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=

It wasn’t the White Wolves or Combat 18 or the BNP, or any combination of organised fascist groups that planted the nail bombs, say the police. Indeed, if everything we are led to believe turns out to be true, the culprit was no more than some spotty Herbert with Milosevician delusions, carrying out his one-man crusade to cleanse dear old England of its niggers, pakis and poofs.

Panic Over. Everyone can relax. The neo-Nazis have returned to their back bedroom bunkers to plan their next bid to dominate the world, and to load a bit more toxin on to their Internet sites.

Within two days of someone being taken into custody, interest in the nail bombs had subsided to the point of indifference. It was just some sad loony acting on his own, so no need to go on about it.

But is that true? Maybe one dangerous little wanker has been taken out of circulation, but his fantasies are still at large, fantasies that The Sunday Times called “the poison that exists in the underbelly of British society”.

The problem is that this poison doesn’t just exist in the “underbelly”; as far as attitudes to homosexuality go, it is blatant, it is mainstream and it is the province not just of crazy Hitlerites, but of Archbishops and respected journalists and Lords and Ladies in Parliament.

Yes, indeed, straight reaction to the Soho atrocity was stunning in its hypocrisy. The crocodile tears flowed down Fleet Street in a torrent. “It is outrageous to seek out homosexuals in this way,” thundered The Daily Telegraph the day after the bomb had gone off. “Such stupefying evil must be met by only one response: cold, quiet but deeply angry resolution.”

We can only hope that The Daily Telegraph intends to apply the sentiments expressed in these noble words to its own editorial policy. The day before the bomb, a headline on the letters page of The Daily Telegraph said: “Don’t push homosexual laws on us”.

The letter, from a clergyman in Grand Cayman, demanded that those British colonies that still retain their “tradition” of criminalising and imprisoning gay people should be allowed to continue to do so. Never mind human rights, was the message, we simply don’t want that sort in our Christian society.

Then came The Times, as resolute as all the other papers in the face of the attack on the Admiral Duncan: “This murderous explosion appears to be the third strike in a malicious campaign aimed at persecuting Britain’s minority communities. The public should express their disgust for such acts by affirming a national spirit of vigilance in defence of tolerance.” The Times knows all about “malicious campaigns” — it has run enough of them against gay people.

And what about this, from The Sunday People: “There is nothing quite so foul, quite so disgusting, or quite so stomach-turning as blind prejudice. … Britain is shocked that among us are those with minds so warped and views so extreme they will plan and carry out cold-blooded murder because of the colour of your skin, the sexuality you practise or the religion you choose to follow.”

A few short years ago, The Sunday People was castigated by the Press Council for “gratuitously and without any possible justification” writing shockingly crude articles about gay priests, under the banner “poofs in the pulpit”.

So, what, all of a sudden, is this about “foul prejudice”? Has the editor of the Sunday People noticed any inconsistency here?

Then, ripest of all, came The Sun. “There is a huge tide of sympathy towards the minorities. An attack on THEM is an attack on each and every one of US. And as we saw in Soho, the victims wore certainly not all gay anyway.”

Is this the same paper that has, over the years, carried out one of the most sustained anti-homosexual propaganda campaigns? Regular readers of this column don’t need reminding of the countless occasions that The Sun has been cited for its fetid homophobia.

It was The Sun, in the 80s, that led the way in the use of hate-filled words like “poof’ and “poofter” in its headlines. And it has employed one extremist homophobe after another to write vitriolic attacks upon us. Garry Bushell, Richard Littlejohn, Norman Tebbit, Trevor Kavanagh —they’ve all been given space in the paper to spew out their hatred. What effect can such an extended and widely-read campaign have had on the minds of people who are already inclined to hate?

And, talking of hate, look here at Paul Johnson in The Daily Mail. “It is simply not true that we [the British] are intolerant of minorities, ethnic, racial, sexual or any other kind,” he says. We know that Johnson has a penchant for humbug — but surely this piece of sanctimony is too big for even him to swallow. Over the years, Paul Johnson has penned reams of virulently anti-homosexual rhetoric, and The Daily Mail and The Spectator have enthusiastically published it.

In The Sunday Telegraph, Cardinal Basil Hume, leader of the Roman Catholics in Britain, was quoted as saying how “horrified” he was at what happened in Soho. “The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t agree with many aspects of the way the gay community think and act,” he said, “but it does condemn utterly, and I condemn utterly, all violence against gays.”

Oh please! Pass me the sick bag. Is this the same Cardinal Hume who wrote to The Times on the day of the Lords debate on the age of consent, urging their Lordships to chuck the bill out because of the “exploitative” nature of gay relationships and because acceptance of equality would “send the wrong message” to society? And is it the same Catholic Church he represents that refers to gay people as “intrinsically disordered” and to our love as “an objective moral evil?” Does Basil Hume see traces of blood on his own hands?

The Cardinal’s unconvincing performance was matched, if not surpassed, by old fork-tongue himself, George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He said: “Like racism, homophobia has no place in our society.”

In case you thought that was a: misprint, I’ll repeat it: “Like racism, homophobia has no place in our society.”

Where does George Carey get the sheer brass neck to utter such words after his performance at last year’s gay-bashing jamboree known as the Lambeth Conference? Was it the same George Carey who gave his vote to a resolution which set gay Christians back centuries? And was it he who gave his endorsement to the African bishops who called us “evil” and “satanic”? Either George Carey is an idiot, or he thinks we are.

Another repetitive homophobe is Peter Hitchens, who is at least honest enough to admit that he is a homophobe and to define himself as “pretty Right-wing”. In The Express, where his unpleasant column sits uneasily with the new liberal regime introduced by Rosie Boycott, he wrote: “I am worried that there will now be attempts to suppress certain attitudes and opinions, on the grounds that they may ‘lead to’ incidents like these bombings. That would be wrong… If we really want to stamp on the idea that you can blow up people you do not like, then attacks on `homophobia’ are not the answer.”

Oh, aren’t they? Silly old me — I was under the impression that homophobia was the bomber’s motivation that Friday evening. And, anyway, it is not illogical to imagine that those who hate homosexuals might one day want to hurt the objects of their hatred. Peter Hitchens might not feel the need to make bombs, but who is to say that one of his crazed readers might not find, in his words, the rationale he needs to walk into a crowded pub with a lethal weapon and leave it there to kill and maim innocent people?

Then Tony Blair — ace political opportunist that he is — climbed on to the rickety isn’t-Britain-tolerant bandwagon. “These bombs are hideous acts,” he wrote in The Sunday Times. “But the only good that can come of them is if they spur all of us, whatever our age, creed, race, sex or sexuality, to work harder to build one nation… In Britain there is no place for bigotry, no home for the politics of hatred.”

Has Mr Blair heard the bigotry and hatred against gay people emanating from the House of Lords? He describes the neo-Nazi hate groups as “evil bigots who are in the minority in this country” but, as Philip Hensher said in The Independent, “there is an undeniable continuity of thought between the disapproval and hatred voiced in the debates on the age of consent in the House of Lords and that which spoke on Old Compton Street on Friday night. Both assumed the unelected right to inform us that our lives are worth less than theirs; that they have the duty to protect society from our malign influence.”

Lord Tebbit has been a long-time representative of this establishment homo-hatred. In The Mail on Sunday he wrote about the age of consent debate like this: “Last week hereditary Tory peers (supported by some brave Labour peers and many Tory lifers, too) again voted down Mr Blair’s Bill to encourage buggery and increase the spread of AIDS by legalising the seduction of young boys of 16 by predatory men seeking perverted sex. The public does not want this Bill…”

If Tony Blair is serious about his desire to “build a society where there is opportunity for all, where the barriers of prejudice are dismantled”, then can I just remind him that he has a few promises to keep to gay people in this country. If he wants justice for all, be must take a major role in creating it.

Simon Fanshawe in The Guardian told of telephone calls received at Stonewall on the morning after the bomb. Some were sympathetic, but a greater number weren’t: “I’ve got a box of nails here, shall I send it to you?” said one. “They should have bombed every pub in the street,” said another. “Gas the queers… fuck off nancies” and on and on. In the end, thought Fanshawe, this is about who defines Britishness. Is it the cruel, backward-looking eccentrics in the House of Lords or is it the diverse communities that now make up the population?

“Is Britain a country unable to do more than fix its stare in the rear-view mirror and reverse into its white, straight, imperial past?” wrote Fanshawe. “Or is it a country that can turn a great tradition of liberal tolerance into a new identity that draws its essential strength from its diversity?”

This is the big question that will decide the safety of all our futures. But those who could make a difference — a big difference — remain resolutely silent.

The Queen puts out a message of sympathy on the evening of the bombing, offering condolences to the victims and their families. Does she mention that she stands shoulder to shoulder with her gay citizens in their time of trial? Does she buggery.

Even in the Queen’s Speech at the beginning of this session of Parliament she couldn’t bring herself to mouth the “g” word, even though it rendered what she, said meaningless. “My Government will enact legislation to lower the age of consent,” she said. But she just couldn’t bring herself to say it, and anyone from abroad, unfamiliar with British politics, reading that speech would have had no idea what she was talking about.

And then her son, the heir to the throne, arrived on the scene, anxious to improve his new, post-Diana caring image. Was there any indication from him about exactly who had been attacked, and who he was sympathising with? What — the Prince of Wales talk in public about that kind of filthy depraved thing? The very idea!

If these supposedly great and good folk are serious about their commitment to an inclusive, tolerant and unbigoted society, then why do they keep up the charade that homosexuals are still unmentionable in polite society? When will the Queen give one of her waves to her gay and lesbian subjects? When will she open her first gay centre, or pay her first visit to a gay event? If she wanted to show us that she really is concerned about the ethos of her country, she could attend the next Stonewall show at the Albert Hall. For the cost of one evening, she could change this country in a fundamental way. Will she do it? Will she hell. And until the day she does, I don’t want to hear any more empty blathering about breaking down barriers.

And as for the press, the same applies. If they want to change the way Britons regard minorities, they are going to have to change themselves. The Daily Mail will have to cease its constant agitation against refugees and its crude campaigns against gays. The Sun will have to stop its filthy hate-mongering once and for all. The Daily Telegraph will have to restrain its religious extremism. No-one is talking about censorship here. I don’t want laws telling people what they can and can’t say. I want journalists to exercise their own restraint, simply because it’s the decent thing to do.

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 Archbishop of Canterbury held a “top secret” meeting with gay Christians and their opponents a couple of months ago. It was so secret, in fact, that it was only reported in nine out of ten newspapers, on TV and radio and in Gay Times. And yet, it wasn’t until last month that The Observer caught up and reported the meeting on its front page as though it had uncovered a great sensational exclusive.

The only thing it included that we hadn’t already read elsewhere was a quote from an unnamed evangelical priest, who said that the meeting was “appalling, like sitting down to eat with people who have sex with animals.”

Perhaps the quote was included to shock the liberal readership of The Observer. It certainly shocked me to read such a comment on the front page of a paper I’d assumed was above the inclusion of crude abuse in its pages.

