Stonewall’s Ben Summerskill chaired, he was sardonic and quite funny, skeptical and at various points offered Boris and the Green, Jenny Jones, printouts of what they and their parties had and had not said.  The Green admittedly only had one.  It was from a statement from Peter Tatchell to the effect that more and more precise laws mentioning LGBT people were unnecessary.  Jenny Jones rejected this on the grounds that this precision was Party policy, was useful – and more difficult to rescind.  The latter point is very well made.

They each gave a five-minute spiel and then took questions.  Paddick was rather dull.  He was probably very good and conscientious giving evidence in court – but he’s not going to set the electorate alight.  His ‘pitch’ related to his being a Gay man and a policeman for 20 years.  He did make a pleasant jest about how tiresome his being ‘the’ Gay policeman, had been and he did not relish being ‘the’ Gay mayor.  The Jenny Jones seemed slightly scatty. Though, like Paddick and Ken Livingstone, claimed that her programme was closely ‘costed’.  Some matters were interesting, and as she said, of interest to all people in London – air quality, getting traffic off the roads, and improving public transport.  Boris Johnson’s approach was exemplified when he simply said Ken Livingstone’s programme was not ‘costed’ – but brought forward no evidence to back his bluster.

Paddick and the Green were followed by Livingstone, who looks rather worn he wasn’t playing to the gallery – addressing a Gay / LGBT audience he hardly had to.  Ken sponsored the setting up of a London Gay Centre in defiance of the Thatcher Government’s homophobia.  He also went out of his way to help LGBT’s in other ways too, and had the whole of ‘Fleet Street’ at his throat.  The Guardian and the Morning Star cheered him on. But their joint circulation figures would make Rupert Murdoch laugh (or possibly cry).  Ken recounted a tale told by a Conservative MP, (he got it from a Daily Mail… journalist) that he, (Ken) had been buggered, in a Gay club, by six (leather-clad) men in a row!  He, like Paddick and the Green, Jenny Jones, wanted more police on the streets.  The Coalition government is to decimate the police in England and Wales.

Paddick has the problem that his Party is part of the Government.  He was asked in the Q&A session about the LibDems having dumped most of their policies (and principles) on entering Government.  He (rather noticeably) did not defend the LibDems in Parliament.  He said he would stick to what he was offering the public.  In effect, then, he is standing as an independent – using what is left of the LibDem infrastructure (it’s an open secret that party-members are resigning in droves).  I don’t think he won many votes at this gathering, though he is clearly an honourable and decent person.

BoJo’s mojo

Boris Johnson (‘BoJo’) was the most — engaging — speaker.  He is not as scatty as he pretends.  And is not so much a homophobe as, (despite his own relatively exotic origins), disdainful of minorities.  He has managed to insult a fair few of them lately, including the Irish.  He described a £200-a-plate St Patrick’s Day charity banquet as a ‘Provo fund-raiser’ which cost the public £20,000.  The fact that he, as an honoured guest, got fed buckshee did not meant that the others at the hooley got in for nothing.  No doubt he won’t be asked again, even if he wins the mayoral election.  His accusation about the St. Pat’s Day feast is fairly typical of BoJo’s ‘style’.  Throwing the totally unwarranted ‘mud’ of accusation that helpfully sticks to the accused.  (And he’s pretending not to realise that ‘the Provos’ are in Government in Northern Ireland, but he must meet some of them fairly regularly).  A BoJo win is on the cards.  The ‘yuppie’ element has been colonising former working class areas for decades now, and they sign up to vote.  The plebes being offered Hell or Essex (the latter place is where what’s left of London’s industry has gone).

On the other hand the Irish and most Muslim communities also sign up to vote.  After the last General Election an East End newspaper had a strange article complaining that the Bengali community was signed up in the electoral register to the tune of 80+%.  The rest of the (read ‘white’) electorate was only signed up to the tune of about 60%.  I have some experience of East End politics.  The Irish still vote, and some Bengali’s don’t.  Canvassing I encountered a lovely Anglo-Bengali man whose eyes – literally – glazed over when asked who he was voting for (OK then, ‘for whom he was voting…’).

The person who wrote the article was called Kevin D’Arcy – a Fermanagh name.  A century ago D’Arcy would have been the object of suspicion – the Irish (and their co-conspirators, the Jews) were ‘taking over’ (from the Liberals, largely,) by way of a new political Party — Labour.  (In the course of the same General Election people in Fermanagh practically had to fight to vote.)

