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=

Getting married or joining the army — these, we are told, are the most important issues of the moment for the gay community. It seems to me, though, that we have much more pressing priorities. The rights and needs of young gay people, for instance, are constantly denied, and the resultant pain and suffering is intense.

Last month the media launched a ferocious attack on the only organisation in the country which provides shelter specifically for homeless young gays. There was also further resistance to the idea of positive images of homosexuals in schools.

The Sunday Telegraph started the assault on the Albert Kennedy Trust (February 18th) in a grotesquely distorted front-page story declaring: “As many as 100 ‘gay’ children have been placed in homosexuals’ care in London and Manchester by the government-approved charity. The practice has horrified psychologists and MPs who fear that children will be ‘ensnared in a deviant way of life’.”

Tory MP Sir Ivan Lawrence is quoted as saying: “This is ghastly. I would take a lot of persuading that children who have homosexual tendencies are not redeemable. Giving them homosexual foster parents will merely set them in that way for life.”

The story was predictably taken up the next day by The Daily Mail and The Daily Express, who gave it the full ranting treatment. “Gay foster homes scandal” screeched the Express, and editorialised: “The sexual turbulence of adolescence is well attested. Putting youngsters who might be temporarily confused about their sexual feelings into the hands of homosexuals risks turning that confusion into a permanent way of life. It is difficult not to suspect that this is what the [Albert Kennedy] Trust intends… Do Ministers know what is being accepted in their name? They do now in this case. So let us see some action.”

The controversy even provoked Mary Whitehouse to emerge from her dotage to repeat her over-familiar whinges in The Sunday Telegraph’s letters column (February 25th): “I speak from years of experience of responsibility for sex education of adolescent children…” Mary Whitehouse was in charge of sex education? No wonder the nation is so maladjusted!

Meanwhile The Sun’s “Watchdog”, Leo McKinstry, put all those sad, homophobic fears in a nutshell (February 24th): “Gay rights groupies persist in trying to influence children… Under-14s cannot possibly be sure of their sexuality.” This was reiterated by consultant psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud in The Daily Mail: “There are lots of children who go through a gay phase in adolescence and if they are in a phase, how do you know they won’t come out of it?”

This “homosexual phase” theory is really the core of the argument— and also at the root of a great deal of misery for young gay people. But is it real or the figment of disordered imaginations? The one calm voice of reason came in The Times (February 21st). One of their writers (a self-confessed heterosexual) criticised the “we-know-best” brigade in these terms: “They swear that all these young boys will get seduced, ‘condemned’ even, into a life of homosexuality. Now I know 13 sounds young, but those of us who aren’t gay can’t possibly know how it feels if you are. Every one of my gay friends says he knew he was gay from the age of 5. And if being fostered by a straight couple won’t make a gay boy straight, I can’t see a gay couple turning a straight boy gay.” Such logic evades homophobes.

So, what are young gay people — the vast majority of whom aren’t in the least confused or ambiguous about their feelings — supposed to do? They can suffer in silence or risk being told by Mary Whitehouse that she knows better than they do what’s going on inside their heads.

Or alternatively they could write to an agony aunt. This seems like a very good course of action because in the main they’ll get a respectful and positive response, even in the tabloids. “My parents found out I was gay — though I’ve known about it for years — and they won’t talk to me,” wrote a desperate 16-year-old to Deirdre Sanders in The Sun. She tells him to keep trying to build bridges with his parents, and gives the address of the Lesbian and Gay Youth Movement.

A much less straightforward case turned up for Zelda West-Meades, The Mail on Sunday’s advice columnist: “My younger brother is 15, but from the age of ten he has believed he is gay. He says he hates gays and that he has never fancied another boy and will never do so. He feels his mind is to blame because it is telling him he is gay. If a man so much as touches his clothes, he has to wash them and have a bath. Recently it has got worse and he is hitting his head violently. I am worried that he will have a breakdown or cause brain damage.” Zelda suggests the writer tries to persuade her brother to see his GP so he can be referred to a psychologist, or alternatively to ring Childline on 0800-800 500.

The only way to stop torturing gay children is to give them the information they need at an early age. But any attempt to do this immediately brings down the ire of the smug, the complacent and the plain evil.

“Outcry at gay school book for children of 5” announced The Daily Express (March 2nd), but the “outcry” came from all the usual sources.

“5-year olds to get gay lessons” was The Daily Mail’s version of the story about a modest little school book called “Colours of the Rainbow” produced by Camden and Islington Health Trust. The Mail told us that: “The book provides lesson ideas for pupils aged five to 16. It tells teachers how to create ‘positive images’ of homosexual men and women, and persuade children that it is an acceptable lifestyle.”

Given what has gone before one would imagine it to be an excellent idea, but The Mail solicited the half-baked opinions of the lamentable Lady Olga Maitland: “The people who are putting this kind of thing forward as a model for children are frankly rather sick. We ought to be doing more to encourage normal family life.”

Then the Mail had the cheek to say in its editorial “Discrimination against gays is patently unacceptable.” (I’ll let you chew on that one for a while). “But to teach children about homosexuality and bisexuality at an age when they can surely have little understanding of heterosexual conduct is political correctness gone mad.” It then goes on to insist that the Education Secretary ensures “that the book be banned from all schools.”

A few days later The Mail was taken to task for its hate-mongering by Darrell Gale, a 25-year-old gay man, who wrote in the letters column about “the horror of growing up gay while at school”. He said: “At secondary school the bullying started, name-calling intensified and, when adolescence arrived, I became an irate, unbalanced youth. My energies went into thinking up different ways of killing myself, harming myself or willing my body and soul to change.”

With testimony like that I don’t know how Lady Olga Hateland and The Daily Mail can live with themselves.

But sometimes newspapers can provide a platform for young gays who want to tell others about their experiences. Gordon Menzies grew up gay in a small community in North Ayrshire. He says he knew that he was gay from the age of twelve, but was worried about the reaction he would get if he came out.

When he took the first tentative steps from the closet, the trouble really started. Gordon took the first opportunity to escape from Scotland and made a bee line for Manchester, but he decided that he would let the residents of West Kilbride know just what they had done to him. In a letter to the local newspaper, The Largs and Milport Weekly News, he wrote: “At the age of 20, I decided to tell my mother. It was one of the hardest things a son could tell his mother, but I broke it gently and she took it better than I expected. However, I felt like an outcast from the family and soon it spread around the village and I was given a lot of abuse by local residents and shop owners, and was even sacked from my hotel job in Glasgow just for being different. It is something I would not wish to happen to my worst enemy, as by the time small-minded people have finished with you, all your confidence can be destroyed.”

It was only by running away that Gordon could get any peace. He’s now happier than he has ever been. Others are not so fortunate and that’s where the Albert Kennedy Trust’s real value comes into play.

It’s up to all of us to help our gay children survive in a world full of Olga Maitlands, Ivan Lawrences and disgusting Daily Mail readers.

***

Peter Mandelson is a Labour MP who almost everyone believes to be gay, but who refuses to talk about it. The launch of his book, The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? has brought him much personal publicity, much of which made oblique reference to his sexuality.

In the Daily Telegraph’s profile, Fiammetta Rocco wrote: “One of Mandelson’s assistants twice called to ask what I would write about his private life. ‘He is paranoid about his sexuality and doesn’t know how to deal with it’ a close friend told me. ‘I think it makes him a very lonely man.’ He is clearly very sensitive about it, and as Tony Blair gets closer to the very heart of the political establishment he can become only more so.”

For someone who is supposed to be an ace media manipulator and string-puller, Mandelson seems strangely blind to what can happen to those who are economical with the truth in politics. If Labour does come anywhere near to attaining power, does Mandelson think that the Tory papers will spare him? His reluctance to be open and dignified about his sexuality puts a mighty powerful weapon into the hands of his enemies,

Meanwhile, David Ashby, the Tory MP who recently lost a libel action against The Sunday Times after it alleged he was gay, showed there were no hard feelings. He bravely voted against the Government by supporting a Housing Bill amendment that would give homosexual people living in a council or housing association property the right to inherit the tenancy if their partner died. “Why should we not allow succession?” he reasonably asked. “What is fundamentally wrong?”

Might I suggest Mr Ashby discusses the issue with Mandy Mandelson?

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 QUESTION of Michael Barrymore’s coming out has once more been exercising the tiny minds of our media. What they want to know now is whether “revelations” about his sexuality have destroyed his career. 

The moralising end of the media, the Dally Mail and Express are in no doubt – if he’d stayed in the closet none of this would have happened. And their conclusion from this? Let it be a warning to the rest of you “militant homosexuals” who insist on telling the truth.

The speculation was prompted by news that Barrymore’s Saturday night TV show had lost two million viewers, and had, as a consequence, been downgraded by “TV bosses” to a less desirable teatime slot at 6.15. “A year ago Barrymore regularly attracted 11.5 million viewers,” reported the Daily Mail (March 18th). “But figures have plummeted by 18 per cent – more than any other show in TVs Top 50 – since the star came out of the closet.” 

The conclusion to be drawn from this, as far as the Mail was concerned, seemed obvious. “Has the moral backlash finally sunk Barrymore?” it asked in a feature on March 25th. It quoted Bill Cotton, former controller of Light Entertainment at the BBC, as saying “I’ve been through all of this before with Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams. For a lot of the time that those two were performing, homosexuality was actually illegal and a constant nightmare of mine that either of them might be found out at any moment. 

“I never lost sight of the fact that even if, in the world of television, most people accepted homosexuality, for the bulk of the viewers the idea was not a particularly nice one. I think it’s just the same now and that’s why I think it would have been better if Michael had kept his counsel. I believe he has been under pressure for some time from people in the gay community to come out into the open, but they had a lot less to lose than he did – as all of this shows.” 

Not to be outdone in the moralising stakes, the Dally Express came up with its own version “Barrymore and a question of modern morality” (April 1st) – subtitled “Why flaunting his sexuality has cost TV star dear”. The article, by David Thomas, said: “To many people, the decline in his popularity will be a simple proof that the British are prejudiced against gays”. After this bit of earth- shattering insight, Mr Thomas makes the case for hypocrisy: “Many gay people will say that it is unfair that they still have to live by rules imposed by straights. But hypocrisy – or, to put it another way, espousing standards that one doesn’t always live up to – has its role to play in a civilised society.”

Read that sentence again. David Thomas seems to be saying that it’s OK for heterosexuals to condemn their homosexual fellow citizens for behaving “immorally’, while indulging in very similar behaviours themselves. If that’s the way the Dally Express defines civilisation, then gawd help us.

A more thoughtful exploration of Barrymore’s apparent plummeting popularity, written by Paul Vallely, appeared in the Independent (March 21st). Vallely challenged the tabloids’ gloating interpretation of the ratings figures: “It is true that his audience is now averaging around 9.3 million, but his share is only down to an average 41 per cent compared with the 42 per cent for BBC1 which screens the very similar Noel Edmunds House Party at the same time. ‘It is not regarded as much of a drop,” said one industry observer, “especially as Barrymore has a very poor lead-in from the previous programme The Shane Ritchie Experience, which is the real dud of the evening, pulling an audience of only 7.5 million. Barrymore boosts that by 1 5m. Yet for some reason people talk about Ritchie as the blue-eyed boy and Barrymore as being on his last legs,” Indeed, since that piece was written, The Shane Ritchie Experience has been “axed.” Mr Ritchie has not come out of the closet and appears, in fact, to be heterosexual. Was his heterosexuality anything to do with his show being dropped? Would the Daily Mail please commission an article from Paul Johnson to explain this to us? 