The gay-bashing jamboree that emanated from religious sources last month started with what might have been considered a positive announcement — that the Anglican Children’s Society had lifted its ban on gay couples adopting children. Not surprisingly, that little titbit provoked a deluge of hatred from the true believers.

The Director of the Evangelical Church Society, for instance, called on “ordinary church members who raise funds for the Children’s Society” to stop doing so and to “redirect their efforts and giving until the policy is reversed.”

Then came Martin Hallett, who describes himself as “a charity worker and self-confessed homosexual”. He was given a large amount of space in The Daily Mail to condemn the Children’s Society. “The decision fills me — a homosexual — with anxiety,” he wrote. “For a leading Anglican charity to suggest, by implication, that homosexual activity is a good example to set before impressionable youngsters is to make mock of long-established and deeply-held beliefs.” He then went on to spout all the usual stuff about children needing “domestic role models of father and mother” and how damaged children will be if they are raised in confusion by two mummies or two daddies.

The fact that numerous studies have shown that these fears are groundless doesn’t stop them being perpetuated by those with an axe to grind. In fact, a great deal of research has shown that children exhibit no confusion in these situations — all they want is someone who is concerned about them and who will love and support them. But Hallett insists that “Adoption societies and local authorities can afford to be picky. They can hold out for the `ideal’ family to come along looking for a child to bring up.”

But they can’t. The children we are talking about here are the damaged ones, those with disabilities, those with emotional and behavioural problems, the tearaways and delinquents. They often aren’t cute, they aren’t adorable and they can be extremely demanding.

The ‘ideal’ (i.e. heterosexual) couples that Martin Hallett seems to think are queuing up at the Children’s Society’s doors wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole. “Holding out” as he suggests will simply result in these children spending the bulk of their formative years in institutions, and however good such establishments are, they cannot be a substitute for a home and a family of your own. Even if it is headed by two men or two women.

By the way, the charity that Martin Hallett works for is The True Freedom Trust, which seeks to “cure” homosexuality through prayer and Bible study. I am not alone in thinking that what the TFT actually does is further damage people who are already deeply disturbed about their sexuality. Hardly the right man to be talking about what’s best for others.

In The Independent, Yasmin Alibhai Brown, probably the only liberal Muslim columnist in captivity, wrote of her own feelings about gay and lesbian adopters. At first she went along with the crowd who, despite convincing evidence to the contrary, feel in their guts that it’s “wrong”. But, after some thought, she changed her mind.

“The many cases of torture and abuse of children by heterosexual fathers and mothers should, by now, have cured us of the myth that these are ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ parents. Where is the justice in applying such prohibitive standards to gay parents?” she said.

She was also helped along the goad of enlightenment by “an unpleasantly triumphant call” from a Muslim acquaintance, who said that Christians are now surely assured a “place in hell” because of the Children’s Society decision.

This annoyed Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, who wrote to The Independent: “It was much the same fear of the reaction from Muslims in their own countries that motivated much of the willingness by so many bishops of the Anglican Church worldwide to adopt a formally anti-gay policy at last year’s Lambeth Conference. This is a clear case of a Christian church allowing its theology to be determined out of deference to Islamic sensibilities. This is a very curious state of affairs, bearing in mind the widespread prevalence of homosexual behaviour in Islamic countries, a fact which some Muslims in Britain are beginning to face up to.”

But he wasn’t going to be allowed to get away with that. Shahid Amin quickly retorted in the same paper: “Homosexuality is not widespread in Islam. Islam was perfected as a religion in the seventh century. Homosexuality was made illegal at that point. You cannot be a Muslim and gay.”

And neither, it seems, can a Catholic be even gay-friendly. The Catholic magazine The Tablet reported that “An American priest and a religious sister whose ministry to homosexuals has brought them a following around the world have been forbidden to continue by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). They have been ‘permanently prohibited’ from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons.”

The priest and nun in question are Father Bob Nugent and Sister Jeannine Grammick. The CDF, a Gestapo-like department of the Vatican that seeks out and destroys dissenters, said that Nugent and Grammick’s position on “the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts and the objective disorder of the homosexual inclination” was doctrinally unacceptable, and “harmed the community of the church”.

Nugent and Grammick, who “ministered” to homosexuals by providing counselling and trying to reconcile gay Catholics with their religion, have been under investigation by the Vatican since 1977. But it has taken until now for the CDF to make what it considers a strong enough case to destroy the two.

The Vatican seems not to care that it is seen to be acting like some kind of malignant dictatorship, and simply remains indifferent to the storm of protest which greeted its decision. Father Joseph Gallagher of Baltimore wrote to The Tablet: “At a time when persons are being penalised and even killed on the mere suspicion of being gay, it is sad indeed that spokesmen for the Church which teaches that love is the greatest commandment can issue statements which hate-filled people can easily twist to endorse their warped use of the Bible and Christianity.”

Dr Bernard Ratigan, a psychotherapist at University of Nottingham Medical School, chided the churches (also in The Tablet) for the damage they do to people: “Religions like Catholicism, Judaism and Islam reach deep inside people. They can, therefore, bring about severe psychological problems when there is a mismatch between what the religion teaches about the ‘correct’ nature of sexual orientation and gender identity, and what individuals subjectively experience as their own internal reality.”

So far, I would go along with Dr Ratigan, but I part company with him when he says: “Besides clinical intervention for those most seriously affected, there needs to be an extensive network of parish and diocesan pastoral care for gay, lesbian and transgendered Catholics and their families.”

The extraordinary message seems to be: religion damages your brain, so why not go back for more? It’s like saying, “Oh, you’re an alcoholic, why not go on a wine-tasting course?”

Wouldn’t it be better to set up a clinic that can help us get religion out of our lives once and for all? Wouldn’t we all be happier if we could just look at the Pope or the Archbishop, the Ayatollah or the Rabbi and say: “I don’t believe a word you say. You’re emperors with no clothes.”?

In The Guardian, Gordon Urquhart, author of The Pope’s Armada, wrote about the Vatican’s use of lesbians and gay men as scapegoats: “The brutality of both the sentences (against Nugent and Grammick) and the language is hardly surprising given the political crusade that the Holy See has waged against lesbians and gay men in recent years.

“They have become the prime targets in Rome’s struggle against what it terms the ‘culture of death’, in other words, modern understanding of such diverse questions as contraception, abortion, extramarital sex, divorce and, of course, homosexuality. The Vatican and its political allies have implacably opposed moves throughout Europe to give legal recognition to gay relationships. In France, the struggle against the law supporting civil unions was led by Deputy Christine Boutin, a member of the Vatican’s Council for the Family.”

Mr Urquhart noted that “It is surely significant that the Vatican’s condemnation of Nugent and Grammick came in the wake of atrocities such as the Soho bombing and the murder of Matthew Shepard in the US. Curial officials cannot be unaware that their anti-gay rhetoric fans the flames of prejudice among the extreme right in Europe and America.”

He makes the point that, throughout its dark and bloody history, it has been the habit of Christianity to pin the ills of society onto a scapegoat: “In the past, Jews and women have fulfilled this role. Is it now the turn of gays and lesbians?”

Gay Christians will argue that these are just the last thrashes of a dying dinosaur’s tail. The churches are changing, they will say, slowly but surely the walls of holy homo-hatred are crumbling.

Is that true, or is it just another of the delusions that believers seem happy to saddle themselves with? Is it maybe truer to say that the churches need an enemy around which to rally their troops? Are we to be the next victims of crusading Christians, exploiting homophobia in order to revive their own flagging fortunes?

This exploitation has certainly been apparent in the USA over the past decade, where homophobia has become the main plank of the religious Right’s platform. The endless hate-mongering amongst these religio-political groups has created an ethos of antipathy towards gay people there, sometimes culminating in murder.

Last, month, the Christian Action Network called for the chairman of the Disney Corporation to resign, saying that Disney’s annual “Gay Day” had turned the Magic Kingdom into Sodom and Gomorrah. The Church of England Newspaper (which, incidentally, is edited by George Carey’s son) reported: “The campaign is the first such effort since an evangelical boycott of the entertainment conglomerate, which they say is showing signs of rapidly declining moral and family values. Disney has been attacked for ‘blatantly endorsing and promoting a dangerous and destructive lifestyle to millions of American children and their families’.”

The boycott has been joined by The Southern Baptist Convention, Focus on the Family, the Assemblies of God, Concerned Women for God and so on and so on.

By instigating these campaigns and encouraging their congregations to take active parts in them, these organisations know that they create feelings of moral superiority in their flocks. This may boost their congregations, and fill the coffers, but it stimulates a climate of hate and fear for those of us on the receiving end.

Maybe that’s why, whenever I think of “gay Christians”, the word oxymoron springs to mind.

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=

A week may be a long time in politics — a month might prove to be a lifetime for Michael Portillo. Events are moving so fast that by the time you read this, Mr Portillo might already be yesterday’s man.

Alternatively, he may have taken the next step on his carefully crafted, long-term plan to take up residence at 10 Downing Street.

In the meantime, as you may have noticed, Mr Portillo has thrown the whole future direction of British politics into confusion with his admission of “homosexual experiences as a young person”. Newspaper commentators hardly know what to make of it.

Does it mean the end for Ann Widdecombe as a possible new Tory leader? Does it mean the end for William Hague as present Tory leader? Does it, in fact, herald the revival of the Conservative Party and, therefore, the premature end of the Blair regime?

More importantly, does it at last herald the dawn of a new attitude to homosexuality in British politics? Or is it just another dose of the temporary tolerance we’ve seen so much of in recent months? (Let’s face it, if, as so many of the papers assure us, it isn’t an issue any more, why are they devoting so many hectares to it?)

All these fascinating questions have been exhaustively explored by the press following Mr Portillo’s now legendary, oh-so-carefully worded interview with The Times. When asked by interviewer Ginny Dougary whether he had had “gay flings” while at Cambridge, he replied, after some hesitation: “I will say what I want to say. I had some homosexual experiences as a young person.”

Following the interview, journalists quizzed Mr Portillo about what his ambiguous statements actually meant. An ITN reporter asked: “What are you actually admitting to when you say there had been rumours for many years?” Portillo replied: “Well, I want to make it perfectly clear that all the time I’ve been in public life there has been nothing of this sort whatsoever. When the interviewer asked me if there had been any experiences at university, I said yes.” ITN: “That is something you have not continued with?” Portillo: “That is exactly right.”

Then a Sky News reporter asked him: “When you say relationships at university, are we talking about one encounter or several?”

Portillo: “I’m not prepared to go into that. A few experiences.”

Sky: “What about your time since university?”

Portillo: “During my time in public life, there has been no such experience or activity.

Sky: And between leaving university and going into public life?

Portillo: “I am not going to go into that.”

The Daily Mail’s reaction to this evasiveness was: “His refusal to answer is certain to fuel speculation about the period between leaving Cambridge in 1975 and being elected MP for Enfield Southgate in 1984.”

