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GAY TIMES May 1988
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=
Reviewing a BBC TV “Open Space” programme about the press treatment (and, indeed, creation) of the “Loony Left”, Peter Tory wrote in The Daily Express (15 Mar): “The trouble with the Left—loony or otherwise—is that it doesn’t have much sense of fun.” It seems that Mr Tory thinks it’s hilarious that newspapers blatantly lie and invent stories. He must think it’s a hoot that the democratic process is ruthlessly undermined by papers such as his own. I don’t think he would be so amused if he found the tables turned and the newspapers doing the dirty on him.
And meanwhile John Birt, the deputy director-general of the BBC, made some pithy and apposite comments about the state of the British media in his speech to the Royal Television Society. “Some of our popular papers regularly contain stories which invade the privacy of individuals for no reason of public interest; which shows insufficient concern for standards of good taste and decency, which indulge in occasion in outright invention … Increasingly common is the sound of grinding axes, from proprietors, editors and individual correspondents, shifting the balance away from journalism where the fruits of inquiry allow the readers to form his or her own opinion, towards journalism conducted in support of previously held opinion.”
The sound of grinding axes in newspapers is, indeed, familiar to gay people. The sheer volume of hatred that is directed at us day after day shows no sign of abating. To hold anti-gay opinions is an individual’s right, but as Mr Birt says, such opinions should be kept for the comment pages.
Nowadays it’s almost impossible to distinguish news from comment, both have been distorted to fit into a very narrow political view of the world, and if a story can’t be slanted it is ignored. Mr Birt said: “British journalism is not in a healthy condition and is neither capable nor allowed to serve society as it should.”
The lecture was reported by all the broadsheets and, indeed, The Times carried a long extract from it (7 Apr). The tabloid newspapers, however, omitted all mention of the lecture.
Which illustrates precisely the point Mr Birt was making.
Have the sordid Sunday scandal-sheets run out of gay celebrities to drag out of the closet? Nowadays they seem to be reduced to ‘exposing’ the children of the famous. After Francis Rossi’s son was given the treatment last month we now have the daughter of film star Stewart Granger being identified as a lesbian by The News of the World (10 Apr). But best of all must be one the NoW provided us with on 20thMarch. I can imagine the delight of gay people all over the country as they went to buy their paper that day and saw the headline of the front page of The News of the World: “God’s cop girl is gay”.
Anti-gay policeman James Anderton has himself fathered a cess-pit swirler! Oh, what exquisite irony! His only progeny one of the monsters he so deplores! But, of course, his tune has changed somewhat. In his daughter’s case it’s all “God’s will” (not God swill, as some would have it).
The other papers were strangely uninterested in this revelation and the only reference I saw to it was a letter in The Sun from “a parent with a gay child” who had been “deeply hurt” by Mr Anderton’s pronouncements on homosexuality and wanted an apology from the prophet. The writer was a certain Mrs Doreen Potts and the letter was published on 1 April.
Or, as The Sun might say: “Gotcha!”
[Note: Doreen Potts was a character invented by Terry Sanderson whose comic misadventures in the gay world were a regular feature in Gay Times.]
The intensely tiresome idea of homosexuals having “stolen” the word gay was given another airing by the equally tiresome Sun (23/24 Mar). The paper had dug up a couple of men with the name Gay, one of whom decided to change it by deed poll to Straight after being subjected to what the paper called “poof jibes”. The silly chap at the centre of the story went on and on about how he was a “red-blooded man” and how he wasn’t “gay by nature”. A friend was quoted as saying: “Women wouldn’t go near him because of his name.” Oh really? Women are that stupid, are they? A more likely reason for his lack of success with women is that he is an idiot.
Next day another Mr Gay was at it: “Didn’t those woofters think of the misery they would cause when they hijacked our name?” he said. A reader sympathised with his plight: “It’s not his fault homosexuals stole the word from the English language and made it mean something different.”
I know exactly what he means. We used to have a pouffe at home, but had to replace it with a foot stool because of the shame it brought on the family—don’t these furniture manufacturers realise what misery they’ve brought into innocent people’s lives by naming a piece of furniture in such a way?
The Sun invited readers to think of a “more appropriate word to mean homosexual—an original one for a change?” And I’m inviting Gay Times readers to think of an appropriate word to describe Sun readers. Answers on a postcard please. Or if it’s not fit for mixed company, in an envelope.
As readers of The Times vie with each other to be the first to report hearing a cuckoo, I regret to advise you that the first “poofter” has been spotted in The Daily Telegraph. Admittedly, the word was contained in a letter to the editor (9 Apr), but the fact that it was without quotation marks was ominous.
It’s bad enough that such abusive language is common currency in the smelly end of the press, we certainly don’t need it creeping into the broadsheets. How long, I wonder, before the word becomes an acceptable part of the Telegraph’s house style?
Most newspapers employ columnists to comment on current affairs and interpret events for their readers. The tabloids employ a special breed of such commentators who are advertised as “provocative” and “controversial” — which generally translates as insufferably racist, sexist and homophobic. There is little to choose between them—all are unquestioning Thatcherites and, like their heroine, supremely smug and self-satisfied.
Their knee-jerk predictability makes their columns sorry reading. The worst offender is Ray Mills of The Star, the man whose column the Press Council calls “outrageously racist, abusive and inflammatory.” The man who has been expelled from the National Union of Journalists for persistent breaches of journalistic ethics. The man who makes a living using violent language against defenceless people.
Last month I was invited by the BBC to take, part in a pilot TV programme about the press and its standards. I had been asked to challenge Mr Mills on his outpourings and ask him for an explanation of his relentless promotion of hatred against gays. Being a pilot programme, it will not, unfortunately, be broadcast. Mr Mills made it clear that he would not take part if it were to go on the air. This is understandable. To express repellent opinions under the cloak of print with no-one to challenge is one thing, but to face one of the victims of his evil campaign and try to justify his actions is quite another. The TV camera has a happy knack of magnifying bigotry and without the hollow cheering of his newspaper to egg him on, there would be nowhere for Mr Mills to hide.
In the flesh, Ray Mills seems inoffensive. Shy even. But it was he who made words like “woofter”, “lezzie” and “queer” once more acceptable in newspapers.
There was an audible gasp in the studio when Mills defended writing that he was sorry that a gay man’s attempt to kill himself had failed. “A completely useless member of society” he concluded. He said he did not approve of “queer-bashing” but denied that it could ever be proved that his comments provided encouragement for thugs who carry out the attacks. He justified his opinions by claiming that they were shared by the vast majority of the British public. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr Mills that if all the British public’s baser prejudices were allowed to run unchecked, the country would rapidly decline into anarchy.
In short he was unrepentant. He was also something of a disappointment, his voice almost inaudible (hopefully an indication of the shame he feels about the words he utters). The ogre I had expected was, in fact, something of a mouse. Another reason, no doubt, that Mr Mills is a reluctant TV star. What would his readers think if they knew the sad truth about their ranting hero?
A classic example of how evil the tabloid press can be was the case of Henry Tennant, a gay member of “an aristocratic family” who is also HIV positive. After The Sun discovered Mr Tennant’s HIV status and revealed it on the front page (29 Mar), the poor man was pursued around the world by reporters who seem to find some strange fascination in linking royalty to Aids.
After Mr Tennant’s father, Lord Glenconner, complained about the hounding of his son by the press and said that it would not happen if he had terminal cancer. The Sun then produced one of its sickeningly pious editorials to try to excuse its filthy behaviour: “First, it is not ‘hounding’ to report the news. Second, people contract cancer totally by chance. Aids usually occurs through a sexual choice.” To say such thinking is wicked seems insufficient. To justify the intolerable harassment of a man who is already under such enormous strain is almost unbelievable. And to say that dragging the details of his medical condition on to the front page is “news” is contemptible.
The Tennant affair also gave The Sun another chance to demonstrate its nasty and insidious campaign of misinformation about Aids and HIV infection. In a story (31 Mar) the paper said that Henry Tennant had hired a house for a holiday with his boyfriend on the Caribbean island of Bequia. After the paper revealed to the owner of the house that his guest was HIV positive the man had allegedly said that he intended to “burn all the mattresses” and “throw away all the plates, cutlery and glasses.”
The man’s foolish hysteria was left unquestioned by The Sun which said nothing to contradict it. Presumably its readers will imagine that such reactions are perfectly reasonable and rational. Education groups who try so hard to counter such ignorance must despair when they see their work undermined so gratuitously by journalists.
It’s not good enough anymore for reporters to claim that they are ignorant of the subject or that they are working under pressure. If they don’t know the basics about Aids and HIV infection they shouldn’t be writing about it.
We can only assume that there is an element of malevolence in the actions of irresponsible papers such as The Sun.
The Murdoch campaign to name doctors who have Aids (and presumably the ones who are HIV+) gained new impetus last month after the death of Dr David Collings. All of the Murdoch papers (and most of the others) joined in the chorus demanding “tests” for all doctors (and, in some cases, their patients) and (Sun 1 Apr) to “boot out” the ones who are found to be infected.
There may well be grounds for public debate on this issue and naturally there is genuine concern. But the debate must be raised beyond the level of this, which appeared in The Daily Express (16 Mar): “I am fed up with being continually bombarded with the Aids problem. The majority of victims have only themselves to blame because of their sexual activity. I abhor the amount of money being spent on them and feel no sympathy whatsoever for them.”
The tabloids already dictate too much of the political agenda in this country, we must not let their renewed Aids hysteria stampede those in power into regrettable actions on Aids.
The British Medical Association must stand firm against the pressure being applied by the press when it meets in July for its annual conference. Journalists are, in the main, ignorant and unsympathetic to the plight of those with Aids. They must not be allowed to impose this ignorance and prejudice on those who are already suffering enough.
Gratuitous insult department: “My Beautiful Laundrette: Funny, perceptive study of a Pakistani man marred by a homosexual element that seems irrelevant to the story”—TV review in Daily Express (9 Apr).
“I do not mind what homosexuals do with each other. But I do mind the contempt for life that is implicit in their sexual proclivities and the humbug that being homosexual is in no way inferior to being heterosexual” — George Gale, Daily Mail (8 Apr).
Commenting on the National Union of Teachers decision to “defend members who are discriminated against because of their homosexuality”, The Star (7 Apr) conceded that “At first sight that sounds not unreasonable” but then, rather predictably, went on to say that “Parents have the right to expect fit and proper teachers … The teachers at their annual conference devoted an entire session to ‘gay rights’ (i.e. homosexual wrongs) … If teachers flaunt their perversions in public, the public has a right to demand that they change professions. If that be discrimination, The Star says: Discriminate for our children’s sake!”
Of course, rather like the word “promote” in another context, The Star’s argument rests very much on what they mean by “flaunt”. Does it mean, for instance, that if a child asks a gay teacher about homosexuality and the teacher answers, he is “flaunting”? Does it mean that a school is “flaunting” if it employs an openly homosexual member of staff? Perhaps the intellectual giants who run The Star would like to explain.
Nicholas de Jongh of The Guardian confirmed (8 Apr) what many of us have suspected for some time: that Mrs Thatcher was personally responsible for pushing Clause 28 through Parliament.
