The Sun (21 Apr) carried an article claiming that Shakespeare was gay (“Friends, Romans and Countrymen, lend me your rears.”) Its only purpose was to give the writer, George Pascoe-Watson, the opportunity to make some feeble, bad taste puns. Example: “Schoolkids everywhere know that the bard’s bawdy quotes do NOT include: Beware the Aids of March; Once more into the britches, dearie friends; To be or not to be one, that is the question.”

He makes other pathetic attempts at humour by saying Shakespeare did not title his plays “Macbent, A Mince-Summer Night’s Dream or King Queer”, proving that you don’t need a sense of humour to appreciate The Sun — you need to be brain dead.

Commenting on this in The Guardian, Bryony Coleman wrote: “No doubt champions of …Clause 28 will be greatly reassured by this sniggering new low in fourth form wit; yet another leg cocked against the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality, yet mother thumbs up for homophobia. It’s the sort of everyday drivel that gays have had to learn to live with.”

Tired of ‘living with it’, I wrote to The Sun’s other unfunny joke, its ‘Ombudsman’, Mr Ken Donlan. I complained in reasonable terms about the cheap cracks about Aids and the nasty stereotyping of gay people in the article.

Mr Donlan’s reply was succinct: “The gay community invites the treatment which you rightly reject because of the antics of a minority.” A classic example of The Sun’s favourite tactic — blame the victim for the crime.

And if you want to see another example of the same trick, look at their front-page story of 12 May “Lesbian Warders Shocker”. It reported a court case in which a man was accused of causing actual bodily harm and damaging property. He “got drunk on beer and punched and kicked Mrs Wells on the legs until she fell to the floor. He is then said to have broken £1200 worth of ornaments.”

But the people who appeared to be on trial in The Sun’s story were the women staff at Holloway jail. According to The Sun the prison is “in the grip of dozens of lesbian warders … Many of the 250 officers at Britain’s biggest women’s prison are gay and attend drinking parties packed with lesbian couples.”

The man on trial is given only a passing mention, the women who have done nothing but act as punchbags for him are, on the other hand, vilified and made to sound sinister. “There was a wicked conspiracy against him by lesbians.”

No use complaining to the Ombudsman about this distortion. Kenneth Donlan is a front to deflect attention from The Sun’s disgusting tactics. But he ain’t fooling this punter.

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For some reason The News of the World decided to splash the opinions of sex-obsessed harridan Victoria Gillick over double pages for a couple of weeks. On 14 May she “launched a vitriolic attack on gays for spreading the killer disease”: “Their practices are dangerous and unlawful. They play in open sewers. Somebody has got to say loudly and clearly that sodomy is dangerous … People with Aids are turned into martyrs … it’s nobody’s fault but theirs … Homosexuals will tell you that their way’s normal and natural. They claim it’s an alternative. But they’re the ones who ought to be named for what they’ve done … People were prudish about sex in the last century because it was a killer. Syphilis killed, having too many children killed.”

The mother-of-ten rambles on in similar fashion for two whole pages. Her uninformed, ignorant opinions will, no doubt, be cheered by News of the World readers (although a telephone poll revealed that 15,966 of them thought Gillick had ‘overdone it’ with her own rabbit-like reproductive habits).

At the bottom of the page a small quote is attributed to Maureen Oliver, co-ordinator of OLGA: “How can she say that lesbian or gay sex is unnatural — unnatural for whom? If someone’s gay, then that sort of sex is not unnatural for that person. There’s an increase in attacks on lesbians and gays whenever someone like Mrs Gillick gets publicity for her views.”

Given that this is an undeniable fact, what motive prompted NoW editor Patsy Chapman to give such prominence to Mrs Gillick’s worthless ranting? Come on, Ms ‘Chapman, we’re waiting for an answer.

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An astonishing court case was reported in The Hampstead and Highgate Express (14 Apr) concerning two men who were kissing in a Kings Cross street.

Apparently, the two had been arrested by a police officer who “realised how offensive this can be to ordinary members of the public”.

The men were bound over for £100 each after charges of “gross indecency” against them were dropped. The judge Thomas Pigot, QC, told them they were lucky to escape a prison sentence: “This kind of thing is intolerable”, he said, “and you had better tell your friends that they risk a prison sentence if they do it … People are fed up of watching performances of this kind.”

And this person is fed up of hearing stupid, homophobic, ranting old twerps using their privileged position as a platform for their vile bigotry. Justice? It all seems to hang on the mood and prejudices of the bewigged berk you happen to come up before.

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Michael De-la-Noy was writing in The Independent (15 Apr) about his desire to take a holiday in a guest house. But where to go? “I decided to take a furtive peep at Gay Times, and lo and behold,” he wrote, “a bevy of enticing advertisements beckoned.”

Mr De-la-Noy chose an establishment in Dartmoor National Park, where he was greeted with inordinate generosity. Free drinks, free afternoon tea, tiny prices for an excellent meal and accommodation in exquisite surroundings.

Having snapped himself up a bargain courtesy of the gay community is he grateful? “No, I could not have stood the cosy intimacy and chi-chi conversation in the sitting-room for very long, but I assume that most patrons for whom ‘gay guest houses’ are primarily run would have appreciated the overtly hand-holding atmosphere. (Those who were staying at the same time as myself had not, I think, been in a stable relationship very long, and honeymooners en masse can be very trying).”

Charming. He intrudes himself into the small space that gay holidaymakers can call their own and then has the gall to complain when we relax in our own way. ‘Chi-chi conversations’ are far preferable to sour-faced whinging.

“I may well continue to take pot luck via the pages of Gay Times,” writes Mr De-la-Noy. If he does, I must make sure that I check any registration book before I take a room at a gay guest house. He’s one person I wouldn’t want to share a holiday with:

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Paul Foot, The Daily Mirror’s exposer of abuses in some of our most powerful institutions, took up the cudgels for the gay community on 27 April. He was commenting on the disgraceful police raid on the Vauxhall Tavern in South London, when 35 officers wearing plastic gloves suddenly burst into the pub and started arresting people. “I asked the police if this was a crude exercise in gay-bashing since many gay people drink in the pub,” wrote Mr Foot. “A spokesman replied: ‘The reason the raid took place was in connection with alleged breaches of the licensing laws but also allegations that there was drug dealing going on inside the public house’ … The spokesperson confirmed that there were no arrests for drugs or anything else.”

Nice to see the occasional acknowledgement of the injustice that is routinely meted out to gays, so we should give thanks for small (very small) mercies.

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Lord Rees-Mogg, chairman of the dubious Broadcasting Standards Council, has been touring the country finding out for himself what the British public’s standards are. His Lordship, who wrote about his experience in The Independent (18 Apr), still clings to the idea of the “tolerant, liberal British”. He found “that one hears much more antipathy to homosexuals than might be expected in a tolerant society. Scenes of men kissing do not seem to promote tolerance; they were invariably commented on unfavourably, sometimes with sharp hostility.”

What can all this mean for the representation of homosexuality on television? How will Lord Moggy translate his findings into policy? Is he telling us that because the British are homophobic there must be no positive mention of the subject on TV? Or does he think that attitudes need changing?

Maybe he won’t have to do anything, for it seems the self-censorship has begun already. “Lesbian act cut from Royal Gala” reported The London Evening Standard (8 May): “ITV has ordered a controversial lesbian act to be cut from a variety show recorded in front of the Prince and Princess of Wales.” The “controversial” item in question was by “American comedienne Sandra Bernhardt who performed a lesbian version of Billy Paul’s paen to adultery, Me and Mrs Jones.”

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As regular readers know, the British press are obsessed with Cliff Richard’s sexuality (or lack of it). Is he gay or isn’t he? The man himself sort of denies it “What does it matter?” is his typical response.

Appearing for the ‘defence’ (Daily Express 18 Apr) is guitarist Hank Marvin. He apparently “hit out at gossips” by saying about his old pal Cliff: “If he is, he’s fooled me for 30 years … I think it is pathetic that everyone is hung up on this question. Because of his beliefs, Cliff leads a very moral life.”

He goes on to say: “Unfortunately, because of this day we live in, people tend to think if you’re not leaping in and out of bed with everybody — or at least seen at every public occasion with a different girl on your arm — there must be something wrong with you.”

Well, that’s true. Wasn’t it tennis player Sue Barker who always seemed to be on the arm of Mr Richard at one time?

Finishing off with a final stab at closet cases, Marvin says: “I know a lot of guys who appear at places with different girls but are as bent as two-bob watches.”

This latest conjecture has had an effect on at least one person, namely plain John Smith “man of The People” who commented (23 Apr): “It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference if he goes to bed with men, women, teddy bears or cups of cocoa.”

Very generous, I’m sure, but can this be the same Mr Smith who wrote in October, 1987: “The responsibility for Aids rests firmly with the gay community and the homosexual sluts who couldn’t care less who they infect.”? Slightly inconsistent, wouldn’t you say?

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A survey of 10,000 European teenagers showed that while tolerance of homosexuality seems to be taking a nosedive in Britain, it is increasing in other European countries. Only 15 per cent of our own rising generation thought a gay relationship was “right”, whilst 44 per cent of Spanish young people thought gay was OK.

The other questions asked seemed to indicate that British youth is greedy, selfish, racist and just plain nasty. Reporting the survey (11 May) Today’s headline was “Sad to be gay”. I think the only sad thing is the way young people seem to have been so thoroughly corrupted by Mrs Thatcher’s grasping, self-seeking, intolerant attitudes.

Being disapproved of by such a bunch of bigots feels almost like a privilege.

Recent incidents have brought “rent boys” once more into the public eye. The tabloids’ reactions to news of these young men are often startlingly foolish. Look at this, for instance, from The Daily Star (23 May): “Jason Swift was what we have come to glibly call a “rent boy”. He was a lonely, unloved, unwanted, pathetic little boy who sold his body to homosexuals. How many child runaways who, for a variety of reasons, believe they cannot go home to face their parents … All of them are easy pickings for the warped bastards who have carefully conditioned us into believing that there is nothing really wrong with homosexuality and that rent boys are a fact of life. Isn’t it time for a massive police crackdown on these sewer-dwellers in our midst? And, if that doesn’t work, how about flame throwers?”

This piece of hysteria comes from The Star’s editor, Brian Hitchen. Mr Hitchen would have us believe that children are at risk mainly from homosexuals. But to utter blanket condemnations of homosexuals every time there is a case of male-male child abuse is wishful thinking. If Mr Hitchen believes that brutality towards children is confined to the gay/rent boy scene, he ought to open his eyes. As Julie Burchill pointed out in her column (Mail on Sunday 4 Jun): “Some children are being raped nightly by their brothers, fathers and grandfathers … We nag our children never to talk to strangers —despite the fact that the vast majority of attacks are carried out by family and friends. It is a sad fact that a child may well be safer going for a car ride with a strange woman than sleeping in its own bed at night when there are male relatives in the house.”

A correspondent in Community Care (25 May) tried to explain where rent boys come from: “It is our society’s prejudiced and blinkered views on homosexuality, and abject ignorance on this subject which has caused gay youngsters to be on the run in the first place. Many parents on learning their child is homosexual simply fail to cope with it … Educators are now prevented from teaching children about homosexuality, and from supporting those children who find themselves isolated, knowing they are different from their classmates. There will inevitably be, more runaways; more vulnerable, powerless young people desperately trying to survive on the, streets of our big cities, and more suicides.”

Mr Hitchen and his sympathisers don’t want to hear about this, of course. Nor do they seem interested in other evidence which emerged this month that many mothers, too, sexually abuse their children. Did he have anything to say about the case reported in The Independent (2 Jun) which began: “A three- year old boy was so violently shaken by his father that his spine was broken in 16 places and five of his ribs were fractured…” or the one in The Daily Mail (8 Jun): “Father of five Les Pingel chose victims from little girls learning to ride his ponies … He admitted 21 charges of indecent assault and five attempted rapes.”

Nobody ever mentions the sexuality of straight child abusers, but they almost always point out the gay ones. One honourable exception is Esther Rantzen, whose work on Childline is well known. She was exposing incidents of sex abuse at a boys’ school on “That’s Life!” and in The Daily Mirror (1 Jun). She managed to tell the whole story of male teachers and their assaults on boys without once referring to them being gay.

It’s very handy to be able to lay your guilt at the doorstep of an unpopular minority; gays make convenient whipping boys in this respect. But it just won’t do. As Ms Burchill says: “I think we are becoming incredibly smug about child abuse once more; it isn’t us — it’s the pods who come down and do it.”

Before he turns the flame thrower on the supposedly exotic meeting places of the gay community, the editor of The Star ought to open a few front doors in suburbia. It may be an uncomfortable experience for him to discover that the real villains are nearer to home than he thinks.

