaceful, good-natured affair, although The Daily Express objected to the demonstrators “outrageous behaviour” — holding hands, dragging up, booing — that sort of thing. There were a lot of people, but they were calm. It was hardly surprising that they became angry on hearing the news that smug MPs had decided to continue denying them equal rights of citizenship in their own country.

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=

The “Pink Pound” continues to fascinate pundits in our press. In the USA, the IKEA furniture store has now launched a TV advertising campaign featuring a gay couple. Commenting on this, Kate Muir in The Times (April 6th) noted that “American advertisers scent rich pickings in the gay market.” She says: “Directing advertising at gay men on the East Coast cities of America makes firm commercial sense. They are generally affluent and tend to have more disposable income than families with children… The power of the ‘pink pound’ is well-known in Britain, and Overlooked Opinions, a research company, claims there are 18 million gay Americans, who spend up to $500 billion (£338 billion) a year.”

She goes on to say that IKEA have chosen a gay couple because “there is a certain assumption that gay men will have good taste in design” and their presence in the ad is intended to give the shop “the Gay Housekeeping Seal of Approval”.

Meanwhile, Palm Springs, a traditional California tourist destination, is trying to revive its flagging economy by courting the gay traveller. In a report in The Daily Telegraph (March 12th) we are told that the local tourist office sends out a gay guide with its literature. “Statistics show that the gay traveller has money to spend and has been virtually untouched by the recession”, says Palm Springs’ head of tourism. “In the current economy we’re are all scraping for every piece of business we can get and we are delighted that gays and lesbians are coming here.”

Mmm. I’m a little suspicious of this sudden enthusiasm for gay money. When there’s no recession we can be excluded from the good things in life (forgotten all those “bannings” that CHE conference organisers had to put up with in the seventies?), but when business has to be “scraped for” we’re the bee’s knees.

***

Tom Hanks’ acceptance speech at the Oscar ceremony might well have been embarrassingly overblown and over-rehearsed, but I suppose it was made with the best of intentions. I don’t suppose the star of Philadelphia could have known that any sympathetic mention of homosexuality on television brings a compensating torrent of hate in the British press.

Leading the charge of the Right brigade was John Junor (Mail on Sunday, March 27th): “Should Hanks be congratulated for his acceptance speech in which he sought to glorify men who died from Aids?” he wrote. “I know many actors don’t have too much behind their ears and that Mr Hanks was in a state of euphoria. Even so I could hardly believe my ears when he described them as ‘angels walking in the streets of heaven’… Isn’t it a bit hot? I would agree with Mr Hanks if he were talking of innocent victims, haemophiliacs who had died because of being transfused with blood, but homosexuals who contracted the disease through their own promiscuity? If they’re in heaven just who the hell is in the other place?”

Barbara Amiel in The Sunday Times (March 27th) made the same point while talking about Hollywood’s desire to follow the “politically correct” trends of the day. “My understanding of Heaven is that admittance and celestial status are conditional on leading a good life or on God’s forgiveness. I do not think God is going to exalt the lifestyle of promiscuous homosexuals any more than I think he is keen on my serial monogamy.”

At least she had the guts to admit that she is hell-bound, too. Junor, on the other hand, must believe that Heaven is populated by poisonous worms such as himself. If he’s the best that Heaven allows, I’d be happier with the “other place”.

Phil Reeves saw the Oscar back-slapping on TV in a bar in Independence, Missouri and reported the reactions of the good Christian people at the “heart of America” as they watched Hollywood’s festival of self-congratulation (Independent on Sunday, March 27th).

“To be fair,” he wrote, “Aids and homosexuality are not subjects which many mid-Westerners find it easy to broach. When the Kansas City Star, Independence’s local paper, took the bold decision to run a three-part series on the metropolis’s gay community, there were 800 calls to its readers’ comment phone line, the bulk of which were critical, if not explicitly homophobic.”

The bar chosen by Mr Reeves is as far from “political correctness” (or “simple humanity” as those of us who haven’t fallen for the trick prefer to call it) as it can get. The bar’s proprietor, John Norton, gives his “analysis of the ethical question of homosexuality” by saying: “Ever seen a hippopotamus screw a giraffe? No, you haven’t. Why? Because it ain’t what God intended.”