“One senior minister,” wrote Mr de Jongh, “believes there is no need for the clause and says that it is wrongly believed that pressure for the clause came mainly from some right-wing Conservative backbenchers.”
Aided and abetted by what The Guardian calls “penny-in-the-slot-politicians” (you put a penny in the slot and they say whatever Mrs Thatcher wants them to say) the Prime Minister “made sure that the clause was not dropped” and that non-government amendments were not accepted.
But opposition continues all the same. On 3rd April The Sunday Times carried an anti-clause letter signed by over a hundred art-world heavyweights including Sir Hugh Casson, Francis Bacon, the Duke of Beaufort and Derek Jarman. Not that this would impress Mrs T, after all she has her reputation as the country’s leading philistine to think of.
The London Standard carried an article about the clause by Paul Bailey (30 Mar). After pondering the meaning of ‘promotion’ he said: “The tabloid that coined the felicitous phrase ‘pulpit poofs’ and uses the abusive ‘screaming queens’ when gay people inform the public, in reasonable terms that they have rights, clearly does not favour such promotion. No clause has been drafted for its removal from reading rooms and I hope none ever will be.”
The fight continues.
GAY TIMES June 1988
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=
Marcel Berlins, ex-editor of Law Magazine was writing in The London Standard (6 May) about the implications of Section 28. “Only one thing is certain if Section 28 of the Local Government Act ever comes before the courts,” said Mr Berlins, “the lawyers are going to get even richer.”
This much we know, but Mr Berlins goes on to inform us that “Section 28 does not create a criminal offence. No one can be prosecuted if the local authority breaks the ban. And that means that there is no scope for a private prosecution by an enraged individual — like the successful one for blasphemy launched by Mary Whitehouse against Gay News.”
So how can the Section be used? “Any dissatisfied ratepayer — and there will be plenty of those waiting for the opportunity — will be entitled to ask the High Court to rule that a council’s action is contrary to Section 28. The district auditor could also start court proceedings … the difference being that the amount of money involved in promoting homosexuality is likely to be relatively small.” Even the London Borough of Haringey devoted less than one-tenth of one per cent to the cause.
The danger, of course, comes from leaving it to judges to decide the issue. As we know from bitter experience there are some horribly homophobic people sitting on the bench — remember the infamous comment of Lord Chief Justice Lane who publicly described the 1967 Sexual Offences Act as “a bugger’s charter”? Hardly what you’d call an objective opinion.
Now we must be ready to fight it every step of the way.
The renewed ferment in the Church of England over the presence of gays led to an article in The Times (7 May) by Edward Norman, Dean of Peterhouse College. A more moderate and considered line was taken than the usual hysterical “against God’s law” crap. The Dean said that instead of just rejecting gays out of hand, Christians should be “agnostic” on the issue. “The notion, as enunciated by the bishops, that individuals are put together by God, who fills them with sexual urges and then sends them indelibly celibate into a world in which their contemporaries — because of a shade of difference in their body chemistry or their early environment — achieve a kind of fulfilment which they are not allowed to, can hardly be compatible with Christianity.”
Dr Norman ends by saying: “the fact is that the lives of very many homosexual Christians down the centuries have disclosed spiritual gifts in astonishing abundance” and that if the Church kicks out its gay members, then it will be “the Church itself that is the loser.”
Meanwhile, The Star was gleefully reporting (12 May) the refusal of a bishop to ordain one of his clergymen who was openly gay: “The ban will bring shrieks of protest from the so-called ‘gay’ community. But the Bishop must be firm. He can count on the support of every decent British citizen.”
The ban will also bring cackles of delight from so-called ‘newspapers’ whose wilful mendacity make their pseudo-religious rantings sound like an evil joke.
One of the more alarming of the rentagob MPs is Geoffrey ‘the jerk’ Dickens. The fat fool’s philosophy is much-admired by The Sun and The Star who quote him frequently in their intellectually retarded columns. But if you’re an idiot (and this man indubitably is), you can’t hide the fact for very long. Interviewing Dickens for his ‘Notebook’ in the Sunday Times (24 App), Paul Pickering observed: “Geoffrey admits he often doesn’t think until after the words are out of his mouth.” The current spate of interest in Mr Dickens comes from his request that the House of Commons debate witchcraft, which he says is “sweeping the country.”
The 19-stone MP for Littleborough and Saddleworth, according to the article, is convinced that witchcraft and paedophilia are directly related. “Children are sacrificed sexually to the lust and gratification of the coven,” he says, “In the dark ages they used an animal. Now they use the body of a child… Bodies have been taken from the grave and their heads cut off. People have cut the heads off and sexually assaulted the skeleton.”
After contemplating the mechanics of sex with a skeleton, Mr Pickering notes on his way out of the Dickens abode that “workmen seem to be engaged in the very necessary task of padding the walls.”
Gratuitous Insults Department: “Gay rights activists threaten members of the House of Lords … It could have been worse for their Lordships. The poofters could have threatened to KISS them instead.” — Sun (4 May).
“Peers have received death threats over the controversial Clause 28 … Time was when we thought hell had no fury like a woman scorned. That’s nothing compared to a poofter peeved.” — John Smith People (8 May).
Deserved Insult Department: “Reading the Sun is like putting your hand down the toilet,” — Erasure’s Andy Bell — Sun (3 May).
The April issue of Family Circle (the women’s magazine you always see at the supermarket checkout) contained a woeful tale of a young man’s coming out to his unsympathetic parents. The photograph accompanying the article gave some idea of the tone — a weeping youth, head-bowed is comforted by his equally distressed mother.
What a terrible time this particular family had, although it has to be said that most of the misery seemed self-inflicted. I usually feel great sympathy for parents who are first coming to terms with their child’s homosexuality, but it was difficult to maintain much care for this pair. Their son, Chris, was, by their own admission, a good lad. He didn’t take drugs, vandalise the neighbourhood or rape girls. What he did do was show a preference for flamboyant clothes and the occasional touch of mascara. This, to his father, was worse than murder. “There was nothing else I could do,” says the mother, “I agonised for weeks, but I knew I had to tell Chris to go.”
As it turned out, giving Chris his marching orders was the biggest favour his parents could have done him. After all, who wants to live with relatives who say: “What he’s doing is horrible. I don’t know how you can put up with it”? Or a mother who tortures herself by blaming her son’s sexual orientation on her potty-training technique?
He moved to London, set up home with an older, but very responsible, gay man called Stephen. From the mother’s description it sounds as though his life has improved about a trillion times since he left the family behind. He now has a successful career in theatrical design and a house overlooking the river — a life that most people would envy. But not his parents. Even though he has escaped their stifling grasp (and a brother who walks out of the room when Chris walks in), Mum still manages to say at the end: “I am sad that Chris will not have children, and I shall always worry about his future. Stephen is a lot older than Chris. He may get tired of him, or Chris might find someone younger and then go from partner to partner. I don’t know what the future holds.”
None of these dire things could possibly have happened to Chris if he’d been straight of course! It seems Mum and Dad are trapped in a fantasy world where everything gay is bad and everything straight is good. Even when the evidence of their own experience tells them different.
A particularly ugly report about Russell Harty appeared in The News of the World (8 May). It said that “A desperate manhunt was under way last night for handsome Jamie Wilson —TV star Russell Harty’s live-in toy boy lover. Doctors fear dark-haired Wilson, 23, could be under sentence of death because of their gay affair.”
And here’s me imagining that the threat was from hepatitis. Still, as far as the NoW is concerned, homosexuality is a far more dangerous disease.
A similarly loaded statement came from a group called ‘Family and Youth Concern’, reported in The London Standard (9 May): “The Government’s advice on the use of condoms to protect against Aids was unreliable and influenced by fears of upsetting homosexuals.”
Oh really? The Government has shown little sensitivity for the feelings of homosexuals in other areas. The introduction of Section 28 hardly indicates an anxiety to spare our feelings, now does it?
What The Standard didn’t reveal, however, is that ‘Family and Youth Concern’ is none other than The Responsible Society in another of their crafty disguises. I don’t mind the Bible-bashers spouting their clap-trap, but why are they so reluctant to be up-front about who they are? Why do they always have to invent names like ‘Parents Action Group’ and ‘Viewers and Listeners Association’?
Could it be that if people knew the truth they’d run a mile from the message?
For satire to be successful, two ingredients are essential: wit and truth. An effort to send up gay rights in the London Standard (28 Apr), contained neither of these elements. What it did contain was a sorry collection of cringingly embarrassing stereotypes.
Just to give the flavour, here’s the first paragraph: “Don’t you just lahhhhhve the idea of teaching children Gay History? Isn’t it so cute you could just scream? Some stuffy old party poopers will get all stuffy and upset, of course. Mrs Thatcher will hate it. But we all adore it, don’t we?”
Michael Bywater, author of the piece, is the sort of humourist who doesn’t have a sense of humour. He’s the lazy sort of writer who reaches for ready-made and dishonest clichés rather than taking the trouble to come up with something original. If the London Standard is going to make a habit of carrying this kind of spoof, I recommend that they get someone who can do it properly.
GAY TIMES August 1988
The “homosexual conspiracy” theory, which seems to be all the rage in the “serious” papers at the moment, popped up again in a major feature in The Mail on Sunday (“Scandal of the Gay Clergy” 10 Jul). This time it was written by Iain Walker who said, in effect, that the man who conducted the persecution of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, George Cassidy, the Archdeacon of London, is himself being persecuted as a result.
Apparently, according to Mr Walker, one in four of inner London’s clergy are gay and “they are supported inside the wider church establishment by homosexuals in positions of the highest responsibility” – no names, no pack drill, of course, but hearsay and anecdotes abound in this diatribe. It appears on the news pages but is merely opinion – rather poorly presented with each point more dubious than the last.
Like last month’s effort in The Sunday Telegraph, this disgraceful piece of propaganda brings shame on the British press. It has no balance, although it is presented as “analysis”, it has no substance, although “investigative journalists” are invoked to give it credence. It talks of LGCM selling “obscenity… the kind of thing you would expect to find in a San Francisco bath house.” The only evidence cited as proof of this was a safer sex leaflet which was very cunningly only reproduced in part, with no mention of its purpose. The leaflet was not produced by LGCM and its inclusion in the feature is to confuse readers of the article by not revealing the whole truth about the leaflet. No mention is made of its purpose – the prevention of the spread of Aids.
If the upper end of the British press is going to continue with this wilful campaign of disinformation about the gay community, then who could complain if there really is a conspiracy afoot?
Is the Government trying to get revenge on us for its humiliation over Section 28? Why are so many articles with a similar, and quite blatant, anti-homosexual purpose, suddenly appearing in sensible as well as loony papers?
Call it paranoia if you like, but let’s not be complacent.
The front-page lead in The People of 2ndJuly was about a man who is HIV positive and working as a hospital porter. He was referred to in the story as “a menace” even though the body of the article showed such a description to be totally unfair and unjustifiable. The man was behaving responsibly in every way.
The People’s decision to persecute him for no other reason than that he is trying to get on with his life is despicable. The journalists who tried to destroy him are detestable. How they got the confidential information about this man isn’t clear, but it isn’t he who should be vilified but those who betrayed his trust.