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I have been criticised for not being polite to gay-bashers. In defence, I would point out that there are others who are far less restrained than I. City Limits (5 Jun), for instance, carried a letter from a lesbian born-again Christian deploring that magazine’s “Official ‘Fuck Off Billy Graham’ T-Shirt”. “I don’t think attacks on good men like Billy Graham help,” wrote our “lesbian and socialist” sister.

But then again, being a lesbian born-again Christian is something like being a Jewish Nazi. Nonetheless, I will try to moderate my language in future, particularly following the news (Daily Telegraph 10 Jun) that a Labour councillor in Finchley has been charged with “using abusive language during a visit by Mrs Thatcher to her North London constituency.”

But before I eschew abuse for good, may I have one last fling at Tory MP Terry Dicks? He was commenting in The London Evening Standard (7 Jun) on a Pride 89 event for Lesbian and Gay Parents: “Quite frankly the whole thing is twisted and perverted. Of perverts, by perverts, for perverts. What is this about gay parents? Two men can’t have a child.”

Mr Dicks is a facile, creepy, moronic, jumped-up dope. It is a disgrace that such a birdbrain should be allowed out of the Reichstag let alone to hold power over people’s lives.

There, having got that off my chest, I now faithfully resolve to stick to diplomatic language. (Regular readers should note that I am notoriously bad at keeping resolutions.)

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Before we leave the wonderful Brian Hitchen (referred to as “bone-head” by Private Eye) and his fast-fading Star (circulation well below a million and falling), we must also look at his reactions to the news from San Francisco of “new licences granting all-men couples the same rights as other wedded folk”. “Poofters get right to wed” said the headline.

Commenting on this story (25 May), The Star’s editorial went: “San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. In some ways, it is also the ugliest…What is the reaction of the city of San Francisco to the plague launched on a sick wave of so-called free gay love (homosexual promiscuous sex)? Horror? Shame? Not for a moment. Yesterday the city’s lawmakers voted to recognise homosexual weddings — the first time in history that such a travesty of marriage vows has been legalised … Anyone who thinks that these ‘marriages’ are anything, but a grotesque mockery of a solemn occasion is living in FAIRY-LAND.”

We were spared Mr Hitchen’s informed and thoughtful comments on the news carried in The Daily Telegraph (27 May) that the Danish parliament had gone one step further voting to “allow homosexuals to marry and have equal rights with heterosexual couples in all but adoption.”

A spokesman for Denmark’s 1948 Association of Gays and Lesbians said: “We hope Denmark’s example will influence the work for human rights for gays and lesbians in many other parts of the world.” A noble sentiment. Can we expect some movement in Thatcher’s Britain?

Well, not according to The Sun (26 May) which gleefully informed us that: “A bid to lower the age of consent for gay sex was rejected last night by the Government”. Tory MP Nicholas Winterton has just returned from San Francisco and was unimpressed by what he saw there. He is quoted as saying: “In view of the shocking situation in San Francisco, Aids continues to pose a massive threat. Anything which increases that is out of the question.”

Yes, Britain leads the world, as usual. Its record of homophobia, gaybashing and head-in-the-sand stupidity remains completely intact. Well done, Maggie!

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That’s-one-way-of-looking-at-it department: “Private Eye has always stank of a strident homophobia to the extent that my one regret if it now goes under is that this country’s six million lesbians and gay men will be unable to sue it for collective gross defamation of character.” Letter in Guardian (8 Jun)

Let’s-blame-the-gays-for-EVERYTHING-department: “The Rottweiler is the gay community’s favourite pet” — The Star

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For the last five years of his life, Russell Harty had a lover called Jamie O’Neill. Last month Mr O’Neill appeared on Channel Four’s anti-newspaper programme “Hard News” telling how the tabloid press had hounded Russell Harty into the grave.

Now The Sunday Mirror has come to get Mr O’Neill, too. In an article (11 Jun) Jamie is alleged to have had “a sordid past” working in “sleazy Soho clubs” and “parading around naked in sexually explicit poses” in Mister magazine. Mr O’Neill is portrayed by the article as greedy, grasping and ruthless.

Is this another example of the vengeance tabloids exact on their critics or is it mere coincidence?

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With such a compassionate and sensible leader, is there any wonder that the Roman Catholic Church is such a humane institution? Especially where its followers are most ardent —Latin America.

The Independent (3 Jun) told us how Mexico’s “much needed Aids education campaign” had been scuppered by the Church and other “conservative” forces. It all ended with a call from the loonies who run the asylum “for a roundup of homosexuals and compulsory euthanasia for victims of the virus.”

In a report which was quite staggering in its implications, reporter Chris McGreal revealed: “The head of Mexico’s Aids prevention programme, Dr James Sepulveda, met Church and ‘pro-life’ groups in an effort to end their blanket ban on any mention of the word `condom’ … The Church described the government’s education campaign as ‘criminal’ and forced the cancellation of a television advert because a popular soap opera star warned ‘if you are going to have a relationship use a condom’ … Conservatives pressure television and radio stations by threatening advertisers with boycotts and by playing on public prejudice with violent attacks on homosexuals.”

At least 100,000 Mexicans are infected with HIV, but because of the Catholic Church’s dogmatic interference there is hardly any public knowledge about it.

Which leads me to ask: are Mexican Catholics pro-life or are they pro-genocide?

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Just when you thought the tabloids had given up Aids hysteria, back they come with a bit of old-fashioned pig-ignorant Aids madness.

“The House that Died of Shame” was the headline in the Paper that Knows No Shame (News of the World 28 May). It concerned the residence of the late Rock Hudson over which hung “the taint of his diseased death.” Now, according to the NoW, it “is being gutted until every memory of Hudson is obliterated.”

Naturally the new owner, film director John Landis, will want to rearrange the house to his own taste, but The News of the World says: “Workmen wearing protective clothing have stripped the house to a skeleton … Demolition men are careful not to cut themselves. No one wants to chance the remotest possibility that the disease can linger on, even in the wood, stone, porcelain and fabric of the house … An estate agent explained: ‘People didn’t want to sleep in the bedroom where Rock breathed his last breath. Similarly, they didn’t want to use the bathroom facilities or swim in the pool where he and his buddies played.”

Rock Hudson died more than two years ago. The tabloids continue to pile indignities upon his memory, but even worse than that is the continued encouragement of such sad ignorance. No-one in the article contradicts the foolish idea that the virus can linger in a house for years on end; nobody makes the slightest effort to challenge the superstitious nonsense being peddled.

I had imagined my contempt for The News of the World could not intensify any further. Just shows how wrong you can be.

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The News of the World (4 Jun) carried an extraordinary article headed “Evil Fantasies of Kinky Canon” in which a senior church man had, apparently, revealed to a NoW reporter his most intimate fantasies about “ogling youngsters on the beach” and “gay orgies”. What came over most strongly in the feature was the uninhibited terms in which the “confession” was couched. One began to wonder why on earth the Canon had chosen to talk in this way to a reporter from such a notorious rag. And then you began to think: did he actually know he was talking to a reporter, and had he any idea that the conversation was being taped?

It is unclear from the article when or where the interview took place, or how it was obtained. I have made a complaint to the Press Council in the hope of finding out just what is going on here. If it turns out that the interview was obtained by deception, then I consider it to be a gross abuse of journalistic ethics. To destroy someone simply because they let their fantasies run away with them is a terrible use of the power of the press.

I’ll keep you informed, but in the meantime: if you are in a public position and you get into conversation with a sympathetic stranger, make sure you know whether he’s got a tape recorder up his sleeve and a pay packet from Mr Murdoch in his pocket.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography The Reluctant Gay Activist is now available from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2E2YEZK5ZTRMI&dchild=1&keywords=the+reluctant+gay+activist&qid=1635334396&sprefix=the+reluctant+gay+activist%2Caps%2C110&sr=8-1

Last month I wrote about my suspicions that The News of the World had used deceit and a hidden tape recorder to trick a gay clergyman into incriminating himself. I tried, through the Press Council, to persuade The NoW to admit that they had used trickery in their entrapment of Canon Brian Brindley, but they repeatedly refused to come clean.

Now Canon Brindley has resigned from his post as business manager of the Church of England General Synod and the whole murky incident has been exposed. As suspected, News of the World reporter Chris Blythe had insinuated himself into Canon Brindley’s confidence, posing as “a friend and an admirer” and encouraging the Canon to speak of his secret sexual fantasies in an indiscreet manner. All this time the treacherous liar, Chris Blythe, had a tape recorder secreted about him and was recording the Canon’s musings; these later appeared in The News of the World under the heading “Evil Fantasies of the Kinky Canon”. Accepting the Canon’s resignation from the General Synod, the Archbishop of Canterbury said: “I believe the manner in which the journalist obtained and used the material gained from Canon Brindley was deplorable.”

Meanwhile Canon Brindley’s Bishop, the Right Rev Richard Harries said: “That a journalist should go into the Canon’s home with a concealed tape recorder, cajoling him into fantasising about his private life is deplorable. More deplorable is the fact that a national newspaper should print a story based on material obtained in such a deceitfu1 manner.”

But you do not criticise The News of the World (or any other tabloid) and walk away unscathed. On 9 July the filthy rag “confessed” to using these despicable tactics in order to ruin Mr Bridley and then went on to repeat, with lurid embellishments, all the original alleged comments. The victim was referred to as “vile Brindley”, “the camp Canon”, “the Kinky clergyman” etc. There was talk of “sorting out a powerful ‘Gay Mafia’ within the Church”, and then came the sanctimonious plea of public duty: “From time to time newspapers feel justified in using clandestine methods in reporting matters which are in the public interest. We believe that the conduct of Canon Brian Brindley was such a case.” As The News of the World rightly points out: “The Press Council which, as a broad rule, frowns upon subterfuge and deceit, has many times recognised the legitimacy of such techniques.”

My complaint with the Council will progress, and we’ll see whether they consider that the repeated humiliation and destruction of Canon Brindley served any discernible public interest.

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The supposed rent-boys-in-the-White-House scandal has brought some strange reactions from our own press. Most of them carried the story of senior US Government officials using credit-cards for “call boys”, but only The Guardian (1 Jul) questioned the veracity of what was going on. Its suspicions were aroused by the source of the story — The Washington Times. Now this rag — so far to the Right it almost falls off the dial — is owned and run by The Moonies, a sinister pseudo-religious cult with more arms than a shoal of octupuses.

I am not saying that there has been no rent-boy activity in US Government circles (or in Westminster come to that), but some of the Washington Times’ allegations about “homosexuals who held senior posts during the Reagan administration” being “compromised by KGB agents” are simply risible.

One politician is quoted as saying he suspects there was a “nest of homosexuals” close to Ronald Reagan when he was president. This kind of language (“A nest of homosexuals” is presumably one step down from a “nest of vipers”) suggests that gay people are automatically untrustworthy, disloyal and easily corrupted.

But a different angle was taken by The Sunday Telegraph (2nd Jul). “Conservative gays tumble out of the closet,” it said, reporting the bewilderment of the staunchly right-wing Republican Party at the news that some of its most active members are gay. “What fascinates the gossips is the notion of a conservative homosexual; not some mincing Left-wing queen, but a sober-suited chap with a firm handshake who presumably spends most of his time in the closet.” We can put the crudity of such comments down to the journalist’s ignorance but there is no doubt that, at last, they’ve discovered the phenomenon of the self-hating homosexual. This type has already been identified by Laud Humphrys in his study “Tearoom Trade”. He described “the breast plate of righteousness” effect which causes some gays to assume exaggerated homophobic views and inflated conservatism in order to hide their own homosexuality.

The Sunday Telegraph (very fond of homosexual conspiracy theories, as you will remember) goes on to reveal: “The National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, a pro-Contra group, was headed during the Reagan years by Mr Carl Channell, a homosexual. Mr Channell’s mentor, Mr Terry Dolan, brother of the Reagan speech writer Mr Anthony Dolan, was another influential homosexual. He was instrumental in founding the National Conservative Political Action Committee and died of Aids. Mr Dolan once mailed a NCPAC fund-raising letter that said: “Our nation’s moral fibre is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement”. Another homosexual who was a favourite of the emerging New Right, and chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, was Congressman Robert Bauman of Maryland. His political career ended abruptly when he was arrested for soliciting male prostitutes in a Washington bar.” Gay people know from long and bitter experience that our worst enemies often come from within our own ranks, but The Sunday Telegraph seems to find the idea novel. Still, if you insist on thinking and writing in worn out stereotypes, you’re bound to miss the point.

I don’t know what the Moonies’ reason is for creating this furore, but there is almost certainly some ulterior motive behind it. Meanwhile, ordinary gay people have to take the flak of being made to sound like some kind of dreadful fifth column, infiltrating American life like aliens from another planet. The truth is that the hypocrites who have created this right-wing backlash against gays (and many, as we have seen, are gays themselves) are now reaping the whirl-wind along with the rest of us.