Yes, indeed. Mr Portillo’s self-outing (and everyone suspected it was only half a tale) resulted in the usual Fleet Street scrum to be first to prove him a liar. Tens of thousands of pounds and hundreds of journalistic hours were expended over the days following publication of the interview, in trying to track down Michael’s lovers. Even I received calls from desperate Fleet Street hacks looking for leads.

First with the honours was The Mail on Sunday, which unearthed Nigel Hart, one-time information officer for the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. He told the paper that he had had an intermittent eight-year affair with Portillo. Well, not so much an affair as a kind of friendship with the occasional sexual episode thrown in.

More shocking is Portillo’s alleged comment during a car journey with his wife Carolyn Eades and Nigel Hart: “The first time I slept with you, Nigel, was the day after I slept with Carolyn for the first time.” Boorish, tactless and insensitive or what?

Mr Hart’s contribution to the debate tells us two things: firstly, that Mr Portillo was having homosexual encounters well after he left university, and long after he could be convincingly described as a “young person” in the way that Mr Portillo appears to want us to understand the term.

Nigel Hart says: “We are not talking about teenage fumblings or childish ‘experiments’. Portillo was having sex with me in the second half of his twenties.” Secondly, when Hart asked Portillo if he preferred men or women, he says Portillo replied: “I like them both.” And from this we must conclude that Mr Portillo is bisexual, or at least not completely heterosexual.

We will leave aside for the moment the insulting way that Mr Portillo describes his past liaisons (“these vile rumours”), and the impression he tries to give that homosexuality is OK for a “young person” (him, not others), but it’s disgraceful once you’re grown up. We will, instead, try to discover whether Portillo’s progress will be impeded by these events.

According to opinion polls just after the interview, all is well for Mr Portillo with the electorate — so long as everything that he has said so far is true and complete. The Mail on Sunday reported: “The day a gay Prime Minister crosses the threshold of 10 Downing Street may not be far away. The remarkable finding that seven out of ten people would have no objection to someone with a gay past occupying the highest public office in the land comes in the first opinion poll to be conducted since Michael Portillo revealed he had homosexual relationships… A similar number say they would even accept an openly homosexual Prime Minister.” Only the over-55’s demurred.

The Sun conducted one of its you-the-jury phone-ins and was surprised to find its readers indifferent to the issue. It recorded the lowest response since it started these polls in 1990. Only 392 callers thought Portillo’s revelations would damage his career, while 658 said they wouldn’t. To give some idea of the level of indifference, a recent phone-in on the euro generated 130,000 calls.

But, of course, the Fleet Street muckrakers are working overtime, and there is a strong suspicion that there is still plenty for them to find. Nigel Hart went on to write in The Guardian that he thought that Mr Portillo’s admissions had fallen short of completeness. There were also dark mutterings in other parts of the press about other lovers waiting in the wings — a theatre director, an ex-school chum, and even, according to the Daily Mail’s Brutus column, someone called “Bill”.

To take up a gambling metaphor, Mr Portillo is playing for high stakes, and is backing a rank outsider if he thinks he can get away with giving an incomplete picture of his past indiscretions. I suppose he is operating on the Nick Brown principle —you will remember that the agriculture minister pre-empted a tabloid outing by doing it himself the day before the revelations could be published.

Unfortunately, many people think it’s going to end up more a Ron Davies episode. Ron’s half-arsed attempts to run rings round the press with half-truths, dissemblings and outright lies did for him completely. Michael Portillo is running the same risk if he’s attempting the same deception. “A moment of madness” is the phrase that will follow Ron Davies to his grave, just like Clinton will have etched on his tombstone, “I have not had sexual relations with that women, Miss Lewinsky”.

The Observer also questioned the impression being cultivated by Mr Portillo that he was somehow no longer gay. It consulted several psychiatrists and “experts” to find out whether “a man can have gay love affairs and then turn straight”.

Professor Alan Sinfield, author of Gay and After said: “I know many gay men who have done what he has done, and they almost always relapse — so to speak. If you like men and go to bed with men, you tend to remain interested in men. We ought to take seriously that he believes in Tory doctrine — that traditional families are best and gays should not serve in the military — but repressed sexual desires tend to return at unguarded moments.” Dr Glen Wilson said that he thought ‘temporary’ homosexuality in the teens and twenties “is extremely rare”.

But, of course, the other side of the coin could be that there is nothing else of any consequence to be unearthed, and that Michael will pass the finishing post unscathed. In that case, the sky’s the limit. After all, if you’d said 30 years ago that the first woman Prime Minister would be a Tory, you’d have been laughed out of court. So who’s to say that the first out gay (or, at least, not completely heterosexual) Prime Minister won’t also be a Tory?

Now we come to the tricky question of Mr Portillo’s supposed new caring, compassionate image. To many he will always be (in John Major’s memorable phrase) a “bastard” of the kind that only right-wing Tories can be. He did everything he could to retard the progress of gay rights. He voted against equalising the age of consent (even though he himself was happy to have gay sex at 19, when the age of consent was 21).

He thought it was OK to kick gay people out of the forces while he himself enjoyed the privileges of being Minister of Defence. He was happy to go along with Mrs Thatcher’s introduction of Section 28. He spoke of “gay shame not gay pride”. So, if he really has suddenly become a social liberal, he has a lot of catching up to do. So far he has given no indication that he would act in any way differently should he be returned to Parliament.

In fact, we are left wondering if he has really left his hard-line and intolerant ways in the past along with his homosexuality.

If Mr Portillo beats the odds and does not come the cropper he so richly deserves, there is one person who will be particularly unhappy, perhaps even devastated — Ann Widdecombe. Over the summer, while William Hague was away on his hols, Ms Widdecombe kept the papers amused with her antics, and was so successful in her self-promotion that people started to talk about her as a serious rival for the Tory leadership. She was the one who could keep the Tory faithful faithful. The one with her finger on the Conservative pulse. She was going to give William Hague a run for his money.

It was easy to get carried away with that speculation at the time, but it all seems a bit silly now. Who could possibly take the Virgin Ann seriously, with her “gravity-defying architecture” (Andrew Rawnsley, Observer), cracked contralto and repulsive religiosity?

It might have been entertaining to have had her as leader of the Tories. After all, the BBC can’t produce a sitcom to amuse us, so it would have been St Doris of Karloff’s duty to make the nation laugh. And although she doesn’t believe in euthanasia, she could have finally put the Tory party out of its misery by leading it to a farcical end.

All the same, we are likely to see plenty of the hilarious Ann at the Tory Party conference in Blackpool this month, where, as Andrew Pierce in The Times said, she will “make the best use of bosom as a theatrical prop since Barbara Windsor”. Who knows what she will do this year, after her acclaimed one-woman show last year. Maybe she will repeat what she wrote in The Salisbury Review, that while Tories are correct to respect the right of people to be homosexual, they are morally bound to oppose an equal age of consent. This is a direct rebuke to William Hague, who was one of the few Tories to vote for 16 last time around.

A lot of hats are going in the ring, but if Michael Portillo survives, the result might be a foregone conclusion.

However, big-hearted as ever, Ann went on GMTV to say: “My view is that Michael Portillo is an extremely able ex-colleague. I look forward to the occasion when he becomes a colleague again.”

She was then no doubt carted off to the nearest dentist to have her teeth ungritted.

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=

A battle has been won, but the war is far from over. The ruling from the European Court of Human Rights on gays in the military caused the predictable brouhaha in the papers, and there were few surprises about who was in favour and who was against.

The Guardian, Independent, Express and Observer all wrote supportive editorials with no caveats or qualms about the rightness of the decision. The Times, The Telegraph and the Mail were just as certain that it was wrong-headed and dangerous.

Significantly, the tabloids were neutral on the point, and let the issue pass without much comment, although Brian Reade in The Mirror wrote: “Like those other great bastions of masculinity — university rugby teams and the British National Party — the armed forces are obsessed with homosexuality to the point where you wonder quite why.”

Ironically, the day after the ruling, The Express reported the Prime Minister’s speech at the Labour Party Conference under the headline: “Blair’s Nation of Equal Opportunity.” Needless to say, inequality is as evident today under Mr Blair as it ever was under the Tories.

Mr Blair loves to talk about equality, but I don’t see his much-trumpeted “equal opportunities government” rushing to put things right. As Angela Mason told The Observer: “To continue the ban after a European Court judgement would be simply disgraceful. The question is whether [the Government] is going to continue with an essentially Tory policy.” Mr Tony could, of course, have dismantled the ban the day he took office, but declined to do so.

The Observer revealed that Portillo “ignored legal warnings that the ban on gays in the military breached human rights and maintained the prohibition in order to reduce compensation pay-outs to sacked service personnel.”

The paper had uncovered a ministerial briefing that had been prepared for Portillo when he was Defence Secretary. It said: “Before the Court of Human Rights…we are likely to lose. But that would certainly be in three or four years’ time…”

Given this, we might enquire of the Conservative Association in Kensington and Chelsea, where Mr Portillo is seeking selection as their candidate for the forthcoming by-election, whether it really wants a human rights abuser as its MP? A man who made the — some might say hypocritical — decision not to correct a gross breach of the European Convention on Human Rights when he had the power do so?

Needless to say, those directly affected by this decision — the guys and gals in the barracks and on battle-fronts — had little to say about it all. Their officers, on the other hand, were very quick off the mark, and very few of them had a good word to say about the decision.

Major-General Julian Thompson was typical of the “let’s-keep-the-status-quo” brigade. Writing in The Daily Mail, he couldn’t resist misrepresenting the ruling: “Now that the ‘right’ to homosexual activity is likely to be established in the armed forces, the gay propagandists will try to push the envelope of what is acceptable in pursuit of their own agenda.”

Did I miss something? Did the ECHR really say that it was OK for soldiers to shag each other without fear of being disciplined? Who is calling whom a propagandist here?

The anti-gay lobby sounds increasingly unconvincing, with its lurid talk of shower room rapes and of “predatory older homosexuals” preying on vulnerable new recruits. Colonel Bob Stewart (described as a “Bosnia Chief”) came up with a new slant on the “men would be uncomfortable in the showers” angle when he told The Mirror: “We have situations where soldiers have to be locked into personnel carriers. Women are not allowed into these units because bodily functions have to be carried out next to someone. Now we will have instances where those are done next to someone who is not of the same sexual persuasion.” Bodily functions? Could he possibly mean taking a crap?

Oh dear, can you imagine — van-loads of squaddies constipated because they daren’t go to the lav in case a woofter sees their willy?

John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph’s defence correspondent, made a more cogent point when he suggested that life in the army for an open homosexual would be extremely difficult. “Historically, any tendency to homosexuality has been viewed in the ranks as a negation of manliness, something to be mocked, scorned and, ultimately, attacked if detected. To be accused, in the barracks, of homosexual tendencies is the deepest of insults, demanding expiation in violence…Time is not going to make the homosexual victim accepted. If self-proclaimed, as Stonewall wants, his life will be a misery from the start. If unself-proclaimed, but detected, his lot will be no better, perhaps worse.”