BoJo’s budget

BoJo got a lot of laughs – not all of them sought-for.  He is not a friend of LGBTs.  Summerskill asked about his withdrawal from Stonewall’s kite mark (for Gay-friendly enterprises).  BoJo threw out the assertion that it was money saving effort on his part – all of £2000.  Summerskill practically whispered (he knows how to use a microphone) that the ‘kite mark’ is free.  BoJo had just told us his budget is £15 billion!  He didn’t really impress the audience.  He claimed – rightly – that he had walked ‘all the way – and it was a long way’ on Pride parades.  A problem is that – for me, at least – this was another irritant.  Last year’s (London – it still likes to think of itself as the UK ‘national’) Pride was dedicated to GLF (Gay Liberation Front) veterans.  He was either blandly unaware of that, or was trying to steal their thunder, for his own purposes.  (There is a very big, politically motivated, LGBT community in London.  A 300-odd turnout at 10.00 am on a Saturday, for a political event is not standard in this blasé burg.  We vote, and are prepared to ‘float’ / shop around – though, of course, many queer people are political party-animals.  Quite often small, even micro-parties.)

The Q&A session wasn’t very ‘Gay’ so to speak.  A man from GLADD (the doctors’ and dentists’ group) asked about health.  He mentioned HIV / AIDS but said that the LGBT community (particularly men, I assume) have many other health problems.  They mostly have to do with other STDs and misuse of alcohol and other drugs.  Livingstone seemed to have done (some) homework on this, nobody else, (including Paddick), had.  Another asked about ‘LGBT arts’ – BoJo boggled at the very notion.  Livingstone said that when he was head of the GLC (Greater London Council – upstart) help had been given to all sorts of ignored minority arts, including LGBT.  He had the LISO (London Irish Symphony Orchestra – drawn from students at the various music schools), in the glass ‘testicle’  – the City Hall – some years ago.

He did not mention it. But it was part of the overall attack on him and the GLC that money was being ‘wasted’ on queers and coons (it could be quite as crude as that.  I’m a volunteer in LAGNA, the Lesbian & Gay Newsmedia Archive, and stuff from well into the 1990s would make one’s hair curl – if one had any hair).  Livingstone may be partly responsible for London becoming a major hub for dance / ballet.  I’m not suggesting they are particularly ‘queer’ – but London dancewise (I wish I hadn’t written that…) is no longer just the Royal Ballet.

BNP ^lite?

A young woman with a decidedly ‘posh’ accent rose and said she was a member of UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party) and that Livingstone had recently visited the Finsbury Mosque.  He had said while there that he would try to make Islam better understood by Londoners (for most of us a laudable policy).  The young UKIP person seemed to think it was self-evidently outrageous – and presumably came to an LGBT meeting on the assumption that we had glib views about Islam and Muslims.  Ken said that he was and would remain an atheist.  But he quoted Mohamed’s benign, humanistic, ‘last sermon’.  She was not impressed and mock-clapped every time Ken spoke for the rest of the meeting.  She did not do herself or UKIP any favours.  If she is representative it deserves the scornful label ‘BNP-lite’.

(‘Finsbury Mosque’ got a bad ‘rap’ for ‘radicalism’ in the early noughties.  It may possibly have been deserved. It’s now a standard politically moderate Mosque.  Mosques are social centres.  The notion that non-religious things happen in them is accurate.  They are the products of Muslim people’s sweat.  It’s their business what goes on in them.  The ‘notorious’ Finsbury Mosque should properly be called ‘the Hornsey mosque’, as there is a rather plebeian one just beside Finsbury Park rail and underground station.  The people who attend Finsbury Mosque appear to be quite middle class.)

It is probably fairly obvious who I am going to vote for (cough – ‘for whom I am going to vote…’) come the election.  But Livingstone may not win.  He jibed at BoJo allegedly avoiding paying taxes, and then himself was caught out avoiding taxes, while BoJo was (apparently) innocent.  Livingstone circulated a manifesto specific to LGBT people.  It is claimed that the Labour Party in London is not really backing him.  Unite the [very wealthy] Union most definitely is backing Ken.  The ‘Labour Party in London’ is as undernourished as are the LibDems.  Milliband (Labour’s ‘leader’) appears to be committed to the current economic orthodoxy — despite the blatantly obvious fact that we are all in the (non-revolutionary) red because the bankers played one smart game too many.