Another man — a lawyer— explained to the reporter that homosexuals would not be welcome. In fact they would be beaten senseless. But then, that’s non-political correctness for you. In the same issue of the Independent on Sunday there was a photograph of a 1930s lynching. Two black men are swinging from a tree, hanged by a braying, laughing mob of “politically incorrect” whites. I expect some of these “decent folk” might have originated in Independence, Missouri.

Hanks had the good grace (London Evening Standard, March 29th) to admit that he “felt like a fraud” for winning an Oscar for Philadelphia. Indeed, he looked like a fraud with those actor’s tears and that over-the-top actor’s speech (why didn’t he get a decent script-writer to help him out if he wanted give a ‘performance’?). But he says mysteriously that “it’s pretty much guaranteed if you play a homosexual they start to give you trophies.”

The Standard comes to the conclusion that Hanks won the award on grounds of “political correctness” alone. I have to agree that the film was crap in its own right — dishonest, evasive and money-grubbing. Its inability to get to grips with the real issues was illustrated in an interview (Daily Star, March 25th) with “Spanish heart throb” Antonio Banderas, who also starred in the film as Hanks’s lover. He said: “The love scenes are done in just the right way. The romance between Tom and myself is very innocent. For instance, in the hospital scene, I kiss him when I come into the room, but it’s no big deal….” (In other words: “don’t worry folks, the queers won’t actually behave as though they love each other, so there’s no danger of you regurgitating your popcorn”.)

Political correctness was also invoked to describe the fundraising concert for Hackney headmistress Jane Brown.

Ms Brown, you will recall, refused tickets for the ballet Romeo and Juliet on the grounds of its heterosexism. Her support group organised an event at the Hackney Empire which was attended by the Independent’s Sandra Barwick. “In the world of PC — or equal opportunities, as Ms Brown’s supporters prefer to call it — skirt wearers are a minority group, and lipstick is a label,” she wrote.

Well, poor old dykes don’t seem to be able to do anything right as far as journalists are concerned. It seems no event can possibly be genuine and free from the taint of PC unless it has been organised by white, heterosexual men (preferably a brain-dead Education Minister). To qualify as “real” it must, presumably, exclude all mention of minorities who consider they have a grievance.

Having said that, Ms Brown received some support from a most surprising quarter when The Sunday Express (April 3rd) sent an undercover reporter to the Kingsmead Estate, where her school is situated, to find out why the parents were supporting her so determinedly. They discovered that, in fact, Kingsmead School is “a beacon of hope for the rest of the estate”. Ms Brown is making a difference to the lives of the children who live in circumstances that would have shocked Charles Dickens. Victorian values certainly rule in Hackney.

The Sunday Express was big enough to admit that Jane Brown’s decision about the ballet was “far from being about petty political correctness” and much more concerned with the play’s portrayal of violence and gang warfare, which is rife on the Kingsmead.

Mike Hornby, writing in The Independent on Sunday (March 13th) has seen through the manipulative harping on “political correctness” by bigots who want an excuse for their bigotry. “I don’t want to be accused of political correctness myself,” he says, “but.. No, sod it. Actually I don’t give two hoots. We have reached the stage where one only has to say, politely, that one disapproves of, for example, the charming contemporary custom of pushing excreta through the letterboxes of Asian families, and otherwise humane people start to sneer about social workers and Guardian readers.”

He recalls his childhood in the late sixties and early seventies when Asians were “pakis”; Afro-Caribbeans “coons”; girls “scrubbers” and we told “Irish jokes and Biafran jokes and queer jokes”. He thinks things have improved since then. “Love Thy Neighbour and The Black and White Minstrel Show are hardly likely to be revived, and Bernard Manning is now confined to the Northern club circuit; but I cannot… find it in my heart to grieve for their absence, and if that makes me sound like a bleeding heart, drippy, pinko pansy, well, I’m sorry.”

He continues, “Elsewhere it looks like business as usual. Local councillors with Nazi sympathies, drunken Tory MPs interrupting important debates with moronic homophobic abuse, terrifying assaults on Asians in the East End of London.”

We’ve reached a pretty pass in Tory Britain when common human sympathy and concern for the suffering of others have become the objects of scorn. The fake moralising of the Government (“a gang of narrow-minded fanatics” as Neil Ascherson called them in The Observer) has reached sickening proportions. Hopefully when the furniture van arrives to collect Mr Major from Number Ten, he’ll pack his cretinous Cabinet in the back.