The newspaper that carried this story is owned by Robert Maxwell, a man who gains much publicity for his supposed concern about Aids.
What I’d like to call him isn’t printable.
Christopher Monckton writes regularly for the London Evening Standard about Aids. He is a nasty, manipulative schemer, who is seeking to use Aids as a political weapon.
His whole approach is based on the idea that people who are affected by the disease must be penalised in order to “protect the uninfected majority”. In short, Mr Monckton is a right-wing loony of the most dangerous sort.
On 16 June he was writing about “testing everyone” for the virus. He made it sound so easy with his talk of a “simple 30 second test”, Does Mr Monckton know something that the rest of us don’t?
He says the whole population could be screened for £30 million, but gives no indication where such a wildly optimistic estimate comes from. There are 56 million people in this country and each would have to be tested regularly to ensure that antibodies haven’t appeared since their last test. And what about false positives and false negatives? Monckton does not consider how a Health Service which is already falling apart would cope with such a task. He does not address the problem of those who would actively avoid the test and how they would be forced to undergo it. A police state? At the very least…
And even if the impossible happened and every man, woman and child in the country had been tested, then what? What would happen to those who were antibody positive? You won’t need three guesses to find Mr Monckton’s answer to that, I fear.
As Larry Gostin, Executive Director of the American Society of Law and Medicine, said in The Guardian (22nd June): “Irrational fears, political pressures, and prejudice against gays and intravenous drug users, which have no scientific validity, have confounded our ability to respond rationally. American debate on Aids focuses more on theoretical possibilities and highly remote risks than on the accumulated public health data.”
If the likes of Monckton have their way, this country’s debate will go in exactly the same direction.
As its contribution to Gay Pride Week, The Sun ran a grotesquely offensive two-page feature on gay life in Brighton (23rd June).
Peppered with weasel words intended to create alienating feelings in the minds of their readers (“bizarre blessing services”, “odd couples”, “gay mafia”), the piece was gratuitously insulting on many levels. “Places you’ll hate if you’re straight”—was a subheading, listing all the gay pubs and clubs in the town and more or less inviting gay-bashers to pay a call. “If you prefer steak and kidney pud to Ducky a l’Orange avoid (these restaurants)… Prefer pints to Pink Fairy cocktails? Then avoid (these pubs)…” And so on.
Another section resurrected “the gay plague” and allowed a local Tory councillor John Blackman to rant in a most disgusting fashion: “The poofs …have made Brighton a place for sick voyeurs and encouraged perverts to come here from all over the country. I think they are giving the town a filthy, dirty image that will damage trade. We don’t want to know about these people who indulge in disgusting acts which are harmful and offensive to the majority of people who live here…I think Brighton would be well rid of them.” The apoplectic Mr Blackman says that “aggressive gays” are “ramming their ideas down everyone’s throat.” Unlike himself, of course, who wouldn’t dream of forcing his bigotry on to an unwilling audience.
The Sun and Mr Blackman infer that gay people have no place in Brighton, that they have, somehow, arrived from another planet to hijack the town from ‘real’ people.
The truth is that the gay community contributes far more to Brighton’s economy and cultural life than Mr Blackman and his crackpot cronies ever will, and the gays will still be there when this silly burgher has been long-forgotten.
The News of the World dragged two more celebrities from the closet this month. One was Pam St Clements (“Pat” off Eastenders) and the other was Andrew Logan (Dr Evadne Hinge).
The latter was treated to the “Celebrity in gay rent boy shame shock-horror disgrace” treatment. The usual routine was followed: some dim-witted rent boy who cares for nothing and no-one—including himself—realises that if he can hook a celebrity client he can make a nice little bit on the side from the ever-open wallet of Mr Murdoch. This time the slimy little Judas came in the form of someone called Ray Morrison, who met Logan at the Apollo Club, “a notorious gay haunt in trendy Wardour Street.”
All this is par for the course, and the NoW’s condemnatory tone totally ignores the fact that Murdoch pays far more to rent boys than their regular customers do.
I hope very much that this grotesque piece of spite will not rob the world of Hinge and Bracket. The BBC stood by Kenny Everett when he got the Murdoch treatment, and they didn’t allow the Russel Harty revelations to stop him working for the Corporation. I think Andrew Logan will find that the Beeb will not hold his private life against him, even if rotten Rupert does.
Boy George might be a pleasant chap, but he’s as thick as his own foundation cream. In an interview in Record Mirror recently he was spouting in his usual half-baked fashion about Section 28.
Take this as an example: “I don’t want kids to be educated about homosexuality. I wasn’t taught about heterosexuality, I couldn’t have given a shit. I’m completely OK, do you see what I mean?” To be frank, George, no.
But worst of all was his rounding on his fellow gays: “What really upsets me about the whole issue is that 10 per cent of the voting public is gay and none of them have the guts to come out and say anything. It makes me sick, it makes me angry, and it really annoys me.”
Mr O’Dowd seems to have overlooked the tens of thousands of people who turned out for the marches in London and Manchester. Or the contributions of many courageous individuals at great personal cost. As someone who was denying his own gayness a few short years ago, George seems to imagine that he’s the only one who feels concerned.
Even given that the quotes have been reprocessed by a journalist, George has a reputation for mouthing off first and thinking later. Rather like a Tory backbencher. Perhaps he should stand for Parliament.
Congratulations Ian McKellen on a well-presented reply (26 Jun) to the Sunday Telegraph’s sinister feature “Is there a gay conspiracy”. It was a most cogent and eloquent article; just the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from our famous champion (who also managed to get Section 28 on to the Wogan Show).
GAY TIMES September 1988
The Glasgow University Media Group’s guide to the nation’s press awarded first prize for the Most Inaccurate Daily Newspaper in Britain to The Sun. Runner-up was, predictably, The Star. Greg Philo of the Media Group said The Sun was “well ahead of the rest of the pack for clear prima facie untruths”. Well, I am surprised!
And here, right on cue is another chapter from The Sun’s barefaced lies department. Reporting on the departure of EastEnders’ gay character Colin (“Ender Bender in Aids Rumpus”) The Sun said (6 Aug): “Eastenders executives are under political pressure to give gay screen characters like Colin a lower profile. Once Colin’s gay love affair with barrow boy Barry was one of the dominant plot lines in the series. But angry viewers jammed the switchboards last year after the two men were seen kissing on screen.”
Now just a minute — to start with the characters have never been seen kissing on screen. The most that ever happened between them was when (more sensitive readers might want to turn away at this point) Colin once squeezed Barry’s arm. I checked with the BBC myself following The Sun’s claim that there had been a mass protest at the arm-squeeze, and they denied categorically that there had been any more calls than usual. It was simply another of The Sun’s fabrications, which they continue to perpetuate even to this day.
Now an illustration of how the papers like nothing better than to perpetuate each other’s lies. On 24th July, John Junor (my nomination for Top Twat of this — and every — month) was screeching in his scumbag Sunday Express column: “Once again the London Borough of Ealing is advertising for a child care officer . . . saying Ealing’s new council will welcome applications from ‘lesbians and gay men’ … Isn’t that akin to setting alcoholics free in a liquor shop?”
Unable to let a choice insinuation about the “loony Left” pass without repeating and embellishing it, the following day’s Sun carried a story headed “Lefties Seek Gay for Boy’s Home Job”.
In fact, Ealing Council’s Equal Opportunities statement is carried in all recruitment advertising. This ad was no exception. Far from “seeking a gay” for the job in question, the ad simply said that gays would not be barred from applying.
Still, when there’s a propaganda war to fight, truth is expendable.
No sooner has Parliament gone on holiday (please, please stay there!) than the media’s “silly season” begins. First off the mark was, of course, The News of the World, where the silly season has no beginning and no end. “Gay Cell Shocker for Lester” was the front-page lead on 31st July. It told a rather pathetic tale, sold to the Murdoch merchants by “burglar David O’Halloran”, of an alleged incident in High Point Prison where Lester Piggott is incarcerated.
It seems The News of the World’s ever-open wallet encourages people with rather dubious morals to come forward for the easy pickings. Indeed, I would imagine the journalists who write this kind of bilge feel at home with these deadbeats they support so avidly.
The alleged “gay sex scenes” were described with the usual adjectives: “sordid”, “stomach-churning” and so on. But the really sordid player in this little affair is the disgusting editor of The News of the World, Wendy Henry. If the Press Council wants credibility it ought to make her explain what she thinks she’s doing paying rent boys and criminals for their “stories” — what kind of morality is it that allows this kind of dubious journalism to flourish? They must be queuing up to get into High Point — going to jail has never been so lucrative!
The Independent carried an interview with Bishop John Spong of Newark, New Jersey (20th July), who was at the Lambeth Conference. The Bishop is of the liberal persuasion and is “unimpressed” by the British church’s ludicrous debates on such topics as women priests and homosexuality.
On homosexuality, the paper says he has been impressed with research at a New York hospital which appears to show that male homosexuality is the result of neuro-chemical influences on the foetus. “If this is substantiated,” says the Bishop, “it means that the attitude of the Christian church has been evil and not just wrong.” He also says he honours some of his avowedly homosexual priests as well as some of his secret ones. He argued that the Church should support monogamous and long-lasting homosexual partnerships, although he denies vigorously that he is talking about ‘homosexual marriage’.
I wouldn’t go along with all the Bishop’s opinions, but at least they have some kind of reason to them. Not so The Star, which picked up the story the following day and headlined it “Chemicals to blame for poofs — says bishop”. The bishop became “whacky” because he wanted “the church to give its blessing to woofter relationships”. He was also quoted as saying: “If the Church of England can bless the British Armada before it sails to kill Argentinians it should be able to bless two human beings who are in love with each other.”
The Star says Bishop Spong allows his priests to bless “queers”. Although the story was credited to “Star Reporter”, it had the fingerprints of Ray Mills all over it.
The Lambeth Conference did try to come to grips with homosexuality in relation to Aids. “African Bishops yesterday led a fierce and triumphant attack on liberal understandings of human sexuality,” reported Andrew Brown in The Independent (5 Aug). He said, “An official motion on Aids, and a private members motion on human rights for homosexuals were savagely amended.”
The Primate of Kenya, the “Most Rev” Mannasses Kuria is reported as saying that Aids “is a disease from that sin of homosexuality.”
Oh really? What about lesbians — they are homosexuals and Aids is almost unknown amongst them. And isn’t it true that the majority of those infected in Africa are heterosexual? The Primate of Kenya is going to have a lot to answer for on judgement day if he continues to cling to his Biblical fantasies at the expense of common sense and compassion.
Although it is convenient for the religious fools to believe otherwise, Aids is not a homosexual disease, it is everyone’s disease and the sooner we recognise this the better.
If they want to know about sin these foolish men should step outside of themselves and start to question their own wicked attitudes.
Undeniable truth department coupled with hypocrite of the month award: “The Times and the Sunday Times tell up-market lies and The Sun and the News of the World trawl the gutter for their fantasies” —Editorial in Daily Mirror (25 July).
The Sunday Telegraph (24thJuly) announced that its crank columnist (Holy) Mary Kenny was in hospital. At last, I thought, some good news.