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The nomination for the most inhuman, callous and detestable comment on Aids must go to Abdullah al-Mashad “leader of a body which rules on Islamic issues in Egypt” who was quoted in The Independent (4 Jul) as saying: “We should kill Aids victims to stop them harming society … Aids victims could be denied food, water and medical treatment.”

But before the pronouncement could be exploited, Rushdie-style, by Muslim fundamentalists, Dr Hesham al-Essaway, chairman of the Islamic Society for Religious Tolerance, pointed out that the views of al-Mashad had no basis in Islamic law.

However, the whole episode once again served to open up the debate about Aids and morality. As Rabbi Julia Neuberger wrote (Sunday Times 9 Jul): “The fact that many victims are homosexuals strengthens the vitriolic response of the self-appointed moralists, who argue that they deserve segregation at best and death otherwise, but certainly not our sympathy and love. The immorality of this argument is breath taking. It comes from religious leaders of all faiths. Yet it is beyond me why where you put your penis and into whom should be a moral question, rather than whom you betray, whether you are faithful, and whom you are exploiting sexually.”

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Wimbledon inevitably means it’s time to wheel out the tired old Martina-is-a-lesbian features. Surely everyone who could possibly be interested knows by now that Ms Navratilova is not only one of the greatest woman tennis players the world has ever known but also the lover of Judy Nelson. But just in case anyone had missed it, The Sun gave it another airing (28 Jun) under the heading “Martina’s Courtiers”.

Apparently: “Martina has never made a secret of her homosexuality but the revelation of her affair with wife and mother Judy whipped up a storm of controversy.” Or put another way, The Sun whipped up a storm of controversy and the rest of us have to endure it. The Daily Mail (1 Jul) rated Wimbledon’s romantic partnerings and gave Martina and Judy 9 out of 10 (as opposed to Boris Becker and companion’s 5/10).

The following day, The Sun’s Dear Deirdre (“The world’s top agony aunt” it says here) was regaling us with “My Mum’s Lesbian” and “Can children come to terms with having gay parents? Or should gay parents keep their sexuality secret and sacrifice their dreams of sharing life with the partner of their choice?”

Well, that’s interesting enough, and the letters that followed were a reasonable exploration of the subject (given The Sun’s propensity for scaling everything down to three sentences so as not to over-tax their readers). Deirdre’s advice was understanding, reasoned and she gave some contacts for further counselling.

Last time I gave Deirdre a pasting for being so negative on gay topics, I was told she goes on working for The Sun because her column is the only one in that paper which could possibly get any sympathetic coverage for gays and anyway her copy is often distorted by The Sun’s notorious subs.

We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

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National press coverage of Pride this year amounted to a couple of worthy articles by Nicholas de Jongh in The Guardian, a tiny paragraph in The Sunday Times and an even tinier one in The Observer (25 Jun). But as their contribution to the celebration, The Sun and The Star were cheering on the thugs who destroyed a flower bed in Manchester which had been planted to celebrate Lesbian and Gay Pride. “Anti-gay gang wipe out pansies! (We’ll get to the bottom of it say lefties)” was The Sun’s predictably jeering reaction (1 Jun). And this anti-gay gang — could they mean the notorious Wapping Wankers, bussed up to Manchester especially for the occasion?

The British press seems far more enthusiastic about reporting American Pride marches; perhaps the poor dears feel less threatened if it’s all at a safe distance. Anyway, while totally ignoring the British march, The London Evening Standard carried a report (“Sad to be Gay” 3 Jul) of the New York celebrations. Author of the piece, Clive Barnes, starts off by telling us how glum gays are, quoting the gay-bashers favourite line from Boys in the Band “You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse”.

It seems that Mr Barnes has come not to praise the gay movement but to bury it. However, even he has to admit that the annual Lesbian and Gay Pride March is important enough to receive “growing political support —many of the current mayoral candidates including the incumbent, Mayor Koch, marched in this year’s parade”.

But Mr Barnes is anxious that no-one should get the idea that gays in New York are making progress: “The backlash has been spurred by the Aids epidemic, which is popularly seen as the gay scourge and in some sections of the community has made the homosexual actually feared. As gay concern rises over the money allocated to Aids care and research a certain restlessness seems to be building in the straight community … In New York City, a significant increase in ‘gay-bashing’ has been reported. As well, hopes have dimmed in the city of getting either homosexual marriages legalised, or at least a ‘domestic partners’ law similar to that recently passed in San Francisco.” He grudgingly admits, though, that: “Gays are no longer in any New York closet at least not as a community- and in general terms their situation regarding discrimination and acceptance has clearly improved. But it has certainly not improved as much as its militant advocates would wish.”

But even before New York gays had time to ponder the futility of it all, there was incredibly good news for them. “Gay couple are family, court rules” was the headline in The Guardian (8 Jul) over a story which said: “In an historic ruling, New York’s Court of Appeals, the State’s highest court, has broadened the legal definition of a family to include a gay couple.”

Seems the epitaph was a little premature.

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Good news department: “The founder of the Moral Majority, Mr Jerry Falwell … announced that he would be dissolving the Moral Majority this August …” — Guardian 14 Jun.

History-of-homophobia department: “One of his executioners later boasted in town that when Lorca was already dead he fired ‘two more bullets into his arse for being queer’. Envy of his fame and hatred of homosexuals were at the rotten core of Lorca’s hideous death”. — Guardian (30 June).

The two sides in the Church of England debate on homosexuality are donning their gear ready for the Big Fight. The liberal corner (supported by some of the broadsheet newspapers) wears kid gloves and jewelled slippers, while the fundamentalist corner (cheered on by the tabloid press) is dusting off the jackboots and knuckle-dusters. First round goes to The People (11 April), taking its turn to play Holy gestapo, and rooting out the vicar of Dulwich who they alleged had hosted “gay orgies” at his vicarage.

The information was supplied by a parasitic little Judas named Paul Gregory, who enjoyed himself at the parties and then betrayed his fellow gays by running to The People when he was short of a bob or two. I hope his ten pieces of tabloid silver choke him.

Meanwhile, Cannon Brian Brindley, who recently got the concealed tape recorder treatment from The News of the World (“Murdoch’s stinking rag” — Auberon Waugh, Sunday Telegraph 13 Aug), has now resigned from his job, hounded out not only by sanctimonious creeps posing as journalists (take another bow champion liar Chris Blythe) but also by his fellow Christians. Commenting on the nasty activities of two individuals who circulated The NoW revelations to all 574 members the General Synod in case they missed them, The Independent editorialised: “How was the attack on Canon Brindley supposed to help the Church? It has lent support to those who fear the Synod has become a playground for self-righteous, petty-minded activists ready to use any weapon, no matter low, in pursuit of their feuds. They may have convinced themselves that on balance they were doing good. But to do good by endorsing, or seeming to endorse, the persecution of homosexuals, the betrayal of confidences and the standards of the gutter press is an approach which finds no parallel in the gospels.” (Auberon Waugh in The Sunday Telegraph put it a little more directly on 13 Aug when he asked: “Why were they reading the newspaper in the first place, unless planning to masturbate or looking for prurient gossip?”).

Canon Brindley’s former bishop, Patrick Rodger, wrote in The Independent (12 Aug): “That he should have been driven to this (resignation) is a poor reward for his years of faithful ministry both to his parish and to the General Synod. Many members of the Synod (who were powerless to prevent the article being circulated to them at York) were as distressed by that squalid episode as you obviously were by the behaviour of The News of the World.”

No doubt Canon Brindley’s persecutors would say that it was his duty to practice what he preached. If he called for sexual restraint from the pulpit (and, apparently, he did), then he should live by the same tenet.

Some light was thrown on this dilemma by Rabbi Lionel Blue, who did the dignified thing and came out voluntarily in a rather depressing interview with The Independent (26 Jul). He said: “Some of the ministers I knew and respected said one sort of thing in the pulpit and another in their private counselling and advice. There was that gap between the theory and the practice. One said to me: Always give the general rules in the pulpit, but treat everyone who comes to you as an exception.”

Far better, surely, to be honest and up-front in the first place. If priests are allowed to accept homosexuals in private but are required to condemn them from the pulpit, doesn’t the double-standard risk making the Church look even more foolish?

One man trying to do something about that is the Anglican Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, the Rt Rev John Spong. He recently spoke in London about the need to recognise “homosexual and lesbian ‘marriages’” (Daily Telegraph 9 Aug). The People said Bishop Spong’s remarks were “another move in the pansy propaganda war” (13.Aug), while The Sun (10 Aug) enlisted the gay-hating Rev Tony Higton: “The bishop would be regarded as a lunatic by many in the church. His views are not Christian … he is not qualified to be a Bishop … it is blasphemous for him to call sex outside marriage holy.”

I would have thought Mr Higton was walking a tightrope in calling others “lunatic” — the sanity of his own views and activities might well be called into question by the less charitable among us (which includes me).

The intellectual bankruptcy of fundamentalist argument will hopefully ensure that it soon fades into oblivion, and then a debate that means something can begin.

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There’s been a bit of a hoo-ha in Exeter over remarks made by Tory councillor Dr Adrian (born-again) Rogers. Commenting on a book-shop window display celebrating Lesbian and Gay Pride, the rabid Rogers raved: “I believe any public display of homosexuality should be made illegal. To glorify immoral relationships which have cost so many lives with Aids is absolutely sick” (Exeter Leader, 13 Jul), and “I continue to consider homosexuality as a God-condemned, sterile and disease-ridden occupation.”

Now all this might seem like a routine bit of gay-bashing from an attention-seeking politician who recognises a sure-fire way to get himself onto the front page of the local rag. Dr Rogers is the standard tin-pot local councillor with delusions of grandeur, but his relentless homophobia seems more like an unhealthy obsession than a genuine concern.

Lining up with Dr Rogers was the Leader’s “controversial” columnist Alan (happy ignoramus) Butt, a sort of cut-price Ray Mills, who wrote: “Toleration of gays – or sads as I prefer to call them – is one thing. Proclaiming their tarnished sexual appetites (and their sexual deviation) is another.”

The letters column over the following few weeks provided a lively platform for people to state their entrenched positions. The gay community rallied after a slow start and the paper seemed, after a while, to be under some kind of siege. Eloquent dismissals of the homophobes’ arguments appeared. Particular credit goes to Beth Lambdon (the manager of Fagin’s Bookshop) for a couple of robust letters. The bigots’ contingent included the following anonymous contribution: “I am a retired magistrate. I sat on the bench when homosexual acts were illegal, during the ‘Sexy Sixties’ and let me tell you that when any homosexual had the misfortune to come before me he was treated with the full might of the law — six months imprisonment. I quickly acquired the reputation as a ‘hanging judge’ among many of my more liberal colleagues, but my methods often had the desired effect.”

As I suspected, all men are equal before the law — unless they’re gay. Also appearing in the correspondence column, along with about twenty-five Holy-rollers (an obviously orchestrated write-in by one of Exeter’s wilder churches), was Mrs Edna Welthorpe, celebrated alter-ego of the late Joe Orton, presumably communicating through a medium. Quite appropriate really, as by the time her letter appeared the whole thing had become the kind of hysterical farce that Orton would have loved.

The God-shouters were rolling their eyes to heaven and praying for the sinners. They were thanking their God that they were ‘normal’ and that the homosexuals would get their just desserts in the sweet by and by.

It was an example of the British at their best, cheerfully parading their ignorance and sexual hang-ups (not to mention their illiteracy), and seemingly unaware of how ridiculous it all was. Just the ticket for the silly season.

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The Daily Mail’s resident bigot George Gale has incurred the wrath of ACT-UP, the militant Aids organisation. (Their raid on The Mail’s offices was reported in the communist Morning Star, 8 Aug, with a background piece in The Observer 13 Aug). One of the many grossly offensive remarks Gale made in the now notorious Mail column of 21 July was: “The message to be learned — that the Department of Health should now be urgently propagating — is that active homosexuals are potentially murderers and that the act of buggery kills.”

The dreadful irony is that the charge of murder might well boomerang back on George Gale one day. What happens when those heterosexuals, lulled into a false sense of security by ill-informed comments, find that they aren’t after all immune to HIV? Will Mr Gale (and The Sun’s “medical expert” Dr Vernon Coleman who pushes the same line) accept any of the blame? Who will be the murderers then?