***

The Daily Star, under the noxious editorship of Brian (Bonehead) Hitchen has been responsible for some of the most filthy and unfair attacks on gay people we’ve ever seen. That policy continues unabated.

“Radio Five is devoting a weekly programme to homosexuals and lesbians,” said an editorial on March 15th. “Why should this minority get so much special attention? What about programmes for other interest groups such as anglers, pigeon-fanciers, bird watchers, or even ferret-down-the-trouser enthusiasts. But, of course they aren’t as vocal and politically fashionable as the gay lobby.”

In the same issue, in his own column, Bonehead wrote: “Florida’s homosexuals are jumping for joy over a Supreme Court ‘decision to block a move to strip them of their special rights. The American Family Association had been running a state-wide drive to collect 429,000 signatures needed to put the amendment on the Florida ballot in the autumn. Fed up with homosexuals and lesbians demanding special treatment for everything from employment to medical benefits, the American Family Association, which has recruited massive membership, said it was time to fight back for normality.”

I’m not surprised that the AFA has managed to recruit such numbers if they’ve told as many lies about gays as the foul-mouthed Hitchen and his mendacious crew. He says gays are demanding “special rights” and “special treatment”. The truth is that we are asking for NO special treatment (Special treatment in this instance means not being sacked or kicked out of your flat just because of your sexual orientation) The rights that gays want are the same rights that heterosexuals take for granted. And as for Radio Five — Mr Hitchen obviously doesn’t listen to radio or he would hear every one of the minorities he has mentioned having programmes devoted to them.

The Daily Star, along with the rest of the tabloid trash, may be straight as a die as far as their sexuality is concerned, but they’re as bent as corkscrews when it comes to honesty and fair play.

***

Alison Pearson, a columnist in The London Evening Standard, was writing of her concern about the rise of militant Moslems (April 5th). She cites several cases of Moslem women being “spat on and called slags” in East End schools because they refused to adhere to the strict dress code demanded by Islam. “Lurking behind the extremism,” she says, “is the increasingly influential Moslem Society, which organises lectures for young people. At one of these uplifting events, it was apparently suggested that homosexuals should be put to death.”

I have some experience of this myself. I was recently invited to talk about gay rights to students at Brunel University, and during the question and answer session which followed I received a stream of questions from a group of youths who were obviously coming from some extremist religious position. Fortunately, I had the microphone and they were unable to shout me down. Later I was told that they were members of the campus’s Moslem Society and that they regularly disrupted meetings on progressive topics with displays of intolerance.

Allison Pearson says that they are attracting supporters because of the rise of fanatics in our own political system. “After fascists won the Tower Hamlets bye-election in September, Bangladeshis and Bengalis said they were afraid to walk down their own street. Losing faith in the British system they were more vulnerable to the mirthless hardmen of their own faith.”

This is a situation that it will pay us to monitor carefully.

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=

Things are changing fast in the media and the development of the “information highway” is proceeding apace. Satellite and cable television promise an almost unlimited choice of viewing, and computer and telecommunications technology will give access to an almost endless stream of news, information and entertainment. Soon the number of options will be so enormous that it will be difficult for the government — or any other body — to effectively regulate them.

In theory this is a good thing. Traditionally the means of mass communication have been tightly controlled by a small number of people, and access to the public prints and airwaves has been off-limits to some minority voices. Certainly, gays have frequently complained that our voices have been kept off TV and radio as well as being distorted in newspapers. As far as broadcasting is concerned, we cannot make that claim any more. The airwaves are thick with gay voices, whether in mainstream schedules or in “ghetto” programming— such as Radio Five’s news programme, GLR’s Gay & Lesbian London or Channel Four’s Out series.

In the past month we’ve seen programmes about gays in the military, a chat show about coming out and a critique of lesbian lifestyles. A French friend of mine, over here on a visit, was astonished by the amount of national broadcast time given over to gay issues. In France, she said, the subject is hardly ever mentioned.

While the tabloids continue to provide the usual diet of distortion, spite and lies, the quality press take gay life altogether more seriously — although not always uncritically. Hardly a day passes without The Guardian or The Independent carrying a piece that would not look out of place in Gay Times. The Times and The Daily Telegraph, too, will occasionally include features that are surprisingly sympathetic and well-informed.