This may be true in some cases. Bullying, grotesque racism and sexism are rife in the armed services, something which the resisters of progress seem quite content with. They seem to think that living within a culture of violent, sub-human bigotry is somehow good for young men, and that attempts to introduce civilisation would compromise fighting power.

Besides, there is plenty of evidence that gay people can be integrated successfully into service life. Richard Young, an ex-Royal Navy chef, who has found a sad fame as the “last gay man to be fired from the forces”, is evidence of this. Although he was subjected to the usual witch-hunt, he told The Guardian: “The two men I shared a cabin with already knew, the whole galley knew. They didn’t give a damn.”

The paper said that although his shipmates all supported him, they were “warned that they would be sent to a military jail unless they signed statements against him.”

Is this kind of malignant persecution supposed to be honourable? Is this the kind of legalised thuggery that the Colonel Bigot-Smythes of this world want to see continued?

To be fair, not all the military oppose lifting the ban, and a few enlightened souls were prepared to put their heads above the parapet and say so. Lt-Col Anthony Slessor gave a dressing-down to the dozens of outraged officers who had written in grossly homophobic terms to The Daily Telegraph.

“The bulk of your letters on the subject of homosexuality in the forces were bigoted tosh,” he began. “As a regimental commanding officer, I don’t give a fig about the sexual orientation of my soldiers. What I do care about is that they are uncompromising in their professionalism and that the adhesive of mutual respect binds the regimental family across all ranks. In 25 years of service, I have encountered heterosexuals and homosexuals who sign up to these values and I’ve also met those of both persuasions whose behaviour has been intolerable. It is behaviour that matters, not sexual orientation.”

Surely this is the point? I don’t think anyone is saying that gay soldiers should be treated differently from straight soldiers or sailors. If shagging on a mixed-sex ship is forbidden between men and women, the same rule should apply to same-sex couplings. It’s as simple as that. But people should not be stopped from joining up simply because of their homosexual orientation. It is this simple fact that the dinosaurs can’t, or don’t want to, grasp. It’s inevitable, they say, that once homosexuals are in barracks or on the poop deck, they will start to “recruit”. There were several horror stories recounted in last month’s papers about the effects of supposed homosexual predation on young soldiers.

Lieut E C Coleman wrote to The Telegraph: “I have a vivid memory of one 16-year-old weeping with fear after being invited to go on a ‘run ashore’ by a petty officer known to be homosexual.

“I have also known several young sailors who would only go to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning to have a shower, in order to avoid the attentions of predatory homosexuals. I have seen a teenager fall into the grip of ship-borne homosexuals and be reduced from a bright, cheerful young man to a diseased, dull-eyed, shambling wreck who, eventually, had to be ejected from the service.”

Leaving aside the exaggeration that exudes from that letter, we return to the point that the kind of exploitation that Lieut Coleman describes is unacceptable in any situation, whether in the services or in civilian life. My question is: why did he do nothing to protect these young people? Why didn’t he report this grotesque bullying? Surely, with his silence, he was complicit in these outrages — that’s if they ever took place. I would not for a moment support the lifting of the ban if I thought it would legitimise such activities. But the whole point is that disciplinary action would still be taken against anyone who broke the rules — whether those rules applied to sexual activity or to violence against minorities.

As Philip Hensher wrote in The Independent: “Heterosexual sex in the armed forces, after all, is controlled between serving personnel; otherwise it is acceptable. If a soldier has a male partner who is not a member of the armed forces, there is obviously nothing wrong with that; if his partner is in the armed forces, then it’s probably right that the forces be aware of the relationship.”

Naturally, those who have to give up the privileges they’ve enjoyed for generations will resist change, but change has to come, despite their bleatings. The next big battle will be the civilising of Britain’s armed forces so that anyone who is of able body and sound mind can serve his or her county, safe in the knowledge that they will not be harmed by their own comrades.

That will be a much harder battle. As Henry Thoreau once said: “Reasoning with prejudice is like fighting a shadow, it exhausts the reasoner without visibly affecting the prejudice.”

Yet we have no option but to try.

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=

It’s rather like waiting for a bus. You stand around for ages waiting, and suddenly they all come at once.

Not only has the High Court redefined “the family” to include stable gay couples, but the Government has given another, more substantial, commitment to scrap Section 28. In the United States two British gay men have been given permission to be named as joint fathers on the birth certificates of their surrogate children, and high-ranking family judge, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, opined that gay couples should be able to adopt.

Meanwhile, the Law Commission recommended that gay people should be able to claim damages if they are financially dependent on a partner who dies due to someone else’s negligence. And in the light of the Soho bombing, Home Secretary Jack Straw reiterated his promise to reform the Criminal Injuries Compensation rules so that it covered gay people, too.

Needless to say, the conservative Jeremiahs in the press struck up their familiar chorus of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Woe, woe and thrice woe, they moaned. “Labour will let schools promote homosexuality” announced The Daily Telegraph, in a weird echo of the kind of newspaper story that was common in the early Eighties, when homosexuality was the Fleet Street weapon of choice in the fight against “the loony left”.

“New Labour’s insidious love affair with the gay lobby” was The Daily Mail’s contribution to the creation of the image of Tony Blair as a filthy gay-lover. The Times ran an article by Aiden Rankin, headed: “Throughout the land, councils neglect street cleaning but pour money into feminist propaganda. They will do the same with gay propaganda, given half the chance.”

It is a taste of what is to come when the attempt is made to repeal Section 28. Edward Heathcoat Amory in The Daily Mail re-ran all the propaganda from the days that led up to the implementation of Section 28. “Before we rush to embrace this new era of tolerance and equality, it is worth recalling why Section 28 was introduced in the first place,” he wrote before listing all the dreadful events that had made the law necessary.

Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin was disinterred, and the Inner London Education Authority was once more put in the dock for making available “so-called educational films, such as Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts, in which teenagers explained that they found gay sex more fulfilling, and heterosexuals were associated with boxing matches and nuclear explosions.”

Mr Heathcoat Amory said that Section 28 had not been introduced by people opposed to homosexuality, “it was demanded by parents who were horrified that local government was using their money to teach their children that there was no meaningful difference between a family with parents of the opposite sex, and those of the same sex.”

This is not my recollection of the events surrounding the creation of Section 28. What I remember was the triumphalist bullying of a minority by a powerful Government of bigots and religious fanatics.

When Barry Drewitt and Tony Barlow, a gay couple from Essex, announced that they’d paid a woman in the United States £200,000 to be a surrogate mother for them, they took a lot of stick from the “family values” brigade. Now they’ve managed to persuade an American judge to allow both of them to be named as the legal fathers of the expected twins, and this has set the puritanical press off into another fit of outrage.

“I set the limits of tolerance at coming before the point where family law is bent to accommodate homosexuality, making a mockery of the very institutions upon which our society is based,” wrote Simon Heffer in The Daily Mail.

“This seems to have been a cruelly selfish decision, taken with regard only to what gratifies the whims of a couple of rich men, and without any thought to the effect on the two children with whom their surrogate mother is about to provide them… Our current obsession with establishing that homosexuals are no different from heterosexuals puts another nail in the coffin of marriage as we understand it,” he continue.

The Daily Telegraph editorialised that “little attention has been paid to the children’s future prospects and feelings. Generations to come may curse those who brought them into the world, dressing up selfishness as ‘lifestyle choice’ and ‘human rights’.”

Even Ivan Massow, the gay financial adviser, was worried about the consequences of gay men and lesbians being parents. In a rather confusing article in The Observer, Mr Massow says that he would be expected to say that he likes the idea of gay parents — after all, many of them provide him with his not-inconsiderable livelihood, and he’s even considered it for himself. But he admits, “I’m also a Tory. In fact, I want to be a Tory MP.”

He claims that the Tory leadership is progressive on these matters, but the “lumpy crust” underneath makes formidable opposition “if your hymn sheet is a little too modern”. He then asks, “Is life short enough for integrity?” Do I take this to mean he would ditch the rights of his customers in order to advance his political ambitions?

The Church, naturally, was disturbed by all this modernism. In The Daily Mail, the Bishop of Southwark said he “utterly disapproved” of the decisions and called for an urgent “talking up of family life”. “In our desire for self-fulfilment, we have sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind — a whirlwind of distressed children.”

Mrs Sheila Fletcher, Family Life and Marriage Officer for the diocese of Exeter, told The Church of England Newspaper that enormous changes had taken place in the last few decades. She called it a “shaking of the foundations”. She says that now one in 2.2 marriages end in divorce and a third of all babies are born out of wedlock. “It is not all bad news by any means,” she sensibly says, “and it is unhelpful to be reactionary.” Perhaps she could have a word with some of the bishops when she attends the General Synod this month.

But the Church is on to a loser if it thinks it can control, or even influence, these seismic shifts in the way society is restructuring itself. The concept of family does not belong exclusively to the Conservative Party or to any religious institution. Neither is it God’s exclusive property, as they’ve been telling us all these centuries. Everybody is entitled to belong to a family of their own choosing or their own making.

Three Law Lords came to the same conclusion when they ruled that Martin Fitzpatrick could inherit the tenancy of the flat he had shared with his now-deceased long-term partner. The historic decision declared that, although gay couples could not be considered as spouses, they could be regarded as being family.

The Express considered the judgement to be “a landmark which should be welcomed by all those who care about justice… The world has moved on, thank goodness, since the days when homosexuality itself was illegal. It had not, until yesterday, moved on sufficiently to allow the law to protect gay relationships as it does heterosexual ones. The Lords deserve high praise for this progressive and sensible decision.”

The Guardian also welcomed the ruling and explored its wider implications, foreseeing the difficulties that would arise from defining “a stable and permanent relationship” for legal purposes. “Reduced to the absurd: could someone claim to be a member of the family after a one-night stand? The facts of Mr Fitzpatrick and his partner, John Thompson, made this case compellingly clear. They lived together for 20 years, and for nine years of that Mr Fitzpatrick was nursing Mr Thompson 24 hours a day, after he was paralysed in an accident.

“The law lords’ decision… reflects the wider social reality that some of the deepest relationships of trust, commitment and love may lie outside the conventionally understood blood relations of family, and yet carry responsibilities and rights which deserve to be recognised in law.”

None of this convinced Peter Hitchens in The Express. “All these actions take security and status away from the married family, that great support of civilisation, the place where we learn good and bad, right and wrong, where we can pass on the culture and customs of our people, and where we can build a small private world, free from interference of the State.”

Beatrix Campbell, on the other hand, opined in The Guardian that the conservative fantasy about “traditional” family life has prevailed too long. Our society is re-aligning itself on an emotional level, she said, and is not waiting for permission or approval from the Archbishop of Canterbury or Tony Blair or even the editor of The Daily Mail.