One can’t help thinking that George Gale’s homophobia is so ingrained that he’s incapable of seeing past the prejudiced chip on his shoulder. He seems even to abandon logic in order to make the “facts” fit his hatred of gay people. I ask him — and Sir David English, editor of The Daily Mail — to consider this letter, written to The Independent (4 Aug) by Annabel Kanabus of Aids Education and Research Trust: “Many studies have shown that vaginal intercourse may indeed transmit the virus. However, although anal intercourse may indeed transmit the virus more efficiently, it should be remembered that it is not only homosexuals who enjoy this activity. The most important factor with HIV is not who you are but what you do … Of millions infected, the vast majority are heterosexual. It is only in a few Western countries that the virus, unfortunately for them, became established among homosexuals. There seems no good reason why the high level of heterosexual infection seen in other countries will not, in due course, happen here, and it will happen more quickly if people deny what is happening before their very eyes.”

I implore The Daily Mail, and the rest of the British press to stop their commentators creating this dangerous complacency amongst heterosexuals. It may never happen to them — but who will be responsible if it does?

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The Independent reported: “A series of sex scandals involving altar boys and, so far, 23 priests, brothers and officials across the country is causing turmoil in the hierarchy of Canada’s Roman Catholic Church”. The blame seems to lie with the Church’s ridiculous insistence on celibacy, which few of the priests and monks seem to be able to sustain. It was refreshing, though, to find that the debate was not the shallow “Gay priests molest choirboys” nonsense that tends to prevent sensible discussion of the topic in this country. In fact, one report into the scandal makes a comment which should be engraved in stone and beaten over the head of British tabloid journalists until they understand it: “There was no one profile of a child molester; the link between abusers was not sexual preference but opportunity.”

Editors of The Sun and The Star please note: child abusers don’t do it because they’re gay or straight, they do it because they’re tempted and they don’t resist. The sex of the child seems often to be irrelevant.

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An illustration of how important it is for gay couples to make wills if they want to be sure their partner inherits their money was contained in The Sun (26 July). “Roly-poly comic Jimmy Edwards, who died last July, left his £250,000 fortune to a young man friend — cutting his brother out of the will. Star Jimmy … bequeathed the cash to Philip Aylemore who shared his farmhouse. Brother Alan got nothing. Jimmy divorced his wife Valerie ten years after telling her on honeymoon that he was a homosexual.”

The Sun shows how easily it is assumed that gay relationships are “not real” and that the family have some kind of “right” to the money. If Mr Edwards hadn’t made a proper will, that’s probably how a court would have seen it, too.

So, if you want your lover to get your cash rather than a family who might have made life difficult for you, get a solicitor to draw up a will.

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The South Wales Evening Post (5 Jul) carried a report about a police crackdown on a beach frequented by gay men near Jersey Marine. It gave the local police, in the person of Constable Richard Thomas, the opportunity to carry on alarmingly about the alien nature of homosexuals. Apparently gay men are coming from all over Europe to cruise on the beach. “Let’s hope we can drive them out of our area,” says PC Plod, explaining the persecutory nature of his clean up: “Local residents have had a bellyful — they are very concerned about it.”

Of course, by kidding themselves that the arrested gays are coming from “somewhere else” the people of Coedffranc can claim that “abnormality” has to be imported and that there are no gay people living in their midst.

Self-delusion? Hypocrisy? Take your pick.

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The Guardian printed a letter (10 Aug) from Peter Dawson, General Secretary of the Professional Association of Teachers (the PAT is one of those ‘conservative’ unions which seems to work actively against members interests). Mr Dawson was defending his opinion that EastEnders “presented deviant behaviour as perfectly normal”. He cited the homosexual story-line as particularly “evil”. The letter was held up for admiration by John Smith. The Man of The People who wrote (13 Aug): “It’s about time someone put the poofters in their place.”

Needless to say, Guardian readers were unable to let such illiberal yammerings go unanswered, and within days the letters column was awash with people giving Mr Dawson the long overdue slagging he deserved.

“I am a newly qualified teacher. I am also ‘normal’, by which I presume Mr Dawson means heterosexual,” wrote Josh Parker (12 Aug), “However the use of such labels would seem to be a pointless exercise, because who can say what would happen if I should meet a man with whom I fell in love? I’ve been wondering which union to join since gaining my B. Ed. and with the intolerant nature that Peter Dawson expresses, it most certainly won’t be the PAT.”

Peter Knight in the same issue suggested that members of the PAT wave bye-bye to Mr Dawson and his anti-gay Association: “Unless, of course, like him they are proud to come out and proclaim that they are afflicted with the unpleasant disease, homophobia. 1 do understand that it is very difficult for such people because they are firmly convinced that their sickness is normal.”

What more is there to say?

THE News of the World and The People seem to have perfected a new blood sport — gay-baiting. It is rather like fox-hunting, except that with gay-baiting nobody seems concerned about the barbaric cruelty of it all. The location of the victim is usually ascertained using information purchased from some greedy rent-boy or alternatively a trap is set by a deceitful journalist. Then the hyena pack moves in for the kill.

The selective use of quotes, the ludicrously sanctimonious tone and the liberal use of emotive adjectives ensures that readers are left in no doubt that homosexuals are exotic, alien and have no place in the ordinary world of “good” people (i.e. the readers of these foul rags). The reasoning seems to be that if you tell people often enough that gays are evil, eventually they’ll come to believe it.

The past month has seen the usual clutch of gay exposés, all of them awash with antagonistic adjectives. Take The People’s 20th August offering “Queen Mum’s priest in gay sex scandal” which, within the first three paragraphs, contained the words “perverted”, “vile”, “seedy”, “sordid”, “kinky”, “filthy” and “corrupt”. Then on 27th August we were regaled with “Top Lawyer exposed in Rent Boy Scandal” which described the victim as “sordid”, “kinky”, “bizarre” and “squalid”; on 3rd September The News of the World’s contribution was “Beast sends gay filth on Prestel” (“perverted”, “seedy” etc.).

What was not clear from the stories was how they were obtained. Do readers of this tittle-tattle have any idea of the lengths to which the journalists go in setting up the victims? Have they any inkling of the lying, trickery, deceit and sheer premeditated nastiness that goes into creating the weekly diet of gay-baiting? Are they aware of the amounts of money paid out to prostitutes and liars in the pursuit of exposés? Tabloid readers must face up to the fact that in buying these papers they play a major part in encouraging the malevolence which passes as journalism.

The editors of The People and The News of the World, Patsy Chapman and Wendy Henry, seem concerned only with their fat pay cheques and not with the havoc and destruction they wreak in the lives of their victims.

The tragedy is that while the tabloids constantly blame unpopular minorities for the lamentable state of our society, it is they themselves who are the arch-promoters of perverse values. The family fanatics who fall over themselves to protect children from any positive mention of homosexuality seem indifferent to the hatred and intolerance being instilled in their off-spring by the Murdochs and Maxwells of this world. Could this strange paradox have anything to do with the fact that nearly all the agitators for “traditional values” are Tories and all the tabloids are likewise?

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Those politicians who imagine that accusing opponents of sexual misdeeds is an easy way to power must be having second thoughts at the moment. If you present yourself as the party of “family values” claiming the moral high ground, you had better watch out that there aren’t any sexy secrets in your own closet.

The Tories have repeatedly discovered, as they present themselves as morally superior, that own goals are very easily scored. The side has been let down by the likes of Harvey Proctor, Cecil Parkinson and now Ross Harper, president of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Association (“Scots Tory resigns after ‘spanking’ allegation” — Guardian 9 Sep). When it happens to them, the Tories get on their high horse: “It is essential that it should become a form of criminal defamation to expose the private deeds of persons if they have absolutely no bearing on their competence or honesty in public life. The Press Council should be given the right to prosecute those whose conduct destroys the lives of people whose affairs are strictly private matters, and nothing to do with their status,” said Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, Tory MP for Perth and Kinross (Sunday Telegraph 10 Sep).

The Tories are learning that those who live by the exposé are likely to die by it, too.

They’re having similar problems in the USA, where a spate of gay revelations in the Republican party has caused their spokeswoman Leslie Goodman to declare “It was a personal matter and none of the public’s damned business” (London Standard 30 Aug). It will be difficult therefore for the Republicans to exploit the plight of Democratic Congressman Barney Frank. Mr Frank is an openly gay politician who, it is claimed, “used the services of a male prostitute, Stephen Gobie, who rewarded his benefactor by setting up a sex-for-sale operation in the basement of the Congressman’s Capitol Hill home.”

According to opinion polls, Congressman Frank’s constituents would re-elect him tomorrow despite the “scandal” which was revealed by the Moonie-owned Washington Times. Americans seem bewildered by the issue; they are torn between the desire to punish ‘moral culpability’ and the need to stop the hypocritical destruction of their most effective public servants.

The Standard quotes “an expert on political ethics”, Michael Josephson: “It is difficult to know when a private act will put a public life at risk. We are in a period of moral tumult right now. We are becoming aware of our frailties, but also of our ideals. It’s a very important process from which we will begin to choose our values.” The Independent (9 Sep) put it more directly: “The country may howl about the decline of standards, but their own standards are no less sordid than the people who represent them.”

The Independent conjectures that “What must disturb Frank most is Gobie’s appetite for money and notoriety. As Gobie recently told a local reporter: ‘I’m an open person. I’ll listen to all offers’. One, may presume he has other steamy stories to tell and no scruples about telling them.”

It seems that the greedy, back-stabbing little traitor, so beloved of tabloid editors, is an international phenomenon.

Another issue this affair is bringing to the fore is the political power of the gay community in America — “A potent, and hyperactive political lobby” according to The Independent, or “the new muscle of the homosexual lobby” as The Standard called it. “Its strength is seen in dozens of ways from Chicago’s Mayor Daley riding at the head of a Gay and Lesbian Pride parade to the unprecedented underground clinical testing of unproven drugs for Aids at the behest of militant gays,” reported The Standard’s Washington Correspondent.

Even the political commentators admit that they have no idea how this case will be concluded, but it may serve as a catalyst for sorting out some of America’s ludicrously contradictory ethical dilemmas.

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The revelation that American actor Michael Glaser’s family has been devastated by Aids has brought on another bout of the objectionable “innocent or guilty” idea of people with HIV. The once-respected Sunday Times opined (27 Aug) that there were “people whose lives have been invaded by a deadly enemy, not through drug abuse or homosexual contact, but through a blood transfusion”.

The Sunday Times was taken to task over that by Dr Trevor Bentley of Wetherby who wrote in its letters column the following week: “Is the implication that (those infected through blood transfusion) are especially in need of sympathy and understanding, whereas those who have contracted HIV in some other way don’t deserve it? Anyone who has HIV deserves all the caring and love we can give them.”

This kind of compassionate thinking has no place in the hate-filled world of Brian Hitchen, editor of The Star, who wrote (29 Aug): “Just how many innocents like the Glasers are there in Britain? How many families have been sentenced to death by faceless blood donors who were drug addicts or permissive homosexuals? And how long are we going to support spurious Aids charities for those who brought this awful curse upon themselves?”

One might be tempted to ask how long the few thousand people who buy The Star will continue to support a spurious newspaper.

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That’s-telling-him Department: Report in The Times of the Murdoch lecture at the Edinburgh Festival (26 Aug): “Ms Jaci Stephen, the television critic of the London Evening Standard questioned Mr Murdoch’s wish to rid British society of the barriers which caused so much damage. ‘How do you tie that view with publishing a newspaper that represents the very worst in every prejudice, that is really at the root of rotten British society?’”

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The battle over gays in the Church continues to be fought abusively in the tabloids, more politely in the serious press.

The sad case of Canon Brindley has now rumbled to a halt. You will remember that News of the World reporter Chris Blythe lied his way into the Canon’s confidence and then set him up with a hidden tape-recorder. Anti-gay members of the General Synod (of which Brindley was a prominent member) waited until the persecuted clergyman was down before they put the boot in — hang your heads in shame Jill Dann and David Holloway — and the Canon is a ruined man.

The Rev Malcolm Johnson wrote to The Independent (15 Aug) in reply to one of those self-righteous members of the Synod: “Would Mr Reid and his fellows have pursued Brian Brindley had the fantasies been heterosexual? … I also find it impossible to believe Mr Reid when he says this affair has nothing to do with persecuting homosexuals, because in his recent book Beyond Aids, homosexual acts are throughout described as ‘buggery’ and hardly a page goes by without him insulting lesbian and gay people. Who does he think he is kidding?”

Mr Brindley’s parishioners also came to his defence in the same issue of The Independent. Elizabeth Utting, Canon Brindley’s former churchwarden, wrote “on behalf of the congregation”: “We at Holy Trinity have been left bereft of a good parish priest whom we have known and trusted as pastor, preacher, teacher and friend for over 20 years. We are not interested in church politics or the Synod. We should all prefer Canon Brindley to return to us as our parish priest.”

I had made a complaint to the Press Council about the activities of The News of the World in the Brindley case, but at the request of the Canon I have now reluctantly withdrawn this. I do not wish to provoke further vilification, but in effect the NoW has intimidated us into silence.