Samples from last month: The Independent and The Guardian reported on Home Office bias against gay couples — April 27th; Mark Simpson explored the developing influence of gay culture on straight men — The Guardian, April 28th; The Independent did Greta Garbo’s lesbianism — April 23rd, while The Guardian started a new series by a gay man — Oscar Moore — living with Aids, April 16th. The gays-in-the-military issue got a full-page airing in Scotland on Sunday, April 17th; while on the same day, The Sunday Times praised the blossoming of gay theatre. Both The Guardian and The Evening Standard have featured developments in the gay press.

But there are clouds on the horizon. What we are experiencing now may turn out to be a “golden age” of gay representation, which we will look back on with wonder. The traditional liberalism that has dictated much of television’s approach to homosexuality will soon be challenged.

Commentators like Garry Bushell and Paul Johnson complain constantly that critical presentation of homosexuality is never seen on British TV. Bushell calls it “poofter propaganda” and Johnson blames it on the influences of what he sees as the “liberal fascists” who control broadcasting. There is evidence that their views are shared by many other people — one opinion poll after another shows that the appearance of lesbians and gay men on television is not popular. As William Rees-Mogg, the first chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council, said when he was conducting research into the values held by viewers: “One hears much more antipathy to homosexuals than might be expected in a tolerant society. Scenes of men kissing do not seem to promote tolerance; they were invariably commented on unfavourably, sometimes with sharp hostility.”

To its credit, the BSC has rejected just about all anti-gay complaints from the religious Right and other bigots trying to push gay images off the screen.

Now that the right to broadcast is being carved up and shared out, and as the tradition of “public service” broadcasting gives way to unfettered commercialism, we may see more pandering to what the public “really wants.” As TV and radio are deregulated, we are likely to witness a mad scramble for the finite number of listeners and viewers. Just as the tabloids’ race for readers dragged standards of journalism to the sewers, so competition in broadcasting may lead the same way. And just as homophobia became a staple diet of popular newspapers, so it may become in the rapidly growing world of tabloid television.

It is already happening in America, where half a dozen nightly programmes compete for the “tabloid TV” market — perhaps the most successful being Hard Copy and A Current Affair which concentrate on intrusion into private lives, sensational “human interest stories” and disasters. Ironically, just about all the reporters working on these shows are imported from Britain. The Americans needed the ruthless, amoral skills of Fleet Street’s tabloids in order to make these shows work.

Wendy Henry, who began her tabloid training on The Sun and went on to become the first woman editor of a national paper (The News of the World) is prominent in this new arena of trash television.

US commercial radio stations also employ “shock jocks” to boost their ratings. These men — like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh — are invariably ultra right-wing, pushing out a constant stream of reactionary opinion, much of it based on racism, sexism and homophobia. The formula is successful, because it is something quite new for radio, and if you aren’t on the receiving end of the hate, I suppose it is quite entertaining. No one knows what a constant diet of this kind of broadcasting might do to public perceptions of gays.

Because such provocative presenters get huge audiences, all the stations have to have one. As the competition hots up, they each must try to outdo each other in outrageous opinions, pushing the limits of decency ever downwards.

It was only a matter of time before the idea was imported into this country.

The Sunday Express (May 1st) carried a profile of “Caesar the Geezer” who broadcasts every weekday on Kiss FM. Described as “the most aggressive person on radio”, Caesar is a bit of a pussy cat when compared with his American counterparts. He doesn’t like racists and homophobes (although he does think it’s a disgrace for gay people to be allowed to adopt). His speciality appears to be personal abuse and rudeness. He is bringing in audiences, and soon others, slicker and less restrained, will follow.

In January, Kelvin MacKenzie, long-time editor of The Sun, was elevated by Murdoch to managing director of Sky Television, and soon after that, Richard Littlejohn — the paper’s resident columnist and homophobe — was given his own five nights a week show on Sky, and was also signed up for a weekly programme on London Weekend Television. This may be the first step in the serious “tabloidisation” of Sky. And if it is, can it be long before the other channels are forced to follow suit?

Littlejohn was recently censured by the Radio Authority for comments he made on his LBC morning show. The first complaint referred to his suggestion that the women’s movement had been “hijacked by hatchet-faced, shaven-headed dykes in boiler suits, who despise men.” The second concerned comments he made the morning after the age of consent debate. He said on air: “Curious woman, Edwina Currie. A couple of years ago she wanted to ban all eggs on the grounds that they’re a threat to health. Now she demands legalised teenage anal sex — the surest and quickest way of transmitting Aids… I couldn’t care less about (the age of consent) but I think the decision to peg it at 18 was about right. However, after seeing the plankton bouncing up and down outside the Commons last night, if I were an MP I’d probably have voted to raise the age to 65 and banned moustaches and earrings as a basis for negotiation. Anything which that lot outside the Commons are in favour of, I’m against on principle. The police should have turned the dogs on ’em — and if that failed, brought out the flame-throwers.”