But there was even better to come — her place had been taken by Celia Haddon who had the following to say: “Almost all the middle-aged heterosexual men I know seem to have become unhealthily obsessed with and prejudiced against homosexuality. They are intemperate, bigoted and hypocritical. Clearly, their tolerance a few years back was only skin deep. Aids has given them the chance to come out in their true colours. What really enrages me is the way they pretend sodomy (and therefore higher risk of passing on Aids) is confined only to gay men. As many women know, it is something that quite a few completely heterosexual men like doing. I am also infuriated by the Russian roulette idea that conventional intercourse is safe because so few women in Britain are infected yet. This claim is usually made by the same middle-aged men … You would think straight men ought to be grateful that the Aids epidemic started among gay men. Gay men are literally dying for all of us. The two or three people I have come across who carry the virus are an inspiration to me for their courage and humour.”
That’s telling ’em, girl. I wonder if it was a coincidence that the editor, Peregrine Worsthorne was on holiday that week?
Tom Robinson spoke to The Sunday Times (31 July) about his career and his private life. In passing he mentioned that at the moment he was having a relationship with a woman. “He dismisses the idea of any betrayal. ‘I’ve had plenty of affairs with men who consider themselves heterosexual. Why can’t I have an affair with a woman and still consider myself homosexual?’”
A fair enough question — after all, most of us accept that human sexuality isn’t a cut and dried business. But not so the tabloids, for whom everything must be in black and white, even if it makes no sense. For the following week The People took up the story, and expanded it into a double-page spread, with pictures of the lady involved (defined as a lesbian because she wears leathers and rides a motorcycle).
An editorial in the same issue, though, betrays The People’s true (save our children from positive images of homosexuality) motivation: “Rock star Tom Robinson has shocked his homosexual friends by falling in love with a GIRL. Which just goes to show we misunderstood when he sang Glad to be Gay. He was just demonstrating how happy he was!”
There’s only one word for The People: pathetic. Truly pathetic.
It was intensely pleasing to see Mrs Thatcher getting a rough ride from Australian gays during her recent trip down under. One thing that emerged from her narrow escape from the angry “homos” was that La Thatch seems to be genuinely puzzled when it is made clear to her that not everyone worships at her shrine.
Her infuriating voice and her presumptuous use of the royal we (“we take our decisions to our parliament” — who does this woman think she is?) are enough to drive anyone insane. Alan Rusbridger noted in The Guardian (6 Aug) that Mrs Thatcher was interviewed on Australian television in a way that would be simply unthinkable here (that is to say, someone has the temerity to ask tough questions and insist that she answer them). “Mrs Thatcher stared at (the interviewer) with the evil eye. But by now something had cracked. The Reece grooming, the bouffanted voice, the Meltis soft-centred manner: midnight had struck and they had all vanished. We were transported back to a Mrs Thatcher we’d not glimpsed on telly since 1978: eyes flaring, strident, corncrake voiced.”
Speaking about the gay protestors (London Standard 5 Aug) she is quoted as saying: “One is very glad that they are not on your side”.
It sounded somehow pathetic, as though she were deeply hurt that people could possibly disagree with her — about anything.
The unfortunate truth is that millions of people hate and detest her with a ferocity that is quite alarming to behold. She should spend a few days in the North of England and she’d soon discover what most of her “subjects” think about her. I have never known a Prime Minister generate such feelings of antipathy amongst normally well-balanced people. Indeed, I spoke to one man in Sheffield recently who told me that he was saving up for a street party to be held on the day Mrs Thatcher dies. All the places are booked.
However, her press corps (“our lapdogs”, as she probably calls them) will have none of it. They tried to make the Melbourne protesters sound like some kind of aliens brought from another planet to utter anti-Thatcher blasphemies (“she was mobbed by poofs and provos” — Sun 6 Aug). The Daily Mail (5 Aug) enlisted Senator John Stone, Leader of the National Party in the Senate and one of Australia’s most outspoken politicians (i.e. a loony right winger) to write about “The shame of Australia”. In the Senator’s view the “shame” seems to be that dissent of any kind was permitted. “I don’t know who makes up the mob” he said. “In Melbourne … there were homosexuals who are certainly not representative of Australia and are likely to be even less so in the future.” The article was so extreme and anti-democratic that The Sun simply couldn’t resist it and also carried it the following day.
But these efforts by the press lackeys to rescue the PM’s image from the debacle were undermined by the fact that we could all see the truth of what was happening on television.
Mrs Thatcher has now made plain (in case anyone was in any doubt) that she holds gay people in the utmost contempt. I am pleased to say that, for the most part, the feeling is quite mutual.
THE British Medical Journal (30 July) carried an editorial by John Bancroft which posed the question “Is living a homosexual lifestyle bad for your health?” After much rumination, he came to the conclusion that not only was homosexuality “compatible with full health” but that if the Government “fostered sexual equality” and came to regard sex as “a binding force in loving intimate relations” rather than “a means of asserting gender or gaining status” it might “improve the heterosexual rather than reduce the homosexual aspects of our society.”
Let’s have more of this kind of thought, please.
Finally, I’m taking a rest from the Mediawatch column for the next few months but I hope to be back in the New Year. Bye for now.
GAY TIMES January 1989
Terry Sanderson’s new autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
After three months travelling the world, I was not looking forward to returning to a daily diet of Britain’s dismal tabloid press. But what do I find? At last the scumbags are getting their come-uppance. They’re being hit where it hurts — right in the bank balance. The pay-outs in libel and damage claims have escalated right up to a record £1 million for Elton John, who also received a grovelling front-page apology from The Sun (12 Dec).
“We are sorry that we were lied to by a teenager living in a fantasy world” was their pathetic excuse for the malicious and prolonged campaign of vilification they conducted against Elton in 1987.
Elton joins a long list of other people, as diverse as Koo Stark, The Queen, Michael Cashman and Richard Harris who have had substantial pay-outs recently. But this list of aggrieved individuals has one thing in common —they could all afford to take the huge financial risk of court action against the lie merchants. And, as was pointed out in The Sunday Times (27 Nov), the current spate of tabloid-bashing is probably just a reflection of “the desire of the average jury to teach newspapers a lesson”. It follows that the libel laws are not the ordinary person’s antidote to newspaper poison.
It is unfair that only the rich and famous can strike back at these loathsome liars, there should be a statutory right to privacy or right of reply available to anyone who feels victimised. And, indeed, another attempt to introduce such legislation is to be made by Labour MP Tony Worthington.
The climate of opinion in this country has definitely turned against arrogant tabloid newspapers. A law to protect innocent people from their rampages is inevitable, although it might still be a couple of years away.
While I was making my way around the globe a new baby, The Post, was born to Eddie Shah — and a sickly child it is, too. Promoting itself as something different in the tabloid market — a pop paper without sleaze — it should be welcome. What the advertising failed to tell us was that the paper had nothing else of interest to fill the space vacated by the absent tits and scandal mongering.
The pre-publication razzmatazz promised that the paper’s editorial line would be independent and its opinions would not be forced down our throats. And yet within days the “NEW voice of Britain” was sounding —as far as gays are concerned — exactly like the old. They used letters from accredited nutcase Denis Nilsen to reveal “The sordid details of undercover homosexual lifestyle inside Britain’s top security prisons” (21 Nov). Then came “Lesbian shocker for BBC” (24 Nov) followed by “£18,000 Gay video storm” (2nd Dec) which could have come from any of the other scuzzy papers (“A storm of protest erupted yesterday over a left-wing council’s plan to recruit gays as foster parents.”)
The Tories were given the lion’s share of the space, of course: “Sick and perverted … Ideas like this undermine the principle of the family unit. Children could be put at risk. They could catch Aids and all sorts of things.” Oh, please!
Rumours abound that The Post is already in serious difficulties. One can only hope that they are true.
Gay public figures who have come out of the closet voluntarily rather than waiting to be dragged out, have a definite advantage. This month there have been several examples in the press of celebrity gays comporting themselves with dignity while at the same time being truthful about their sexuality. In all cases their careers are flourishing.
Ian McKellen leads the field. Having just opened in a new West End play to rave reviews, many of the papers were anxious to interview him. In all the interviews I saw, Ian ensured that everyone knew that gay rights had now assumed a large importance in his life. In The Guardian (22 Nov) he told Lynda Martin that his decision to come out could be compared to something “absolutely fundamental like changing your nationality … I feel wonderfully at peace with myself and energised”. He also said: “I think there was a time when I agreed with my acting colleagues who still won’t say they are gay that somehow my career would be damaged. I was blind and selfish and uncaring about other people’s position. The sort of people I am thinking about are all those lesbian and gay teachers whose jobs would be on the line if they let it be known they had a friend of the same sex, I am thinking about people in the Church who have to lie about their sexuality, I am thinking of anyone in a small community away from the metropolitan area…”
The Independent (29 Nov) told us that Britain’s only out MP, Chris Smith, had taken a career leap by being elected chairman of the Tribune Group of MPs.
In The Sunday Times Magazine (27 Nov) Miriam Margolyes was describing her frantically busy work schedule and, incidentally, told us about “Heather, with whom I have a close relationship and share a house in Italy.”
Julian Clary, aka The Joan Collins Fan Club, was given a four-page profile in The Mail on Sunday magazine (27 Nov). He said that his gayness didn’t give him problems, but his relationships often do. One of the reasons for wanting to be a “personality” in mainstream entertainment (he is about to be co-host on a TV quiz show) was so that he would then have some influence to “speak out about political things like Clause 28.”
Another up-front gay person making it big is Harvey Fierstein, author of Torch Song Trilogy, which has just been made into a film. Interviewed in The Independent (28 Nov) he explained why he had decided to go ahead with a gay project that didn’t mention Aids at a time when the two have become inseparable in the public mind. “I think the media have won an incredible battle against gay people at the moment, and it is important for us to see something about ourselves that is not disease-ridden.”
All these gay men and women have refused to bow to “the siege mentality” as Sheila Johnston called it in The Independent. They have decided to move forward and not retreat. They are an example to all of us.
An interesting insight into the workings of “sleaze newspapers” was provided by Terry Lovell, an ex-People reporter writing in The Observer magazine (13 Nov). Mr Lovell had become a practising Christian and couldn’t reconcile his religion with a career which cast him in the role of Pontius Pilate, crucifying people left, right and centre. “More and more I read (The People’s) stories with a sense of disgust and anger at its brutal treatment of people’s lives, the damage to society of its negative values and attitudes … It started with a series of investigations, all successful: the naming of Harvey Proctor for his rent-boy-beating activities, a high society drugs exposé, and the gay vicars scandal which The People tactically broke on the Sunday prior to the commencement of last year’s General Synod.”
Mr Lovell eventually could take no more and sacrificed his £32,000 a year salary for his conscience. But not to worry, there are plenty of others prepared to do the job. Like Graham Parker, who produced a double dose of turgid gay-orientated melodrama in the News of the World magazine (11th Dec). “I’m still branded a twisted gay blackmailer” was the leading story, about the present life of Norman Scott, who was involved in the Jeremy Thorpe scandal ten years ago. A few pages further on we are treated to “My Love for Gay Prison Officer Saved My Life” about the experiences of a lesbian woman in Holloway prison. Both stories were basically sympathetic to their subjects, but both portrayed the gay people involved as either pathetic inadequates, rampaging sex-abusers or sinister “vice queens”. Where the apparently insatiable appetite for all this depressing low-life comes from mystifies me. Perhaps it is the newspapers themselves that have created it.