But before we leave the whole story, one has to ask how safe it is to criticise The News of the World without risking the same treatment for yourself. The Rev Malcolm Johnson has been a leading critic of The News of the World’s reprehensible tactics, and he duly got the treatment (27 Aug) in a non-story headlined “Emma’s Odd Vicar Says Let Gays Wed.” Mr Johnson, who officiated at the much-publicised “wedding” of Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh, is referred to as an “oddball” because he blesses lesbian and gay relationships. The “story” itself says nothing and has no point; its only apparent purpose is to smear and humiliate Malcolm Johnson.

Patsy Chapman disgraces the trade of journalism once again by using her position of power to try and destroy critics of her vicious rag.

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John Smith of The People wrote (20 Aug): “Channel 4 invited me to . . . confront a bunch of homosexuals who objected to me calling them poofters. However, when the little darlings turned up at the London studios their behaviour was so arrogant, objectionable and aggressive that the producers …scrapped the whole idea. Excitable creatures these poofters.”

The Press Council has repeatedly rejected complaints about newspapers’ use of abusive terminology for gays, but this might change. Raymond Swingler, assistant director of the Council says, “The issue is far from static and the offensiveness of the terms you mentioned could well be reviewed by the council.”

The answer seems to be: keep those complaints rolling.

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Tabloid stories about gays are almost invariably negative, but the headlines which go over them are even worse. I’m beginning to wonder whether tabloid sub-editors (the people who invent the headlines) don’t undertake training courses to increase their offensiveness skills. Perhaps the courses are geared around “Effective smearing for subs” or “Fine-tune your stereotyping”.

Just look at a few of the headlines from the past month and note that each contains a negative word to set the tone: “Pervert Priest sacked” (People 27 Aug); “Beast sends gay filth on Prestel” (NoW 3 Sep); “Fear of lesbian friend” (NoW 3 Sep); “Gay Mum and Dad made my life a misery” (Star 8 Sep); “Warder at Myra Jail in a Lesbian Wedding” (with the most tenuous connection between the women involved and the ‘evil’ Myra Hindley, who is pictured with the word “sadistic” — Sun 7 Sep); “Bisexual Brando made my life Hell” (Sunday Mirror, 3 Sep); “Gay Shame of Top Teeny Heart-throb Jason” (People, 10 Sep).

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=

Reporting from New York for the London Evening Standard (2 Oct), Clive Barnes told of a new American gay magazine called Out Week which has “initiated a policy of trying to drag reluctant gays out of the closet, even if they are kicking and screaming”.

This is achieved by “publishing a list of about 50 people in a box marked ‘Peek-a-Boo’. There is no explanation for the list, but if a name is included alongside that of such uncloseted gays as Johnny Mathis or Barney Frank people can draw their own conclusions.”

Mr Barnes does not approve of this tactic. “Surely people should be allowed to come out of their appropriate closet in their own time. No-one needs this kind of smear coercion.”

Stephen Fry, on the other hand, almost certainly would agree with it. Mr Fry made the front page of The Sun (4 Oct) by declaring that “the House of Commons is full of perverts and homosexuals — who try to keep their own sexual behaviour quiet while attacking gays.” A double page spread inside the paper told us that the “self-confessed gay” “denounces loose-living MPs as hypocrites when it comes to moral values. Attacks society for assuming male homosexual teachers are influencing their pupils. Advocates that all homosexuals should marry and father children as well as continuing their homosexual acts. Condemns the ‘sanctimonious’ views of people who claim that the killer disease Aids is ‘God’s punishment on gays’”

Mr Fry expressed a lot of very sensible views about “Britain’s hypocrisy over homosexuals”, and it was good to see them being published in The Sun. But it was only two days later that the paper’s own columnist Fiona Macdonald Hull was shitbagging him. “Give it a rest all you gays”, shrieked this dreadful harpy. “Hands up everyone who is a little bit sick and tired of homosexuals telling us how NORMAL it is to be one, and how the rest of us really SHOULD try it,” she wrote. “The latest in the long line of hetero-bashers is Blackadder star Stephen Fry …”

I re-read the interview with Mr Fry and didn’t see him anywhere making a case for the superiority of homosexuality or encouraging straights to try it. Undaunted, Ms Hull continues: “Stephen also curses heterosexuals who curse homosexuals for the Aids plague. Bit unfair that, since homosexuals — whether they like to admit it or not (and they don’t) — DID start it.”

ACT UP might like to think about that one. And finally, in order to excuse her over-shrill defensiveness she wrote: “And yes, gay-bashing is common. So is Paki bashing, black bashing, and something called mugging which happens to everyone.”

Well, that’s all right then. Just so long as the violence doesn’t extend to stupid, irrelevant tit-heads who’d sell their own granny for a Murdoch paycheque there’s nothing to worry about.

Roger Scruton wrote in The Sunday Telegraph (24 Sep) what must surely rank as one of the most bizarre pieces of polemic ever printed in a British newspaper. Its title “Why heterosexism is not a vice” said it all. Ranting and raving in the most desperate manner, Mr Scruton was unable to make a single point without drifting into irrationality. He started off by saying that perhaps apartheid was a good thing and then went on to his main topic. “Probably the comment pages of The Sunday Telegraph provide the last remaining place where you can criticise homosexuality in print — the last place where toleration will be extended to the heterosexist.”

What a rarefied world Mr Scruton must inhabit if he is never exposed to the unending bad-mouthing of homosexuals in the British Press. Has he never listened to a debate in the Church of England Synod? Was he out of the country when Section 28 stirred up hundreds of column inches of anti-homosexual comment? However, the brunt of the article makes out that homosexuals are a danger to society because they do not reproduce and therefore have no “commitment to the social future”. This is fallacious, too. Homosexuals can, and frequently do, have children, and to cite a few members of The Bloomsbury Group (as Scruton does) as justification for the opinion that homosexuality is per se corrupt and effete is simply specious. He even blames homosexuals (personified in this instance by TE Lawrence) for creating a “langorous pacifism” which gave the green light to Hitler. So, it seems that even the Second World War was our fault!

Mr Scrotum (er, sorry, Scruton — I just can’t help thinking about a lot of balls as I read his article) ends by saying: “this lack of ‘moral shock’ — or, to give it its proper name, this shamelessness — is far from fortunate for society, and may well contain the doom of us all.”

A letter in the following week’s correspondence column summed the piece up: “The tabloid press is full of such stuff, but their scurrilous clap-trap is not dressed up as reasoned argument.” But that did not stop The Sunday Telegraph from continuing its vilification by also printing a long letter from Rev Hugh Rom who said that homosexuality “is no longer a private vice, but now a many-headed movement designed to make deviancy the norm by incestuous, underhand and dishonest propaganda.”

Such evil propaganda is easily recognised by the Reverend gentleman, of course — he and his fanatical predecessors have been engaged in it for over two thousand years.

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Apparently, there is some kind of glasnost at The Sun. Worried by the mounting criticism of its filthiness, Rupert Murdoch ordered editor Kelvin McKenzie to break his arrogant I-don’t-have-to-explain silence and make excuses. Mr McKenzie invited fellow journalists to dinner and told them how wonderful The Sun was and that yes, they’d made a few mistakes over the years, but nothing to worry about.

But Mr McKenzie’s apparent ability to forget the harm he has done to countless people through The Sun’s racism, sexism, homophobia and unapologetic lying, doesn’t wash any more. The gay community will never, ever forgive McKenzie for what his paper has done to foster and promote the myths about Aids, to incite hatred against homosexuals and for the cruelty it has inflicted on individual gay people. As The Observer (24 Sep) said: “The ‘clean-up’ is purely cosmetic, putting a better face on the Murdoch empire … Ironically what may save newspapers from further assaults, such as the mooted legislation on privacy or restrictions on media monopolies, is that The Sun is Mrs Thatcher’s most slavish supporter in Fleet Street. She credits the paper with delivering working-class votes to the Tories and is therefore reluctant to smother Murdoch’s monster golden egg.”

As part of this strategy of pretend reform, Murdoch himself gave an interview (reported in The Sunday Telegraph 15 Oct) in which he has the temerity to forecast a religious revival in Britain “in which his newspapers will play their part in maintaining ‘high moral values’”

Pass me the sick-bag, please!

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The fact that Zola Budd’s father was murdered in a so-called “homosexual love-tiff” is, I suppose, a legitimate news story. But what The Sunday Mirror printed (1 Oct) about the poor man was unforgiveable. The front page was taken up almost completely with the headline “Zola’s Gay Anguish” with the sub-heading: “My kinky father condemned me to a life of shame.” Ms Budd was then given two pages to insult and vilify her father’s memory. “I hated my Gay Dad to the Grave” was the next headline over the usual “sordid sex secret” “seedy double life” “father’s sex shame” etc. Ms Budd (a committed Christian, naturally) says in so many words she forgives the man who murdered her father because he was probably “provoked” into it by a homosexual advance.

Ms Budd tells how her father “masterminded” her athletics career and made her world famous. However, they fell out over money and eventually the rift between them became impossible to heal. The article portrays Frank Budd as a monster simply because he was gay; he is presented as a verminous creature unworthy of life. There is not one iota of sympathy for his predicament and, although Ms Budd is quoted as saying: “I forgive him his homosexuality. I can understand him in a way, although I think it was terribly unfair of him to marry and have children when he knew what he was”, nobody is interested in the hell Frank Budd must have endured being gay in the red-neck heartlands of South Africa.

This story was one more contribution to the relentless barrage of anti-homosexual propaganda being perpetuated by the evil trinity of Sunday scum-sheets. May they all rot in hell.

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And-they-say-WE-have-no-sense-of-humour department: “The world’s most famous rabbit (Bugs Bunny) is to be branded a poofter … by a bunch of gays and lesbians. The so-called evidence is to be screened at a poofters film festival. And before the organisers start squealing ‘gay rights’ we question THEIR right to destroy a character who has made so many laugh gaily.” — Editorial in The Star (9 Oct).

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At last someone has challenged the hypocrisy of television’s attitudes to gay people. Actor Alec McCowen was the subject of This is Your Life. As is usual when the subject is gay, the producers failed to mention anything about his sexuality. Mr McCowen wasn’t having any of that and when the programme was finished, and no reference had been made to his lover of seventeen years (who died of Aids two years ago) the actor denounced the programme as “a sham and an insult” (Sun 13 Oct).

The Daily Mirror quoted a “This is Your Life insider” as saying: “We never dwell on the sexual side of anyone’s life and we thought we were being discreet.”

Of course, with heterosexual subject the spouse invariably sits by their side, holding hands, wedding photos are shown and the children are paraded (presumably we are to believe that these were found under a gooseberry bush and are not the result of sexual congress). Mr McCowen would not go along with the “discretion” though, and as a result a small tribute will be paid to his lover in the edited programme.

We can expect no such concessions in that other haven of heterosexism Blind Date. In an interview with the producer, Kevin Roast, The Guardian’s Melanie McFadyen asked why there had never been a gay Blind Date. “I don’t think that would be appropriate for a game show on a Saturday night at 7.30. Blind Date is a heterosexual show. I’m trying to make the best entertainment I can with the best mix of people I can; people who enjoy themselves on TV. I’m not sure whether gays would enjoy themselves or not. It’s not something we’ve thought about. It doesn’t interest me so I suppose as long as I’m producing it, it won’t happen. I’m not anti-gay, but you have to think about the audience.” Or as Cilia might say: Warra lorra, lorra crap, chuck.

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The new-born Sunday Correspondent has carried a couple of sympathetic gay features in its first few issues. Rev Malcolm Johnson wrote (15 Oct) “Gay Love: part of God’s creation”, an excellent, uncomplicated retort to the usual anti-gay Christian fundamentalist views so popular in newspapers. It also did a complimentary article about the tenth birthday of The Gay Men’s Press (1 Oct).

The Sunday Mirror, however, decided to celebrate that same tenth birthday with a shock-horror “Stop the bookshop ‘poison’” screamer. Apparently “Authors fight move to sell gay literature in High Street”. The gist of the piece is that famous writers like Jeffrey Archer, Jilly Cooper, Barbara Cartland and Frederick Forsyth are vigorously campaigning to stop GMP books from being sold in anything other than “specialist bookstores and sex shops”. The supposed “campaign” however is a figment of Sunday Mirror journo Ian Markham-Smith’s imagination — there is no wide-spread outrage as he suggests. What actually happened was that Markham-Smith saw an advertisement for GMP books in The Bookseller, rang a few famous names and got them to say things like: “If the Gay Men’s Press sought to shove this kind of garbage under the noses of my two sons I would happily smash their faces in” (Frederick Forsyth). “These titles could easily pollute children’s minds” (Barbara Cartland). “It’s distressing that these books should be available in a family neighbourhood.” (Jeffrey Archer).