Seán McGouran

PS

The helpfulness of the BFI, and Stonewall’s, largely young (and lovely – as in courteous and physically comely) staff should be noted.

In the 1970s the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement was not even aware that homosexuality was still illegal in Northern Ireland. And Gay Rights was seen by the left in general as very much a marginal issue. In London in the Winter of 1976, I can remember a little group of communally-living-gay radicals being sent to the very end of the large demonstration organized by the TUC against the then government cuts.

Our situation has now totally changed to our complete advantage;  we and the other gay organisations are now in the very best position politically as a community.  Now it is the Left who march at the back of our demonstrations as we now are leading the fight for radical change and civil rights in our society.

Following the dramatic fall of the House of Paisley and their successors the House of Robinson we appear to be at the height of our powers and influence.  Being invited to participate at the very top of government (despite the setback of the experience of CoSO) was an important development but our true significance and potential is yet to come.

NIGRA and the other community organisations have done their best to copper fasten the process of change – to ground it legally and using our not inconsiderable influence to make sure there is no back sliding by any of the public bodies or government organizations.

Though we should be rightly proud of our achievements and the positive force we embody as a community in society,  we should never become complacent,  as some of the publicly funded groups can tend to be.  We do not need to wait and see or assume what Jim-Ulster-Alister’s new homophobic party the TUV will mean for our rights or the political atmosphere and hostility that his party will try to generate in the wider society.

This will happen as sure as day follows night,  just as it did after the rise in surveillance and hate crime that occurred following the wider success of the DUP – the Save Ulster From Sodomy party.  What the DUP victory meant was more violence and hate crime directed towards minorities and more requests from councils and councilors to the police to dramatically increase surveillance of gay people.

We cannot depend on the assurance given by Vince Creelan (an ex-police officer) of the Rainbow Project that the police will be too preoccupied with security matters to increase surveillance of gay people when requested to do so. It is highly unlikely that they will now say ‘no’ where they said ‘yes’ to the same request in 2006. If they do say ‘no’ to surveillance requests from councils that will most certainly not be accepted by the fundamentalists and homophobic politicians of the DUP and the EX-DUP TUV who have a track record in encouraging violent vigilantism if the police refuse to do what they ask of them.

We have all seen the horrible results of that approach which not only meant the loss of two lives through suicide after the Lisburn surveillance operation that was requested by the DUP but it also meant the brutal murder of Ian Flannagan. NIGRA did its very best to avert tragedy by asking the police to issue cautions to the two arrested men (one of whom was just 16 years old). They not only rejected this advice they also refused to direct their surveillance when requested by NIGRA at the violent gang that also roamed the south Belfast park were the two gay men where arrested. The bloody result of not apprehending the gang is now an established fact with the brutal murder of Ian Flanagan – battered to death with a wheel brace for being in the same park as the gang.

In any case that is not the prime political objective of Ulster’s new homophobic party the TUV – collapsing the Peace Process and the institutions that support it, is the prime political objective. We therefore must be prepared for the fall out and the collapse of the institutions, and the pressure that will be put on the police by politicians to do more against us. We must be aware also of the danger that the drive to extremism on the streets will mean to our own public safety. In the weeks and months ahead and especially after the General Election we should expect to be more seriously targeted as we were following the electoral success of the DUP.

At the moment we as a community remain confident and professional in our conviction that our rights cannot be easily gain said or rejected – for the simple reason we represent the very essence of modern life itself and occupy the prime position as the reforming force in Northern Ireland society. This is understandable for very good historical reasons:

By simply living their lives in Germany as a community – qualitatively living and thinking of and for wider German society – the Jewish people were able to articulate the very best liberal reforming traditions of modern Germany as did our movement.  The only way that process could be stopped was by returning society to Hitler’s pre-modern age – by using modern technology and militarism to destroy the unity and diversity of modern society and modern life itself.

We are as the German filmmaker Rosa Von Praumheim put it – an Army of Lovers. And our battles are fought out as we are attacked – so do we defend and so do we heal, with love. That is the lesson that we have taught the wider community. Because our unity is in our diversity and our political will flows from saying very loudly and rightly that that diversity is indeed a virtue in itself.

I know we will win in the end and that our unity and diversity will survive and continue to transform society for the better.  NIGRA and the community organizations will do as much as they can to transmit the clear message to government – that we will not accept any attempt to end our rights – whether that be public funding or the simple right to live and fight as an army of lovers for love.