I’ve been taken to task for being beastly to Boy George. I still think he shoots from the mouth occasionally, but the revelation in The People (4 Dec) that he has been beaten up and had his life threatened because of his record ‘No Clause 28’ made me angry. We’ve all got our faults, but if push comes to shove, I’m standing shoulder to shoulder with George.
Cliff Richard, who has been celebrating thirty years in show business, still refutes any suggestion that his live-in relationship with Bill Latham is anything but a purely business arrangement (Observer 4 Dec). I can understand his frustration that nobody seems to believe him. I expect these dratted journalists will just go on repeating the question until he gives them a different answer.
The scum who run The People and The News of the World were at it again on 4th and 11th December, with a spate of anti-gay stories. They make model examples of why a right-to-reply law is needed. Two of them were based on revenge —“kiss and tell” being the paper’s own twee expression for the sickening practice of paying rent boys and others to take revenge on clients and lovers.
The People encouraged a young man called Mark Tyler to rat about an affair he had had with former Sea Lord Admiral Sir Derek Empson. Sir Derek had treated Tyler with great kindness —despite a wife, children and reputation to think of. After his wife found out about the gay liaison, Sir Derek told Mark Tyler that the affair would have to end. Tyler’s response was to run to The People and do the dirty. Over three pages every detail of the affair was catalogued. In one of the photographs Tyler is shown confronting the Admiral in the street (for the benefit of People photographers). A truly disgusting image it makes, too.
I can’t imagine a more wretched way to end a love affair than to feed your ex-lover to the hyenas of Fleet Street. Not only has he done a disservice to the man he claims to have once loved, Mark Tyler has also given The People another opportunity to vilify the whole gay community. He should hang his head in shame.
Not to be outdone on the same day, “Royal hatmaker” David Shilling was given ‘the treatment’ by The News of the World who had received a story from Eric Jenkins, a hotel porter, who claimed Shilling had “lured him” into gay sex at a hotel. The whole episode is related in sordid detail by The NoW, including the position in which the supposed sex act took place. The only criticism I have of David Shilling is that —if the story is true — the sex he had wasn’t safe. Now that really is a crime.
Presumably the two squealers were paid by these “newspapers” for the juicy details. And two otherwise innocent men have been pilloried and probably ruined for the sake of a fit of pique and a few lousy quid.
It isn’t clear how The People found out about ”Rugged yachting tycoon David May, father of Prince Edward’s steady girlfriend Georgia”, but find out they did: “He and his gay lover, 18 years his junior, have set up home at a luxury London Dockland flat. Their saucy goings-on will rock the Palace and cast a shadow over any Royal marriage plans.”
Over three whole pages the “amazing double life” routine was trotted out again. Even though both men are quite open about the affair, (“Everyone here knows about Nick and David. We just treat them like a normal couple” says an unscandalised neighbour). The People carried on as though the two had committed some heinous crime instead of simply falling in love.
This whole spectacle of destroying innocent individuals as entertainment for a howling mob resembles the Roman arenas of old. It stinks, but it’s The News of the World and The People that produce the vilest smell.
National Aids Day was greeted, in the main, by yawns from the press. This is probably an accurate reflection of the public’s indifferent response to the disease.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph (4 Dec), Auberon Waugh even managed to turn World Aids Day into a platform for his pro-drinking and pro-smoking arguments. He wrote: “It looks to me as though the Aids industry is seriously worried. The pandemic has not materialised.” And commenting on the British Medical Association’s claim that “alcohol consumption, which ‘loosened sexual inhibitions’ would be responsible for speeding up the spread of Aids,” he said: “We must all wait until next year for the ‘experts’ to announce a possible link with smoking.”
One of the ‘experts’ Mr Waugh was alluding to might be Richard Ingrams — well-known for his rational opinions on homosexuality — who wrote in The Observer about the Government’s press adverts: “If the aim was to combat Aids, they might just as well have poured the money down the drain. There ought to be one major priority in the anti-Aids campaign, namely: identify carriers of the HIV virus both for their own benefit and the benefit of those with whom they might come into close physical contact.”
The information about who has the virus might also be useful to other people, whose motives; for wanting to know are less benign that Mr Ingrams’. But this is a point he seems to have overlooked.
GAY TIMES February 1989
At one-time Wendy Henry, ex-editor of The News of the World, vied with Divine as the queen of sleaze, trash and bad taste. But really, there was no competition — Ms Henry won hands down every time she brought out an edition of her filthy rag.
Now she has fallen foul of her one-time mentor, ruthless Rupert; first she was packed off to be deputy editor of the super salacious Sun, and now she’s out of the Wapping empire altogether —whether willingly or not isn’t clear.
It’s tempting to say that Mediawatch will miss the material provided by Ms Henry, but I can say with one hand on heart that it isn’t true. Good riddance is what this column thinks, and here’s hoping her career has gone where it always deserved to be — down the toilet. Under her editorship the NoW was packed week after week with anti-gay garbage — “the more bizarre the better” as The Independent said (19 Dec). “It is widely known that Mr Murdoch does not like homosexual stories,” said the same article. Oh really? It may be widely known to The Independent, but news doesn’t seem to have reached The Sun, where the gay-bashing continues as usual.
In her final edition of the NoW on 18th December, Ms Henry managed to squeeze in two double page spreads on gay themes. One concerned “rampant homosexual” Cary Grant and several other deceased “pervert stars”. A gentleman by the name of Michael St John claims that he was “gang-raped” by the likes of Charles Laughton and Gig Young at a Hollywood party. Needless to say, all those named are now dead and beyond denying the allegations (and also, mercifully, being hurt by them). But it doesn’t stop there — apparently Mr Grant enjoyed other “perversions that made even gay sex look tame.” It’s all so prurient that I won’t sicken you with it. Ms Henry seems to have imagined that the gloating descriptions of necrophilia were great family entertainment. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that the instigator of these tawdry ‘revelations’ is about to bring out a book. Oh, how easy it is to make money if you don’t have a conscience.
Another sensational exposé concerned “Former First Division soccer hardman Tony Powell” who apparently has “run away with his gay young lover” to “San Francisco, the Aids capital of the world.”
This sorry tale was provided to the ever-slavering NoW by the victim’s deserted wife (no indication of how much she was paid for the dirt). It boils down to the classic case of a gay man marrying to fulfil other people’s expectations, and then finding out he can’t keep up the pretence. The article’s heading “Sordid truth . . . he now dolls up in frocks” was unsupported in the body of the feature. There was a picture of Mr Powell at a fancy-dress party in panto-style drag – hardly evidence of someone taking a serious interest in transvestism.
As a case of revenge, it was perfect. The wife’s—bitterness is understandable, she feels wronged and this is evident in the way she refers to her husband disparagingly as “a big fairy”. But this kind of vengeance is a mean-spirited business which is probably why The News of the World grabbed it with both hands.
However, in one of the first editions of the NoW under the editorship of Patsy Chapman (15 Jan), there appeared a double page spread devoted to the gay life of BBC presenter Bill Buckley. Lo and behold, it was friendly, positive and generally complimentary. Mr Buckley spoke of his five year relationship with James Thomas. He told how happy they were and how he and James would marry if the law permitted. Bill was not treated to the usual quota of disapproving adjectives like “outrageous”, “sleazy”, “bizarre”, etc. that have become the norm in these kinds of stories. In fact, it was all rather sympathetic.
He also told how he received a “personal assurance from the BBC” that speculation about his relationship wouldn’t harm his career. The whole feature was seen from his point of view, and very cheering it was, too. “There are so many gay people in showbusiness who keep quiet and must worry every day of their lives about being found out,” he says. “If they let it be known publicly, as I’ve done, they’d find it a tremendous help to their peace of mind. We should be much more open and break down public ignorance.”
Indeed, the article ends with Bill declaring “Life just couldn’t be better.” Cheers, Bill — and thanks to Patsy Chapman. Let’s hope it’s the dawn of a new era.
The annual report of The Press Council (Press and the People. £8.50) chides editors for either ignoring its findings or publishing them “in an obscure place in the paper in minuscule type.” But what of the Press Council itself? It obviously doesn’t work, and despite the unconvincing defence by the outgoing chairman, Sir Zelman Cowan, the Council’s reputation as a “toothless watchdog” will persist.
A Gay Times reader made a complaint to the Press Council about the grotesque editorial which appeared in The Sun on 4th November, 1988, blaming the whole gay community for the murder by Victor Miller of newsboy Stuart Gough. A more blatantly prejudiced and dangerous piece of journalism would be difficult to imagine. The Press Council replied that the complaint had been ‘disallowed’ because the complainant had “not made a sufficiently substantial case to warrant adjudication”.
It’s been the same story with almost all gay complaints. It seems the Press Council defends the rights of editors in tabloid papers to “express their opinions forcefully” on gay topics — meaning they can publish whatever slanderous anti-gay rubbish they like. The Council will not accept that such attacks are likely to incite hatred and violence against innocent people.
The Victor Miller/ Stuart Gough case took the vilification of the gay community to new extremes, but I knew that the Press Council would not entertain complaints about it. Consequently, I decided to make a complaint on grounds of racism. The offending article appeared in The Daily Star on 9th February, 1988, and referred to Miller as a “black bastard”. Whatever contempt Miller deserves, his race and sexuality were not the issues on trial.
My complaint was accepted for adjudication on 22nd December, 1988 — eleven months later! God knows how long it will be before they reach a decision. And of what value will it be when it’s announced? Nobody will remember anything about the case.
The newly appointed Chairman of the Press Council is Louis Blom-Cooper. He promises that there will be fundamental changes in the way the Council operates in order to make it more convincing. Perhaps now would be a good time for a gay pressure group (OLGA, perhaps?) to make an approach to him and ask him to investigate and correct the blatant anti-gay bias in his organisation.
Deserved contempt department: “The Sun, a newspaper which some would argue does little for communication at any level, except the most basic of propagating prejudice and stereotypes of the grossest kind” — The Guardian, (29 Dec)
“Murdoch is a ruthless tycoon who has pioneered new lows in popular journalism, thereby degrading the whole of the popular Press. In certain instances, he has used his papers to support Mrs Thatcher’s Government in the most craven way.” — The Observer, (8 Jan)
Back in November the annual survey into British Social Attitudes “revealed” that 74 per cent of the population thought that homosexual relationships were “always or mostly wrong”. Now a survey by The Sunday Times (8 Jan) says that 44 per cent thought homosexual relationships between consenting adults to be “morally wrong.” That’s a swing in our favour of 30 per cent in three months!
So, what does this tell us? That we are far less unpopular than the Government would have us believe? Or maybe that these surveys are just a load of bollocks that are good for nothing but filling the pages of crappy newspapers?
The choice of Julian Clary or The Joan Collins Fan Club as co-host for an early-evening TV quiz show was surprising. One would have thought that anyone as blatantly gay as Julian and as disgracefully camp as Fanny the Wonderdog would have been totally unacceptable to a family audience. That is certainly the somewhat predictable opinion of the tabloids, reporting that “TV bosses wash out gay Julian’s foul mouth” (Daily Star, 22 Dec). The Sun said on the same day that “Gay gags by gender-bender Julian Clary have been AXED from TV star Mike Smith’s new games show.”