But beyond the ratings, other commentators have different explanations for Barrymore’s fading light. They think he has had a personality change. Marcus Berkmann in the Sunday Express (March 24th) thinks Michael has “exhausted his charm reserve” and is being nasty to his guests. “This was a brand new Barrymore we were seeing, an aggressive, prickly Barrymore, and we have seen a lot more of him since the series has progressed – the balance of the show has altered.”

                  Mr Berkmann thinks that viewers are turned off less by news of Barrymore’s sexuality, more by his “irritability”. “He doesn’t seem to enjoy what he Is doing any more. Viewers are not fooled. They turn over and watch something else.” 

Mark Lawson in the Guardian agreed. “Viewers on Saturday night have concluded that the show’s real problem is that the star has gone in on himself. Long before he was gay in the new sense, he was gay in the old way, but now he seems burned and nervy on screen. These days Barrymore’s manner is less camp than prisoner-of-war camp.” 

John Smith in the People thought it was the show’s format that was wrong. “The harsh truth is that Barrymore’s producers believed that ordinary people can be hugely entertaining if you stick them in a studio. A dreary procession of geriatric singers, ‘cuts’ youngsters and unfunny interviews proved them disastrously wrong.” 

But surely every entertainer needs to ring the changes from time to time. Nobody on television, however talented, can do the same thing over and over again without eventually boring his audience. Barrymore needs to abandon this stale format and return with something new and fresh, something that will take into account his new approach. 

Like so many gay men, he has tried desperately to be loved by everyone. Like the rest of us. he was afraid that if people knew the truth. they would reject him totally, and so he over-compensated in the niceness department. 

                  Now that he’s out of the closet, there’s less need for that cloying eagerness to please. Now that his audience knows who he really is. he doesn’t have to beg quite so manically for their approval. And despite the tabloids wishful thinking that Michael Barrymore has “turned straight again” by apparently returning to his wife, the man himself has assured Jeremy Joseph, the gay disc jockey, that he isn’t going back into the closet. In the gay paper QX, Joseph says that Barrymore told him: “I have no regrets about coming out. As I said at the beginning, if that means losing it all. then so be it.” Barrymore should be given a medal for courage in the face of the perverted “moralising” that is rapidly becoming the staple fare of our tabloid press. 

***

ANOTHER show biz personality, Michael French, who plays David Wicks in EastEnders, was recently outed by the Sunday Mirror. The story was sold to the paper by Michael’s ex-lover Bryan Lawrence, who was sympathetically presented throughout. 

For a newspaper that condemned Outrage’s outing activities so vehemently – “bitchy and scabrous” they called them – the Sunday Mirror s prurient and titillating story had no purpose other than to out the star. Not satisfied with that, the Sunday Mirror then began to suggest that Mr French could no longer keep his job as the “Albert Square Romeo”. They quoted an unnamed BBC “insider” as saying: “He has no option but to leave because his credibility as the show’s heart throb has been destroyed.” 

No doubt, as with Barrymore, they were hoping that the more they repeated the idea that an openly gay person is unemployable on mainstream television, the more likely it would be accepted as “fact”. 

A dissenting voice in the witch hunt was Carol Sarler in the People (March 31st). She says she can’t understand why French’s gayness should damage his career. “He’s an actor,” she says. “Acting is all about pretending to be something you are not. And the more convincingly you do that, the more you deserve the top roles and the top money that goes with them. If French can continue to make us believe that he fancies Michelle Collins – most especially if he really doesn’t – then I don’t care if the man snogs goats.” 

Despite tabloid efforts to create the impression that here was another gay man being brought low by his sexuality, the BBC stuck by Mr French and he will continue to appear in the programme. Meanwhile, Pam St Clements – who plays French’s mum in the serial – should be able to give him all the advice he needs on dealing with a press that apparently can’t tell fiction from reality. After all, she’s already been through this and survived. 

***

A GENERAL ELECTION creeps ever closer, and despite Tory boasts that they are going to see their term in office through to the bitter (and twisted) end, there are signs that they won’t make the finishing post. One such sign is the fact that after a brief period of criticising the government, the loyal Tory newspapers have returned to the fold. The Mail, Express, Torygraph and the rest are now resuming their usual uncritical pro-Tory stances. 

What this means for gay people is that there will soon be a large increase in antigay reporting. The papers will use any means at their disposal to link homosexuality negatively with Labour or the Liberal Democrats. Labour local authorities will come once more under scrutiny (we’ve had one loony left story already this month about a London authority apparently proposing a housing estate exclusively for lesbians. Ha!), and any suggestion of pro-gay policy from any opposition party will be presented as the end of civilisation as we know it. And all of those closets on the Labour benches had better man the barricades. 

Stand by your bunkers chaps, it’s going to be a dirty fight.

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=

RECENT EVENTS seem to have convinced The Times and The Daily Telegraph that the gay army is advancing a little too boldly, and so they have been wheeling out their own big guns to fire back. 

Both papers have a veritable army of commentators – many of them obsessive on the subject of homosexuality – who regularly wield their favourite antigay cliches like cudgels, repeating them endlessly, on the assumption, I suppose, that if people hear them often enough, they will eventually come to believe them. 

 Here are some of the more common examples seen in the past month. Cliche No 1: “Homosexual ‘rights’ are a threat to family life and the traditional moral order.” Digby Anderson was peddling this one in The Daily Telegraph (April 19th) in an article entitled: “Sad road to ‘gay weddings’.” He says that if gay marriage is sanctified, then all that “we” hold dear will be destroyed. Mr Anderson used to favour that other well-known myth, the one that says that if it hadn’t been tor the liberal reforms of the sixties, we wouldn’t have this “increasingly aggressive demand for homosexual ‘rights””. Now he’s changed tack. These days he believes that those who originally reformed the divorce and homosexual laws, had never intended their liberalism to lead to the present “grab for rights”. “It [sixties law reform] was a settlement that retained the old notions of normality and perversity; the normality of heterosexual faithful marriage as an ideal, while exercising tolerance and compassion for those who could not attain it.” 

  Now look what has happened! “Rationality, compassion and tolerance are drowning in a sea of minority rights, demands for ever more handouts, denials of the very notion of normality and perversity… Current society is morally adrift, moral considerations and responsibilities have been replaced by warring rights and competitive grabs at the cake.” 

(Cliche No 2, which Mr Anderson also deploys in this piece, is that “traditional morality” is being turned on its head. (“The sin of the Nineties is not sodomy but homophobia,” he says disconsolately.) In the Jewish Chronicle (April 19th) Chaim Bermant, flogged Cliche No 3: “Gay relationships are meaningless 

His rant was prompted by a decision by the Central Conference of American Rabbis to gjve its blessing to gay marriage. “We are not a particularly united people.“ he says, “but if there is one thing which the various Jewish denominations had in common, it was a commitment to family fife. Let us, for the moment, forget the many and emphatic imprecations on sodomy to be found in Scripture. Let us evert forget the dangers inherent in such practices. Yet even Reform rabbis of the most reformist tendency cannot deny that homosexual unions are inherently sterile.” He goes on to say that even though one in three heterosexual marriages end in divorce, those unions at least have “the potential for bliss… which gay marriages do not.” (Mr Bermant also manages to work into his piece Clich6 No 4: “The very fact that homosexuals have appropriated and perverted a word like ‘gay’ as peculiarly their own is a confession of the inherent bleakness and emptiness of their way of life.”) 

 Back to The Daily Telegraph (May 1st) for Cliche No 5: “If homosexuals didn’t flaunt their sexuality, people wouldn’t discriminate against them.” This one was peddled by Angela Jones, a new name to add to the roster of unbalanced press homophobes. “Over the past couple of decades there has grown up an increasingly strident homosexual lobby. Not content that their private behaviour should no longer be punished by the criminal law, they have been lobbying for their lifestyle to be fully accepted by mainstream society…There are still many people who feel uneasy about these trends. They do not wish to be constantly reminded of perversion… But what of the right to free association, the right of an employer and fellow workers to work with those of their kind. At present, if a homosexual alienates employer and colleagues by flaunting his sexuality an industrial tribunal will uphold the fairness of his dismissal.” Ms Jones seems, therefore, to think that it is good to deprive people of their livelihoods simply because they make her feel uncomfortable. Surely the very definition of bigotry! 

Cliche No 6: “Homosexuals who fail to integrate will suffer a backlash.” This was given an airing by Magnus Linklater in The Times (April 18th). He was talking about the departure of Andrew Sullivan as editor of The New Republic in America. Linklater thinks that Sullivan is a “sexual fundamentalist” and says that his opinions are “erecting barriers rather than demolishing them, encouraging prejudice against the gay community rather than reducing it.”

When the National Union of Teachers passed a motion at its conference asserting that “The presence of openly gay and lesbian teachers has a positive impact on schools”, it prompted Ray Honeyford, a former head teacher, to repeat Cliche No 7 (Daily Telegraph, April 17th): “If children are told about homosexuality, they will be lured into a homosexual lifestyle.” Mr Honeyford said: “The ultimate sexual destiny of children is an open question, though we know the vast majority will turn out to be heterosexual. Children and young people are not sexually being so much as sexually Incoming. Moreover, many boys go through a period of sexual confusion at puberty The presence of an obvious homosexual on the school staff, can easily lead an adolescent to mistake a transitory crush for a permanent sexual commitment.”

Cliché No 8: Being gay is the same as being a paedophile. This one was brutally promulgated Daily Express headline (May 8th): “Gay attackers snatched bike boy, 9, off Street” over the hideous story of a young boy raped and killed by two monsters who made a career out of child abuse. 

***

IN EDINBURGH, two gay men applied to adopt a 5-year-old boy whom they had been fostering for 18 months. The boy, who is severely disabled, had been in care from an early age, and his unmarried natural mother did not want him. The heroic gay couple decided to take him into their home and by all accounts have made a wonderful job of caring for him. The judge, Lord Gill, refused to allow adoption, not because he doubted the truth of court reports saying that the child was benefiting from being raised in a house of love and commitment, but because he felt the whole issue of adoption by gay couples needed a thorough airing. 

As The Scotsman said in an editorial: “A fuller legal, moral and social debate can only benefit future similar cases.” This is a view shared by veteran gay campaigner Ian Dunn who told the paper he was confident that such a public discussion would eventually result in gay people being allowed to adopt. Meanwhile, the child happily remains with the gay couple. 

Of course, adoption is not the only way for gay people to make child-raising part of their lives. The Daily Express reported on its front page (May 7th): “A boy of two conceived by artificial insemination is being brought up by a lesbian couple and two homosexual men.” The two couples in question have done nothing illegal. One of the female partners inseminated herself with the sperm of one of the gay men, and the resulting child is being raised with the participation of all four. “Outcry at the toddler shared by four gays. It’s totally unnatural” screeched the Daily Express, which is hardly a good start to a balanced debate, The Express asked local MP Phil Gallie to comment. He said: “This is totally against all the teachings of the Church and traditions of the family. I feel sorry for the child involved.” 

Then came the Conservative Family Campaign: “That a child should start his life shared between two homosexual couples is absolutely horrendous. If this is legal, it shouldn’t be. Children are not the playthings or property of adults. They have rights and needs of their own.” (Oh really? Ask the CFC about the rights and needs of gay children and see what the response is.) 

To be fair, The Express did tack on to the end of its story a comment from The British Medical Association saying that “there is no evidence that gay couples make worse parents” and one from a child psychologist saying: “If a child is genetically programmed to be heterosexual, it is unlikely that his sexuality will be adversely affected by this sort of situation.” 

In the arena of gay rights, parenting is likely to become the crucial issue. As the notion of what constitutes a “real” family is gradually redefined there will be vehement resistance from “traditionalists” who will employ every weapon in their armoury to thwart our efforts. Jeanette Kupfermann in The Daily Mail (May 8th) was first to the barricade making the point that the fundamentals of our culture are changed at our peril: “The family’s function is not merely to provide a home for children; it serves as a prime transmitter of our cultural values, it’s the crucible where all our attitudes and values are manufactured, despite increasing intervention by the state. We recognise at some profound level that at the basis of all our values lies the notion of heterosexuality.”