The following site is a great starting point to find out what is happening in your area, just click the image:

We look forward to receiving reports on events held in which ever part of the country you reside in.

Further to this is an interview he gave on the BBC Spotlight magazine in which he indicated that haemophiliacs developed their condition because of receiving blood.

We are publishing a letter written by Andy Smyth sent to the Belfast Telegraph, Newsletter and Irish News in which he request the the minister produce any person who has been unlucky enough to have developed this condition in the way he describes:-

Dear Sir,

Edwin Poots, Minister of Health made a telling remark in response to the question; ‘What Science is the Minister basing his opposition to gay blood donation on”  (Spotlight, BBC1 21/02/12)

I know people who are haemophiliacs as a result of receiving blood. I have to be very sure and be very strong on this, that what I am doing is in the best interest of the people who are receiving blood, not who is giving blood

As anyone with a basic understanding of science would be able to explain to the Minister,  Haemophilia is a hereditary genetic disorder. Contracting it ‘as a result of receiving blood’ would be a medical impossibility.

If Edwin is unable to grasp the basic principles around what can and cannot be transmitted as a result of blood borne infection, what confidence can the public possibly have in his ability to make a rational, evidence based decision on this issue.  Moreover, what does this tell us about the Science he is basing his decision upon? And why did the Minister go on to state that he is seeking legal advice on what is clearly a medical issue?

If the Minister is able to produce the person ‘he knows’ who has been unlucky enough to defy all medical knowledge on the subject, I will follow in the recent example of a well-known Physicist and vow to eat my boxer-shorts.

Yours etc,

Andy Smyth

Cara-Friend

Tel:             028 90890202

http://www.cara-friend.org.uk/

Jeffrey Edward Anthony DUDGEON. For services to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community in Northern Ireland.

A short, but inspiring sentence which means so much more than just its content!

Without Jeff and those, including the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA), who took HM Government in the United Kingdom to court from 1976, many people in Northern Ireland might still be living in fear of blackmail, losing their jobs, reputation, and even their lives simply because of their sexual orientation.

Jeff’s case Dudgeon v United Kingdom is often cited around the world. More specifically, here in Northern Ireland, it led to the decriminalising of male homosexual acts between men over the age of 21 in private by the Privy Council in 1982.

Recognition

“I feel very warmed by it,” Mr Dudgeon said.

“It an award for me and my achievements but it’s also an award for the community and a recognition of its equal status in society which has been 35 years in the making.”  (BBC News)

Seán McGouran

Agitato con fuoco

The Daily Torygraph sorry, Telegraph (Thurs., 17.04.97) had a ‘think-piece’ by Norman Lebrecht.  It was on the position of women in (what record vendors call) ‘classical’ music.  It isn’t really very secure.  Lebrecht quoted some orchestral musicians’ sexist (and racist) utterances.  They were German-speaking musos, which was… interesting.  He admitted that the managerial end of the ‘classical’ game is a male preserve.  As is – his – critical end.

His musings on opera, however, take the (dog) biscuit.  Here is the paragraph in full:

“Why must classical music be a boy’s own zone?  The reasons are twofold: orientational and orchestral.  Like all arts, music attracts a dis-proportionate influx of minorities, including a sizeable homosexual element.  Homosexual men preponderate in areas of operatic and vocal activity, as organisers and audience, chorus and critics.  Their input is indispensable, both creatively and commercially, but their collective attitude is resistant to women.  Of all the impediments to openness and equality, theirs is the most deeply embedded.”

Another minority in classical (and other musics) is pompous Tory gets.  Lebrecht – inevitably – bashes musicians’ unions.

This article was to be entitled WITHOUT COMMENT – but Lebrecht’s assertion is not merely absurd and childish – it calls into question his adequacy for his post.

Gay men have tended to dominate the operatic stage in the English-speaking world.  But, apart from Britten’s all-male Billy Budd, they all wrote substantial pieces for women.  Britten’s first and last large vocal pieces Our Hunting Fathers and Phædra were written for sopranos (Sophie Wyss and Janet Baker respectively).  The opera Lucretia was tailored to Kathleen Ferrier’s voice… but this has the look of excuse-making accommodation.

Lebrecht’s assertion is so breathtakingly bigoted that it is difficult to believe it was published in a broadsheet that fancies itself as an intellectual power house of the political Right.

If Lebrecht, or his editor, Max (‘Hitler’) Hastings, want a heterosexual Tory to carry the banner for vocal music they’ll have to go back to Elgar.  And he was a plebeian Papist.