As usual, the po-faced papers had missed the joke. “Trick or Treat” is a send-up of quiz shows with prizes given out by bare-chested men instead of scantily-clad women and Julian providing a counterpoint to the blandness of Mike Smith. (Ruby Wax reviewed the programme for Today [12 Jan] and said that Julian’s ensemble looked like something he had ripped from the corpse of Carmen Miranda.) So shocked was The Daily Star by Julian’s jokes (or perhaps even his existence) that they went into their screeching moral outrage mode: “Shocked TV chiefs dramatically censored Mike Smith’s new games show after his outrageous gay co-host blurted out a stream of crude sexual innuendo. Self-confessed homosexual Julian Clary stunned LWT bosses with his evil-tongued outbursts — to be screened for family audiences … now the makers are bracing themselves for a backlash.” With this level of hysteria over something which isn’t really very important, one begins to fear for the sanity of the people who write it day after day. Perhaps a bucket of cold water or a slap across the face would calm them down. If The Daily Star thinks I can be helpful in this department, please let me know.
The Ealing Gazette —slightly less prone to the screaming hab-dabs — previewed the programme with this comment (6 Jan): “It must be the oddest partnership ever … Mike said his mum was a bit worried about him working with Julian and Fanny the Wonderdog, although Julian hasn’t said what his mum thinks about him working with Mike Smith.”
Here’s hoping that “Trick or Treat” lives up to expectations and provides a bit of real entertainment for the much-neglected pretend family audiences. After all, we pay our licence fee, too.
Although Peregrine Worsthorne was on holiday for the 15th January issue of The Sunday Telegraph, his defence of Section 28 is upheld by someone else writing the editorial that week. The argument goes that critics of Mrs Thatcher should not always be dismissed because they are “well-off sillies”, but because they often overstate their case. The campaign against Section 28 was cited as an example. “This was a measure which was supposed to enable local authorities to ban from municipally subsidised theatres and libraries any works by or about homosexuals,” says the editorial. “In fact it was introduced to stop teachers proselytising in the classroom on behalf of homosexuality, and local authorities from subsidising ‘Gay’ events on the rates.”
The editorial then goes on to say that the campaign which followed the clause’s introduction was “hysterical” and subsequent history has shown that the protests from the “arts lobby” were over the top as “there have been no prosecutions under the clause, and any successful ones will be rare and have little to do with ‘the arts’.”
What this writer fails to say is that the clause was so badly worded and so illogically constructed that there is little wonder that its intention was misunderstood. The Sunday Telegraph also omitted any analysis of the philosophy behind Section 28, and the necessity to challenge it strongly as a message to anyone with a desire to take the legislative gay-bashing any further.
I am unconvinced by The Sunday Telegraph’s arguments that criticism of Section 28 was misplaced; the section is a salutary example of Thatcher-ism’s increasingly sinister face.
GAY TIMES March 1989
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 Observer was first to let the cat out of the bag by revealing (29 Jan) “A secret Church of England report advocating more tolerance for homosexual clergy is being kept under wraps because some bishops believe it is too liberal.”
That was enough to cause the “true believers” to don their jackboots and make a beeline for the General Synod where, I suppose they were seeking a repeat of the “Pulpit Poofs” debacle. Their motion to “condemn teachers who suggested that homosexual and lesbian relationships were acceptable” and to have the Gay and Lesbian Christian Movement removed from the Church of England Yearbook failed to capture the tabloid imagination.
Instead of giving the Rev Tony Higton and his self-righteous followers another chance to kick their gay brethren, Synod adopted a procedural device to curtail the debate. According to The Independent (3 Feb) the Rev Peter Broadbent proposed that the Synod should proceed to next business “because the motion was based on incoherent premises and ill-documented assertions.” At last, somebody noticed.
The Sun (30 Jan) told us “The Archbishop of Canterbury said it had not yet been decided whether (the report) should be published”. Not that it will change anybody’s mind, even if it is. With the usual hedging, the report (according to The Observer): “does not condone homosexual clergy, the working party suggests it is unreasonable to insist that homosexuals should never in any circumstances give physical expression to their love. It points out that some homosexuals feel they have a choice between expressing their deeply-felt sexual needs in a stable relationship or in more promiscuous contacts. In that situation, it says, “the Church has to decide which of the two evils is less immoral.” (My italics).
Meanwhile, in the same article, Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement was saying: “Does the Church want to become a bigots’ paradise?” Those of us on the outside looking in might be tempted to reply that the Church has been a haven for bigots from the day it was invented.
And finally, we have Gerald Priestland, opining in The Sunday Times (5 Feb): “The gay cat is out of the bag, and it will not be stuffed in again simply because most of us do not like thinking about it. At the same time, gays have to realise that — for whatever tangled reasons — the majority cannot help reacting to them as though they were a new wave of immigrants, who need to settle down and show themselves good citizens.” And so the can’t-help-being-a-bigot brigade are now trying to reduce us to the status of ‘aliens’ or ‘incomers’, are they?
It’s clear that Mr Priestland and his cronies can’t control their irrational prejudices – that’s their sad problem. But trying to cover their shortcomings with attempts to make gay people into strangers in their own land just won’t wash.
It was with some satisfaction that I read of the long-overdue come-uppances visited upon two of the decade’s most repellent hypocrites. The Observer (29 Jan) informed us that “American political extremist Lyndon LaRouche has been jailed for 15 years for … a scheme to ‘borrow’ millions from his supporters without repaying them.” Mr LaRouche, you will remember, tried to manipulate the California political system in order to get people with Aids isolated from the rest of society.
Then, to some wry smiling from yours truly, I read in The Independent (31 Jan) that “Jimmy Swaggart, the Louisiana televangelist defrocked after admitting he hired a prostitute to perform sexual acts for him, is the subject of new allegations of perverse sexual conduct.”
Two down — about six hundred to go.
At last — Colin got a kiss from his boyfriend in East Enders. It was of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety, but a kiss nevertheless.
Straight off the mark the following day (26 Jan) was The Sun: “Furious MPs last night demanded a ban on EastEnders after the BBC soap showed two gay men kissing full on the lips. The homosexual love scene between yuppie poofs was screened in the early evening when millions of children were watching.” (And just in case any Sun-reading kiddie missed it, the shocking peck was photographically reproduced for their edification).
Back to these outraged MPs, who could they be? Well, surprise, surprise — it’s Terry Dicks and Geoffrey Dickens (is it mere coincidence that they both have Dick in their names?) But The Sun really wanted to know what “You the Jury” thought about it. “Do you think TV should show scenes of men kissing each other?” Ring this 0898 number (at 38p a minute gay-bashing is turning into a nice little earner for Murdoch).
The result, published the following day, revealed that 20,223 voted “against the scenes” while 6,313 voted in favour. (By the way, The News of the World asked its readers to vote on whether ‘Alo, Allo’ star Gorden Kaye should be sacked after revealing his “rent boy shame”. 11,000 wanted him to stay, whilst 1,532 “wanted him out”. Big-hearted aren’t they?)
But back to EastEnders. By the 2 February, readers had let The Sun know by post what they thought of the kiss. A brace of “mums-of-two” wrote in to say that their children accepted the kiss with equanimity. “We cannot wrap children in cotton wool,” said Mrs Metcalfe of Cheltenham, “Living, with the fact that everybody is different makes for well-balanced human beings.” Whereas Mrs Gaffney of Stanwell wrote: “For all I know gay people might find it offensive to see a man and a woman kissing on TV, but you never hear them kicking up a fuss.”
These two women sound far too sensible to be Sun readers. Perhaps they found their copy on the train.
The making of a molehill into a mountain department continues to be amazed at how much mileage can be squeezed from Julian Clary’s appearance on the quiz game ‘Trick or Treat’. He’s a soft target for publicity-seeking bigots, of course. Jimmy Greaves who, according to The Sun (17 Jan), is a “telly pundit”, apparently called Julian a “prancing poof” on TV-am. Next in line (Sun 21 Jan) came Bernard Manning, whose dreadful nightclub in Manchester was recently burned to the ground (surely an act of divine retribution for the god-awful jokes told there): “It’s disgusting, that poofter fella prancing around. Men should be men and women should be women.” And greasy fat-arsed berks should have their gobs sewn up.
Another Sun correspondent, Mr MP of Bournemouth, wrote (27 Jan): “Like Julian Clary I am also gay but none of my mates at work suspect it. He is the exception and has chosen to be outrageous. Ninety per cent of gays appear as normal as the next bloke. Julian wanted fame — good for him — but he puts all gays in a bad light.” And here’s me thinking that gay people at last had the confidence to accept themselves in all their rich variety.
By the 11 Feb The Sun was threatening “We’ll make a man of gay Clary!” To which I’ve only one response: Get your bleeding hands off our Jules or we’ll get Fanny to go for your throats!
One last look at tabloid hysteria over gay things on telly. The News of the World (29 Jan) carried a feature about Gary Hailes the “actor” who once played the gay barrow boy in EastEnders. “I never fancied having a man in my life,” he is quoted as saying, “And I never want to play a gay man again.”
I don’t think Mr Hailes need worry. If jobs are offered on the strength of his performance in East- Enders, I think he’s likely to be out of work until they need a broom handle or a plank — anything made of wood, really.
The other gay character in EastEnders “Queenie” is played by John Labanowski hitherto “an unknown” according to The Sunday Mirror (29 Jan). Mr Labanowski wishes it to be known that “I have a wife and two kids and live a rather rural life.”
So that explains why Queenie is such an unbelievable, unconvincing character.
The two attempts in Parliament to make the Press clean up its act (to respect privacy and give the right of reply) did bring overdue discussion to the topic, and serve as a warning to the Wapping weirdos.
Over the past month, the tabloids have been given the kind of drubbing which they so often mete out to others. “Sordid”, “seedy”, “repellent”, “disgusting”, “vile”, “grotesque”, “stinking”, were just a few of the adjectives used to conjure up the “gutter” (or “sewer” or “yellow”) press.
In an attempt to deflect the Armageddon heading its way, The Sun appointed an “ombudsman” (“Most Sun readers probably think an ombudsman is a Swedish bus driver,” wrote Peter MacKay in The Evening Standard 25 Jan). The ombudsman’s “independent credentials” were faultless: he is Mr Ken Donlan, The Sun’s managing editor.
Meanwhile, The Independent ran a long, detailed background feature on The Sun’s hounding of Elton John (11 Feb). It made eye-popping reading. The sheer scale of corruption and depravity at The Sun whilst concocting the “case against” Elton was breathtaking. The editor, Kelvin MacKenzie (“a sewer-mouthed yobbo”) is said to have known from the start that the story wouldn’t stand up, but he started a war of attrition against Elton, escalating the vilification in the hope that the pop star would back down.