But best of all is soft-porn writer Jilly Cooper: “I think it’s just tacky and awful. This sort of literature doesn’t help anyone”.

It’s hard to imagine that the works of any of these philistines and would-be book burners adds much to the quality of human life. Given the garbage that Cartland churns out and the universally mocked writings of Archer, I would think that GMP are quite happy to be in a different league. And forward to the High Street!

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Nice to see that Rev Jim Bakker, the appalling televangelist who screwed millions of dollars out of his crazy congregation, has got his just desserts. One hopes that all the other grasping hypocrites posing as “men of God” will go the same way. But it was slightly unnerving to see (News of the World 15 Oct) that he is now “accused of having a string of GAY lovers”. I wonder if that’s enough to provoke Tammy Fay into weeping her first real tears?

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The Church Times (8 Sep) advised its readers that “The Queen has appointed the Bishop of Chelmsford … to be Clerk of the Closet.” His duties, presumably, will be to ensure that all gay clergy not already dragged out by the Sunday scandal-sheets remain safely locked away where they can do no harm.

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“Eyebrows shot up last week when Lord McClusky ruled that four-year-old James Hill should return to Canada with his gay father. Yet, ‘statistically, we should be more, worried about a heterosexual man gaining custody of a child. For almost daily, the papers show that nearly all the monsters behind masks of normality who murder, maim and sexually abuse children are HETEROSEXUAL.” —Dorothy-Grace Elder, columnist Sunday Mail (3 Dec)

Amazing-U-Turn Department: “I think parliament was right to legalise homosexuality between consenting adults.” — Geoffrey Dickens MP, once a leading campaigner for “re-criminalisation” of homosexuality (News of the World, 10 Dec).

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“The poofs party line, regurgitated in the bitty HYSTERIA 2, is to exaggerate grossly the Aids threat to straights and play down its causes. They do this to boost funds for Aids research and keep us from discussing radical solutions, like outlawing homosexuality and hanging heroin pushers.”

Believe it or not, this is from a television review. It appeared, need you ask, in The Sun and was written by someone called Garry Bushell whose journalistic style absolutely epitomises that paper: he is racist, sexist, homophobic, stupid and vacuous.

Mr Bushell assures us that he is an unashamed reactionary, he boasts of his unenlightened bigotry and hard-line right-wing credentials, and yet investigative journalist Paul Foot of The Daily Mirror revealed that Mr Bushell once applied for a job on the ultra left-wing paper Socialist Worker. “Into the office strode a young man who wanted to change the world. He was brimming over with rage at capitalist society … He wrote beautifully and passionately for the revolution and we loved him. I imagine you’ve guessed his name by now: Garry Bushell.”

Stung by this revelation, Bushell quickly put the record straight in The Sun (25 Nov): “Like many people, I believe in things Parliament never discusses — capital punishment, abolishing immigration, an end to the ceaseless promotion of poofs and perversions and a crackdown on the spongers who have bled this country dry.”

Mr Bushell admits to cheering the National Front and makes his TV column a platform for his bottomless hatred. The two photographs above the article told the whole story: the first was Bushell aged 20 — a reasonably attractive, the other was “Gary now” — looking remarkably like Jack Nicholson running amok with an axe in The Shining.

However, I suppose everyone has the right to change their mind; the problem is that Bushell has no discernible mind to change — his skull seems to contain little more than a pimple.

And the same goes for Paul Johnson who is, according to The Sunday Correspondent magazine (19 Nov): “the stern Catholic moralist and spiritual counsellor to Mrs Thatcher”. It was revealed that Mr Johnson was once the writer of soft porn novels.

Mr Johnson propagandises ceaselessly about the sexual laxity of youth, the dangers of tolerating homosexuality and the evil inheritance of the sixties, whilst conveniently forgetting his own contradictory past (his porno novels were published in the mid-sixties at which time he was a loony leftist, too). No doubt he would claim that in his case it was youthful exuberance and nothing more. Nowadays like other tiresome ‘moralists’ he tries to deny the present generation similar exuberance. But isn’t selfishness one of the seven deadly sins?

NOTE: Gay Times was not published in December 1989

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The wind of change is blowing through the newspaper world — or so they would have us believe. The execrable Wendy Henry has been sacked as editor of the ghastly People and a “five-point code of conduct” has been agreed by the editor of every national newspaper (except The Financial Times). We are told that sceptics will be unconvinced by promises of good behaviour made by the likes of The Sun and The News of the World. Well, I count myself an unreserved sceptic on this one; I don’t believe a word of it. The code of conduct is itself nothing but a cynical front aiming to deflect legislation.

The sanctimonious cant with which the code was announced by some of Fleet Street’s worst offenders was simply nauseating. Brian Hitchen, sinister editor of The Star, declared (28 Nov): “It is a code of honesty and fair play that we have ALWAYS followed, long before its wording was agreed by other Fleet Street editors.” Yet one of the points in the code says: “Irrelevant references to race, colour and religion will be avoided.” Only last year The Press Council upheld a complaint I had made about The Star referring to someone as a “black bastard”. So please, Mr Hitchen, pull the other one.

The News of the World commissioned a MORI poll (3 Dec) to find out “what people think about Britain’s Press”. The questions were all loaded to give the answers that were required. For instance: “Would a newspaper be right or wrong, in the following cases, to breach people’s privacy during their inquiries or in the stories they print? To expose criminal conduct; to expose personal hypocrisy; to expose political extremism; to expose matters of public interest.” Why didn’t they add: “To titillate their readers” or “To persecute people we don’t approve of”?

The News of the World brags that: “This paper has a proud tradition of exposing corruption, humbug and perversion. Our scroll of honour (the five-point code) must not become a hiding place for those behaving illegally or immorally.” And that’s the giveaway. To the self-serving creeps who infest The News of the World the definition of “immoral” can be anything that suits them at the time. In effect they are saying, we’ve signed this code of conduct but we reserve the right to flout it whenever we want.

As far as gay-baiting is concerned, it will be business as usual. Susan Ardill wrote in The Independent (1 Dec): “It is dismaying to learn that the new code of practice … affords no protection to the two groups most routinely abused in their pages — gays and women. Will the misogynist and queer-bashing excesses of the British Press remain fair comment?”

Julie Burchill, however, doesn’t agree with the code at all (Mail on Sunday, 3 Dec): “The homosexual pop star who flaunts a new ‘girlfriend’ every month, or who gets married in a hurricane of publicity is offering his ‘private’ life for public consumption and approval —and then he expects to turn it off like TV when it doesn’t suit him .. In the long run, this code will make the world a safer place for camp crooners — and Members of Parliament, of course.”

What Ms Burchill, and many other apologists for Press gossip-mongering, fail to acknowledge is the sheer cruelty of it all. Not only “camp crooners” get the unwelcome spotlight but ordinary people who do not seek publicity or influence. “Everyone likes to gossip” say the tabloid pack, and that, as far as they are concerned, makes the filthy business of destroying lives OK. There really is no defence, and no amount of pious bleatings from embattled scum-sheets can justify their rottenness. General legislation to curb the evil antics of a small number of newspapers is dangerous, but if it does come the Press will have no-one but themselves to blame. It is no good maundering on about dangerous threats to press freedom now — the public know the difference between what is really in their interest and what is in the interests of newspaper proprietors’ balance-sheets.

I urge every reader of Gay Times to harass newspapers every time they breach this unconvincing Code of Practice.

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The Star brought us a report (23 Nov) headed “Cops Quiz gays over death of schoolboy”. It began: “Gays and sex offenders were quizzed last night in the hunt for the brutal killer of a runaway schoolboy.”

At the end of the report we were informed that “a juvenile” had been charged with the crime — one of the murdered boy’s school friends, in fact. So, what was all this about inferring that the gay community were in some way implicated? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on that one.

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We are constantly warned that the Government will fight the next election on a “morality campaign” (the word ‘morality’ in this sense has been given the Tory treatment which makes it mean the precise opposite of what is in the dictionary). Gays will become Mrs Thatcher’s next Falklands factor, and it is over our lives that she will attempt to trample to victory.

In America a similar campaign is underway as right-wing politicians and fundamentalist churches spit venom at our brothers and sisters over the water. Of course, the American God-shouters are the real experts in persuading the gullible and ignorant that what was formerly considered undesirable is now virtuous. Persecution and scapegoating are, in the eyes of the holy-rollers, “good things” because by having an “enemy” to fight, the fundamentalists can feel righteous.

If gays didn’t exist, religionists would have to invent us. As it is, they’ve had to settle for reinventing us — as threatening monsters and exotic aliens. Look at this quote (The Sun, of course, 30 Nov), from “Baptist firebrand” Daniel Jackson, upon hearing about a proposed gay soap opera in California: “The Lord did not want these creatures and we don’t want them in our living rooms at prime viewing times.” ‘These creatures’, boys and girls, are you and me.

The London Evening Standard (29 Nov) told us of “The Preacher waging war on gays”. This story concerns “Louis Sheldon, the latest name to conjure with on the religious Right”. This Sheldon creature is apparently a Presbyterian Minister “a hell-fire and damnation voice who is also a subtle backstairs operator.”

The Standard told us: “His tactics are bold and ruthless. When the city of Santa Ana refused to ban a Gay Pride Festival in a public park, Sheldon published the names of the offending council members and started a campaign to remove them from office.” Apparently gay activists burn him in effigy, spit at him in the streets and picket his home. But, of course, Sheldon has gigantic financial backing from a “multi-millionaire California businessman” which makes him powerful and influential, however dangerous and fanatical he becomes. How come there are no “angels” willing to finance an effective opposition. Are there no gay millionaires?

Sheldon, of course, comes from a long line of religio-political opportunists who have tried to use gays as a rallying point for their mad ideas —beginning with Anita Bryant. “Sheldon’s campaign could grow,” says The Standard almost hopefully, “and if so: gays beware.”

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On the day of reckoning Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie is going to have a lot of explaining to do. Not least will be his reckless reassurance to heterosexuals that they are immune to Aids. “Straight Sex Cannot Give You Aids — Official” was the incredible headline on November 17th. This was supported by an editorial reading: “The killer disease Aids can only be caught by homosexuals, bisexuals, junkies and anyone who has received a tainted blood transfusion … the risk of catching Aids if you are heterosexual is ‘statistically invisible’. In other words, impossible. So now we know — anything else is just homosexual propaganda.”

This, of course, was prompted by the ill-informed utterings of Lord Kilbracken (“Editors latch on to any crank who appears to discover discrepancies deep in official statistics” — Observer 10 Dec) who gave The Sun the ammunition it needed.

Lord Kilbracken was roundly condemned by people who knew better than he and, to its credit, The Daily Mirror accepted that straights are not immune (29 November, “Aids the REAL risk — straight sex is a threat.”)

Not so The Sun, which continued on its hare-brained way: “Aids — the hoax of the century” wrote Dr Vernon Coleman (Sun 18 Nov): “Why it paid prudes, gays and business to scare us all.” On December 4th Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote: “After all, it is hardly a disease which threatens the vast majority of the population despite the misleading propaganda being peddled by the gay lobby. If you steer clear of sleeping with woofters and drug-users you should be safe … The Government seems more concerned with a handful of homosexuals than millions of women. Perhaps if more lesbians got cervical cancer, Ministers might consider doing something.”

We know The Sun has nothing but contempt for gays, but to write off the thousands of gay people affected by HIV as “a handful” is a disgusting trivialisation of an enormous tragedy affecting many lives. The Sun and other papers are engaged in wishful thinking if they are trying to turn Aids back into “the gay plague”. Equally irresponsible is the attempt to convince readers that gay lives are valueless. As leading Aids-expert Michael Adler wrote in The Observer (10 Dec): “If reinventing myths and delighting in fantasies is all that happens, then silence is better, so that we can get on, unimpeded with the battle.”

Everyone fervently hopes that there will never be a huge heterosexual incidence of Aids in this country, but no-one knows for sure what will happen — not even The Sun. To wilfully encourage complacency at this stage could well turn out to be monstrous and murderous error. What will Kelvin have to say then?

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The Bedside Guardian is an annual anthology of items from that paper’s pages. The introduction to it this year was by Ian McKellen who wrote: “It’s time The Guardian had a regular gay page. And if you don’t know why, then it’s hightime.”

On 18thNovember, The Guardian invited the sadly bewildered Peregrine Worsthorne to review the book: “Ian McKellen urges you to start a regular gay page,” he said in his peculiarly pompous way. “That would be carrying liberal silliness a bridge too far. Gays, and other unpopular minorities, like feudal reactionaries – the one I belong to – don’t need special pages where we appear like protected species in a nature reserve.”

The difference, of course, is that feudal reactionaries occupy every other page of just about every newspaper in the land, and they write on topics of interest to other feudal reactionaries. If gays were given similar access, we wouldn’t complain.