This debate is only just beginning, but I have a feeling that the newspapers will ensure that it is nasty, mendacious and cruel. 

***

QUOTE… UNQUOTE

 “We seem to be entering into an era of liturgies for anything under the sun. Will there be one for homicidal maniacs next?’ asked an outraged Revd Tony Higton, a leading Church of England evangelical, when informed of a new collection of Christian liturgies for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, of Cape Town, has given the book We Were Baptised Toohis full backing and caused further controversy by stating that the homophobia inflicted on gay people was “nearly the ultimate blasphemy”.

“It’s not about the right to be different. The services don’t have a right to be different to the rest of lite, but they have a need to be different. Anything that breaks the trust between man and man in combat, is not something we can have,” Armed Forces Minister Nicholas Soames commented recently about the ban on gay service personnel. However, when asked if the armed services allowed females, “Allowed,” he boomed, “they’re positively welcomed… “ – until he realised the Sunday Telegraph interviewer was in fact inquiring about lesbians.

“Twenty or thirty years ago to be homosexual was, for a large majority of people, and certainly in terms of the mass media and political establishment, immoral. Now, to be homophobic is immoral,” Andrew Marr, the new political editor of The Independent recently told journalists on Out this Week, the lesbian and gay news programme on Radio 5

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=

Reading The Daily Mail is rather like being hypnotised by a snake — you know it is going to poison you, but it’s difficult to take your eyes off it.

One person who has had closer dealings with the reptile than most is Polly Toynbee, The Independent’s excellent standard-bearer for liberal values. She writes the sort of stuff that makes Paul Dacre, the spiteful, malevolent, yet unimpeachably moral editor of The Daily Mail, go blue around the poison gland. Toynbee espouses sympathy for single mothers, tolerance for divorcees and, recently, support for gay rights. She also hates religious fanaticism.

Ms Toynbee recently became aware that The Daily Mail was out to get her. The paper’s journalists were snooping around her neighbourhood, questioning neighbours and friends, generally trying to dig the dirt. Ms Toynbee’s house was broken into, although she ascribes this to coincidence. When she became aware that the Mail’s dirty tricks department was closing in on her, she took pre-emptive action. “The Mail stands for everything that stinks about moralising hypocrisy,” she blasted from the front page of The Independent.

This started a rash of navel-gazing in the press. The Guardian detected a conspiracy at the Mail – a conspiracy to denounce powerful women on the Left of politics. Andrew Marr, the Independent’s editor, wrote that his paper would take on The Mail if, as it threatened, there was an “exposé” of Polly Toynbee.

It’s good that the liberal press is at last standing up to the boorishness and downright evil of the tabloids. It’s a resistance that is long overdue.

Needless to say, The Daily Mail also has a case to answer in its treatment of gay issues. Anybody who exposes themselves to The Mail’s daily dirge of misanthropy will know that it is to the nineties what The Sun was to the eighties: The Gaybasher’s Gazette.

For instance, the predicted upsurge in pre-election homophobia in Tory newspapers is nowhere more apparent than in The Daily Mail, which can spin even the most innocuous gay happening until it becomes a stick with which to beat the opposition.

On 15th March the paper headlined: “If Blair wins so will we, say the gay campaigners.” This headline was over a report which began: “Gay campaigners intensified their pressure on Tony Blair yesterday, demanding a raft of new rights from a Labour Government. And they are confident, on the basis of a promise from a shadow minister, that homosexual sex at 16 will be allowed if the party wins power.” So there we have it. Labour is the gay-lovers party.

The story was based on the publication of a “manifesto” by The Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights. As well as lowering the age of consent, the group is also apparently demanding “the lifting of the forces’ ban on gays and the presentation of positive images of lesbians and gay men in schools. The policies would then be enforced by a Gay Rights Commission.”

In 1987, just before the general election of that year, The Daily Mail wrote an almost identical story which it headlined on the front page: “The Left’s plan for a gay charter”. Once more it was based on demands issued by The Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It was equally distorted and misleading. Seems The Daily Mail knows the tricks that work and recycles them endlessly. (But, of course, whatever Labour does, it can’t win in the pages of The Mail. The paper had already reported, a few days earlier, that “Gays accuse Blair of betrayal as he misses vote on Forces ban.”)

Then, when the former Archbishop of Canterbury made his now famous admission that he had knowingly ordained gay priests during his time in office, The Mail inevitably sought the opinion of York Minster’s malevolent Billy Bunter figure, “The Venerable” George Austin, who said: “If an Archbishop flouts the policy where does that leave everyone else? Does he close his eyes to a man’s promiscuous heterosexuality or to someone who is financially untrustworthy? Scripture is quite clear in its condemnation of homosexuality.”

All this led The Mail to exhort the virtues of Islam: “Anglicans who are desperately trying to believe in their Church can be forgiven for envying the simple moral certainties preached by Islamic clerics in the fast-growing networks of mosques across this green and pleasant land.” (Presumably Mail readers would like to see the return of decapitation for adulterers and limb-severance for shoplifters? Not to mention stoning to death for shirtlifters? And if Paul Dacre likes authoritarian religion so much, why doesn’t he bugger off to Iran?)

The Loony Left, of course, is never far from Mr Dacre’s thoughts, and he must have been rubbing his hands with glee when he found out that “Lesbians working for local authorities are eligible for ‘paternity’ leave at public expense when their partners have a child.” The policy, which apparently has been accepted by “many of the 480 local authorities around the country”, allows five days leave with pay to “the child’s father or partner, or nominated carer of an expectant mother at or around the time of birth.” But better still, left-wing Islington Council in London has doubled the leave entitlement to two weeks.

A few days later, the Chief Executive of Islington Council pointed out in a letter to The Mail’s sister paper, The London Evening Standard, that the policy was generally accepted throughout the country and made no specific mention of lesbians – a “carer” could be a sister or a mother. He said: “This misleading report will only damage Islington’s reputation at a time when we are doing all we can to attract companies and organisations into the borough to provide jobs for local people.”

So why had The Mail introduced lesbians into the equation and singled out Islington Council? Why, because Labour leader Tony Blair is a resident of Islington, and if they can whack him over the head with a lesbian they’ll do it. The fact that the whole thing was total distortion was of no consequence to the moral bankrupts at The Mail.

Then came the story that gay sex is now apparently permissible in prison. The Mail headed its version “exclusive” — exclusively lifted from The Pink Paper that is —and then editorialised: “Len Curran, [deputy head of Healthcare for the Prison Service] speaking this month to a conference considering HIV in prisons, said the Prisons Service considers sex between consenting prisoners in a locked cell to be a private matter and therefore legal under the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. The truth is that a sorry mixture of cowardice, permissiveness and political correctness means that the Prison Service would rather condone a perverse regime built around sex and drugs in jail instead of acting ruthlessly to stamp out these growing evils.”

Then the Mail found the perfect opportunity to solicit more predictable quotes from the raving Right after news emerged that Jane Hardman Brown, (described as “a lesbian headmistress who refused to let her pupils see a production of Romeo and Juliet) had been promoted to become a schools’ inspector. “The fact that she is so committed to a homosexual agenda must make it a reason for concern that she should sit in judgement over other schools,” said MP Julian Brazier. The Conservative Family Campaign (an organisation with inordinate influence at The Daily Mail) called for “a proper vetting procedure to be put in place for such appointments.”

In The Mail’s frighteningly one-dimensional world, Ms Brown could not, of course, have been given the job on merit. Despite having her skills lauded in two official reports, The Daily Mail still thinks it’s all down to “political correctness”. In an editorial the paper says: “Many had hoped that Ofsted would deal with the worst excesses of permissive education. Ms Hardman Brown’s appointment suggests that either trendy liberals wield undue power in the educational establishment, or that Chris Woodhead, Ofsted’s director, feels the need to make a token appointment to assuage his increasingly vociferous liberal critics. Either way alarm bells should be ringing.”

The paper wasn’t content to leave it there, though, and a few days later reported that “an education chief who tried to discipline a lesbian headmistress is planning to quit his job.” The man in question is Gus John, Director of Education at Hackney Council. The lesbian being, of course, the aforementioned Jane Brown. The Mail suggests that Mr John has been driven to early retirement because of pressure from “the gay lobby”. In fact his desire to discipline Ms Brown was thwarted not by some homosexual fifth column but by the parents themselves who supported Jane Brown from the very beginning.

Next in The Mail’s firing line was Euan Sutherland, with his battle to get the age of consent law changed by appealing to the European Court of Human Rights (or “his disturbing gay crusade” as The Mail has it). Euan and his parents were interviewed by the Mail’s reporter John Ungoed-Thomas. The subheading over the feature said it all: “This boy is using your money to fight for a lower age of homosexual consent. But does he know his own mind?” Mr and Mrs Sutherland were presented as “permissive” parents for allowing Euan to sleep with his boyfriend in their house at a time when the law forbade it: “What is deemed acceptable in this middle class home is poised to have a possibly devastating influence over Britain’s ever-sliding standards of morality.”

Euan is subtly portrayed as a child who does not know his own mind. “The fact that Euan had shortly beforehand lost his virginity to the schoolgirl he had been dating hardly seems the behaviour of someone who had everything clear in his mind.”

The Mail’s record of hatred and intolerance has a long pedigree. If we go back to its issue dated January 15th 1934 we will find the headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”

The Blackshirts were, of course, the British Union of Fascists. Unsurprisingly, The Daily Mail supported them enthusiastically, even after Hitler came to power.

A long time ago? For regular readers of the Mail it must seem like only yesterday.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

“Accused people want their briefs tarted up for their day in court.” David Ashby MP revealed exclusively in a Commons debate on whether judges and barristers should still wear wigs.

“Jason Gardiner’s Dick leaves me quite unimpressed,” wrote Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard’s theatre critic, in his review of the musical, Dames at Sea. His editors were not impressed either. In later editions, the review was changed to read: “Jason Gardiner in the role of Dick…” What were they thinking of?

“Gay marriage seeks merely to promote monogamy, fidelity and the disciplines of family life among people who have long been cast to the margins of society. And what could be a more conservative project than that?” argued conservative American gay journalist Andrew Sullivan in Newsweek.

“I always thought Margo had a certain appeal as a gay icon, so I was delighted to be asked to do the voiceovers,” Penelope Keith, star of the kitsch 70s sitcom The Good Life, told The Radio Times about her new role on Gaytime TV. What would the good folk of Surbiton have to say about this?

“The dafter aspects of political correctness are just that,” Tony Blair commented recently to The Evening Standard when asked about the decision by Islington Council to allow ‘paternity’ leave to the partners of pregnant lesbians. Adding insult to injury Blair said that the action of Islington was not typical of Labour councils.

“Absolutely speechless,” Lady Olga Maitland told The Sun when asked her response to lesbian headteacher Jane Brown being made a schools inspector. If only it were really true then the world would be a much happier place.

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 I saw The Sun’s headline “Loony Lottery”,  I thought, yes, betting at odds of 16 million-to-one is certainly loony. But the story turned out not to be about the impossible dream but about how the Charities Board spends the money set aside by the Lottery for “good causes”.

In tabloid-speak the Loony Lottery is simply a variation of the Loony Left – spending all its ill-gotten gains on gays, prostitutes, foreigners and other dissolutes.

The papers were. of course, taking their lead from that nice Mr Major who was said to have “thumped the table” in anger when he heard that some of the Lottery cash was being given to organisations like the Leicester Lesbian. Gay and Bisexual Centre and the Gay London Policing Project.