A man called John Boyce (“Scottish con-man, homosexual pimp and ex-rent-boy”) was employed by The Sun as a contact between male prostitutes on the London scene and the Wapping scumbags. Boyce admitted that he produced “witnesses” to events that never took place and was paid £1,750 for each affidavit he got signed. He was in it purely for the money, and The Sun was a remarkably easy touch. The truth, as ever, was nowhere to be seen.
Mr Murdoch apparently refers to his money-spinning editor as “My Little Hitler” and The Independent asks what the future holds for MacKenzie “the most powerful journalist in the country.” They say he “may well end up the same way as his predecessor did. He was knighted for services to journalism.”
The Times (7 Feb) informed us that The Professional Association of Teachers has issued a report about “declining standards amongst teachers in the past few years”. Mr Peter Dawson, secretary of the union, wants to see gay teachers who come out of the closet sacked. He said: “We are not being judgemental about homosexuality, but many parents would find it morally questionable. It is something that we believe a teacher should keep private; it is not something he should shout or promote. There are things which parents would not want their children to know about.”
Presumably some of the things which these parents wouldn’t want their children to know about are tolerance, diversity and alternatives. Heaven forfend that a teacher should tell children about what is going on in the world. Much better to feed them tales of the Tory dream world.
And I wonder how Mr Dawson squares his union’s stance with a report in The Guardian (Feb) which revealed that: “The number of young homosexual men contracting Aids soon after becoming sexually active, is increasing. The increase appeared to be among 17 and 18-year olds who haven’t yet ‘got the message’.”
And they never will get the message while the likes of Peter Dawson rule the world.
In last month’s Mediawatch I expressed the hope that the career of Wendy Henry, ex-editor of The News of the World had “gone down the toilet”. I’m pleased to report that she has indeed reached the sewer — she has been appointed editor of The People. The People is so utterly loathsome that I would be surprised if even Ms Henry could make it any more depraved.
One interesting little snippet: the three Sunday scandal sheets, The People, News of the World and Sunday Mirror, between them boasting 40 million readers, are all edited by women. There used to be a belief that if women took power in this country it would be a less brutal, more compassionate place. If the quartet is made up with Mrs Thatcher, I begin to wonder what went wrong.
A correction published in The Dunoon Observer: “Fire. The old pouffe which started the fire at 7 Douglas Cottages, as reported last week, referred to an item of furniture and not the owner, Mr Donnie McArthur” (as reported in The Guardian 8 Feb).
GAY TIMES April 1989
That extraordinary phenomenon the “real man” has been stirring from his Neanderthal depths this month. One of his few refuges these days (outside the pub and football ground) is tabloid newspapers. You can always be sure of a sympathetic hearing for “real men” there. A “real man”, apparently, is one that plays sport, kicks a ball around, drinks, fights and generally behaves in a way would make civilised human beings ashamed of belonging to the same species. What is most likely to send a “real man” into a violent frenzy is to suggest to him that he might be homosexual.
The Daily Star informed us (22 Feb) that “The Los Angeles police department is recruiting GAY SHERIFFS!” Above this piece of earth-shattering information is a ‘Wanted’ poster, from the ‘Los Angeles Poofs Department’. “It’s enough to make Billy the Kid spin in his grave,” says the paper with utter disbelief that “poofters” might do the job of a “real man”. “The Wild West image of tough guy lawmen is set to bite the dust.”
Well, I wouldn’t want to be Billy the Kid, but I wouldn’t mind being a Jesse (James, that is), especially in West Hollywood, where 37 per cent of the population are not “real men” (or “real women” come to that).
And next we travel to Australia, natural habitat of the macho beer-swilling oik who advertises himself as “the real man”. It was in Oz that The Daily Express (17 Feb) unearthed a magistrate who had slagged off the Australian cricket team for “homosexual-type behaviour” and “unseemly activities” such as “kissing which is otherwise not normal.” He was not referring, in this instance, to the bowling over of maidens or, unfortunately, to erotic encounters in the changing room, but about the kissing and fondling and admiring of each other’s googlies which occurs during play.
The captain of the team, Merv Hughes (“a real matey bloke even more macho than Rambo. He’s fond of his beer and a good swear”) was not pleased with this “defamatory attack” on his “manhood”.
Michael Parkinson was commenting on the same incident (Daily Mirror 20 Feb) and he ended by saying: “anyone considering an alternative lifestyle would certainly have second thoughts if it meant being kissed by the likes of Merv Hughes.” Oh, I don’t know, I quite like a bit of rough for a change.
And in the pop world, Bros are reported to have “blown their tops” when an Italian journalist asked them “Is it true that both you guys are poofters?” The report was, naturally, in The Sun (27 Feb). Luke, one of the Goss Bros, snapped back: “Look, we don’t wear dresses and we are not gay. Get it right — we are as straight as they come.” He was so angry that an eye witness said: “Luke looked like he was going to hit the guy.”
And just to prove how macho he really is, brother Matt was “branded an animal” after he “started hurling bread rolls and French fries at nearby diners in a posh San Remo fish restaurant.” He did not bother to deny that he was “an animal”. In fact, one gets the distinct idea that he might consider it a compliment.
And finally, on this fascinating topic, Peter MacKay, writing in the London Evening Standard (13 Feb) gave the last word to the late Tom Driberg MP who “recalled in his scandalous memoir Ruling Passions that, after going to bed with a Scottish soldier he had picked up in Edinburgh, he asked the handsome kilted giant why he was not out seducing women. ‘Och, sleeping with women is for sissies,’ was the reply.” And that says it all.
The new chairman of the invertebrate Press Council, Louis Blom-Cooper, has promised to review the role of the Council in the light of recent criticisms. With this in mind he has created a committee to consider issues such as intrusion of privacy, right of reply and chequebook journalism. The operation and speed of the Press Council’s complaints procedure, including possible development of its conciliation service and of internal newspaper ombudsmen, will form a major part of the review.
I’ll have a few things to say to Mr Blom-Cooper about a complaint of mine which was upheld last month against Ray Mills, The Daily Star’s former disgraceful columnist.
The period between the complaint and the adjudication was a full year. It resulted in a small report of the Press Council’s decision in the 11th March edition of the paper, and nothing else. The complaint had concerned Ray Mills’ description of Victor Miller, the murderer of newsboy Stuart Gough as a “black bastard”, and the Council described Ray Mills’ outpouring as “indefensible.”
So what? Ray Mills just sits back and laughs. There has got to be something stronger than this if the Press Council is to be taken seriously by its detractors.
Meanwhile, The Sun’s internal ombudsman issued his first report (17 February) condemning the paper for “breaking privacy rules by revealing TV star Leslie Crowther’s treatment for alcoholism.”
The paper “was wrong to buy and publish the article,” said the ombudsman.
A few days later, with its usual childish defiance, The Sun wrote the same story about comedienne Joan Turner who was entering the self-same clinic for treatment for the self-same problem.
So much for the ombudsman’s influence over its employer, and I shall tell Mr Louis Blom-Cooper as much. If you want to stick your two-pennyworth in, write to The Press Council, 1 Salisbury Square, London EC4 8AE by 1st May.
Are the papers trying to tell us something, in a roundabout way, about two Tory politicians? The first is William Hague, freshly elected in the Richmond by-election. According to the London Evening Standard (2 Mar) he was recently a guest of the Speaker at a soiree at the House of Commons — the only bachelor amongst fifteen married couples. “He shares a flat with Alan Duncan,” the Standard’s gossip writer informed us, “two years his senior, also politically inclined …”
Mr Hague (27) “who has already had a 15-minute chat with the Prime Minister … says: ‘It’s complete nonsense that you have to marry for career reasons.’”
Meanwhile, The Sun (2 Mar) reported “Young Tories sat stunned as their Conservative leader’s slide show on Russian culture suddenly showed a colleague flashing his bum.”
Apparently, John Kershaw, who is leader of the Conservative group on Manchester City Council, went on holiday with Steve Robinson, “a psychiatric nurse in his mid-twenties” who appeared in the photo “grinning and lying face down on a hotel bed.”
“Oh, that should not have been there,” Mr Kershaw is quoted as saying.
Freudian slip, perhaps?
Gratuitous insults department: “Another surprising finding of the survey was that only 74 per cent of the public disapprove of a lesbian or gay couple caring for a child, and 14 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds would approve of such an arrangement.” — Mail on Sunday (5 Mar).
Speculation has been rife as to whether the quiz show Trick or Treat is to be AXED (as the tabloids love to say about cancelled TV programmes).
The Daily Star (16 Feb) said the slump in the show’s popularity was all the fault of “Outrageous transvestite co-host Julian Clary, who calls himself The Joan Collins Fan Club. The executive claimed that camp Clary’s lewd behaviour, women’s clothes and make-up had older viewers switching off in disgust.”
Lewd behaviour? Am I watching the same show as everyone else? The Sun’s TV critic Moira Martingale opined (1 Mar): “I’m sure Trick or Treat is being axed because of boring Mike Smith rather than camp Julian Clary, who’s rather fun.”
Daily Express reader Marion List of Lancaster did not agree (24 Feb): “The awful Julian Clary makes me feel sick,” she wrote. I know what she means. The Daily Express letters page has a similar effect on me.
City Limits (23 Feb) was enthusiastic: “The unmissable Joan Collins Fan Club perfects the catty one-liner … in this vicious but vastly entertaining game show parody.” This was echoed by a correspondent to The Sun (3rd Mar) who thinks Julian is “fantastic”.
The question of whether or not our Jules survives into the next series (should there be one) is not a topic that will keep me awake nights. But he certainly knows how to make “real men” squirm, and that’s a point in his favour.
“Silence Equals Death” goes the slogan, and I think this is the technique that the tabloids are trying to use on Channel Four’s lesbian and gay magazine ‘Out on Tuesday’. By all previous standards ‘Out on Tuesday’ should have provided endless cannon-fodder for the gay-bashers at The Sun and Star. But what do we get? Total silence. The only mention they’ve made of the programme so far is an unavoidable one-line announcement in the TV listings. Why is this? Could it be that they do not wish to alert their readers to the existence of a positive, confident and well-made programme which totally contradicts their own negative view of gay life?
Of the tabloids, only The Daily Express (15 Feb) reviewed it, and then only to whinge that the Saatchi and Saatchi attempt to “promote homosexuality” got round the IBA ban on gay advertising.
It’s a shame that many potential viewers, who would have been helped and reassured by the programme, will never know it existed, simply because their morning paper failed to tell them about it.
The Sun’s medical correspondent Dr Vernon Coleman likes to think of himself as “controversial”. In fact, his opinions (of which he has plenty) seem, at times, simply daft. Writing in the 23 Feb issue of The Sun, he commented upon the Health Education Authority’s Aids campaign, the one in the straight papers featuring a beautiful woman. “The adverts are designed to convince us that straight sex is dangerous … But it is the HOAX of the century …Last October I pointed out that the Government’s official estimate was that just EIGHT heterosexuals had died of Aids contracted in Britain since 1981.” Now, he says, that figure has been reduced to FIVE. On this reasoning Dr Coleman suggests that the HEA’s spending of “£3.5 million of YOUR money” is simply “pointless, misleading and unnecessary”.
However, on 2 March, The Independent was quoting Mr Chris Daykin, chairman of the Aids working party of The Institute of Actuaries, as predicting that Aids among heterosexuals could exceed the cases among homosexuals by the first decade of the next century. “It seems likely that heterosexually-acquired infections are growing quite fast,” he says, “albeit from a small base.”