“Already only five per cent of households are comprised of husband, wife and 2.4 children,” wrote Ms Campbell. “In a decade, the single-person household will be typical. But those single people, whatever their sexual orientation, are already inventing elaborate affinities. What these judgements give are the rights that accompany responsibilities as partners and parents. What they’ve given the Government is the opportunity to endorse what is really radical about them: gay people as pioneers of the new emotional economy.”

Meanwhile, in what seems like a parallel universe, Michael Portillo is playing out his destiny. We had better get used to his smug, arrogant face because we are going to be seeing an awful lot of it. His almost certain return to Parliament could herald another age of uncertainty for the forces of progress. It all depends on whether his claim to be a changed man is true.

Has his admission of his own (apparently now-defunct) homosexuality given him the insight to be more sympathetic towards other gay people? Now that we know that he knows how we feel, can we expect him to change his negative voting pattern? Probably not, judging by his recent comments on gays in the military, as reported in The Independent. The ban should stay, he says, “in the national interest.” Ah yes, and maybe in Mr Portillo’s interest, too.

I wonder if he will feel the same way about the age of consent, given that this is a law that, as we now know, he has personally broken. Does he perhaps think that it was unjust in his day, but that something has happened in the intervening years to make it justifiable today? Or does he think it should be one law for him and another for everybody else?

These questions, and the many others that remain unanswered, will ensure that from now on Mr Portillo will never sleep easily. He knows that eventually the day will come when his dodging and weaving and phoney smile will not be sufficient to ward off the truth. On that day he will wish for the ground to open up and swallow him. Let it be soon.

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=

James Collard went to New York in 1998 to edit Out, one of the USA’s leading gay magazines. Now he’s back and he wrote in the Independent on Sunday about the differences in gay life here and in the States.

“Oh my Gaaad! You can show that on primetime TV?” one of Mr Collard’s colleagues exclaimed after seeing the tape of Queer as Folk. It seems that the country that invented gay liberation just can’t get over how much progress we’ve made and how far behind they’ve slipped.

“Perhaps,” Collard says, “the answer lies in what Britain lacks but what America must contend with – a powerful and highly organised religious right. Every step forward – a prime time kiss, a hard-won constitutional or legal ruling, a city council granting spousal benefits to gay couples, a move to include sexual orientation in a state’s ‘hate crime’ legislation – triggers howls of protest, concerted lobbying and reactionary ballot initiatives aimed at overturning gay-friendly legislation, all led by the religious right.

“The argument for acceptance isn’t just far from being won in the US – it may never be won. You just can’t debate with the Gospel truth… In America no matter how hard the gays shove, the Christians on the other side shove harder.”

Of course, we have our own religious right in this country, and although they may seem like a bunch of amateurs compared to the moral majority groups over the water, they are finding that they have increasing clout.

Since their success in sabotaging the age of consent legislation in the House of Lords, they have learned some valuable lessons in media manipulation. Let us not forget that Baroness Young is still in the House of Lords, ready to open the doors to her friends at the Christian Institute (as she did during the campaigns against the age of consent). She keeps up the pressure on the inside while they agitate on the outside.

The Christian Institute suddenly seems to be everywhere. If it isn’t issuing grossly defamatory reports with titles such as ‘Bankrolling Gay Proselytism’ it is, according to The Church Times, combing the ads in The Pink Paper looking for evidence that local health authorities are “promoting the most medically dangerous forms of sexual practice, facilitating criminal behaviour between homosexuals and engaging in homosexual proselytism.”

The Institute says it took three weeks to track down “£1 million of public money being spent on promoting homosexuality – including £675,000 in salaries for jobs advertised in The Pink Paper and £425,413 given to gay organisations by the London Boroughs Grants Committee.”

In The Daily Star, the Christian Institute claimed “schoolchildren as young as 14 are getting lessons in homosexual love and Sado-masochism. They are encouraged to try out being gay and how to pick up lovers in public toilets.” Ian Bainbridge of the Institute is quoted as saying “This is SHOCKING! Most parents will be appalled. This kind of teaching has no place in our schools.”

He’s absolutely right, and I’d be outside the school gates protesting with him – if it were true. But, I’m pleased to say, it isn’t. However, the Christian Institute doesn’t let small things like truth or accuracy get in the way. It knows what newspapers want and it gives it to them.

The Institute has mastered the art of exaggeration, elaboration and prestidigitation and take a perfectly innocent story and massage it until it seems like the end of the world. Once they’ve hooked the media’s interest (and slandering homosexuals is an almost guaranteed entrée into some papers), the journalists will then take over and inflate the Christian Institute’s little white lie into twenty-point bold.

Brenda Harrison of the Evangelical Fellowship for Lesbian and Gay Christians, made her point about this in The Church of England Newspaper: “Surely as Christians we are called to be people of truth and not bearers of false witness against our neighbours.”

Health authorities have been accused of spending tens of thousands of pounds of public money on promoting homosexuality,” reported The Daily Telegraph. And who were the accusers? Why, the Christian Institute, of course.

“Taxpayers fund the Internet guide to gay ‘cruising’,” announced The Times. On whose say-so? Again, the Christian Institute.

“Thousands of pounds of public money is being spent on a website which gives gay men a step-by-step guide on how to engage in sex in public places,” reported The Daily Mail (source: Christian Institute).

“Pupils asked to act out gay roles in class,” trumpeted The Daily Telegraph. And who says so? You guessed it.

By this constant hammering away of public perceptions, the Christian Institute hopes to create the idea that homosexuals are gobbling up half the taxes that lovely, normal people pay in order to fund perverted, child-abusing lifestyles.

Indeed, one of the constant themes that the Christian Institutes poisonous propaganda dwells is that homosexuals are not to be trusted with children.

But I came across this little statistic in The Church of England Newspaper which I don’t think the Christian Institute would be quite so anxious to put about. “Of the 100,000 people in Britain convicted of sex offences, 25 per cent were regular church-goers.” These figures were produced by the Free Churches Council – but then, it’s easy to ignore or hide the truth, especially when it doesn’t fit your argument.

And it is not only the Christian Institute that is willing to peddle untruths in order to uphold the Christian message. The Church of England Newspaper carried a letter from the Rev Philip Foster of Cambridge. It advised readers that “careful studies among the gay community and the straight community” have come up with some familiar statistics. Such as? “Those who undertake gay lifestyles” can expect their life expectancy to be reduced by 25 years. And that loss of life expectancy is reduced by two years for those men who are in “stable, long-lasting relationships”.

Mr Foster also claimed that “homophobia is an invented condition or ‘crime’ by the gay lobby and attempts by association to be likened to racialist hatred.”

Fortunately, Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement was on hand to slap down the Rev Foster (as well as the editor of The Church of England Newspaper). He told the paper that he was already familiar with these statistics, having seen them quoted ad nauseum in “reports put out by the Christian Institute, Christian Action for Research and Education and Education Intercessors for Britain and Family and Youth Concern.” He says that his own researchers have exposed these “facts” as nothing more than frauds.

One had hoped that these bogus figures, ridiculous as they are to those who know about these things, had been effectively dealt with but, like the Christian Institute, they just keep popping up.

More economy with the truth was to be found last month a little closer to home.

In The Guardian, a bitter argument has been raging over a letter written to the editor by Michael Cashman, former actor and Stonewall activist and now a Labour MEP.

In the letter, Mr Cashman takes a stand on who should represent the Labour Party in the forthcoming election for London mayor.

He said: “Diane Abbot’s assertion that Ken Livingstone’s GLC policies on equality are popular today fails to recognise the struggle or the reality. Furthermore, Livingstone’s token politics and lack of political nous actually gave the Thatcher Government an excuse to introduce Section 28… The right-wing tabloids joined forces and entered a decade of homophobia. It has taken us years to undo the appalling gesture politics of Livingstone’s reign at the GLC. We do not need him again.”

This infuriated those who had been around and fighting against Section 28. David Blood wrote: “So, if you stand up for something you believe in and there is a bigoted backlash, it is all your fault. Perhaps this is why the famous gays of New Labour have been silent about repealing the Section themselves.”

Since he is a New Labour loyalist many of his critics thought Michael was re-writing history to please his new boss, Mr Tony. The only place Mr Tony wants Ken Livingstone to have in London is at the bottom of the Thames with a large stone tied to his leg.

Then came Paul Patrick and Sue Sanders, who had been teachers in London at the time of the battle over Section 28. They recalled a meeting in the nightclub Heaven in which the resistance was being planned by a group of “famous but closeted lesbian and gay people.”

The pair talked about some of the education work they were doing around the issue of sexuality as part of the GLC and Inner London Education Authority initiative. “We were pleased to be asked to that meeting, which Cashman attended,” they said. “We remember his presence very well, as he continually expressed his joy at, and support for, the work we described. He was also much impressed that this GLC/ILEA initiative, under Ken Livingstone’s leadership, had been so well structured and sensitively run that none of its work made it into the tabloids at a time when they were at the height of their anti-gay hysteria.

“It is somewhat ironic that a campaigner like Michael Cashman, who knew the extent to which the campaign to put Section 28 on to the statute book depended on the re-writing of reality, should join with his Milbank friends in doing precisely that. We thought he had become politicised around the battle against Section 28. It would be a shame if his only contribution to gay rights was the right for a man to become a Blair’s babe, too. We thought better of him,” they continued.

Ah, ambition, ambition, how easily it can rob us of our memory – not to mention our dignity and loyalty.

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=

Once again the topic of gay parenting has been exercising the narrow minds of our newspapers. The complications surrounding the birth and ‘importation’ from America of the twins fathered by Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow has prompted the latest flurry of interest.

Depending on your opinion, Messrs Drewitt and Barlow might be using their new babies as “some sort of fashion accessory” (Simon Heffer, Daily Mail) or they may be “the best qualified parents I can think of” (Chris Bellamy, husband of Rosalind, who acted as surrogate for the gay couple). Either way, there is now a legal battle under way to gain British citizenship for Saffron and Aspen. Latest signs indicate that it will succeed.

The hysteria was ratcheted up a couple of notches by the announcement from Stephen Gateley of Boyzone that he too was anxious to be a dad. The 23-year-old star told The Sun that he and his boyfriend Eloy de Jong “long to settle down and bring up a baby together”. Stephen is quoted as saying: “If there was a way open to adopt, I’d do it. I’d love to give the kids an opportunity.”

Of course, there’s nothing to stop Stephen applying to adopt. The British Association for Adoption and Fostering say he could put in his bid tomorrow, although only one of a gay couple could be the legal parent.

Then came Michael Barrymore and his boyfriend Shaun Davis. They told OK! TV that they’d love to have children, too. “When the circumstances are right, then yes, I would adopt” Michael told the programme. “The child would be loved, it would be given all the opportunities it would not normally have.”

And as if to make sure everyone realised that he was serious about family life, Michael and Shaun went off to Hawaii and “secretly married”. According to the Daily Mail, the couple see “the private ceremony as a key step towards adopting a child”. It also said that the phenomenally popular entertainer had “talked about refugee children from Eastern Europe or the war in Chechnya”.