Could this be the same Mr Major who once invited Sir Ian McKellen round for tea and to wish him well his gay rights campaign?’ What on earth could have brought on such a violent volte face? It couldn’t have had anything to do with keeping another of his Euro-embarrassments off thefront pages, could it?

“Major Fury at Lottery Payout – charity cash goes to gay groups and a prostitutes centre” was the Mail’s obliging front-page lead. The tabloids were grateful to the Prime Minister for handing them a whole new area of “political correctness” to bang on about, and they constantly railed about the Charities Board, which was suddenly portrayed as a bunch do-gooding left-wingers.

The Chanties Board in its turn was defiant. In fact, it gave a rather vigorous response to the posturings of the Tories and their tabloid lapdogs. The Board’s head, David Sieff, said: “All groups offered grants sent excellent applications and were assessed thoroughly against our criteria.” 

That cut no ice with the publicity-seekers on the Tory backbenches Peter Butler, the MP for North East Milton Keynes, was quoted in The London Evening Standard as saying that he thought it was “a disgrace that public money should be spent on those sort of people” The Sun said. “When the Lottery was started we were told our pounds would help good causes like The Scouts, youth clubs, medical research, old people and the needy. We never dreamt that hundreds of millions would go to opera, ballet and a host of politically-correct schemes while boys clubs and groups giving holidays to child cancer victims were turned away without a penny.”

The Daily Express thought it “was wrong to use cash from the public to support groups that encourage perverted or immoral behaviour, or help foreigners slide round our immigration controls . What if £10,000 had been given to, say, a group campaigning to win acceptance for sex with children or a National Front youth summer camp?” 

But despite this sanctimony from the Tory press, Mr Major’s little ploy backfired on him, in the way that everything seems to these days. The Guardian said “The protest could not have been more confected. It was badly planned poorly executed and ended, deservedly, with egg all over the protesters’ faces. A Prime Minister who once claimed he wanted to create a classless society showed himself ready to attack even the most vulnerable minority charities for narrow party advantage. Ministers did not just look foolish, they looked cheap.” 

The Independent editorialised that had our grotesque Home Secretary, Michael Howard, made these homophobic remarks at a party conference, no-one would have noticed. But the fact that supposed moderates like John Major and Virginia Bottomley had said it was different “These are supposed to be the balanced, mature, sensible and tolerant members of the Cabinet. Probably they look in the mirror and see that liberals are smiling back They should look again. Their remarks this week were not only illiberal, they were vile” 

Alex Falconer, MEP, wrote to The Guardian saying that he thought that small minority charities are the only ones deserving of lottery grants. “All the other so-called good causes should be properly resourced from national taxation. The Charities Board is a substitute for a well-regulated and fair taxation system. It takes money from those people least able to afford to subsidise these areas of public life which are rightly the province of public funding.”

These remarks cam to mind a few days later when The Sun reported that an old folks home had changed its name to the Gay Gnome Club to give it a better chance of getting a lottery grant

The chairman of the Club said that “the lottery people ignored our request, most probably because we are straight and normal.”

But what the hell is an old folks home appealing for charity money anyway? What did they pay all those National insurance stamps and taxes for over the years? Surely the state should be caring for them, they shouldn’t need to depend on the whim of a Chanty Board. This ail has the whiff of those Victorian Values so beloved of the Tories.  If they aren’t careful, the Gay Gnomes Club will shortly find that their Old Folks Home has been redesignated as a workhouse, and then it’ll be too late for them to realise they’ve been shooting at the wrong target. 

The whole business has pointed up a disgraceful aspect to our national life. It shows just how the nation is being conned by the Lottery and how the Government is using it as a way to wash its hands of its proper responsibilities. The point has been made, of course, that it there really is widespread disgust at the way “good causes” money is being spent. Lottery players have an option which is not open to them with taxation They can refuse to buy tickets. 

Try suggesting that to the Great Bntish public when there’s a £20,000,000 roll-over. 

***

THE DAILY MAIL returned to the theme of Aids funding last month. Apparently, gay activists working in the “Aids lobby” (or “Aids industry or “Aids Mafia”, depending on the paper you read) have said that the “we are all at risk” education campaigns have been a “deceit” and that “experts, doctors and politicians created a myth wasting £1 5bn of your money.” 

Quintessential Mail journalist Anne Leslie patted herself on the back saying she had the foresight to resist the “deliberate deception on the part of the gay lobby” that had cost so much and achieved so little. “I stressed that Aids was not simply a tragic and incurable disease it was a boom industry,” she wrote. The money being siphoned out of taxpayers’ pockets was enriching the ad-men, the hucksters, carpet-baggers who were swarming on the Aids gravy train, all shrieking Gimme, gimme, gimme.” 

Andrew Neil made much the same point, saying that The Sunday Times under his editorship was the most prominent paper to argue that heterosexual Aids was a myth, and the latest statistics “totally vindicated’ the paper’s stance.

Princess Diana then came under attack for continuing to associate herself with those affected by HIV and Aids. Mary Kenny, The Daily Express ‘s “Christian” columnist, counselled the Princess to abandon her efforts to raise awareness of the disease “She must not be fooled by those lobbies which spread the propaganda that everyone is at risk when knows that it is a specific behaviour that puts specific people at risk”. 

But what is the real message of these journalists and many others of their ilk on the right-wing press? Did they think money had been “wasted” because only gay mens’ lives had been saved? That it should have been spent on “real people” with “real” problems? Perhaps the most honest spokesman for these people is extreme right-wing Tory MP Terry Dicks who said in a letter to The Daily Mail “It’s only people with dirty needles and filthy habits who stand any real risk of catching Aids” The unspoken conclusion to that is: “And they deserve it,”

One of the “disciples of doom” that The Daily Mail named as being instrumental in “spreading lies” was Baroness Jay. She was allowed a forlorn comment at the bottom of one of the many pages devoted to this issue and said: “If there had been no great awareness campaign and there had been high levels of infection there would have been the most terrible fuss. It’s one of those things that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” 

Indeed, over in The Independent, Tom Wilkie was warning against those who preach that HIV is not a potential danger for everyone. “By logic that defeats rational dissection, the very success of the safe sex campaign has now been transmuted into evidence that it was never needed at all. Globally in 1996, Aids is a disease of heterosexuals, although gay men remain the most affected group in Western countries and the death toll among them is terrible.” Mr Wilkie reported that in the UK something like 9,000 people have died from Aids, whereas in the United States, with just four times our population, 318,000 have succumbed He thinks this may have something to do with the influence of that country’s strong “moral majority” which has intervened in every public education campaign about the disease. 

In France. Italy and Spain where no coherent health messages were disseminated, the incidence of new Aids cases is running at four times the British rate. So, was that money really wasted? As Tom Wilkie has said “Every case of Aids is an individual tragedy, but that the absolute numbers are so small is a cause to rejoice, not curse that the money was so well spent in the past.” 

This reasoning did not stop the Mail editorialising mightily over its great (although somewhat belated) revelation that Aids education campaigns are to be re-gayed: “At last, the truth is conceded and the Aids awareness campaign is to be targeted where it all along should have been: at members of the predominantly vulnerable gay community. They deserve compassion and help” Read that again: “They deserve compassion and help.” In the very same issue of the paper there was a news item criticising the Charities Board for awarding a small grant to a gay group called Freedom Youth 96. One of the group’s aims is to distribute vital health information to the most vulnerable section of the gay community – those under 25. And yet the Mail recruited Tory MP David Wilshire – one of the architects of Section 28 – to comment that the grant was “absolutely disgraceful”. The headline said it all: “Gay barbecues to burn Lottery cash”.

What was it the Daily Mail was saying about gays deserving “compassion and help”? The crocodile tears are sick-making

***

QUOTE – UNQUOTE

JODIE FOSTERis suing PolyGram for $10 million after, she alleges, they broke an oral agreement for her to star in the film, The Game. PolyGram, reported The Guardian, cites “creative differences”, though rumour has it that the company felt Foster wouldn’t be accepted by audiences as a romantic lead. However, The Guardian naughtily suggests another reason: “So it would be absolutely nothing to do with the rumours around Hollywood that Foster is about to come out of the closet, then.’”

IT CAME ASa bolt from the blue. Jim Davidson in his Daily Mirror comment urged for all those harassing Michael Barrymore to leave him alone. His sexuality isn’t an Issue, he said, and added: “I’m there to help him He can come and stay with me if he wants.” But ever the ‘comedian’ the cheeky Cockney added: “That’s as long as I’ve got my back against the wall, of course.“ Davidson up against a wall, now there’s an idea. 

“I WILL SMASHevery hooligan I meet, break their bones, split their skin open, and bloody them generally. They will receive no mercy from me, though I shall still pray for my attackers, once I have disabled them. Praise the Lord.” Thus spake 86-year-old Sister Leema of St Anne’s convent in Madras. She and the nuns have been receiving karate classes after several of the sisters had been attacked. (Quoted in Private Eye). 

“WE’VE BEENtogether for three years, we’ve never gone through separate entrances and we’ve never disguised the fact that we’re together. But we don’t make an issue of our relationship,.. Anyone whose life revolves around their sexuality, well, it’s boring,” Elton John’s lover David Furnish told The Radio Times while plugging his documentary about the superstar, Tantrums and Tiaras. 

THERE MAY SOON COMEa time when the one-legged Irish lesbian beloved of chroniclers of looney left lore is seen as a target voter by Conservative Central Office and courted accordingly. Sitting MPs in key marginals can be astonishingly broad-minded.” said journalist Anne McElvoy in The Spectator on the changing Tory attitude towards gays

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=

“LOVE ALL” was the headline over a two-page spread in The Sunday Mirror (July 14th) concerning Martina Navratilova and the new love in her life – “stunning model” Hunter Reno. “She’s tall, she’s blonde and she’s beautiful,” said the paper, “But back off guys – she is also Martina’s.” The feature was decorated with several snatched photographs of Martina kissing her new beloved on the doorstep of their rented Wimbledon house. If you leave aside the icky feeling that many straight, male Sunday Mirror readers would be suffering an underpants disturbance from the sight of two women kissing, the story was generally sympathetic (“they had love in their eyes… it looked like a spontaneous show of affection.”).

The article went on to say that “the couple can expect rumblings from the gay community now that the news is out.” An unnamed ‘friend’ was quoted as saying: “Gays see Martina as their champion. A woman who speaks up for them and speaks out. They don’t think she should be hiding Hunter in the closet.”

What tosh. After the salutary experience of the Judy Nelson debacle, who can blame Martina for wanting to be sure before she goes public? And anyway, nobody can seriously lay charges of closetry at the door of Martina Navratilova. Not without deserving one of her legendary forearm smashes – right in the gob.

But the piece did illustrate the changing perception of gay relationships in the British press. Martina’s new amour was treated in exactly the same way as any other celebrity romance would have been.

Then came the bombing at the Olympic Games in Atlanta and news that one of the victims had been British. The Sun was soon on the case and headlined its report (July 29th) “Gay Brits in Bomb Hell – lover waits at bedside as Brian, 53, needs two ops to remove shrapnel.”

The first question has to be: what has Brian Carr’s sexuality got to do with his being injured in a terrorist incident? Well, nothing, of course. But the tabloids need to personalise everything, every story must have “human interest” angle or it won’t get into the popular press. And so, if it had been a “mum-of-two” instead of “a gay” who had been in Centennial Park that fateful evening, The Sun would have said so in the headline.

Mr Carr, and his lover, Chris Hankinson, were quite open about their relationship. There was no question of them being “outed” against their wishes, and so I don’t think The Sun can be criticised in this respect. Just for a change, the tabloids reported a gay relationship with sympathy and dignity. Chris is quoted in The Sun as saying: “We are a happy couple who have come through a lot, and now we are hit with this.” A photograph of them in happier times is captioned: “So close.”