The Radio Authority decided that he had incited violence, in contravention of the Broadcasting Act, and that LBC should pay a substantial financial penalty. Unfortunately, LBC is in receivership, so no fine was extracted. Littlejohn walks away from the whole thing laughing, and picking up contracts that will bring his filthy and dangerous opinions to a much wider audience.

In an article in The Sun (May 2nd), Littlejohn moaned that his “bollockings” were nothing more than censorship. “There are already adequate laws to prevent incitement to violence,” he says. Oh really? I’d like to know which ones could have been invoked by the homosexuals for whom he was recommending the flame-throwers.

This, of course, is just the start. Littlejohn is well aware that his anti-gay ranting can bring in viewers and he will use it ruthlessly. The Radio Authority and the TV regulatory bodies will be helpless when faced with a torrent of yobbo programming — what are a few piddling fines when you are coining millions from flouting the law? It’s the same principle as the libel laws — the fines extracted for slanderous newspaper attacks are as nothing when placed against tabloid profits. Murdoch will laugh all the way to the bank as he leads the way in degrading broadcasting in the same way that he has degraded print journalism.

When the telly ratings war starts in earnest, we can expect gay lives to be used and abused in the same ruthless way that they are in the tabloid circulation battles.

***

The Sunday Express and The Daily Star quite gratuitously “outed” the solicitor who is defending Frederick West, the man at the centre of the Gloucester “House of Horror” case.

As this contravenes section 15 of the Press Complaints Commission’s code of conduct (“The press should avoid publishing details of a person’s sexual orientation unless it is directly relevant to the story”), I made a complaint. The Commission decided that there was no case to answer. “As someone who is involved in a highly publicised case which is in the public eye, the Commission considered that the reporting of the man’s personal life did not raise a breach of Clause 15 of the Code.”

Can someone — especially someone at the Press Complaints Commission —please tell me where this all ends? Are gay people (even those in the public eye) entitled to no privacy at all? This man’s sexuality has no bearing whatever on his job as a solicitor, it is totally irrelevant to his involvement in this case. He has broken no laws and he made it plain that he wanted the matter kept out of the public eye. So what possible justification can there be for “outing” him — or even more so, his partner, who was also named in the article?

The plain truth is that, as far as ordinary people are concerned, the Press Complaints Commission’s code of practice isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. It seems it can be successfully invoked only by members of the royal family.

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=

The rumblings began as long ago as May 1st, when The News of the World ran the headline: “Beeb pays for gays to do kung-fu”. The paper said: “BBC gays are being invited to join a kung-fu course —paid for out of TV licence funds — in case they’re attacked while shopping” — a story which had appeared in The Sunday Mirror a year ago.

It was a warning that the papers were gunning for the BBC and its equal opportunities policy, which had the temerity to include gays. But we had to wait until May 22nd before the papers really hit the jackpot. The Mail on Sunday blared: “Fury at BBC move to send gays on paid ‘honeymoon’ — bosses throw in a £75 gift voucher.”

“Love-struck gay men and lesbians who tie the knot in unofficial ceremonies are to be recognised and given the same rights as straight workers,” reported The Sunday Mirror (omitting to mention that gays have no alternative but to use “unofficial ceremonies” given there are no “official” ones).

The following day the papers again positively fizzed with homo-hatred: “What a disgraceful waste of public money. Why should anyone at the BBC, gay or not, get extra holidays or wedding gifts?” thundered The Sun. “We pay our TV licences for them to make programmes. Not pink frilled curtains.”

The Daily Star editorialised: “The BBC has found a new way of squandering licence payers’ money. It seems TV bosses introduced the ruling after facing demands from gay pressure groups. How pathetic can you get? They should have told them to sod off.”

Sod off, that’s a good one. So good, in fact, The Daily Star decided to break the news the following day that the BBC had backed down on its “crackpot scheme” by leading its front page with a huge reversed-out headline: “SOD OFF!”