Andante febrile

The Style section of the Sunday Times (May 4, 1997) has a piece about Ms Marta Brennan.  She is suing the New York Metropolitan Opera.  She was an assistant stage director.  The ‘Met’ subjected her to a “hostile work environment”.  Her grounds were that the management (in particular her immediate boss David Kneuss) favoured young Gay men.  Brennan (“a 46-year-old heterosexual female”) also claims that other employees had been “similarly discriminated against”.

The ST (aka Rupert’s Sunday Liar) emphasises the Gay male aspect of the case.  But Brennan’s formal complaint suggests that Kneuss “favoured younger homosexual male and younger homosexual female employees” (our emphasis – upstart).  The Times dug up another case of ‘reverse discrimination’, in 1988, (by the ‘Met’).  Dr. Leonard J. Lehmann’s contract was not renewed (by the director, John Dexter, who is English).  Dr. Lehmann claims the latter had a reputation for “pinching little boys’ behinds”.  The relevance of which to his case seems a wee piece strained.  (Where did Dexter find ‘little boys’ in an opera house?  Were they wheeked-in off the streets?)

Allegro con brio (tempo di balletto)

We were always under the impression that opera was the butch element in these great theatres.  Ballet was – allegedly – the queer’s own art-form.  Especially in the eyes of simple-minded, fat-arsed journos.

They found it difficult to square the fact that many of the men in dance were screaming binkies.  And superb athletes.  They (the drunks – sorry… journalists) decided it was all done with wires (and padding).

The real problem most non-ballétomanes had with ballet was the fact that dance in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world has been the domain of powerful women: de Valois / Mrs Connell, Rambert / Ramberg, de Mille, Martha Graham.  Even in Ireland the most substantial figures are Patricia Mulholland and Joan Denise Moriarty.

Strong women and muscular homos with painted faces (and tights!).  Is it any wonder Sexual Norm stuck a cork up his bum and ran?

Scherzando giocoso

The US Southern Baptists’ denunciation of Disney for extending spouse-rights to Gay employees’ long-term partners gives us a piece of Urban Mythology:

Ten-year-old, having heard the news, wakes parent at (or before) the Skraik o’Dawn:

“Hey, Pop, I’m so glad we’re Catholics — we can still go to Disneyland!”

Allegro agitato

In his Monday column in The Times (14.07-97) Must we learn to hate Norman Mailer? Melvyn Bragg mused on the differences between individuals’ personal and artistic attributes.

(Mailer has been exposed as a vicious wife-beater).

Bragg writes:

“Do you think less of Peter Grimes when you know what we do now know about the often vicious sexual exploitation of young children by Benjamin Britten?”

What “vicious sexual exploitation of young children”?

Even ‘biographies’ designed to slag Britten off can’t dig up anyone younger than 17, in whom BB took a sexual interest.  And there is no evidence that he actually had sex with anybody in their teens.  He almost certainly did not have sex with anybody until his mid-twenties.

(Peter Grimes was Britten’s first opera.  Premiered in 1945 it gave many listeners a great post-WWII boost.  And the illusion that England was embarking on a – musical – ‘Golden Age’).

Possibly a (very long) moratorium should be put on journalists (even quite superior ones like Bragg) throwing wild, un-researched allegations about.  The painters Dalí and Matisse are described as “endorsing Fascism” in this short article.  You might as well call the ardently Catholic composer de Falla a Communist.  He endorsed the (entirely bourgeois) Spanish Republic.

This is penny-plain, tuppence-coloured, let’s-not-engage-our-minds journalism.  And a tribute to the Blessed Rupert’s dumbing-down of a great (if overly staid) newspaper.

Gay people, and most of the general public tend to assume that people who have to do with ‘the Arts’ (major and minor) are pro-Gay, or at least are open-minded on matters of sexuality and sexual orientation.

For many years a gliberal consensus was maintained on the matter, with the odd exception, the writer Anthony Burgess, for example.  It might seem that there is a certain solidarity between the Gay community and the Arts establishment, due to the threat of the Knight / Wilshire section of the Local Government Act, but there are a number of peas under the mattress which need examining.  Sir William Rees-Mogg (now a Lord) former editor of The [London] Times, former General Secretary of the Arts Council of Great Britain, (and head of the Maggie Thatcher fan-club), has been appointed the television watch-dog in the new Broadcasting Authority, which is to oversee all radio and especially television.  He is, in effect, going to be a censor, how could Gay people trust such a dubious ally?