The other papers were not quite so forthright and were obviously struggling with the situation. The Daily Express didn’t even try to convey the nature of the men’s relationship, describing them simply as “two friends”.

The Daily Mail, however, went a little further, describing Chris Hankinson as Mr Carr’s “companion and former business partner.” But it is obvious that they had been attempting to dig dirt in the village of Freethorpe, where Brian Carr lives. The paper quotes a neighbour as saying that “everyone knew about his relationship with Mr Hankinson. It didn’t really bother us. They were both nice blokes and we are all devastated by what has happened.”

But what kind of questions had the reporter been asking to elicit such a response? And what other little titbits did he dig up during his foray in Freethorpe?

We can only wonder what the tabloids have in store for Mr Carr when he returns home. Has The Daily Mail already constructed its familiar tale of a man who deserted his wife and two children to live with a gay lover? Will the respect and dignity that has so far been shown the couple by the paper evaporate as it always has done in similar cases in the past?

The Independent (July 15th) did a story on the home lives of Glyn Fisher and his partner Richard Carrington (and Richard’s two teenage sons Scott and Craig). When Richard’s wife left him, he decided to follow his gay feelings (which he said had always been there) and answered a contact ad. And – bingo – into his life came Glyn. The two of them set up home together and created a “pretend family” incorporating the two boys.

Despite a difficult beginning, the four of them have settled down to a generally pleasant life together. The boys have been teased at school, but are dealing with it very well. “Some of my good mates got into arguments with other people about it, because they stuck up for Dad, even when they didn’t even know him. You learn who your real friends are.” You do, indeed.

And finally to The Times, which carried an obituary of dancer Chris Komar, who died from an Aids-related illness last month. At the end of the eulogy a simple sentence – “He is survived by his partner Art Becofsky” – speaks volumes. This, and the other instances cited here, tell us that gay people are at last beginning to refuse to deny relationships that have enriched their lives. We will eventually reach the stage where no-one, however famous, will feel the need to insult their significant other – and the rest of us – by pretending that their love never existed.

***

Last month The Daily Mail was crowing it been right all along, and that Aids is, indeed, a “gay plague.” The paper’s journalists cursed the gay community for having “deceived” the general population into thinking they were all at risk. The “Aids Mafia” was traduced for having wasted “billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money” on unnecessary health messages for heterosexuals. The Mail congratulated the Government on its decision to target the funding more specifically at the groups most at risk, and said it should have done so from the start.

This month The Daily Mail’s career homophobe, Richard Littlejohn, was given a full page to attack Barnet Council because it has advertised for two men to work in Aids Education, specifically targeting men who have sex with men in public places (August 2nd). Mr Littlejohn prefaced his piece with the usual disclaimer, “This is not an anti-gay rant”, and then went on to rant maniacally about homosexuals who use cottages for their “revolting and dangerous anti-social behaviour.”

Littlejohn wrote: “We are constantly being told that the health service is struggling because of a shortage of money… yet there is never any shortage of money for Aids propaganda or for hiring field workers to service MSMs and equipping them with company cars and mobile telephones.”

The Mail also carried an editorial on the same topic: “Many people reading the words of the Barnet Healthcare advertisement on this page will be astonished that taxpayers’ money can be spent in such a way. They will wonder how it is that the Health Service can demand ever more cash, yet finance homosexuals to hang around public lavatories. Let it be said loud and clear: gays should not be discriminated against and Aids is a terrible affliction. But we despair for the future when even NHS Trusts succumb to such offensive, politically-correct clap-trap. Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell should remind these people that they are squandering our money.”

The Daily Mail’s concern for the health and well-being of gay men is touching, isn’t it? Last month it thought Aids money should be spent on targeting gay men, this month it seems to have changed its mind. When The Daily Mail expresses concern for gay people it can be roughly translated as: we are concerned that you are not all dead yet.

Their nasty arguments don’t stand up to logical analysis anyway. If only half a dozen people are prevented from becoming HIV positive by the efforts of these proposed “Aids propagandists” it will save the Health Service several million pounds.

On that basis they seem like a bargain.

Over in The Sunday Telegraph, (June 30th) Dr James Le Fanu was also telling us off, describing safer sex campaigns aimed at the straight community as “a betrayal”, saying that the risk to heterosexuals was comparable to being “struck by lightning”.

But then came a report in New Scientist describing a variant of HIV called subtype E. “A super-strain of the Aids virus, said to be of particular danger to heterosexuals, has spread from Thailand and America to Britain,” reported The Daily Telegraph (August 1st). Research by the Harvard School of Public Health has found that “the strain is more adept at infecting cells lining the vagina and tip of the penis than other subtypes.”

Let’s hope this turns out not to be the beginning of something horrible for heterosexuals, and that complacent newspapers are not going to have to eat their words. Let’s also hope that thousands of heterosexuals — lulled into feeling that they are immune by politically-motivated journalists — are not going to have to find out what it feels like to be at the battle front of such a horrible illness.

The nature or nurture debate was revivified last month by American science journalist Chandler Burr, here on a flying visit to hype his book “A Separate Creation — how biology makes us gay.” Mr Burr concludes that homosexuality is genetic and hormonal in origin.

The Daily Express’s coverage of the book asked rather barmily “Could you be gay for a day?” and advised us that “the gene runs in families. Women who are lesbian are more likely to have other lesbian family members, but not more likely to have more gay family members.” Work that one out if you can.

Chandler Burr concludes that the discovery of a “gay gene” will not result in attempts to eradicate homosexuality, as many activists fear, but will lead to more tolerance. “You cannot discriminate against people for an aspect of themselves that hurts no-one and is outside their control,” he told The Daily Express.

I wonder what “ex-gay” organisations like The True Freedom Trust and The Courage Trust will make of Mr Burr’s theory? The Catholic magazine The Tablet carried a report on these Christian groups that claim to “cure” homosexuality. “The ministries themselves now avoid the term ‘healing’ and want to get away from the concept of ‘sick’ homosexuals surrounded by ‘healthy’ heterosexuals,” the paper said. “In fact the former have much to teach heterosexuals about relationships, being often more sensitive, being more willing to be vulnerable and more honest about the need for physical affection. Living Waters, which set out to be a ministry to homosexuals, now finds that two-thirds of its work is with heterosexuals.”

But if this is so, what are these groups for? Why do they continue to torment their victims by setting them impossible tasks that damage them even further? The answer is that they are not motivated by humanity, but by the Bible.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

Joke overheard in the White Swan: Question: ‘Why do people hate Michael Portillo on sight?” Answer: “Because it saves time.”

“Does the Guardian think that Mark Simpson’s abusive attack on Gaytime TV is editorially justified? And ought you not to have pointed out that Simpson himself was auditioned for a presenting role on the show? Simpson’s real problem isn’t so much with Gaytime as with the whole business of what he calls ‘gay identity’. What a pity, then, that he should inadvertently have revealed himself as one of its most stereotyped manifestations: that of bitchy, jealous old queen.” Neil Crombie, series editor for Gaytime TV, getting his own back in the Guardian letters page

“I always had an eye for a pretty girl,” Julie Burchill vouchsafed to Brighton magazine, Printer’s Devil. And she went on to confirm, “I’m a lesbian.” Then, displaying the consistency for which she is justly renowned, she proclaimed: “I would call myself a heterosexual that’s in love with a girl. I don’t find women attractive at all, frankly, I find men attractive.” So that’s cleared that up then.

“It really upsets me to see people doing my mother in drag. How would you feel if it was your mother?” complained an upset Chastity Bono recently to an American gay magazine. While you can see her point, for any drag queen Cher is too good an opportunity to miss. (Rex Wockner)

“More lovely men please — it’s what the trade wants and needs. Might I suggest that circulation could be doubled by a cover picture of Ryan Giggs in a jockstrap? Just a thought.” So wrote “a Pimlico dealer” to Antique International magazine, thus dispelling that old myth about gay men and the antiques business.

An interview with Madonna in the Budapest magazine, Blikk, which was (mis)translated into Hungarian and back again is causing much merriment. “Are you a bold hussy-woman that feasts on men who are tops?” Blikk asked. “Yes, yes,” said Madonna, taking a break from filming Evita, “this is certainly something that brings to the surface my longings.” Then, protesting “I am a woman not a test-mouse!” Madonna confided, “I am a tip-top starlet.” The interview ended on a touching note. “Thank you for your candid chitchat,” said Blikk. “No problem friend who is a girl,” replied the tip-top 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 Daily Express’s opinion page on September 2nd was devoted to the laudable aim of alerting its readers to the increasing use of propaganda in public debate. “How they stop us thinking for ourselves” announced the feature by Nicholas O’Shaughnessy.

Who “they” are is unclear, but apparently “they” feed us loaded political messages in order to win elections and “they” distort the facts in order to push forward the agendas of pressure groups in “the media”. Mr O’Shaughnessy shows us the methods employed by the propagandists in their attempts to convince us that black is white and up is down.

Among them is “name-calling”. The theory is that if you attach a negative label to something, you can encourage people to “reject it without examining the evidence.” (An example might be Garry Bushell’s review of the EastEnders gay kiss in The Sun on August 28th — ”Queer we go on an Eastbenders outing”).

Then there’s the technique of “transfer” — seeking to have ideas rejected by associating them with something despised. (An approach favoured by that putrid old has-been, Norman Tebbit.) Commenting in The Sun (August 22nd) on the Belgian paedophile horror he concluded: “Before long I am sure there will be a campaign to legalise sex of all kinds with younger children. Already in America there is a campaign to force the Scouts to accept homosexuals as Scoutmasters. Don’t think it won’t happen here.”

Then there’s “testimonial” — seeking the endorsement for an idea from some “respected person” in order to give it validity. (Norman Critchley, leader of the Tory opposition on Bolton council, was asked by The Daily Express to comment on a ceremony to bless the relationship of a lesbian couple at the local town hall: “I am appalled. It is totally and utterly disgusting,” he said. “I have never come across such a blatant abuse of procedure. It makes a mockery of the whole marriage ceremony and lowers the standard of religious belief.”)

After the testimonial we have the “plain folks” trick, whereby propagandists shore up their ideas by making it appear that “ordinary people” applaud them. In tabloid terms this is often where the “mum of two” makes her appearance. She will be quoted as supporting the newspapers’ bigoted position on any given issue so that others can identify with her.

This time round The Sun quoted not a mum of two but a “Gran” from Kent who apparently “stormed” that the gay embrace on EastEnders was “totally irresponsible”. She vowed never to watch the programme again. She was, according to the paper, supported by “a storm of disgusted soap fans.”

After the common people have spoken, there comes the “bandwagon” effect, which consists basically of the theory that “the vast majority believe it, so it must be true.” The Daily Express itself was employing this one — and most of the others — the following day when it reported the case of Bill Zachs and Martin Adams, the two gay men who paid an American woman to have a surrogate child for them.

In an editorial about the case, The Express said: “Just what do you give the homosexual couple who have everything? A child will do nicely it seems — just a little something to round off their dinky lives after the ‘marriage’ has been blessed by some pretend priest or priestess… Responding to this case the churches have for once spoken with one firm, clear voice and reasserted what the vast majority of us know to be true: Children should be brought up by a married heterosexual couple.” (My italics).

The Times, however, did give Helen Reece, from an organisation called Freedom and Law, space in its letters column to say: “The arrangement that this couple made was an imaginative and creative way of starting a family: the fact that money changed hands is merely an indication of how strong their desire was to have a child… The Reverend Bill Wallace [of the Church of Scotland] argues that these parents have placed gay rights above the child’s ‘basic right to have a normal upbringing in a stable home’: children have no such right — indeed the very idea of a right to be born into a particular environment is quite absurd. In contrast lesbians and gay men make as good parents as heterosexuals and should have an equal right to be parents.”