Mr Barrymore made his case more extensively in an interview with The Sunday People. There he told of a close relationship he had formed with a 9-year-old boy called Damon Laffere who had appeared on his television programme, but who had subsequently died while waiting for a heart and lung transplant. Barrymore said: “I do a lot of work with kids but this little boy was special and I got more involved than I have ever done… After he died, Shaun and I went to his funeral and I was terribly upset for his mum, Debs.”

Prompted by this experience, Barrymore than took 100 disabled children on a trip to Lapland, where they were pictured having a great time.

Although this could be interpreted as a cloyingly sentimental approach to children, there are times when sentiment and fun have a place. Whether Barrymore, with his rather unstable history, could ever be a suitable parent would be something for the experts to decide. And when I say experts, I mean social workers, not right-wing extremists like Norman Tebbit. Although he has no expertise whatsoever in this area, Tebbit felt qualified to write in The Mail on Sunday: “What a sick society we live in. Michael Barrymore, the entertainer with a history of alcoholism and drug dependence, wants to adopt a child. … A child in the Barrymore household would have less chance than a puppy given at Christmas might have of happiness.”

Mr Tebbit is not alone in his reservations, of course. There has been a lot of comment about the “selfishness” of gay people who want to raise families of their own. It’s unnatural, goes the argument, or cruel in that the children will be taunted mercilessly at school. Or they will be unsure of their sexuality because they won’t have a “normal” male and female role model.

But is this true, or is it just the frightened bleating of people unsettled by the undoubted changes that are occurring in our society? We know that Norman Tebbit is afraid of change – he wouldn’t be such a committed Conservative if he weren’t – but what about Harry Coen? Mr Coen was once a vice-chairman of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and describes himself as “a fully paid-up gay man”, yet he shares Norman Tebbit’s misgivings. He wrote in the Express about the Drewitt/Barlow case: “Parenthood is not a God-given right – nor a duty – for anyone. I have never understood the urge felt by many gay men to breed. Most of us feel ourselves lucky to have been saved this burden and are content, especially at Christmas, with the joys of unclehood.” He opines that the surrogates “do the gay cause no good” because they “play straight into the hands of the bigots”.

Sorry, Mr Coen, but if we allow the direction of our lives to be dictated by the demands of bigots, we’d still be living in the Dark Ages.

And while we’re on the subject of bigots, Richard Littlejohn in The Sun couldn’t resist this particular bandwagon. “No matter how much the noisy gay lobby insists there is no difference between homosexual relationships and what they like to call ‘straight’ relationships, nature proves otherwise. Men can’t have babies. Full stop.”

Mr Littlejohn says that there will be plenty of gay activists and proselytisers ready to “back up” Drewitt and Barlow’s demands for citizenship for their children. However, the fact remains that “when it comes to bearing children, heterosexuals and homosexuals can never be equal” because the “vital female role has been airbrushed from the record.”

He seems to have forgotten about those gay people who have had straight relationships that have borne children, but we’ll not get in the way of his propaganda by bothering him with facts.

I don’t think, either, that we’ll be seeing mention in Mr Littlejohn’s column of a piece of research conducted by Dr Gill Dunne at the London School of Economics. According to The Guardian: “She has produced a study based on interviews with 100 gay fathers and would-be fathers. It suggests not only that gay fathers are choosing to have children and to look after them, but also that their family relationships could be a model for the future.”

The fathers in the study had come by their children in a number of ways – some from straight relationships, some from surrogacy, some from adoption and some from IVF arrangements with lesbian friends. Although a number of the living arrangements were rather complicated, the consistent feature of these new-style families was that they were organised around the children. A quarter of Dunne’s sample was working less than 30 hours a week in order to devote more time to their children. The Guardian said that: “These gay dads contrast strongly with most British fathers, who work more hours and do less child care, and half of whom – if they get divorced – lose all contact with their children within two years.”

It was not all sweetness and light in this study. Many of the sample were lonely, finding it difficult to integrate into gay social circles because of having children in tow, and into toddler groups because most of the other members were women.

Nevertheless, Gill Dunne thinks, “young gay men in Britain increasingly feel fatherhood is within their reach, to the extent of anticipating a ‘gayby’ boom.”

Lots of people consider all this to be a dangerous social experiment, and that if it all goes horribly wrong the losers will be children. But Gill Dunne is optimistic. “Historically we have grown up in extended families…but now… these [gay fathers] offer us some very interesting models about how men can be parents. They are men who are proud of being men, who are in the forefront of change. We can learn from them.”

And maybe they can learn from lesbian parents, too, who have been at this “pretend family” lark for a whole lot longer than men. The story of one such female couple appeared in the Times magazine under the headline “The New Happy Families.”

Collette Whitefield and her partner Diane Butterfield have been together ten years. They have a seven-year old daughter, Emma, and two-year old son, Todd, both conceived by IVF at a fertility clinic. They live in Rainham, Essex. They confound all the stereotypes and undermine all the right-wing fears. “As well as having lesbian and gay friends, they enjoy good relationships with their heterosexual neighbours and close relationships with several of the parents of Emma’s friends. There have been a few awkward moments, but Collette and Diane are adamant that they have experienced little prejudice in a community not known for its tolerance of difference.”

They are both actively involved in their daughter’s school, in the PTA and as governors. Their (straight) next door neighbour is so fond of the family that she insisted on coming to the hospital with Collette when she was about to deliver Emma.

So, are there any thorns in this idyllic tale of family life in the heartland of Essex, traditional home of the British bigot?

Diane says: “We probably are a bit different. There are less strictly defined roles as to who does what and when. Things are more blurred on that front than they might be with a man and woman. We are probably also more aware of bigotry than a lot of heterosexual parents and the importance of teaching our children never to judge people by their gender, race or sexuality.”

Now we know why Norman Tebbit doesn’t approve. With a few more gay parents we might end up with a tolerant, compassionate and thoughtful country. And he wouldn’t like that at all.

But perhaps Keith Fleming in Granta (reprinted in The Guardian) described the most touching example of gay parenting. Keith was 16, when he was “rescued from a psychiatric ward by his uncle, the writer Edmund White.”

Edmund White, is of course, the author of many classic gay books including My Beautiful Room is Empty and The Joy of Gay Sex.

Keith Fleming’s account of life with his unconventional Uncle Ed in New York’s wild gay 70s is a love story in the truest sense of the word. Fortunately, although he is heterosexual, he was able to appreciate that luck had dealt him a winning hand when the relentlessly gay Edmund White pulled him out of the psycho ward. Now, according to this moving essay, Keith has developed under White’s tutelage into an admirably rounded man. Edmund White taught his eager charge how to appreciate art, literature and music, and better still, how to enjoy people.

What better start in life could any young man ask? And all courtesy of the dreaded gay parent.

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=

Two clapped-out institutions in this country are hanging on to their existence by the slenderest of threads. One is the church and the other the Tory party. Both have tried to revive their fortunes by using prejudice against gay people as a means of getting their irrelevant voices heard by an indifferent populace.

Seeing Cardinal Winning’s apparent success in claiming the moral high ground north of the border, the archbishops and rabbis and mullahs and their yapping dogs at The Daily Mail lined up for a spot of very enthusiastic – but, of course, “morally necessary” – pervert bashing.

The language they employed was typical. Cross a weasel with a snake and what do you get – a fork-tongued Church of England bishop, perhaps.

To prove my point, the Bishop of Liverpool wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph under the heading “There is a difference between homophobia and moral guidance”. Take this tit-bit for starters: “This brings us to the nature of the (homosexual sex) act. Kant said we should test the ethics of an action by applying to it the maxim: acts as if this were to be the law universal. If homosexual practice were to become such, the species would not be in a position to recreate itself.” He then extolled the virtues of celibacy: “Young people in our schools need to hear from single and celibate people, gay and straight, who live fulfilled lives without any sexual intercourse.”

Is it too obvious to say that if Kant’s maxim were applied in a similar way to celibacy, the human race would equally cease to exist?

But what of Bishop Jones’ own past record in the days when he was a humble teacher and not a weasel? A former pupil of his wrote an open letter to The Daily Express, reminding the bishop of an incident that occurred in his classroom twenty-five years ago. “As you rolled over the blackboard that morning, there in capital letters was a message written by someone unknown saying that I was a ‘queer’. It was days after my 12th birthday. You rubbed the legend out and went cheerily on as though nothing had happened… That episode in your classroom was the beginning of the most terrifying year of my life. … What wounded most of all was that teachers like you did nothing to stop it.”

I thought at first that the Archbishop of Canterbury had read this when he entered the fray by saying: “there must be adequate safeguards to protect children”. From whom, exactly? From the imaginary armies of gay proselytisers that we hear so much about but never see? Or from the lousy bullies – and sometimes their teachers – who make gay children’s lives intolerable?

Next in with his size nines was the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. He landed a hefty kick in the groin of gay people with his pronouncement that “homosexuality is forbidden in Judaism”.

He had the grace to admit that: “…homosexuals were sent to Auschwitz just as Jews were. Therefore, if our society has become more tolerant, that is a good thing.” If it’s such a good thing, why is he trying to make it less tolerant? “There is a real danger,” he said, “that the repeal of Section 28 will lead to the promotion of a homosexual lifestyle as morally equivalent to marriage.”

But your holiness, suppose someone had come along and said, “Jews are not Christians, and therefore their marriages are only pretended” what would you say? Such thinking has been carried through into action and was rightly crushed in a World War. Now the people who were the victims of that intolerance seem happy to practise it against others. And just like Bishop Jones, someone from Mr Sacks’ school days appeared to let him know that homophobic bullying is not some fanciful invention of gay propagandists but was happening right under his nose. In this case it was my own partner, Keith Porteous Wood, who told The Times that he had been driven from school by incessant taunting by pupils and teachers alike – while in the same class as Jonathan Sacks. Mr Sacks said he didn’t remember anything about it. How convenient. Or maybe how complacent.

Then came the mullahs and the imams. The Muslim Council of Great Britain said it opposed the Section’s repeal. “We do believe that the repeal of Section 28 will expose our young children, even at a very tender age, to immoral values and practices. Any teaching which presents homosexual practices as equivalent to marriage or in a morally neutral way is profoundly offensive and totally unacceptable.” The Hindus, in the shape of the National Council of Hindu Temples, didn’t want to be left out of the gang, and opined: “Homosexuality is an unnatural state which must be discouraged.” And the Sikhs? “We do not recommend these gay activities at all so we do not think Section 28 should be repealed,” a spokesperson for the Network of Sikh organisations told The Daily Telegraph.

So, at last, religions are united in what they do best – persecuting people. It’s a pity that the same unanimity cannot be extended to the Spice Islands of Indonesia where Muslims and Christians are slaughtering each other by the thousand. Or to the Middle East where Jews, Muslims and Christians kill each other with mad abandon. Much easier to give the gays a good kicking, at least the “faith communities” can agree on that.

Meanwhile, Yasmin Alibhai Brown, The Independent’s liberal Muslim columnist (the only one in the known world), admitted that homophobia was rife in the ethnic communities in this country. But, she says, “hardly anyone wants to admit that racism and Islamophobia exist within the white gay community.”