Other anti-Gay elements have crawled out of the woodwork, or at least, have been given time and space in the various media.  An example was the Turkish film, The Wall by Yilmaz Güney shown on Channel 4 in May.  The film was about very young prisoners.  The chief hate-figure was a homosexual prison guard.  He was presented as a stoop shouldered, slit-eyed, unshaven “baddie”.  In different circumstances it would have been a laughable characterisation.

There are, of course, few creatures in this world more intolerant of the off-centre than teenage boys.  And no Gay woman or man could accept as tolerable the abuse of power this character engaged in — the forcing of sex on his charges.  But writer / director Güney must have been indulging himself in making the Boys of Dormitory 4 promise each other to kill him, in particular, should a riot ever occur.  In a situation where inmates were beaten until they bled, strip-searching was a common occurrence, and food and money, was routinely stolen by staff.  In some ways it is liberal Turkey’s equivalent of liberal Greece’s Z, (Costas-Gavras) where the fascist assassin’s homosexuality was emphasised so often and so shrilly that a very good, serious, film almost sank under the weight of homophobia.  Channel 4 is currently showing the ‘cult’ series Lost In Space, Dr. Zachary Smith is presumably liberal America’s revenge for the late McCarthyite fink Fay Roy Cohn, who helped terrorise Hollywood.

Again on television, Ken Russell gave us an ABC of British Music in the twentieth century.  The show, a middle-brow bigot’s guide to a century of artistic endeavour, was the usual chauvinist plea for composers like Granville Bantock.  Bantock’s contribution to British music was to build up a great regional orchestra, the City of Birmingham.  His own music becomes annoying after a short time.

Russell chose to snipe at, not Gay composers, but openly Gay composers.  Michael Tippett’s opera The Knot Garden was described as “camp and obscure”.  It may very well be ‘camp and obscure’ but coming from Ken Russell it is a clear case of the snow calling the cocaine white.  He also chose to described Britten’s Death In Venice as “a child molester’s fantasy”, and contrasted it with William Walton’s “healthy heterosexual” Troilus and Cressida.  As it happens, Walton’s beautiful opera was a bit too behind-hand for 1954.  But time will make that aspect of its reception redundant.

Walton, who was quite a lucky and successful composer, does not need this sort of advocacy.  Apart from any other consideration, he and Britten liked and respected each other.  Most of Walton’s later first performances were at Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival.

All of this was in a context of Russell wearing funny Music Hall clothes and putting on a ‘begorrah’ accent for Hamilton Harty and the Ulster Orchestra (playing his Irish Symphony).  There were no similar comic turns for Scottish or Welsh composers.  Scotland was represented by Bantock’s Hebrides Symphony, Wales by Edward German’s Welsh Rhapsody.  Both rather pleasant works, but about as authentic as a double-headed dildo.  Taylor-Coleridge, the Anglo-Sierra Leonian composer was passed over very quickly.  Women composers were patronised as “girls”.  He mentioned Elizabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy.  Due to the BBC’s wonderful sexism Maconchy’s music is unknown.  Lutyens was surely one of the most distinguished English composers.  The term “girls” is obviously a put-down.  It is a noticeable example of the tendencies of the thoroughly modern homophobe — he hates uppity women too.

The new ‘quality’ daily newspaper The Independent has developed a line of semi-detached queer-bashing.  One contributor being William, (Lord) Rees-Mogg, writing as a ‘Catholic layman’.  A response to Mogg’s homophobic ramble by a very distinguished Roman Catholic theologian disputing it in every detail, was printed a week later. It was sandwiched between the advertisements and the sports-results.  Mogg’s had been on the editorial page.

The Independent published (Sat., May 5th 1988) a comprehensively anti-Gay (and, like Russell’s, underhand) piece.  It was Profile: Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer at 50.  The techniques of the gossip-columnist and the “puff” writer were very evident.  Remarks were attributed to “close friends”, “close associates”, and so on.  Nureyev “utterly transformed Western ballet’ and “turned a minor art into something major” — this is ahistorical drivel.