The tabloids, of course, don’t just use propaganda; propaganda is their raison d’être. It was kind of The Daily Express to give us a behind the scenes glimpse of its own working practices.

***

Has the gay community become a Frankenstein monster, completely out of control and destroying its own creators? Are we in the thrall of commercial interests that have hijacked gay life and transformed it into nothing more than a niche market, forcing us into a frenetic life of boozing, drug-taking and empty relationships? Has the gay community become the gay shopping society, closed to those over forty, those without funds and those without pecs?

Regrettably, these have become legitimate questions, and they were raised by Peter Tatchell in The Guardian (August 29th). “The last two years have been a turning point in gay history,” he wrote, “marked by a fundamental shift in values and attitudes. The idealism, solidarity and activism that was so significant in the first 25 years of the post-Stonewall gay psyche is now being superseded by a new gay zeitgeist of consumerism, hedonism and lifestylism. The shallow, vain, frivolous, amoral, self-obsessed, commercialised trend in gay ‘culture’ is not a pretty sight, and no amount of glamorous beefcake in Calvin Klein underwear can disguise its essential ugliness. Moreover, it threatens to disarm politically a whole generation of lesbians and gay men.”

There was support for Peter Tatchell’s view in the ensuing correspondence. Ian Lucas of Coventry wrote: “The saddest thing… is that the debate simply cannot happen in the gay press. A single company now strangles and misreports news, servicing advertisers rather than readers, gossiping instead of reporting. By and large we love it — they tell us how to improve our looks, how to stay young, where to drink and where to shop.”

This is not absolutely true. Gay Times does report news and does air issues, and even The Pink Paper, with its total dependence on advertising and its rather Pollyanna-ish editorial policy, recently carried a piece by Nick Vince, a 39-year-old gay man who “feels like a stranger in the promised land.” He put into personal terms what Peter Tatchell had been saying more generally. “I don’t feel old and I certainly don’t think I look old… and yet the gay scene makes me feel absolutely ancient. Worse than that, it makes me feel excluded, past it, over the hill, on the shelf… It seems that if you haven’t shaved your head or had your nipples or your nose pierced; if you don’t sport a tattoo somewhere about your person; if you don’t get ‘off your face’ with drugs every Saturday night and stay out clubbing until the early hours of Sunday afternoon — then nobody wants to know… Surely there must be an alternative to the high fashion, drug-crazed, pop-music orientated gay scene?” he asks. But is there?

On the other hand, Stephen Coote makes this point in The Guardian: “Openly gay businesses are increasing in numbers and in the range of services they offer, and part of this success story is the economic power it provides our community. If we cannot gain equality through moral argument, then we must use all the resources at our disposal to make our point, and that includes selecting where we are going to spend our discretionary income.”

Sorry, Stephen, but equality can’t be bought in the shops, not even for a pink pound.

***

And so we return to that gay kiss on EastEnders (reduced from two seconds to half a second by those on high). “Get this filth off our screens!” was The Sun’s familiar greeting, together with the mandatory rant from Terry Dicks MP.

Anyway, Tony and Simon’s snog must have been the briefest in the history of the known universe, but it served its purpose in bumping up the ratings. As Geoffrey Phillips, the TV reviewer at The London Evening Standard said: “A year ago Coronation Street and EastEnders were neck and neck in terms of audience figures. The latest ratings show EastEnders four million ahead. Impressive: how has the BBC done it?”

Well, they whip up a storm of moralising in the tabloids to start with, then give as little as possible to the gay audience, and then write the characters out so that they can bring in some new ones and do the same thing all over again. (I think that Geoffrey Phillips must have seen an unedited preview version of the kiss because he said: “When the male lips meet one is irresistibly put in mind of a tug of war with sink plungers.” The version I saw required the eyes to be propped open with match sticks so as not to risk missing it.)

Jo Brand commented on the use of homosexuals to boost soap opera ratings in her column in The Independent: “Women have been snogging on the box for quite some time now, but because that is the stuff of pubescent male fantasy it was greeted with a Phwoah! as opposed to the outraged queasiness announcing two blokes at it.”

And that just about sums it up. Once upon a time, gays were introduced into soaps in the hope of increasing tolerance and understanding. Now the question has to be: are we being served, or are we being used?

***

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

“Peers are locked in battle over the alleged outing of the World War Two figure Field Marshal Montgomery. During a debate in the House of Lords on homosexuality in the armed forces Lord Wallace of Saltaire recalled how as a young choir boy at Westminster Abbey he visited Monty whom, Wallace claimed, paid too much attention to him. Springing to the war dog’s defence Lord Longford told the The Sunday Telegraph: “I worked with him [Montgomery] for years and he was not that way inclined. It’s a good job Montgomery’s son wasn’t in the chamber, or this Wallace chap would have been lynched.”

“The Princess knows her support for victims of the predominantly gay disease will unleash fury. But she wants to become a global charity figure at any cost,” so editorialised The Daily Express on Diana, Queen of Heart’s decision to become more actively involved in HIV and Aids campaigning. The paper later commented: “She will be criticised for supporting the ‘gay plague’ at the expense of charities she spurned.” Any charities with complaints better get in the queue behind The Daily Express for a start.

“Ten years ago, people calling me names hurt. Now it’s like, well yes, technically you’re right. I am a shirt-lifter!” was what black, gay singer David McAlmont had to say on the issue of the name-calling he’s endured over the years. The interview appeared in London listings magazine Time Out.

“Buxom Barbara Windsor,” The Manchester Evening News revealed in a super scoop, “has warned EastEnders bosses: ‘I’m not getting my kit off!’ As Peggy’s romance hots up in the soap, the star is determined not to let her love scenes get too steamy. Barbara is 60 next year, and finally hopes to shake off those saucy Carry On boobs that haunt her still.” A great trick if you can pull it (or them) off.

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=

According to Peter Tatchell in The Guardian last month, the gay community has become feckless, amoral, trivial and without substance. This month, according to other papers, it seems all we want to do is take on the responsibilities that heterosexuals are anxious to be rid of – marrying, settling down and having 2.4 children.

Progress towards these goals in this country is negligible when compared with what is happening in the USA. There a titanic political and moral battle has been set in motion by two modest Hawaiian gay men called Pat Lagon and Joe Melillo.

Pat and Joe have been together for 19 years, and they decided, according to The Independent on Sunday (September 8th), that the time had come to get married – not pretend married, but really married. Needless to say, the Hawaii Department of Health refused their request for a marriage certificate, and the two men took the state to court “to argue for the right to become spliced, not as man and woman, but as man and man”.

According to Republican senator Charles Canady, the case has since become an argument about “nothing less than our collective moral understanding – as expressed in the law – of the essential nature of the family, the fundamental building block of society”.

If the Hawaiian case is won, then it is almost certain that gay marriages conducted in that state will eventually have to be recognised in the other 49 states, despite several of them trying to rush through legislation banning same-sex matrimony.

President Clinton then further betrayed his commitment to gay rights by signing the Defence of Marriage Act which encourages individual states not to recognise gay marriages and ensure that gay couples are denied any federal tax benefits extended to heterosexual couples. The Act defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

If the Lagon and Melillo case is won – and there is optimism that it will be – then each state will have to justify any refusal to recognise marriages that will have been legally performed in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, in this country, consternation was expressed by The Jewish Chronicle (September 27th) that Rabbi Elizabeth Sarah, a director of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, was planning to conduct a “lesbian wedding” in Sussex. When she announced her plan at a synagogue in Bushey “many congregants walked out” and the synagogue chairman was quick to distance himself from the plan, saying: “It is not a policy we wish to be identified with.”

All the same, there is some hope of change in the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain. Its chief executive said that the whole matter had been referred to an “assembly of rabbis” who will “look at the issue in relation to Jewish tradition and report back to us early next year”. He said: “As a movement, we are pledged to find room for all Jews who feel a commitment to Judaism, regardless of their social, political or sexual differences.”

Others remain implacably opposed. For instance, Barbara Amiel wrote in The Daily Telegraph (September 19th) that gay weddings would be the “last nail in the coffin of marriage”. She conceded that “some homosexuals couples have spent years together, paying mortgages, supporting each other emotionally as well as financially in committed relationships that make many of our own heterosexual unions seem rather flimsy” and yet still she thinks that marriage should be denied them. Her reasoning? “The institution of marriage has a specific purpose – to procreate and raise a family. That reason is unaltered by the fact that some people marry for purely economical reasons or that some marriages are without issue because of medical problems or personal choice.”

She says there is nothing stopping gays having deeply committed relationships with each other, “but they cannot create life”. Ms Amiel believes the real reason that some gay people are agitating for marriage is not because they feel strongly about the institution, but because they want “to achieve the legal obliteration of any distinction between the normative sexual behaviour of society and the neuropathology of homosexuality which affects a figure estimated at about five per cent of the population.”

Barbara Amiel, of course, is well qualified to comment on the sanctity of marriage, having been wed four times herself.

Another marriage veteran, Elizabeth Taylor, also had some words of advice to the gay community on the topic. In an interview in The Advocate she was asked to endorse the idea of gay marriage. Her response: “I would say to you all: ‘You’re crazy. If you want to be stupid, go ahead, but I don’t want to hear about any of your tears.” Sour grapes or hard-won words of wisdom?

Indeed, human beings being what they are, divorce is the inevitable shadow that dogs the steps of any marriage. It will be no different for gay people. The ending of legally binding relationships will be as messy and painful for us as it is for them. Especially if children are involved.

A little taste of this was given to us on Dyke TV (and subsequently in The Daily Mail) when a Scottish lesbian couple who were raising a child together decided to split up. A custody battle in court then ensued, and nobody came out of it smelling of roses.

Apropos of this, the Reverend Bill Wallace of the Church of Scotland was quickly on hand to tell The Daily Mail that “I think same-sex relationships do not have a good track record for stability.”

Has Mr Wallace seen the heterosexual divorce statistics recently?

Taking on the responsibility for raising children is a serious decision and I am all in favour of it being made difficult. Nobody, straight or gay, should undertake parenthood without first having to think carefully about it. Straight people often have children by accident, children which they resent and don’t want. Gay people have to go to great lengths to achieve the same end. Artificial insemination, adoption or surrogacy all need careful planning, not just a careless night of passion. But that does not stop the outcry from the tabloids whenever a child is brought into a gay relationship.

The Daily Express tried its damnedest to make the surrogate baby conceived in America on behalf of Bill Zachs and Martin Adam sound like a scandal, but the participants in the drama wouldn’t co-operate. The paper eventually tracked down the mother of the child, Andrea Gibson, but she was adamant that she had carefully thought about what she was doing, didn’t regret it and had the child’s best interests at heart. She thought little Sarah Clare would have a loving and privileged life with the two men.

This did not stop anti-gay propagandist George Gordon – The Daily Mail’s American correspondent – from trying to turn the positive into the negative. “My torment, by mother who sold baby to gays” was the headline over his piece (September 7th). He tried to convince us that the two gay men had somehow exploited the woman and that she now regretted her decision, but there was no evidence to back up his assertions, and despite his wishful claim that the government were about to “set up an urgent review into the case” no such review has been forthcoming, and none is planned.

The Right’s objections to gay parenting are familiar by now. Fiona Webster in The Daily Mirror expressed one of them: “A gay couple who have ordered a baby from America – in the same way you might order a toy from a catalogue – say they don’t want any embarrassing fuss… If these suddenly ‘shy’ parents want to learn anything about fuss and embarrassment, all they have to do is go into the school playground on ‘their’ child’s first day at school.” The other point made is that children brought up in a same-sex relationship will inevitably “become” gay themselves.