As usual, the advice proffered for confounding these predictions is for heterosexuals follow the gay lead and “significantly change their behaviour.” Such a thing is though unlikely when you have the likes of Dr Vermin Coleman encouraging a potentially fatal complacency among the people who have proved they do not want to hear the message.
I know that some tales get better for the telling, but The Sun excelled itself on March 6th when it recounted the story of the lion that was used as a gimmick at one of the Hippodrome nightclub’s gay nights. The incident took place at least two years ago, but you know The Sun — always first with the news. Anyway, according to the article, the lion “went berserk”, not because it was being used as an unwilling prop in a cabaret but because “the air was filled with the fumes of an illegal sexual stimulant amyl nitrite… ‘As soon as the lion got one whiff of that it went berserk,’ recalls the club’s former Press officer, Paul Kassel. ‘We ended up with hundreds of squealing gays running over each other in every direction, stabbing each other with their false nails in their panic.”
Maybe they outlawed poppers while I wasn’t looking, but I don’t think so. The Sun is simply inaccurate to say that amyl nitrite is an “illegal” substance- — the rest of the article is a bit hard to believe, too.
GAY TIMES May 1989
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=
Tabloid tittle-tattle reached a new high of stupidity on 2 April in The People (Wendy Henry’s ugly pup). The front page announced, “Bet Lynch’s Hubby is Gay”.
Now then, who are they talking about? Alec Gilroy the landlord of the Rovers Return? Surely he is Bet Lynch’s hubby. But then again, they might be referring to the husband of Julie Goodyear the actress who plays Bet Lynch. She recently married an American called Richard Skrob. Do they mean him?
No, indeed, they mean Roy Barraclough, the man who plays Alec Gilroy, the husband of the fictional character Bet Lynch. Are you still with me? I hope so because we haven’t got round to Bet Lynch yet, who is also gay – that is to say, Julie Goodyear who plays the part who is, in fact, now Bet Gilroy because she married Alec Gilroy who is played by Roy Barraclough who is gay.
Mr Barraclough was cornered by The People while on holiday in Greece. Was he suitably ashamed? “I am gay and proud of it,” said the actor. “I am discreet and what I do behind my own front door is up to me. Still, I’m honest and as you’ve asked me, I can’t deny it.”
That didn’t stop The People which maundered on about “the gay shock” and “Roy’s amazing double life.”
But I fear they’ve pulled this trick a little too often. Nobody cares any more. Roy Barraclough and Julie Goodyear play two of the best-loved characters on British television and the public do not wish to see them crucified. Whether it is her intention or not, the editor of The People is actually turning the tide in our favour.
Ms Henry might be losing her touch. Her marbles went some time ago.
Mrs Thatcher seems to be having a bit of a problem at the moment. Her popularity (inexplicable as it is) at last seems to be showing signs of diminishing. The Labour Party was actually ahead in one opinion poll.
It’s at times like these that Maggie’s press acolytes go into action, trying to reverse the trend. If Mrs Thatcher’s policies are a load of dangerous rubbish, then the only way to keep her in power is to make those of the opposition sound even worse.
One proven way to frighten those delicate voters is, of course, to drag the gay bogey out of the closet. “Labour Plan New Laws to Protect Gays” screeched one headline in The Sun (20 Mar). “Labour will make discrimination against gays or lesbians a criminal offence” reported the most loyal mouthpiece of our unspeakable Prime Minister. In the light of Section 28, Labour’s small movement towards protecting our rights might seem overdue. But as far as The Sun is concerned these are “shock measures”.
The Left’s support is fine on paper, but how real is the support within the party for gay rights? What happens when it comes to the crunch? How many Patricia (“We’re losing pensioners’ votes because of the gay thing”) Hewitts are there under the red flag?
Well, as far as reactions to inflated press stories go, we have a mixed bag — some Labour councils are defiant, some defensive. Let’s look at a few of the ‘loony left’ stories from this month and examine the reactions.
First we have Patrick Moore, the telly astronomer. Most people consider him a harmless eccentric, but a report in the London Evening Standard (30 Mar) reveals him to be a venomous homophobe. Joining forces with barmy Baroness Cox he denounced “the innocently titled (book) The Milkman’s on His Way at a recent committee meeting in the Lords”.
According to The Standard, the David Rees bestseller has been “placed on the ILEA positive images list sent out to school libraries, and Moore claimed at the meeting: ‘Our children are being corrupted and depraved by it’.” (Just for the record, Mr Moore is unmarried and, as far as I know, childless).
The star gazer then begins to sound rather like one of the slobbering hypocrites who feature so prominently in Gay Times’ own wonderful cartoon Fermenting Fruits: “Pure sexual perversion …children will read it and try it out and get Aids. It is an obscene publication and the ILEA are as guilty as drug peddlers for recommending it.”
The most revealing part of the report (because nobody is going to be influenced by the hysteria of a crank like Moore) is the defensive reaction of an ILEA spokesman: “We don’t actually recommend books as such,” he is quoted as saying, “The book was marred by voyeurism and overtly explicit accounts of sexual activities.”
For our next example we move to Ealing in West London, where a “hard Left” council is supposed to have an equal employment policy covering lesbians and gay men. To be fair, they’ve taken more than their share of stick about it, but now the Ealing Gazette (17 Mar) says: “Catholic … parents were told the phrase ‘Ealing Council welcomes applications from lesbians and gay men’ would be dropped in an advert for a head teacher at Our Lady of the Visitation Roman Catholic School in Greenford. But the line cropped up in a national newspaper — and angry Catholics thought the council had included it deliberately.” But, of course, they hadn’t.
Ealing’s equal opportunity policy is as strong as a rock —until the first set of bigots comes along and demands its removal. The Council then accedes without a murmur.
Meanwhile in another London borough — Haringey —home of the first local authority Lesbian and Gay Unit, there is more controversy over the ‘positive images’ policy. But this time criticism comes not from some Holy Joe ‘parents group’ but a teacher in a local school. HW Medwell wrote to City Limits, the London listings magazine (6 Apr) following an article about the aftermath of Clause 28 by Melissa Benn and Rose Collis. “Haringey Council has been surprisingly quiet on the issue,” he says, “In the secondary schools where I have I taught, the Positive Images policy has been something you read about in the Tory press. No informational literature on Positive Images has been distributed to teachers or other staff during the period of controversy; nor has there been any verbal guidance from the ILEA. We’ve had to think of our own answers to the oft-repeated question ‘When do we start having gay lessons?’ and our own ways of coping with the marked increase of the traditionally high quota of heterosexist filth we meet in the classrooms. Benn and Collis could fruitfully have explored the reasons why a ‘radical’ council should behave in this way.”
A little better is the reaction of Brent Council which was reported in The Evening Standard (3 Apr) as “planning sex advice sessions where people are encouraged to ‘talk dirty’. The proposal is part of the borough’s Aids awareness campaign, designed to break down sexual barriers.”
As usual the first whinger on the scene is Tory group spokesman Leslie Winter who is quoted as saying: “It is absolute nonsense when you consider all the other problems we have.”
Apparently, the council which is “on the brink of a financial crisis” is to ask the Government for £300,000 to pay for the Creative Sex Workshop scheme. “It is based on an American project called Hot, Horny and Healthy, which uses blue movies to encourage people to attend. Brent’s Aids adviser, Vernal Scott said: ‘They put on porno films with people wearing condoms and it’s very popular’.”
Deputy council leader Pam Jordan said: “Anything that makes people aware of the Aids peril has got to be a good thing.”
Anybody with the brass neck to ask Mrs Thatcher for three hundred grand for a Hot, Horny and Healthy project gets full marks from me.
The Leicester Mercury (9 Mar) gleefully reported the banning of ten national newspapers from a students’ union because they were deemed to be “anti-gay”. The ban was presented as ludicrous and good only for mockery, especially since one of the banned titles was The Guardian, seen by many as the only pro-gay paper in the country.
But how consistent is The Guardian in its approach to gay matters? There can be little doubt that it has carried many excellent, thoughtful features that wouldn’t have looked out of place in this magazine. It doesn’t neglect major news stories of interest to gay people, either. But occasionally something slips through the net. One such piece was “Case of the limp-wristed stud” which appeared on 23rd March. It was supposed to be a funny account, by Shelley Bovey, of a cat which had been purchased for “80 quid” for stud purposes. The cat, Claude, showed no interest in the females presented to him which made Shelley Bovey immediately assume that he is gay: “At rest he turns his head affectedly to one side. One paw is tucked under his chest. The other droops languidly. Our stud cat is undeniably limp-wristed.” Then Claude starts a relationship with the tom cat from next door. “One bound through the cat flap and he and Black Tom are greeting each other affectionately, nose to nose. That casual first kiss is just part of a new familiar ritual. Claude then gets down and rolls enticingly in front of Black Tom. Then they disappear, but I don’t wish to go into that. Afterwards . . . they sit on the table outside the kitchen window, close together, exuding contentment, wrists dangling limply over the edge of the table.” Shelley Bovey says, “Not that I am any kind of homophobe”. I’ll believe her, thousands wouldn’t.
I know it’s supposed to be a bit of fun, but there was something unpleasant about the imagery and the cheap cracks which left me feeling uncomfortable. All the same, I wouldn’t ban The Guardian on the strength of it.
Considering the apparent distaste with which the tabloids view gay sex, they don’t half seem fascinated by it. Take this example from The Sunday Mirror (26 Mar), under the headline “Three-men-in-a-bed gay sex romps”: “We chatted and had a few drinks and Hugh and the other man started kissing each other … They became quite intimate. I was sitting in another chair in the lounge, watching them. The other guy went out of the room and Hugh encouraged me over to him and we started kissing and fondling. Soon afterwards we all went upstairs to Hugh’s bedroom and it all got rather involved after that. We were naked and it was a tangle of arms and legs. We all had sex with each other.” Then there follows an explanation about who dominated whom.
When you recall the hoo-ha over Colin’s kiss in EastEnders, I wonder if that righteous, campaigning newspaper The Sun will now organise a telephone poll asking whether The Sunday Mirror ought to be banned because it brings explicit gay sex into the front rooms of “real” families?
Gratuitous Insults Department: “Eartha Kitt is a founder member of the Showbiz Greats Club … despite her ghastly camp followers.” —John Knight, Sunday Mirror (19 Mar)
“I was going to get engaged but I have just discovered the awful truth about my future mum-in-law. She is gay. Now all my friends have found out and say I should finish with him, pointing out that our children could be at risk if they had a gay grandmother.” — Letter to Sun’s Agony column (20 Mar).
Jesus-in-Jackboots department: “Is it not true that for long enough now the Anglican Church in general has soft-pedalled about the sins of the flesh? I find it particularly distressing when a flabby attitude towards this issue goes hand in hand with a sentimental solicitude for Aids victims. It smacks of hypocrisy for a Church to lay claim to sympathy for a group of sufferers, and yet to withhold the full power of its collective voice against one method by which they may have become infected.” — letter in The Church Times (31 Mar).
The media and the fight against LGBT equal rights from Thatcher to Blair 