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Well, here’s another fine mess they’ve gotten themselves into —the British Establishment, that is. The furore (or “scandal” or “gay sex storm”) over the Scottish Judge, Lord Dervaird, has illustrated once again the ludicrous Catch-22 situation for homosexuals in high public office. This “vicious circle” was defined by The Independent (20 Jan): “Unless illegal activity is involved, homosexuality can be damaging to a career because it opens one to blackmail, and it only opens one to blackmail because it can be damaging to a career.”

One thing the affair has achieved is to get the British press all worked up about homosexuality once more, and a more dispiriting spectacle would be hard to imagine. When the broadsheets get on to gay topics, it reveals the profound ignorance of even the best-educated people on this particular subject.

As you’d expect, the reactionary tabloids responded in a reactionary manner. The Sun (19 Jan) gave space to the doddering Lord Denning (“England’s most senior retired judge and former Master of the Rolls”) to air his opinion: “Why we should ban gay judges”. None of this namby-pamby business about an individual’s talents, skills or suitability for the job. According to Denning: if he’s gay, he’s got to go. “Allegations of homosexuality have been known to ruin the careers of civil servants and of politicians. They could, and should, end the careers of judges unless they are quickly and effectively disproved.”

His Lordship is of the opinion that simply having a homosexual orientation makes it impossible for a man “to be of good character and to uphold the highest standards of conduct”. All this bigotry (for that is all it amounts to) was accompanied by some of the most pathetic and predictable cartoons I’ve seen for a long time (“The poof, the whole poof and nothing but the poof’ -The Sun 19 Jan).

The broadsheets took a more considered look at the issue. Only The Guardian consistently made the point that by discriminating against homosexuals, the Establishment encourages dishonesty in some of its most eminent members. The paper provided us (19 Jan) with a long catalogue of ruined lives because of “the Establishment’s hypocrisy” in clinging to the belief that “homosexuality is still unacceptable in public office”.

The article revealed how Lord Hailsham, when he was Lord Chancellor, only appointed married men as judges in the hope of avoiding this kind of incident. The naivety of such thinking is emphasised by the fact that Lord Dervaird is married with three children.

But where did the “scandal” originate? WF Deedes, writing in The Daily Telegraph (19 Jan) argued that it was all down to the vicious circulation war that is raging in Scotland between The Sun and Daily Record which has “produced a spate of grubby allegations about private misconduct by public figures”. He also had to admit that general prejudice against homosexuals is still rife: “It is partly because a considerable number of people in this country still reject the homosexuals’ claim for social equality that we have this division in our society today.”

He ends by chastising newspapers for taking over where (he thinks) blackmailers left off after the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act: “Always assuming that no breach of the Act was committed in this instance, to whom does most guilt attach: to the judge whose alleged indiscretion led to his downfall, or to the newspaper which took unto itself in fresh guise the task of those who made money out of homosexuals before the Act was passed? I have no difficulty, in the absence of incriminating evidence, in returning my verdict against the newspapers.”

However, the following day the Telegraph was quoting “a friend” of Lord Dervaird speculating that “the police had leaked information about the judge”.

Whatever the source of the revelations, and whatever the truth of the matter, the judge has been hounded from office and homosexuals in general have been pilloried once more. The Guardian (19 Jan) made this plea for tolerance: “it is time we all got used to the boring, everyday fact that there are homosexuals in all walks of life; inevitably and rightly so. They are as good or as bad at their jobs as anybody else … The more they are allowed to live honest lives, the less temptation to clandestine sexual encounters and the less the threat from those who run greedily to the authorities or to the nearest prurient tabloid.”

It took gay people themselves, responding quickly through letters columns, to cut through the cloud of confusion and the unenlightenment of the bewildered Old Boys who run this country: “One judge apparently entered, albeit briefly, a gay disco (whatever next?); another ‘Entertained young homosexuals at a cottage’ — the kind of cottage, I presume, with roses round the door,” wrote Brian Simpson to The Independent (20 Jan). “Why this should upset anyone I cannot imagine. After the recent horrific judgements of Judge Pickles, surely any evidence that judges are human beings is to be welcomed.”

Allan Horsfall wrote (The Guardian 20 Jan): “The surest protection against blackmail that gay judges could adopt is to ‘come out’ … I am certain, however, that this is not what the legal authorities and the Government either want or expect or would accept.”

Finally, we can only look to Judge (“Hang ‘em High”) Pickles for the final word on his profession. He referred to the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane as “an ancient dinosaur who is living in the wrong age”. It seems even nutcases can have flashes of insight from time to time.

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In the wake of their intrusive story that Cher’s daughter is a lesbian, The Sun invited parents of lesbians to tell them their Coming Out stories. They did the same thing with gay men a couple of years ago, and at that time I complained that the resultant stories were all of the I’d-rather-he-were-dead-than-gay variety. True to form the same thing happened with the lesbians: “I tried suicide when my girl said: I’m gay” was the main headline over the first mum’s story. The second mum “kicked her daughter Sarah out of the house” and said: “I could cope easier if she was dead”.

Only two of the mothers seemed to have reacted with somewhat reluctant compassion. The message seems to be: if you’re thinking of coming out to your parents, check whether they read The Sun first. This will give you some idea of the reaction you can expect.

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Since the introduction of the newspaper “code of practice”, there has been a distinct reduction in the amount of vilification being aimed at gay individuals by the press. Gay vicars have been able to sleep more easily in their lonely (or otherwise) beds. At the same time, however, the circulation figures of tabloid newspapers are plummeting, an event which caused The Sunday Times (14 Jan) to ask: “Have The Sun and The News of the World suffered because readers are punishing them for their alleged sins against decent conduct? Or are they suffering because they are now on their best behaviour and all the spicy scandal we so deplore — yet guiltily enjoy — has been banished?” On the other hand, the amount of nasty and ignorant comment directed at gay people in general seems, if anything, to be increasing.

The scandal-mongering may have been toned down, but the strident general gay-bashing continues without let-up. The death, from an Aids- related illness, of actor Ian Charleson gave the homophobic tabloid crew another opportunity to put the boot into the gay community. Tom Utley, a columnist on The Sunday Express asked (14 Jan): “Why is it that I could find only one newspaper which bothered even to hint at how he had contracted the disease —surely the most valuable lesson of his death? The answer, of course, is that we all know damn well how he caught it, without having to be told. Yet aren’t the Government always telling us that heterosexuals are almost as much at risk as the likes of Ian Charleson?”

There was no shortage of people willing to spit on Ian Charleson’s grave, and slander the gay community at the same time. The Sun’s resident imbecile, Fiona McDonald Hull, opted for the standard Murdoch line that Aids is the first condition in medical history to have a sexual orientation of its own. “If (Ian Charleson’s) death has done nothing else,” she bitched (12 Jan), “surely it must make our gay community face up to the fact that Aids IS a homosexual disease. It is not a heterosexual disease. It becomes a heterosexual disease ONLY when gays or drug addicts become either blood donors or switch sides. It is time the homosexuals and drug addicts cleaned up their act. They, and they alone, are responsible for people dying from Aids.”

Equally thoughtless has been the reaction to the planned showing of the schools’ TV film The Two of Us and the lesbian drama Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. However, one can’t help wondering whether the hysterical response to what are, in terms of explicitness, rather innocuous dramas, is more to do with tabloid hatred of the BBC than anything else. Whether it is Dave Allen swearing or Dennis Potter doing anything, the Beeb-bashing has been at its most strident this month. Let aunty tangle with homosexuality, and — oh, my goodness — the newspaper tyrants go into overdrive.

The fuss over The Two of Us was created by the opportunistic secretary of the Professional Association of Teachers, Peter (born-again) Dawson. The Daily Express rose to his bait and to hear them tell it (1 1 Jan) The Two of Us was little more than pornography. They quoted the obsessively homophobic Mr Dawson as saying: “I believe the BBC is behaving in a manner that is corrupt and dangerous.”

Editorialising about the play in the same issue, The Express wrote: “Isn’t it odd that those who think children should be exposed to homosexuality on screen never seem to think a play about promiscuous homosexuals, some developing Aids because of their chosen way of life, would be suitable?… The fact that the BBC could be party to such a deceit is further condemnation of the Corporation’s fall from the high standards and ideals it once embraced.”

The Daily Mail on the other hand, sent a critic, Geoffrey Levy, to actually preview the play (13 Jan). His reaction to it also followed the party line: “This is a film which says to an uncertain boy that it is not unreasonable for him to see what it is like being a homosexual. The strong message should have been to avoid experimentation, lest it overwhelms… A little more condemnation of the dangers of experimentation and a little more emphasis on the loneliness and torment of many homosexuals would have been welcome.”

Joining the attack on Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, The Sunday Mirror (14 Jan) said it had upset the Elim Pentecostal Church, who felt the BBC had produced “a distortion and obscenity” with this “shocking new TV series about lesbian love”. The Rev Eldin Corsie is quoted as saying: “My congregation were made to look like a gang of Bible-thumping morons.” Perhaps someone ought to tell him that it was an accurate portrayal.

Nigella Lawson, however, came to the defence of “Oranges” in The London Evening Standard (10 Jan): “What this is all about is the anti-gay backlash. If it were a question of comparable heterosexual love scenes, the series could be put out quite happily and no one would be batting an eyelid.”

***

Is homosexuality unnatural? A lot of people would like to think so —including Islamic fundamentalists who, according to an article in The Spectator, don’t eat pork because “it has been proven that the pig is the only homosexual animal.” This, according to David C Taylor, “a veterinary surgeon for over 33 years” is “nonsense”. In a letter published in the following (6 Jan) issue he assured us that “pigs behave in a consistently heterosexual manner. Cattle however, including those eaten by Muslims, exhibit distinct homosexual (lesbian) leanings when one of their number is in oestrus, and homosexuality is extremely common amongst dolphins and baboons. Even the occasional gay gorilla is not unknown.”

So, having failed with the ‘unnatural’ argument, our opponents turn to ‘abnormality’ as a means of insult. A letter in The Church Times (I Dec) from Elizabeth Moberly, who titles herself rather grandly, “Director of Psychosexual Education’ at something called “BCM International” in Pennsylvania writes: “In terms of psychological development, a male homosexual is like a boy still looking for his father’s love. The lesbian is like a girl looking for her mother’s love. This need for same-sex is good and valid, but it is not appropriate to fulfil it sexually.” She suggests that homosexuality can be cancelled out with appropriate counselling from a same-sex counsellor.

Fortunately, this familiar tune of received wisdom was not playing to a totally appreciative audience. Arthur Johnson shot back in the following week’s issue: “… here, yet again, we homosexuals are being patronised by someone with not only a clear view of what is ‘normal’, but also, as it appears to us, a mission to inflict this ‘normality’ on those who do not quite conform to it.”

The Rev Graham Blyth of Westcliff-on-Sea took Ms Moberly to task over her recommendation of counselling as a means of becoming ‘normal’: “Counselling is designed to equip people for challenges they will face in the real world, on a day-to-day basis. It does not provide a space to ‘hide’ in, so that both counsellor and client can avoid the uncomfortable issues on their agenda.”

Meanwhile, Rev Malcolm Johnson of St Botolph’s Church in London revealed that Ms Moberly “is not a trained psychiatrist, sociologist or geneticist, nor has she based her findings on any scientific research.” But surely that is the whole point — people who rely on the supernatural don’t need scientific proof of anything, they can claim whatever they like and say it’s The Word of God.

The theme was given a different variation in The Guardian’s ‘Notes and Queries’ section (28 Dec) in which readers ask perplexing questions that other readers endeavour to answer. In reply to “Why is sex rampant in the living world?” Dr Raymond Goodman of Hope Hospital, Manchester wrote (among other things): “There is increasing evidence that genetic and hormonal interactions in the developing foetus play some part in shaping sexual, cognitive and behavioural patterns in the future adult. Not only can many of the male and female differences in cognition and sexuality be explained by these processes, but aspects of variant sexuality, e.g. homosexuality, have been elucidated. Having individuals with such differences enables a much wider plasticity of thought and behaviour which in evolutionary terms cannot but be beneficial.”

Of course, Christian fundamentalists have an easy answer to this: they simply don’t believe in evolution. So, it’s all back to sin. Couldn’t you just shake them till their teeth drop out?

***

The Sunday Express (24 Dec) suggested that Norman Tebbit sees himself as a possible successor to Margaret Thatcher. “In Norman Tebbit’s book, there is only one man fit and ready to carry the blazing torch of true-blue Toryism into the 1990s and beyond. A man not afraid to voice the fears of the ordinary men and women — about violence, Reds under the bed, crusading homosexuals … and the threatened influx of immigrants from Hong Kong.”