“BBC bosses have been shamed into scrapping ‘wedding’ perks for gay staff,” said the story, and just like the clockwork rentagob he is, up pops Harry Greenway, Tory MP for Ealing North. “It outrages me to think of the struggle which many people have to raise the £84.50 licence fee when they hear it is being misused in this appalling way.” (Is this the same Harry Greenway who, in 1990, was charged with corruption and “violating his public duty as a Member of Parliament” — a case that was never concluded because the judge considered too much time had elapsed between the charges being brought and the trial?)

Anyway, the editor of The Daily Star, Brian Hitchen, easily topped Greenway’s celebrated homophobia with a column which began: “Working at the BBC must be a poofter’s paradise. It’s so wonderful queer couples who ‘marry’ could, before yesterday, qualify for a £75 ‘wedding gift’ voucher and a week’s honeymoon. And all this coming out of revenue the BBC wrung out of us for ludicrous licence fees. Doesn’t it make you want to vomit?… It’s a good thing the pansies can’t get pregnant. They’d be asking for maternity leave. Or would it be paternity leave? I’m never quite sure.”

More “liberal” papers were quick to comment that it was a good thing the £75 wedding gift had been scrapped — for everybody, not just gay couples. Jill Parkin in — wait for it — The Daily Express thought the whole thing “Dickensian”. She said the gay angle had “spawned a backlash from the Terry and June faction which lives in newspaper columns all over the place”. She said that “They have raged at the BBC for attacking ‘family values’, for encouraging departures from their norm: married mother and father, two children and a double garage. Today the family is a lot wider than that. Perhaps it really always was.” So, it seems even Daily Express people can occasionally see life as it is, rather than as the Tory back bench would like it to be (for the rest of us, that is, not for themselves).

Which is not to say that The Daily Express has changed its spots. Goodness me no. By May 25th one of its intrepid investigative reporters (Ian Cobain) had discovered that “Gays get cut-price travel”.

“Gay bus conductors and Tube drivers are being given travel passes for their lovers,” Mr Cobain told us. “Their partners can use them to claim 75 per cent discount whenever they travel on London’s public transport.” According to Mr Cobain — obviously a Duncan Campbell wannabe — the passes are known as “pink permits” and “awaygays”. MP Geoffrey Dickens “stormed”: “We seem to have gone mad. It’s ridiculous.”

Unlike the “gutless” BBC, London Transport stuck by its equal opportunities policy. “We are sympathetic to people in homosexual relationships, provided it is a stable one,” a spokesman said from his bunker.

The persistent and highly-skilled Ian Cobain then also “uncovered” the remarkable fact that “LT is not alone in extending perks to gay partners.” He “revealed” (although no one knew it was a secret) that British Telecom’s pension scheme will pay out to long-term lovers of gay staff when they die. And the Metropolitan Police say gay officers can apply for ‘married quarters’ to share with their partner.”

Recognising he was on to a good thing, Ian Cobain then scrounged through a few more Equal Ops policies and on May 27th The Daily Express announced on its front page that: “Gay civil servants are being paid thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money to help them set up new homes with their lovers. They are being offered grants of up to £2,275 when they move to a different part of the country.”

Wheeled in to comment on this latest scandal was “Tory MP Nigel West” — who doesn’t actually exist — “This is an insult to tax payers who are being asked to fork out more this year. I will be taking it up with the Minister for the Civil Service, William Waldegrave. It is simply baffling how this can be allowed.” (The guilty party for this little diatribe was actually Nigel Evans).

The following day the Express was pleased to announce that “a top-level Whitehall inquiry was launched last night into the gay civil servants’ cash scandal.”

But how had a fair and just equal opportunities policy suddenly turned into a “cash scandal”? Only the tabloids can manage it. And here come Ann and Nick to pour scorn on gay relationships (that’s Ann and Nick Winterton, MPs, not the charming, but unmarried, talk show hosts). “This is a disgraceful abuse of public funds… One hopes it will be stopped immediately,” fulminated Mrs Winterton, while her husband said: “There is supposed to be a shortage of money, yet we are paying out to people who have an unnatural lifestyle. It is a disgrace.”

God, if marriage means you end up like this pair of old miseries, count me out.

Then came the columnists. “The frenzied homophobia with which some Tory MPs responded to the news [of BBC equal ops. extending to gays] had, I thought, an unusually maniacal edge,” wrote Claudia Fitzherbert in The Daily Telegraph (May 27th). “… Is it not curious that it is the very same people who revile homosexuals on the grounds that they are degenerate, promiscuous and out of sync with the monogamous mores which make for a stable society who are most vociferous in their indignation when these same monsters of depravity make a public show of long-term monogamous commitment?”