I will readily admit that racism exists within the gay community -as it does in the wider community – but never in all my years in gay life have I ever heard anyone make an anti-Islamic remark. It just doesn’t figure in people’s calculations. Although, God knows, if anyone is entitled to be ‘Islamophobic’ it is gay people. Some leaders in the Muslim community in Britain regularly call for the death penalty for homosexuals. And in those countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia that have Islamic legal codes, executions of gay people are quite common.

And it isn’t just the official preachers that tried to raise their profiles by inciting hatred against us. The dreaded “committed Christians” in the House of Lords, the ones who actually assassinated the repeal, were given another opportunity to parade their sad, dirty little minds.

Take Lady Janet Young, for instance. She revelled in her moment of glory, giving interviews here and there, and making stirring speeches about what was RIGHT and what was WRONG (not right and wrong in her opinion, mind you, but absolutely right and absolutely wrong). She gave two almost identical interviews, one to The Times and the other to The Telegraph. In them it emerged that Baroness Young, although a thrusting woman, didn’t actually practise what she preaches as far as family values are concerned. Rachel Sylvester in The Daily Telegraph wrote: “She was the first female director of NatWest, the first woman to lead the Lords and now the first female chairman (she would never call herself chair) of the Association of Conservative peers. … She left her children at home while she climbed the career ladder, something which was, in her words, both ‘very unusual’ and ‘controversial’ at the time. ‘People said to me, do you think you should be doing this? I said it’s up to me how I manage my family’.”

No Lady Young – what you did to your children, leaving them in Oxford while you lived in London, communicating with them only by telephone and letter – was the very antithesis of the family values you are so fond of foisting on others.

Another adherent to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do persuasion is David Mellor. Writing in The Sunday People under the headline “Protect our kids from the clutches of this gay mafia”, Mr Mellor said that repeal was “another attack on the idea of ‘family’”. I hardly need remind readers of this column – although I will take some pleasure in doing so – that Mr Mellor was chucked out of the last Government for his adultery and fornication – while dressed in Chelsea football strip – with a woman called Antonia de Sanchez. Methinks gays are not the only ones that children need protecting from.

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail was obsessively screeching about the evil of homosexuality. Every day for weeks it carried two-page spreads putting the case against repeal. It organised a write-in, polls, and sought opinion from every shade of the religious divide. It even managed to get a gay Uncle Tom to write an anti-repeal piece for them. Every day a new editorial would appear, each one more hysterically self-righteous than the last.

It seemed that gay people were being dealt a hefty blow by the righteous brigade. Reading the papers you would imagine that the whole world had turned against us. The hatred issuing from the correspondence columns as well as the editorial columns was fearsome.

But then the forces of liberalism suddenly got their act together. In The Guardian, Peter Preston discussed his twin daughters, one straight one gay. Of his gay daughter he wrote: “She isn’t some notional stereotype invented to scare elderly cardinals. Nor is she a visitor from an alien place… This is our flesh and blood; part of us, a reflection of us. We don’t have to say she is equal, she IS equal. And no drizzle of incomprehension, no fear fostered in ignorance, no puny section, can alter that. It isn’t tolerance we need. It is knowing what makes our heart beat.”

Andrew Marr in The Observer railed against the “myopic fools” in the churches and Lords. But he also pointed out that the debate over section 28 had become something much more than a mere spat over gay rights. It had become a battle between liberal, plural Britain and reactionary, narrow Britain. “In their campaign against an unused but symbolic piece of legislation, a law which essentially says that gay people are lesser, all these leaders have offended not only homosexuals but also the liberal order which is everyone’s main protection in a plural Britain. They are using their enemies’ sword, arguing in a way which, if turned against their own lifestyles, they would find jaw-droppingly offensive. They are silly fools.”

And so, was the small fortune that The Daily Mail spent on its campaign to incite hatred against homosexuals worth it? Had it created the climate of intolerance that it so fervently desired?

Not if the age of consent debate in the House of Commons was anything to go by. MPs were falling over themselves to state their liberal credentials and demonstrate their commitment to the noble virtues of equality and liberty. The backlash against the backlash had arrived.

The Daily Telegraph then commissioned a Gallup poll to show the state of play after the ballyhoo. It must have been dismayed to discover that “An almost universal tolerance of homosexual relationships now obtains in this county.” When asked whether section 28 should remain, 51% said yes, while 43% said it should be repealed and 6% didn’t know. Hardly the overwhelming majority that The Daily Mail has been claiming. 72% thought homosexual behaviour to be morally neutral and “simply a fact of life.” 53% said that both homosexual and heterosexual relationships were of equal value.

Seems that our ranting prelates, rabbis and cardinals have not only shot themselves in the foot, they’ve shot themselves in the head.

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 churches, the Tories and the right-wing press must think that all their birthdays have come at once. The filthy reactionaries that we’d hoped were gone for good have made the biggest comeback since Dracula rose from the grave.

It was viper-in-chief of this poisonous crew, Cardinal Winning, head of Scotland’s Catholics, who started the hatred rolling. As Christine Odone wrote in The Observer: “As Winning has shown, there are many among the forces of conservatism who are spoiling for a fight. They burn to re-establish old moral certainties – men and women differ in the roles they fill, not just in their biological makeup; marriage provides the only legitimate context for sex; the nuclear family is the only family structure we should recognise. The blueprint of this ancien regimehas been readily available in the pages of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph for some time; Winning’s Section 28 campaign has ensured the momentum to turn the blueprint into reality. His unapologetic stance, and the widespread support it has won him north and south of the border, have forced the Tories to embrace his cause.”

Ms Odone says that Winning and his ilk realise that Tony Blair is an “ideological lightweight” who can be easily manipulated by their machinations. She suspects that the conniving Cardinal is now seeking out other issues to load onto his unsavoury bandwagon.

The clerical conspirators have, as Ms Odone says, plenty of influential supporters in the right-wing press. The Daily Mail – which could curdle the milk of human kindness at a hundred paces – must have spent a small fortune on its ongoing campaign against the repeal of Section 28. Not a day goes by that the paper doesn’t manage to come up with some new homophobic angle. On 5th February it was “The gay rights campaigner with an OBE and her links to a group of anarchist bombers that you won’t find on her CV”. This related to Stonewall’s Angela Mason. It said nothing about her past that hasn’t already been said and was deeply dishonest in its presentation.

On February 14th: The Mail gave us: “Why wrongs don’t make gay ‘rights’”. 19th February: “Gay sex laws must stay now”. 21st February: “Catholic chief backs gay propaganda ban”. 23rd Feb: “Labour peers still defiant in battle of Section 28”. 29th Feb: “Church grassroots fury at gay law ‘deal’”. 5th March: “This sad betrayal of the family”. March 6th: “Let gays ‘cruise for sex’ say Norris and Dobson”. March 7th: “Moslem threat to boycott schools if Section 28 goes”. March 9th: “Keep Clause 28 Premier is told by majority of his constituents” and on and on, a relentless catalogue of distortion, invention and slander. It seems The Daily Mail will stop at nothing in its campaign against homosexuals, and it is becoming increasingly malignant.

Not happy with suggesting that we threaten the safety of school children, it now suggests that we are all – particularly the ‘discreet’ ones – secretly conspiring to destroy family life completely. The idea of a “Velvet Mafia” was resurrected in an article about David Geffen, the man who, with Steven Spielberg, runs the DreamWorks movie studio in Hollywood. A new book about Geffen gave The Mail the opportunity to write: “This man is the leader of an all-powerful cabal of wealthy gay men who now run Hollywood… they have a secret agenda to undermine family life…”

According to The Mail: “The prime example of the power of Geffen and the Velvet Mafia is American Beauty, nominated for eight Oscars this year. Many US critics see the film, produced by Geffen’s DreamWorks as a caustic attack on heterosexual family life.” The paper also cites Ian McKellen’s film Gods and Monsters which, it says, “pushed the notion that gay soldiers are the truest heroes in battle.”

The report concludes: “Geffen recently paid $2million for a black marble swimming pool at his Fire Island house in time for this year’s gay debauch – while turning out films and music designed to undermine our most important values.”

Another Mail columnist, Peter McKay, wrote: “We’re being battered into submission by gay self-pity. First it was Aids and the claim that the heterosexual majority was letting gays die rather than seek a cure for the disease to which their sexual habits make them vulnerable. Since this is no longer tenable, we are harried about their status and right to have sex in public places… the drip-drip-drip Chinese torture of gay propaganda results in new laws and ‘rights’. Yesterday we were told that Culture Secretary Chris Smith, who is gay, phoned Education Secretary David Blunkett to say he and others were anxious that any Government promotion of marriage did not ‘implicitly denigrate homosexuality.’”

In an editorial, The Mail opined: “Now New Labour appear to be considering putting homosexual partners on the same footing as married couples over inheritance tax…. In effect, the people who will be paying for this latest extension of homosexual rights will be widows and widowers – and later, in many cases, their children. So much for a Government that repeatedly proclaims its support for marriage and family.”

The Mail omits to mention that for centuries gay people have been paying top-rate taxes for which they have received far less benefits than heterosexuals. But then, The Mail is ace at omitting what is not convenient.

Not that The Daily Mail is alone in its propaganda war against gay people – it’s just that none of the other papers are quite as obsessive about it, or prepared to devote quite so many resources to pursuing the vendetta.

The Daily Telegraph is obviously following the religiously correct line, although not quite so skilfully. One of its own columnists, Tom Utley (who was a respected journalist before he took up propaganda), produced one of the most ridiculous, stupid and ultimately sad pieces I can remember for a long time. “A Christian Church must come out for Section 28” was the headline, and at first it seemed like the standard anti-gay rant. He was making the point that the Church of England had a duty to oppose repeal because homosexuality is condemned in the gospels. “If the Scriptures and Christian tradition are clear about anything, it is that homosexual acts are wrong. This is extremely tough on people who, through no fault of their own or anybody else’s, are attracted to members of their own sex. But there it is… to be a Christian means to believe that sodomy is wrong.”

Any Christian worth his salt must obey these rules, he argued, which include fighting to retain Section 28. Bishops have no business scheming with the Government to broker a deal that would allow the Section to be junked. “We have long grown used to the worldliness of the CofE,” he wrote, “but this is taking worldliness to the point of seediness: ‘Psst! It’ll be fine by us if you let local authorities teach that sodomy is a good thing, so long as you suggest that marriage is fine, too.’”

This seems standard right-wing fare. But Mr Utley has not finished yet: “I write this as no great champion of Section 28. It strikes me as a silly law – not only because it is badly drafted, but because I do not seriously believe that children can be taught to become homosexual if they are not that way inclined. It also gives unnecessary offence to some of my homosexual friends, and for that reason alone I will not much mind if it is repealed.”

So, Mr Utley despises Section 28, thinks it foolishly drafted and feels sorry for the damage it does to his friends. Yet he also wants the Church of England to “stand on the rock on which it was founded” and crusade for its retention. Can you make sense of it?