A week earlier in the same paper, The Ghoul himself was writing: “It certainly sounds as though the loonies have taken over … in an era of unmatched sexual permissiveness with a spiralling total of children born out of wedlock, homosexual ‘weddings’, the Aids epidemic, the virtual end of any stigma being attached to almost any sexual behaviour however outlandish …”

Tebbit (or Mr Greedy as he’s known to his friends) says he doesn’t intend to stand for the premiership because he couldn’t manage on a Prime Minister’s £80,000 salary. But then, who would believe a word this fork-tongued reptile utters? He might one day make us believe the incredible —that maybe the Thatcher era wasn’t so bad after all.

***

Ian McKellen was writing about being gay for the London Evening Standard (4 Jan). It seems Ian is still feeling a little guilty about waiting until relatively late in life to abandon his personal closet. “Why did it take so long?” he asks. “Well, there were not many good examples to follow — at least not in my line of business. Even in the USA, where there are lesbian and gay organisations in every other profession, not a single famous actor is ‘out’ in Hollywood or on Broadway. It took Aids to tell us about Rock Hudson. The late Liberace still thinks we don’t know.”

We also have to assume that Ian does not move in Sun-reading circles because, he says: “It took me 50 years to pluck up the final bit of courage. I need not have worried. My family, friends and strangers have been totally supportive. I’m still employable, too.”

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=

Gay rights activists have been trying for years to put homosexuality on the political and social agenda and now their efforts are coming to fruition.

More and more institutions are showing a willingness to confront the issues: The Church of England’s report is only the latest manifestation of religion’s long overdue re-examination of the subject; the Labour Party is facing up to its responsibilities (painful though it is for them) while the Tory Party has decided that it will go in the opposite direction to everyone else and try to put the clock back.

Reporting developments within the Labour party, The Sunday Times (11 Feb), revealed that Tory Party chairman Kenneth Baker, “would seek to exploit” Labour’s courageous moves. The familiar we-must-protect-our-children arguments were trotted out and we can expect them to become a familiar refrain over the next two years. Mrs T herself gave it an airing at Prime Minister’s Question Time (“she told MPs it would alarm parents and damage the Government’s bid to combat the killer virus” — The Sun 16 Feb).

Dutifully, The Sun editorialised: “Labour are in favour of reducing the age of consent for homosexuals to 16. Their leaders may see nothing wrong in gay sex for children in schools. Yet what makes them think that the nation’s parents might not object?” The Sun will make every effort in the coming weeks, no doubt, to feed “the nation’s parents” a lot of misinformation and lies in order to ensure those objections materialise.

The Times (13 Feb) trotted out the “homosexual phase” routine in an editorial: “The sexual development of male adolescents goes through several stages sometimes including, particularly in an all-male environment such as a boarding school, a homosexual stage. But few people would regard that as a satisfactory completion of the process.”

There is not one iota of evidence to support this “homosexual phase” theory, but never mind, if it’s in The Times then it must be true.

However, the Murdoch press was not uniformly condemnatory. Today (12 Feb) said: “It is an issue that deserves to be brought out of the closet and looked at by all political parties … It is argued that older, more experienced men may lure 16 to 21-year old youths into homosexual practices they might otherwise avoid. But it must be doubtful whether such youths are in any more need of protection from adults than girls.” Admitting that it is “an excruciating issue” the paper concludes that it cannot be avoided.

* * *

The leaked Church of England report gave “muscular” Christians another opportunity to spew their tiresome hatred on everyone who gets in their way. The Archbishop of Canterbury got a particularly bad hammering from rentagob MP Harry Greenway who called for the primate to “quit, and I bloody well mean it” (Sunday Times II Feb).

Mr Greenway is one of those foolish men who provide much hilarious material to Commons sketch writers with his frequently idiotic and bizarre pronouncements. However, Greenway is, at least, a Christian (convener of the Conservative Christians in Parliament group, no less) which gives him entitlement to speak on the topic. What qualifications The News of the Screws thinks it has to contribute is not so clear. That doesn’t stop it, though, and on 11 February the paper said that the reason its readers have no interest whatsoever in religion is because the Archbishop of Canterbury will not condemn gays out of hand. “No wonder a Church, which preaches the sanctity of family love, while espousing the spread of homosexuality, is in a mess.”

The Sun followed up (17 Feb) with an editorial saying just about the same thing (adding that choirboys would not be safe from “gay revs”). It, too, concluded that churches were deserted because Anglicans aren’t hard enough on homosexuals.

With such immaculate reasoning it follows that as soon as Dr Robert Runcie is replaced by, perhaps, Rev Tony Higton, Sun/NoW readers will be crowding the pews every Sunday, eager to find Jesus.

And cuckoos will call in the churchyard.

* * *

Quite often Labour local authorities are berated by their opponents for “wasting ratepayers’ money” in supporting gay initiatives. Now Newham Council in East London have rather splendidly demonstrated how supporting gay rights can save ratepayers tens of thousands of pounds.

First of all, the council withdrew £200,000 worth of advertising from the local paper The Newham Recorder after the editor wrote a front-page editorial (18 Jan) drawing attention to the “unfortunate” fact that the council had set up an advisory group to “protect the interests of homosexuals at the same time as they reveal the full horror of their budget for the next year”.

According to Newham council’s spokesman, Brian Harris (quoted in UK Press Gazette, 29 Jan) the gay group cost “next to nothing to set up” and so linking it with the Council’s budget deficit was unfair. The journalists on the Recorder are usually paid a bonus which is dependent on such factors as advertising revenue, so the whole staff are going to lose out because their editor thought that gay-bashing was an easy way to score political points.

And now the Council may withdraw a grant of £25,000 from The Mayflower Community Centre because the Bible-bashers who run it refuse to allow a lesbian group and a Muslim group to meet there; the Trust says that such groups contradict Christian principles. Fair enough, but the Mayflower trustees can’t have it all ways, and for some people Newham’s Equal Opportunities Policy is just as important as religion. If they won’t play by the rules, then they can expect to be disqualified from the game.

Let’s hope other much-abused local authorities will follow Newham’s brave lead.

* * *

On the day that “Two of Us” the BBC schools play about young gays was broadcast (2 Feb), The London Evening Standard carried an article about it by Myles Harris. It was one of the silliest things I’ve seen on the topic of homosexuality for a long time. Mr Harris believes that the BBC is playing fast and loose with young minds “Like Scott Fitzgerald’s rich, the media people can be careless with other people’s lives — and their children.”

Harris trots out the old stuff about children being easily influenced into homosexuality (which he is at pains to reassure us never “physically touched” him). He says that in his school days (and still today) children were anxious to conform and therefore “this terrifying sniffing out of ‘queers’ was a deep social reflex, a type of software package in the brain that switched itself on at puberty … Does nature leave this package in our brains or is it written by what ‘modern’ people consider the crude homophobic prejudices of parents and friends? The BBC thinks it is parents and friends. Tempted by the power of its huge TV transmitters it has decided to re-programme our young away from such uncaring and wicked attitudes.”

He gives a resume of the plot and, in the end, finds it “sinister”. “Homosexuality, I should imagine, must be a nightmare for its adherents. If it is a state of mind that can be unconsciously ‘learned’ then the power of this film is that it will set a large number of children on a road that will cause them much unhappiness.”

The article is overloaded with such daft ramblings. Even though the evidence of heterosexual maladjustment is all around him, the complacent Mr Harris still manages to cling to the myth that heterosexuality provides automatic happiness.

Not all hetties are so insecure, though. A few days later a straight Standard reader wrote: “One can’t help thinking it would have been better for (Myles Harris) if he had joined in with the boys who did things in the playground shed. I did, and most of my friends did. Most of us got married, had children and thought no more about it. … Mr Harris’s idea that young people can be led into homosexuality by a TV programme strikes me as completely ridiculous.”

“The young” themselves also reacted rather differently to Mr Harris. The Standard asked a “panel of fifth formers” at a London school to watch the film and give their verdict. “The pupils, boys and girls, said it was not pornographic, nor did it brainwash them, but they did admit that it possibly weighed the scales too heavily in favour of gays… although they recognised this was part of the drama’s attempt to evoke sympathy for the boys’ dilemma.”

***

The Sunday Telegraph (28 Jan) chided Ian McKellen for having been “hysterical” during the Section 28 campaign. None of the dreadful curbs on the arts that were predicted have come about, says “Mandrake” in his column. “Now that Clause 28 has long been law — with scarcely any ill effect which can be attributed to it — the agitation against it looks even more hysterical than it did at the time.”

This totally disregards the issue of self-censorship in the arts world and the consequent reluctance by local authorities to take risks. Clause 28 may not have been invoked in a court of law, but its effects have been nonetheless insidious; and I wonder how much more power it would have had if no one had drawn attention to its iniquity? How many would-be book burners and censors would have been emboldened had no one uttered a word of condemnation? These issues are too complex for The Sunday Telegraph — or perhaps they’re just too inconvenient.

* * *

Yet another right-wing propagandist, Digby Anderson, wrote (Sunday Times 28 Jan): “Let us start by not believing the homosexuals.” He was referring to the oft-repeated claim that one person in ten is homosexual. He says that “pressure groups and noisy individuals who pronounce about (homosexuals)” distort Kinsey’s findings in order to increase sympathy for themselves (“if lots of people do it, it can’t be abnormal and should be socially accepted.”)

No one knows what proportion of the population is gay, not even Digby Anderson; but whether it is ten per cent, four per cent or one per cent, the argument remains the same —there is no justification for persecution. Mr Anderson appeals to his readers to treat all information and statistics from pressure groups with scepticism.

On that point I wouldn’t disagree, I’m a firm believer that statistics are the lowest form of information. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that Mr Anderson himself is a prominent spokesman for right-wing political and religious groups. In the circumstances, is there any reason why we should believe anything uttered by an axe grinding reactionary such as himself?

* * *

One of the saddest newspaper articles I’ve seen for a long time appeared in The Plymouth Evening Herald (7 Feb). It concerned court cases resulting from a police trawl of a local cottage.

Fines totalling £3,350 were imposed on 23 men variously charged with “indecency” offences. Their full names and addresses were published in the paper, which also devoted space to the consequences on the lives of some of the individuals concerned. One young man was arrested three months before he was due to marry, another resigned from his job because he couldn’t face the shame. Some of the men were in their seventies.

I hope the police, the court and the newspaper think they’ve done a good job.

***

Just when you thought John Junor had retired to the Maximum Security Rest Home for the Bewildered, up pops his nasty column once again, this time in The Mail on Sunday.

Whenever other journalists are writing about Junor they do so with a kind of deference that is totally undeserved. Why is his column so admired when it is so utterly predictable? He’s supposed to be the hack’s hack, god help them. The Independent on Sunday sent Lynn Barber to interview the old fool and she came up with a wonderfully telling profile of an unremitting bigot (4 Feb).

She asked, quite properly, why he hates homosexuals so much: “‘Filth, Miss Barber. I regard buggery’ — he paused to savour the word — ‘buggery as the putting of the penis into shit.’ “He claimed that “homosexualism” is “virtually unknown in Scotland.”

The revelation by Lynn Barber that she has gay friends whom she invites to her home for dinner apparently sent the old buffoon into a state of near apoplexy (“JJ goggled at me, completely purple, eyes popping”): “I find that idea most . . . unusual. It does not happen in Auchtermuchty.”

In the end, Junor comes over as one hell of a miserable old bastard. His wife has left him, his daughter slags him off publicly, he lives alone and apparently few people care much about him personally. And yet still Lynn Barber manages to say his column has “appalling fascination”. Rather, I suspect, like inspecting your hanky after you’ve blown your nose.

***

Two cheering pieces have appeared over the past month, the first in The Independent (24 Jan), by Janet Daley, who wrote passionately about her inability to “get inside the heads of people who detest homosexuals”. In a ringing riposte to her fellow hacks’ homophobia she says: “I have honestly tried to understand this aversion (and I mean aversion, since the true homophobe manifests not so much disapproval as revulsion) but have never succeeded in getting so much as a glimmering of comprehension.”

And then in The Daily Telegraph (yes, The Daily Telegraph), Brenda Maddox compared the approach to homosexuality on television and radio programmes to that in the press. She concludes that TV viewers seem far less given to censure than newspaper readers, although they are, in the main, the same people. “The love that once dared not speak its name now proclaims itself in soap operas, chat shows and news programmes … In broadcasting, with certain exceptions, the rage seems not to be there.”

After exploring the topic Ms Maddox ends by saying: “I like the new openness and look forward to the new Channel 4 series (Out on Tuesday). Homosexual behaviour, a phenomenon of uncertain cause and no known cure, is not against the law. Statistically speaking, it is about as common a variation of the human condition as red hair or left-handedness and, at its best, a good deal more entertaining.”