Some of these issues were explored in an article in The London Evening Standard, “Living with Gay Parents” (September 6th). Children who had been raised by gay parents were allowed to tell their own stories. One, Derby Davenport who is now 25, told how, at the age of twelve, she had confided in a friend that her mother lived in a lesbian relationship. “[The friend] told everyone in my class and I immediately became an outcast and all the children would whisper to each other as I walked down the hall. I never wanted to go to school again. That’s how it was for most of my teens.” She admits that eventually the experience made her stronger and more understanding, but it was terrible at the time. She is not gay herself, and neither are any of the other people interviewed in The Standard, although one young man said that he had been troubled about it for a while.

When Dan Katch discovered that his father was gay, he became terrified that he, too, would become homosexual even though he felt no attraction for men. He went to a therapist who assured him that his father’s sexuality had no influence on his own and from then on “I felt overwhelmingly relieved. The realisation that I wasn’t necessarily going to be gay just because my father was meant that I could stop being afraid of it.”

And that’s half the problem – people being afraid. If those who oppose gay child-rearing continue to peddle untruths about the nature and functioning of gay families, then progress will be slow indeed, and totally unnecessary fears will be planted in the minds of young people.

It is not gay couples who are harming the children in their care, it is the preachers and pseudo-moralists who do the damage. As a correspondent to The Daily Express’s letters page said: “Today many children in so-called normal families are abused, neglected and deprived without any public outcry. It is the quality of love and care given a child that matters, not who provides it.”

***

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

Oscar Moore, the Guardian columnist who lost his long battle against Aids in September, wrote a last essay which could stand as his epitaph: “It is perhaps the inevitable, but certainly the fabulous irony, that the threat of death has led to a heightened sense of life, for me personally, and for the gay community in general.” (The Guardian)

“Please, George, do shut up and be sensible. Do refrain from pontificating on a subject, that of homosexuality, of which you, as a happily married man, appear to know pathetically little. I don’t remember Our Lord commenting on it. Are you not being a little presumptuous? In the world to which you look forward, you will not be judged on your sexual proclivities, but rather on the love and compassion you have shown for your fellow men.” The Rev Dr Robert de Massey’s advice to the Archdeacon of York, the Venerable George Austin (The Observer)

“From watching the porno channel in New York, I find that one of the biggest turn-ons for men is to see two women having sex together. I would feel very uncomfortable if, in the name of sexual liberation, I was actually being used for the opposite – sexually oppressing women,” was the reason given by Prime Suspect star Helen Mirren on why she will not be doing a lesbian sex scene in her new TV movie in which she plays a housewife who finds love with another woman.

That Eastenders kiss has got ‘em going. Take self-confessed “middle-aged housewife”, Ann Jones, who wrote to the Radio Times: “It is time television woke up to the fact that a sizeable number of the population are gay. It is far less offensive to watch a gay kiss than a heterosexual couple ripping each other’s clothes off.”

Real men don’t wear support hose. Let Leonardo di Caprio explain, talking to Premiere magazine about his new film he said: “Our Romeo and Juliet is a little more hard-core and a lot cooler. Because I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had to jump around in tights.”

Fran Landesman, the 60-something poet and lyricist, was asked on Desert Island Discs what luxury she would take with her: “Cannabis seeds,” she replied.

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=

Actually I think Mrs Anne Atkins is right. She’s the vicar’s wife who made the famous Thought for the Day broadcast which seems to have brought the Anglican Church to the point of schism. In the broadcast, Mrs Atkins used the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement’s 20th anniversary bash at Southwark Cathedral to launch a full-frontal attack on what she regards as the Church of England’s permissive attitude to homosexuality. “Soon we will have an adulterers’ Christian fellowship, a sex before marriage Christian fellowship. I see no reason why the list should ever end.”

That fateful two and a half minutes on Radio Four generated a huge amount of comment and reaction. Stories appeared about the support the fragrant lady had got from her husband’s parishioners and people all around the country. She was photographed being embraced by her husband and surrounded by adoring children. The complete picture of traditional family values within the context of heterosexual marriage.

Apparently her phone never stopped ringing all day — and naturally everyone who rang agreed with her. A hundred vicars wrote to The Church Times roused to action by her clarion call. The woman certainly whipped up a storm, to the extent that The London Evening Standard opined: “Mrs Atkins bids fair to become a heroine of the church-going middle classes.” And there was plenty of evidence to support that opinion in the other papers.

Her outburst was like manna from heaven for those havens of moral correctness The Daily Mail, The Express and The Sun. “The Reverend Richard Kirker says the proposed service for gays and lesbians will be a ‘celebration’ of the ‘gift’ of their homosexuality. Who might I ask, gave them that gift? It certainly didn’t come from the God I love,” wrote D Keefe to The Daily Mail.

“Church must admit gays are sinners” headlined The Sun, while The Daily Telegraph thought that blasphemy had changed its meaning. The “modern blasphemy” apparently is not speaking ill of God, but daring to criticise homosexuals. Every religious fanatic and right-winger in the land raised cheers. At last, it seemed, their time had come.

But even as the newspapers lauded Mrs Atkins for her forthright espousal of true Christian values, they were, in their usual way, preparing to knock their new-found heroine from her pedestal.

Boy George was first in, when he wrote in his Daily Express column: “Just 60 shopping days to go and already the Christians are curdling the milk of human kindness. Anne Atkins, the wife of a vicar, says gays should be chased out of the Church. Her media outburst and profile might boost the sales of crimplene but life still goes on.”

The Sunday Express, however, thought it wasn’t the sales of crimplene Mrs Atkins was trying to boost, but something else entirely. “Thought for the Day: How to market my wonderful new book” was the headline over a comprehensive hatchet job on Mrs Atkins by Jane Warren. “Could it be that her dramatic contribution to the moral debate was related to the publication last week of her novel On Our Own, on sale in all good bookshops for £16.99?” Surely not.

A retired rector is quoted as saying: “It would certainly seem inappropriate for a vicar’s wife to use the scriptures to serve any other ends than God’s, if that’s what indeed she has done.” And yet Mrs Atkins “does not refute the charge that the radio and the book might be connected.” She happily admits: “The novel may have been one of my reasons for doing Thought…”

“Her morality is also distractingly flexible when it comes to her own fiction,” writes Jane Warren. “the unmarried heroine of her novel feels no shame about sleeping with her boyfriend. Bible-bashing fiction doesn’t sell so she simply stumped up the standard fare.”

During her Thought for the Day talk, Mrs Atkins claimed: “I am not homophobic and have gay friends.” It seems she must now speak of those friends in the past tense, because according to Richard Kirker: “We have received a number of letters from gay Christian friends of Anne Atkins. They are horrified that she might have been thinking of them when she spoke of having ‘gay friends’ and they no longer wish to be considered as her friends.”

But despite the fall from grace, Mrs Atkins had given the holy homophobes a new impetus. The Daily Telegraph reported that “every Friday at lunch-time, two dozen or so City workers meet in a room at St Margaret’s Church, tucked behind the Bank of England, for tea, sandwiches, Bible-reading and prayers”. And, it seems, a spot of righteous gay-bashing.

“The Bible says that if people are involved in homosexuality they cannot enter the kingdom of God,” one is quoted as saying. Another says: “Homosexuality is one thing God says you should not do if you want to benefit from My kingdom and My life.” Another insists the Bible considers homosexuality “shameful and a perversion”.

These sad souls, who seem to derive great pleasure from hatred, adore telling each other how good they are and how wicked everyone else is. But they don’t have it all their own way. The Telegraph also visited a pub up the road, where ordinary people were spending their lunch break, to find out what they thought. Ms Rochelle Ormond, 26, who describes herself as a regular churchgoer said: “If gays and lesbians want to do that sort of thing then good luck to them. It’s a free country. If they want to be together they should be allowed. If a heterosexual couple want to be married in church, then I can’t see why a gay couple can’t be. I don’t see why if two people love each other they shouldn’t show the world what their feelings are.”

Dear old bleeding-heart liberal Rachelle. She’d better watch what she says or she’ll be going to church on Sunday and finding herself had up for heresy. Yes, heresy! If you thought that such a medieval idea had gone out of fashion with the Spanish Inquisition, think again. In fact it’s one of the favourite buzz-words of Reform, a group of Anglican authoritarians who are leading the charge against gays in the Church.

One of the leading lights of this bunch of fanatics is the Reverend David Holloway (he’s the one who’s always on Kilroy and The Time and The Place breathing fire and brimstone to order). The Revd Holloway was writing in The Church Times about LGCM’s party: “There is now evil in the Church even where there is ‘chief authority’. There has been overt heresy in the episcopate… Public doubts and denials of the virginal conception and empty tomb of Jesus are heretical, if words mean anything. The bishops’ report Issues in Human Sexuality is also heretical. For all the benign language (and much good material), the acceptance of conscientious gay sex among the laity is heresy.” In fact, anything that Reform doesn’t agree with (and that’s just about everything that’s happened since the 12th century) is “heretical”.

Heresy is a very useful concept for authoritarians because it effectively stifles debate. You want to challenge the orthodoxy? You’re a heretic. You think the church is being cruel and inhuman? You’re a heretic. This is one game the gentle and compassionate Christian can’t win, only McCarthyite bully boys like Reform will use weapons such as ‘heresy’ and ‘blasphemy’ to silence its opponents. Don’t forget, you can still be sent to jail for blasphemy.

An editorial in The Church Times sought to referee the scrap between the LGCM and Reform. “The bishops have become like the police at a demonstration, caught between two rival factions, and hit by missiles thrown by both… Different views necessarily exist in any Christian Church; and a common mistake is to allow the existence of opposing views to harden one’s own. Valuable Anglican habits of debate and toleration are thus replaced by assertion and confrontation. To live in communion with people with whom one disagrees is a sign of strength, not weakness.”

This plea for tolerance regrettably fell on deaf ears. The Revd Ian F R Jarvis of Derbyshire wrote in the following issue: “You pass over the awkward fact that Reform, most evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, and many other Anglicans besides believe that the gay and lesbian sexual behaviour advocated by LGCM is radically unChristian, in fact anti-Christian. Because of that conviction, solidly based in scripture and age-long Christian teaching, they can do no other than protest and oppose such behaviour as rigorously as possible. Truth matters far more than your editorial begins to acknowledge. It exposes a deep, radical disagreement on what is, and is not, Christian sexual behaviour. Your editorial makes sorry reading, a sad capitulation to secular Western cultural values.”

And so I return to the point I made at the beginning. I think Mrs Atkins is right, and so is the Revd Holloway and all the others. Christian teaching leaves no room for doubt that homosexual sex is contrary to the rules and all the “theological nit-picking” (as the Revd Holloway calls it) in which gay Christians engage will not change that fact. Reform and its members, and the Roman Catholic Church say that our love is “intrinsically evil”. We know from our own experience that they are wrong about this. And if they are wrong about this, then they can be wrong about so much else.

It’s from this starting point that those gays hammering on the doors of an institution that despises them might stop and consider the alternatives. They could begin the slow process of disengagement. There are alternatives to religion that value human life and all experience. It’s possible to be good without God.

***

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

The Guardian was enchanted by a photograph of Defence Secretary Michael Portillo published in The Times during the Tory Party Conference. It showed our Mick “relaxing in his Bournemouth Hotel with a bowl of fruit by his side.” Guardian diarist, Smallweed, pondered the significance of the fruit. “I suspect the return of the kind of iconography, once familiar in portraiture, where heroes appear with symbols… designed to convey some allegedly salient truth about them. We are being asked, subliminally, to see Michael Portillo as a bringer of fruit…”

The arrival of TV’s newest and campest cooks, Two Fat Ladies, has prompted much wild speculation. “Are they nodding acquaintances,” asked The Independent on Sunday’s David Aaronovitch, “brought together by the BBC, like the Monkees or Boyzone, to create a camera-friendly chemistry? Is it possible that they are followers of Sappho, living together in Shropshire, with two golden retrievers and a donkey called Prescott? Or are they Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders in their most subversive show to date?”