Much more sinister than Tom Utley’s confused rambling was something written by Richard Ingrams in The Observer, a supposedly liberal paper. He was commenting on the latest sex scandal that had been uncovered at a children’s home in Wales. “In all the thousands of words that have been written about it, one word has never been mentioned. That word is ‘gay’. This omission ought to strike us as odd, to say the least, considering that nearly all the people convicted or accused of gross indecency with boys over many years were homosexual men. It is even odder when you consider that nowadays the daily bulletins invariably contain an item of ‘gay news’… However, it seems that when gays are shown to have engaged in acts of dreadful cruelty and depravity, they are invariably described as paedophiles, a term which denotes those (male or female) who are sexually attracted to children (also male or female) and therefore have no specifically gay or even male connotations.”

Ingrams say that the use of this “euphemism” lets gay men off the hook and allows us to continue demanding that the age of consent be lowered. He suggests those men in Wales acted in the way they did because they were homosexual, but that political correctness precludes anyone pointing it out. This is a straightforward restatement of the idea that all gay men are paedophiles.

The trouble with this logic is that thousands of little girls are raped and tortured each year. It may be an uncomfortable fact for Mr Ingrams to accept, but the perpetrators of these crimes are heterosexual men. Their sexuality, too, is never mentioned in news reports.

I’m sure Richard Ingrams doesn’t feel that he is in any way responsible for these abuses simply because he shares the same sexual orientation as the monsters who carried them out. Yet it seems Ingrams holds all gay men responsible for what happened in Wales.

So where is all this leading? Has society reached the limits of toleration as far as homosexuality is concerned? Richard Littlejohn certainly thinks so.

Writing about the Soho bomber’s court case in his Sun column, Littlejohn says: “Hysterical politicians and left-wing columnists tried to pretend that there was a vast network of neo-Nazis deeply embedded in British society. They seized on the bombing as a golden opportunity to advance their own agenda. They were demanding new laws and tougher powers for the police… It was a drive to paint this country as racist and intolerant of minorities… I know from my postbag that most people are sick and tired of being labelled bigots, racists or homophobes, whatever the hell that means. This is a decent country. But decent people are being cornered. There will be a backlash. Unless we are very careful, the smear-mongers will one day get the society they like to pretend already exists. David Copeland [the Soho bomber] should be seen as a warning, not an opportunity.”

Richard Littlejohn might just like to ponder the topic of toleration a little. As a citizen born in this country – who happens to be gay – I am not here under sufferance. I will resist being subjected to laws that do not apply equally to all my fellow citizens. Do you understand this, Richard Littlejohn?

Maybe the great American orator Robert Ingersoll can make it clearer: “For one man to say to another ‘I tolerate you’ is an assumption of superiority, and it is not a disclaimer but a waiver of the right to persecute.”

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=

Barebacking has been this month’s buzzword among the finger-wagging elements of the press, and what a gift for the unthinking sensation-mongers it has been. And what a challenge to even our most liberal supporters.

The dizzying moral debate started when the Radio Four presenter Nigel Wrench wrote in The Pink Paper about his sexual adventures as an HIV-positive gay man. Part of those adventures involved having anal sex without a condom (“barebacking” as our imaginative American cousins have dubbed it). “Barebacking is happening at a sauna or backroom near you, without fanfare or announcement and often without words,” wrote Mr Wrench. “I know because I’ve been there and I know because I’m one of those who’ve done it.”

Shock, horror and condemnation were the immediate reactions. But Nigel Wrench is not a malevolent monster, out deliberately to infect his unsuspecting partners. He is always, he says, honest about his status and will always use a condom if his partner requests it.

This did not placate those who were outraged at the very concept of barebacking. Such irresponsibility, they cried. Such downright evil!

Or, as Wyn Evans wrote to The Guardian after it had taken up the debate: “The pernicious claptrap purveyed by Nigel Wrench in defence of barebacking is an insult to the intelligence, although I can applaud the fact that the article advertises to a much wider audience the current thinking amongst a deluded section of the gay community. So it’s OK now, is it, to spread AIDS to the community at large as long as it’s done as ‘the ultimate expression of intimacy’?”

Nigel Wrench’s fellow Radio 4 presenter, John Humphrys then entered the fray with an article in The Sunday Times. He took Nigel up on his claim that “Barebacking can be warm, exciting and involving” and therefore was legitimate among consenting adults, even if some of them are HIV positive.

“Surely,” wrote Mr Humphrys, “the moral issue is clear. Wrench tells us that since he was infected he has had unsafe sex ‘more times than I remember, often with men whose names I could not tell you’ although not with a lover who was unaware that he was infected. But how can it be right to pass on a deadly virus to someone, even if he or she has chosen to take the risk? It is difficult to see how even the most informed and profound debate could jump that hurdle of moral certainty.”

Mr Humphrys then warned: “The danger is that this sort of thing can be exploited by people who want to condemn a little more and understand a little less.” And, indeed, within days his prediction had come true. The Mail on Sunday decided to go big with it. They approached The Pink Paper for permission to publish Wrench’s article. Permission was denied on the grounds that the article would be used out of context. The Mail on Sunday used it anyway, confirming The Pink Paper’s worst fears about “decontextualisation”. (I understand a complaint has been made to the Press Complaints Commission.)

“The article reprinted below will no doubt appal most readers of The Mail on Sunday,” said the paper, before using it to launch into a wide-ranging attack on gay rights. “One issue [the Government has] under consideration, following a submission from the homosexual rights group Outrage!, is to relax the law on gay sex in saunas, clubs, public lavatories and so-called ‘cruising’ areas such as Hampstead Heath in North-West London. Over the last few weeks, a growing campaign to end the legal ban on gay sex in public places has gathered strength, with London mayoral candidates Frank Dobson and Steven Norris backing calls for police to turn a blind eye to such activities… We therefore decided we should publish the article… we believe that the general public should be given an opportunity to raise their voice before being presented with proposals for changes in the law which they may find horrifying.”

In an editorial, The Mail on Sunday said it found The Pink Paper’s reluctance to allow it to reproduce the article “disturbing”. “What can this indicate other than the wish to keep the population at large ignorant of the next set of demands for ‘rights’ from the gay lobby – ‘rights’ the vast majority will simply see as licence of the most appalling kind?” the paper asked.

The following week, the letters column was decorated with the predictable litany of horror. “As a gay man I would never put myself at risk or the health of others in sexual acts described by Nigel Wrench. The sordid and dangerous practice of sex in public places is sad and almost impossible to stop… Mr Wrench you are a disgrace.”

Ms L Awad thought Wrench “thoroughly reprehensible and irresponsible”.

But after the hysteria, what about the debate Mr Wrench had so earnestly sought? Even those who pride themselves on their support for gay rights and gay people found themselves bewildered by this one.

Obviously, some people don’t see the need for any further discussion. Barebacking is wrong, irresponsible, wicked, they will say, and that’s all there is to it.

This may be the more comfortable approach but the issue can’t simply be dismissed that easily. Barebacking isn’t going to stop – any more than gay sex of any kind is going to stop – simply because people think it’s wrong. Bringing it into the light and discussing it is the only way to find out what is going on. After all, it isn’t an unusual practice. According to a study in San Francisco, of 3,000 gay men between the ages of 15 and 25, 41 per cent had recently participated in unprotected sex.

Nigel Wrench tries his best to remind people that having sex is always a two-way transaction (outside of rape, of course). If an HIV positive man is going to be sexually active on the gay scene he has the option of being open with his partners (which might result in him becoming a pariah and outcast) or he can tell himself that the other person is responsible for his own protection. That is to say, both partners in this sexual transaction have the right to say either: “stop”, “go” or “use a condom”. If you are going to permit a stranger to fuck you – or even a friend whose sexual history you aren’t entirely sure of – then the responsibility to produce a condom rests as much with you as with him.

There can be no doubt that so long as the sex is consensual, responsibility is equally divided. If you offer up your arse to a hunk, and you’re worried about getting HIV, then it’s your responsibility to insist he has a condom on his dick before he shoves it in – whatever your assumptions or his reassurances about HIV status. Melodramatic talk of people being “deliberately” infected by evil HIV-positive monsters will not wash. We cannot escape our own responsibility to protect ourselves.

And because this issue is all tied up with those pesky but powerful feelings we call love and lust normal rules of common sense don’t always apply. There are complications galore, not least of which are the inhibition-destroying effects of alcohol and drugs that often accompany this kind of sex.

Psychotherapist Alan Pope pointed out some others in The Guardian: “Gay men who are HIV negative can feel excluded by their status. This is particularly so for the bereaved or those with positive friends. It makes them feel that their identifications are with those who are different from them. To belong means you need to get infected. Additionally some gay men are caught up in the guilt of the survivor.” This may be difficult for some people to take on board, but that doesn’t make it illegitimate.

There is also the question of people in long-term monogamous relationships who know that they are both HIV positive or both HIV negative, and for whom, therefore, barebacking is not an issue. But then comes the added complication for those who are both HIV positive of re-infection with another strain of the virus that might be resistant to drugs.

All this must be a nightmare for health professionals working in the area of HIV and AIDS. In the early days “safer sex” was easily explained – “just say no” or “use a condom every time”. It’s obvious now that these messages aren’t sufficient. A whole generation of young gay men have lived their whole sexual lives in a world where HIV is present, but where death from AIDS is a rarity. The development of protease therapy has removed the edge of fear that previous generations of gay men lived with. We no longer see the horrific images of emaciated young men clinging on to a life of repeated infection and hospitalisation, and therefore the barriers begin to crumble. Complacency develops.

A new approach must be found that will convince young people that AIDS still has the potential to kill them and is something to be avoided at all costs.

In the meantime, gay men – because they are human beings – will continue to sometimes behave irrationally, even suicidally, in their sexual lives. And the heterosexual majority, as well as a good number of gay people, will continue to condemn them for it, and resent the money that their care takes out of the NHS. As Wyn Evans wrote to The Guardian: “The cost to the exchequer for keeping an AIDS patient alive for one year is of the order of £15,000 at least. Perhaps the real debate should be whether those who contract AIDS voluntarily should absolve the state from responsibility for their welfare.”

Mr Evans might, at first glance, seem to have a point. But let’s not forget that, for the first time, the number of people becoming HIV positive from heterosexual sex is higher than that of gay men. And the rise in the incidence of gonorrhoea and syphilis among straights is an indication that condoms have gone out of fashion with them, too.

Perhaps, then, to carry Wyn Evans’ point to its logical conclusion, anyone who acquires a sexually transmitted disease should be excluded from health care at the public expense. Or perhaps Mr Evans wouldn’t want to go that far. Perhaps he thinks only gay young men behave irresponsibly and so only they should be penalised.

I think that’s called discrimination.

As far as Nigel Wrench is concerned, the cost of honesty has been a heavy one. According to the London Evening Standard, the BBC has bowed to public outrage and announced that Mr Wrench is being “rested from his presentational duties”