Francis Wheen in his Guardian column was furious over the fact that “a perfectly decent and unexceptionable policy should be ditched overnight merely because a couple of oafish backbenchers and homophobic leader-writers make a fuss… The cancellation of the wedding presents… represents gutlessness of a rare order.”

In an open letter to John Birt, Director-General of the BBC, published in The Independent (May 24th), David B. Peschek “a former press officer for Gay Pride” said: “The scheme had benefited straight couples for some time — and gone unquestioned… I would have hoped for a less spineless response to such a rabid protest, John. This only goes to prove that homophobia reaps benefits for no one; we are all demeaned by prejudice. You should take a lesson form any lesbian or gay man — don’t let the bigots grind you down.”

Matthew Parris in The Times thought that “in purely book-keeping terms, homosexual employees are a good buy. They are less distracted by family, more amenable to working late, flexible, mobile, and unlikely to become pregnant and demand special payments and months off work — or, worse, resign, wasting all their training. Perhaps employees should be encouraged to form same-sex relationships, with special bonus payments for this type of honeymoon.”

But not everyone thought the whole thing a ridiculous tabloid storm in a tea cup. William Oddie in The Sunday Times (May 29th) was of the opinion that gays are encouraging a backlash against themselves by asking for equality. “What worries [a lot of heterosexuals] is the demands of the militant gay lobby that society should not merely accord them toleration, but that it should unreservedly accept that homoerotic activity is as natural as heterosexuality, and that two gay cohabiting people should therefore be seen as constituting simply an alternative type of married couple. Public opinion is not yet (and may never be) prepared to go that far.”

He feels it is time for “the gay lobby to consolidate: it is certainly not time to get clever with nonsense about gay honeymoons.” Nonsense is it, Mr Oddie? I fear that your advice is not offered with our welfare in mind, more as a sop to your own uncomfortable feelings about homosexuality.

Maureen Howell of Willesden wrote to The Daily Express (May 26th) to tell them that she thought “the BBC should not be criticised for having offered the same considerations to gay and lesbians as it had done in the past to newly-wed heterosexuals. It is about time people came to realise that gay people are working and paying taxes, sometimes for things they can never hope to qualify for themselves. They pay for other people’s children and lifestyles, whether single or married and for couples to qualify for council homes at low cost plus a whole host of other concessions.” She thought the Beeb “in line with European thinking” and congratulated it for its fair treatment of everyone.

However, Leslie Pike of Colchester, wrote to The Daily Mail (June 2nd) with an answer to this new right-wing dilemma — how to have equal ops for everyone — except homosexuals. “If the BBC is still having problems with its conscience over equality, it should stop giving wedding presents to staff and instead make a generous gift on the birth of the first child of the marriage.”

Meanwhile, The London Evening Standard (May 27th) cast an altogether more sinister shadow over the concept of including gay men in equal opportunities policies. In a pre-broadcast account of the odious Inside Stoll, programme on BBC1, it ran the story of Peter Righton who, along with “a group of gay social work academics” were able to “abuse boys with terrifying ease”. The story has originated from a lesbian colleague of Righton’s who had heard him confess at a dinner party in the Seventies that he liked to have sex with boys. “The [people at the dinner party] felt safe with each other. Most were either homosexual or lesbian. It was the mid-seventies and there was solidarity among this group who, in liberal social work departments, had felt able to ‘come out’. They saw themselves as being in the forefront of social change, challenging sexual repression and homophobia.”

The tale of abuse that followed was horrific, but the article seemed to be suggesting that it is equal opportunities and “gay solidarity” that are to blame for the tragedy. “In a profession where ‘anti-discriminatory practice’ now consumes a large part of [social workers’] training, they were vulnerable to Righton’s persuasion that those hostile to gay men’s relationships with boys were homophobes.”

The hundreds of blameless gay social workers who have devoted their lives to the welfare of others will be horrified at the implication which pervaded both the Standard’s story and the TV documentary that they ought not to be trusted with children. No one would dare make the same generalisation about heterosexual social workers based on those who have abused the trust implicit in their job.

The old collective responsibility argument must not hold sway because trust has been breached by some individuals.

In the light of cases such as this, equal opportunities policies become more important, not less.