Prior to Nureyev, British male dancers (you will note that “the West’ suddenly shrinks to the dimensions of Britain), “didn’t look like men”, and were not good at their job.  This is simply not true.  There were many excellent male dancers in Britain before Nureyev’s appearance, Michel Somes, David Blair, John Gilpin, were world-famous and very masculine looking.  The implication of this odd phrase is that male dancers were effeminate, and by implication, homosexual.  So far as can be deduced, the three men named were heterosexual, or possibly bi-sexual.  Gay dancers were not especially ‘fem’ looking (not, by the bye, that we are suggesting that there is anything wrong with being a ‘fem’ gay man).  Kerrison Cooke, who did us all the favour of appearing not over-dressed in gay male publications in the very early 1970s, is a case in point.

The whole point of this Profile comes about four fifths of the way through.  Nureyev is described as a “…flamboyant (and undeclared homosexual) Don Juan”.  This is a very confused phrase and confusing concept.  The man’s alleged sexual orientation has little to do with the subject of ‘…the dancer at 50′.  No reason is given for mentioning it, nor is any evidence advanced to back the assertion.  There is no indication that the subject sanctioned his alleged homosexuality being made known.

The point of this exercise is to buttress the image of gay men (and by implication, lesbians) as odd, engaged in artistic pursuits (but trivial and minor ones, like dancing, hair dressing, interior decoration — you know the rest).  We are isolated by this carefully fostered image.  But are not allowed to be private persons.  Distinguished people, like Nureyev, are discussed as if they were not allowed to be private persons.  Ordinary Joes who are victims of police provocateurs, like the twelve recently in court in Craigavon, are humiliated by having their full names and addresses, and their age and occupation all over their local press and the provincial press.

The point of the foregoing is not merely to give readers a guided tour around the nastier aspects of the British media but to ask that we, as individuals, and in our movement, be discerning about individuals and about social forces.  We in Ulster have, in an odd sort of way been lucky, in that our opponents have generally speaking, attacked us in a non-salacious way.  This was certainly true of Paisley and the mildly-absurdly named Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign.  The Irish News, which serves the Catholic community rarely reports minor Gay “scandals” like that in Craigavon, it will not take Cara-Friend’s advertisement.  But recently it carried a half-page interview with Ian McKellan, which was extremely positive about his coming out and about his part in the fight against ‘Knight / Wilshire’ and his commitment to helping the AIDS Helplines.

Contrast this with our false friends of the Sunday World, with their ‘exposing’ of gay men and gay male ‘scandals’ in practically every edition.  And the pompous Belfast Telegraph, a Thomson organisation paper, which takes Cara-Friend’s money, for advertisements, but has no compunction about doing us down on as many occasions as it can manage, in its genteel ‘Malone Road’ manner.

Even of the two sponsors of ‘the Section’ [Section 28], one, Dame Jill Knight is a heartless bigot of decades’ standing, whose attitude to other minorities, or even to the further advancement of women, leaves a lot to be desired.  David Wilshire appears to be an easily-led parliamentary ‘new-start’ who does not realise that he is allowing the genie of bigotry (and fear of the law) out of the legal bottle.

***

Out-take GS Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1989

Cuttings File

The Independent‘s magazine did a hatchet job on Jim Davidson.  They could not have picked a nicer person you might think.  He deals in racial, sexual and social stereotypes, freely using words like “nigger” in his act.

Aspects of this article are worth examining critically.  Davidson appears to be a quite complex person behind his persona.  He says “…I went to the opera… fucking ‘orrible it was.  Tales of Hoffmann.  Lasts forever.  I hated it.  I’m getting into opera a little bit now.  And ballet.  I went to see Swan Lake in Bath and I had hysterics.  You could hear their feet.  The two blokes came on with their lunches down their trousers.  The big one, the swan, had a great big lunch down his trousers.  I couldn’t believe it.  The bigger the star, the bigger the lunch box.”

The blokes in Swan Lake are not supposed to be swans, but the gist of these remarks, which are probably meant to prove how vulgar he is and how superior readers of The Independent are, appears to be pretty on the ball.  Tales of Hoffmann is appallingly dull.  It gives credibility to the “bleeding chunks” policy of firing off the interesting bits of operas on record or concert hall platforms and leaving the padding.  So far as dancers and lunch boxes are concerned, Davidson, and the rest of us, are products of a culture hypocritical to the point of psychosis about matters sexual and therefore anatomical — we are alienated from our Important Bits.  Dancers’ apparent unconcern embarrasses most men, making a joke about it is quite a good way of defusing embarrassment.