“He doesn’t say much,” writes Sylvia Patterson in The Face, “has a lot of sex and is full-frontal naked for much of his on-screen time.” Who? Euan McGregor, that’s who. In Peter Greenaway’s new film, The Pillow Book. Oh, and “he has a very handsome penis.” There’s more. “Weren’t you worried about, you know, shrinkage?” Patterson boldly enquires. “No fuckin’ worries there, darlin’.” For once, this is no idle boast…

When politicians talk about morality, it’s usually time to count the spoons. But Labour leader, Tony Blair, has made a better pitch than many: “I’ve no desire to return to the age of Victorian hypocrisy about sex, to women’s place being only in the kitchen, to homophobia or to preaching to people about their private lives… But the absence of prejudice should not mean the absence of rules, of order, of stability… Let the social morality be based on reason — not bigotry.”

Poor Jason Donovan, forever haunted by that libel case. His latest attempt to resurrect his once-glittering career saw him talking to The Guardian: “I was virtually brought up by a gay guy for six years so I was surrounded by the gay community and I loved it… I paid the price for alienating the gay community and my gay audience.” And if he had his time over again, would he still have sued The Face? “No, I wouldn’t. It was horrible. Horrible.”

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 I worked on the problem page at Woman’s Own, I was astonished at the number of letters that came from women who had discovered, sometimes after decades of marriage and several children, that their husbands were gay. Often they were in a state of profound shock, insisting that they had never had any suspicion about their spouse’s secret inclinations.

Judging by the number of times this particular problem still crops up in agony columns, there has been little change over the years. The Sunday Mirror’s doctor, Mark Porter (who has taken over from the late, lamented Marje Proops), was proffering advice to a “secret gay afraid to tell his bride-to-be” (November 24th). Then Deirdre Sanders on The Sun heard from a woman who had discovered that her fiance “admitted a gay fling with another man two years before we met” (November 21st) and wondered whether it indicated a poor prognosis for their intended marriage.

Of course, we’ve recently had a very high-profile example of a gay man who didn’t come out until after the marriage vows had been taken. When Michael Barrymore proclaimed his homosexuality, he left his wife Cheryl, but eventually returned to her. And that’s the other thing I found out about mixed marriages (one gay spouse, one straight): people can be incredibly accommodating to new circumstances. Friendships blossom where once there had been resentment, companionship continues, even though sex doesn’t. So, when a gay man marries a straight woman, it doesn’t inevitably spell disaster. (Interestingly, The Sunday Mirror has started a feature on making anagrams from famous people’s names. “Michael Barrymore”, they discovered, rejigs as “I’m a merry bachelor”.)

But what about those wives whose husbands are dogged by rumours of homosexuality? How certain can she be when she is required to pooh-pooh these speculations?

There seemed to be little doubt in the mind of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of Klosters. Her husband Prince Andrew’s sexuality has been the subject of rumours for years now. And not just within the gay community. Giving interviews on US television, promoting her so-called autobiography, it seemed inevitable that Fergie would find herself quizzed on the topic. And so it came to pass when she appeared on The Diane Sawyer Show. “Because the Prince has not been seen with other women, therefore he must be gay?” asked the chat show hostess bluntly. “Oh right, yeah,” replied Fergie, “I really love that. There’s absolutely no chance he can be gay. A lot of people believe that’s true – and it is categorically not true.”

The following day her remarks appeared on the front page of The Daily Star (November 14th) as: “I Know Andy’s No Pansy” (with a strange sub-heading “Ooh, aah, he’s no Brendaah”). Inside, the paper continued to phrase its headlines in this curious, football terrace-style language. “Andy’s Too Randy to be a Dandy”. The paper insisted that he had been “linked with lovelies” such as Koo Stark and lots of others who you’ve never heard of. And to categorically prove that he is heterosexual, The Star said that the Prince “once famously revealed his crown jewels by whipping off his swimming trunks in front of three girls.”

The rumours about Andrew had begun, said the paper, when his wife took an HIV test in 1986. Buckingham Palace was forced to issue a denial that the Prince was HIV-positive after rumour circulated on the Internet. The Daily Star says: “It sparked the rumours about Andrew’s sexuality and newspapers – including The Daily Star – began to receive tip-offs from people claiming to have evidence about the Prince’s private life. Some, claiming to be highly placed, said the Palace would announce that Andrew had a serious illness. Others said they had solid information that he was gay.” None of this seems to have yet come to pass, but there was a particularly fetching picture of the Prince judging a drag competition aboard his ship in The Daily Mirror.

Another public figure who has been similarly hounded with persistent rumours about his sexuality is Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secretary. He also found his wife coming to his defence in an interview with Hello! magazine. Foolishly rising to the question “People have said that Peter is gay. Does that upset you?” Gail Lilley said: “I’ve heard the rumours about Peter, but there’s nobody less remotely gay than my husband. That’s the funniest thing yet because I know it’s not true I just think it’s silly and I laugh.” She agreed that the rumours were probably a spin-off from the fact that he is childless.

There was alarm in the Tory party at Mrs Lilley’s undiplomatic blabbing, and Carole Sarler in The People (November 24th) commented: “Senior party figures are apparently alarmed by Mrs Lilley’s unwise remarks, fearing that to even address the issue is to make people feel that there is no smoke without fire. Besides, says one anxious Tory grandee, this could now ‘become the latest fodder for the comedians scripts’. He need not worry that anything is about to change for the worse. In the comedy clubs that I frequent, the comics have been making merry with this rumour for more years than I can remember.”

Indeed, The Sunday Telegraph’s weekly “Table Talk” feature (“the week’s news – as digested at a dinner party near you”) said that “jumping firmly on the bandwagon, Dinner Party wives publicly declare their husbands to be straight as dice. As is usually the case with such unprompted declarations, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” (Next week no doubt the Sunday Mirror’s anagram editor will realise that “Rt Honourable Peter Lilley” can, coincidentally, be rearranged into… no, I’d better let you work this one out.)

Another politician who round himself in a similar position once was Jeremy Thorpe. His tragic tale was rehashed by Channel 4 in its Secret Lives programme on November 18th. The Independent also took up the tale in its November 13th edition, telling the story of the once-influential politician who had become embroiled in a homosexual affair with an unstable young man who then tried to bring him down. The affair with Norman Scott began in 1961, but Mr Thorpe didn’t marry his second wife until 1973. Was she aware of his homosexual romps? Perhaps we should send a reporter from Hello! round to find out. Whether she did or not, Thorpe managed a very effective cover-up of his secret gay life for many years.

Perhaps there is a lesson for modern-day politicians somewhere in here: closetry — which is a particularly nasty form of lying because it harms other gay people by perpetuating the myth that homosexuality is shameful and must be denied — can bring terrible consequences when you’re eventually found out. It is also a form of wife-abuse.

I wouldn’t have thought it was so bad for pop stars, though. All the same, George Michael can’t bring himself to say one way or the other. In an interview with The Big Issue magazine (ripped off by The Sun before the magazine hit the streets), Mr Michael comes over as monstrously narcissistic and self-regarding man. (Indeed, “George Michael, singer” is an anagram for “G: him sincere large ego”.) However, the part of the interview that interested the tabloids was the bit about his sexuality. As The Sunday Express (or, as we now have to call it The Express: Sunday) put it: “To be gay or not to be gay? That is the question which George Michael cannot answer.” Or will not. “I think everything about me has always been ambiguous,” said the great artiste. “Although my sexuality hasn’t always been completely clear to me, it was never a moral question. I’ve never thought of my sexuality as being right or wrong. To me it has always been about finding the right person. The only moral involved in sex is whether it’s consenting or not… Anyway, who really cares whether I’m gay or straight? Do they really think they’ve got a serious chance of shagging me or something?”

Boy George, forever a thorn in Mr Michael’s apparently much-desired flesh, threw out this challenge to the great sex symbol in his column in The Daily Express: “George says he has nothing to hide and that he has never considered his mysterious sexuality to be wrong. If that’s the case, then why can’t he get it past his lips?”

Mr Michael explains that his obfuscation about the gender of his preferred bed partners is really a career consideration. If he can maintain the ambiguity about his sexuality he can fascinate both men and women, and then everybody is happy. Except those of us who find him absolutely repellent, of course.

And still in the mad world of pop, we return to Michael Jackson who has, since we last communicated, been married and separated again. “Is there anything Michael Jackson won’t do to make us think he’s normal?” asked The Express when the marriage to Debbie Rowe was announced. The paper cast doubts on the veracity of Mr Jackson’s intentions when we were informed that Ms Rowe was carrying his child. “Is the man this desperate or are we being unfair?” asked Jane Warren, the Express’s reporter. “Could it be that he has a genuine desire to be linked in the eyes of God to the mother of his child? The only comment I can offer is: watch this space.”

Well, we did watch that space and within days it was announced that the two were separating. “Michael Jackson’s pregnant bride issued an amazing statement last night,” reported The Sun, “declaring: ‘I’m not a lesbian.” Apparently she felt bound to make the statement after American reporters started to raise doubts about her heterosexuality. Her attorney said: “It is beyond the bounds of decency to suggest anything like this. There is absolutely no truth whatsoever.”

Oh, and just another little note for the anagram editor of The Sunday Mirror. Did you know that “Michael Portillo, as MP” makes “I’m a male trollop, chaps.” And “Prime Minister John Major” comes out as “Ja, strip John, I rim more men”.

Interesting, isn’t it?

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QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

The new-look Daily Express, desperate to attract new readers, seems still to be attractive to the old-style ones, if this reader’s letter is anything to go by. One Geoffrey Lindley from Dorset wrote in calling for a ban on the sale of mistletoe. “Bearing in mind the current Aids epidemic,” he reasoned, “it is highly irresponsible for anyone to sell merchandise that encourages people to act in a debauched and immoral fashion. The habit of kissing beneath the mistletoe is not simply an innocent act and often encourages intoxicated folk to indulge in casual sex.” We’ve obviously been going to the wrong parties…

George Michael comes out. Well, no, not really. His world exclusive interview with The Big Issue magazine was a masterpiece of studied ambiguity. “My sexuality is no one’s fucking business,” he declares, reasonably enough, before talking about it at length. “Even though my sexuality hasn’t always been clear to me,” he waffles on, “it was never a moral question. I’ve never thought of my sexuality as being right or wrong. I’ve wondered what my sexuality might be but I’ve never wondered whether it was acceptable or not to me…” That’s quite enough, thanks George. Don’t call us…

Jane Seymour’s TV son has been caught snogging another man. A picture in The Daily Mirror showed Chad Allen, who plays Seymour’s son in Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, “smooching in a swimming pool with a man.” A “startled” onlooker at a “lavish Hollywood party” said: “Chad suddenly put his arm around Jason and kissed him… [they] could not stop kissing and touching.” Chad will not be surprised to learn that he has been dumped by his girlfriend.

They’ll get you innuendo. Derek Laud, prospective Tory candidate for Tottenham (where he faces the impossible task of unseating Bernie Grant), is black. He is also, The Observer wants us to know, a close friend of former Tory MP, Harvey Proctor, “who was forced to resign his seat in 1987 after admitting gross indecency with rent boys.” And he’s close to gay Tory MP, Michael Brown, “with whom, it was reported, Laud shared a home and for whom he worked as a research assistant.” And? Oh yes, Derek Laud is “a confirmed bachelor”. Which means, presumably, he will never marry…