The writer of this piece chose to follow this up with the following paragraph: “It would be interesting to see what members of the Royal Ballet would make of Davidson’s act, punctuated as it is with direct-to-audience shouts like “Any poofs in?”".  Who is pushing sexual and social stereotypes here?

On the same day was a Profile of Yassar Arafat.  In the course of his, it was claimed that Israeli Intelligence had dropped “dark hints” about Arafat’s homosexuality.

Why “dark hints”?

If Arafat is Gay it makes little difference to his politics – it may have humanised his politics – he appears to be serious about dropping the exterminatory nonsense of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) refusing to countenance the existence of Israel.  Like less eminent people it is Arafat’s attitude to his own homosexuality – assuming the “dark hints” have any validity – is what matters.

If he ever succeeds in establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel it is doubtful of it will be put down to Gay insight and intuition.

GALHA (the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association) hosted a talk in Conway Hall (Friday, 13March 2010). Squatting in Brixton: The Brixton Gay Community of the 1970s, was given by Dr. Matt Cook. He is Senior Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, University of London. GALHA’s print / hand-out mentions the South London GLF (Gay Liberation Front). And the Brixton Faeries (a street-theatre group a member of which was Bette Bourne. Bette Bourne was currently playing Quentin Crisp in Resident Alien. A further element was Gay Left – a magazine with which NIGRA’S Gay Star had the odd passage of arms.

I managed to get to the meeting as Matt Cook ended his talk. One gathered from the questions that he had been more concerned with the squatting movement in south London, especially Brixton, than specifically with the Gay element in it. He appears not to have gone into GLF in detail and said virtually nothing about the Faeries or about the magazine. Gay Left inspired other magazines. From the vigorously non-deferential Gay Noise to the commercially viable Capital Gay. (Which was very friendly to NIGRA, C-F, and the rest.). Gay Noise was my inspiration. One Thursday night in 1981 I was told I was Editor of NIGRA’s official publication. I am not sure that the more respectable elements enjoyed all they read in Gay Star.

One veteran of Brixton GLF (as it in effect was) noted that the consumption of ganga was not mentioned. He thought that describing the organising group (GALHA) by its initials was a step back to the 1970s or even ’60s. It became clear he was not familiar with the meaning of the GALHA initials. (Consuming ganga is notoriously bad for the short-term memory). And Conway Hall is not a place where queers have ever needed to backward about coming forward.

After a few more questions and announcements of meetings germane to the subject in hand, we got down to socialising and drinking the generous quantity of vino available. (We acquitted ourselves excellently well, there was a half-bottle left at the end). It was dished out with generous abandon by a very fetching lanky young man. He was very friendly to us oldsters. Apart from him and some other interested young people (and a few merely middle-aged) the average participant was of the Freedom Pass generation.

I was surprised at how few people I recognised. We’ve all had about thirty five years of living since the halcyon days of upfront Gayness, ganga and general gorgeousness. (It struck me that one was probably a quite attractive twentysomething – pity I didn’t realise it at the time.). Joseph Healy was there. Many will remember him as an evangelist (in the 1980s in Ireland) for the poetry of Gay women and men. He’s now a Green Party member and will contest Vauxhall in the next General Election, against blood sports fan Kate Hoey. (The Gay community in Northern Ireland owes Ms Hoey considerable thanks for her efforts on our behalf in 1994. We had been left out of the further extension of legal rights for Gay people. She ‘fixed it’ with an amendment to the Criminal Law and Justice Bill.)

Another person I recognised was Ian Townson of Lancaster GLF, and now a resident of south London. There was something of a Lancaster / Brixton axis in the 1970s. It had to do with personnel. And with the fact that the two groups were among the only surviving GLF groups. Lancaster helped produce Gay Left and produced some magazines independently in the seventies.

There is one surviving GLF. In Belfast. The central group in NIGRA (the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association) was the Gay Liberation Society. ‘Gay Lib’ was in origin a Society of QUB’s Student Union. It launched itself into the general community in the Autumn of 1972. The ‘Thursday night meetings’ are the longest-running and probably last manifestation of the state of mind which was GLF. And that is what it was – ‘programmes’ and ‘manifestos’ were decidedly secondary to the matter.

We will try to get our hands on reports from the meetings and other events being canvassed at this enjoyable and enlightening event.

I don’t really see a direct connection between Brixton / South London GLF and GALHA, as such, but the latter organised the event. So here’s its address:

Gay & Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA for short)

PO Box 130

London

W5 1DQ

secretary@galha.org

www.galha.org

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