We have written previously about how bullying is affecting youth in our schools and society and how we deplore it and how organisation like Ben Cohen’s is fighting to educate and support both those being being bullied and the bullies – HELP STOP BULLYING FOR WHATEVER REASON!

With around 110 singers on the night, come on down to the Grand Opera House and let’s give the London Gay Men’s Chorus a fantastic Belfast welcome!

If you are interested in Quire then they can be reached through their website or facebook/twitter link below

 www.facebook.com/QuireBelfast   www.twitter.com/quirebelfast

Whatever about intellectuals like Hari, the large lads in Red Lion Square were not engaging in dialogue.  Admittedly, neither were some participants in the conference who looked as if they wanted a fight.  The police decided to keep the EDL in the park.  My perception of the EDL is even less benign than it was prior to this encounter.  At the event the warmth of feeling with which Farooq Murad (MCB – Muslim Conference of Britain, General Secretary) spoke of the LGBT community struck me.  Name-checking is the done thing at such gatherings, but this sort of sincerity can’t really be faked.  I have noticed this in other Muslim speakers.  Possibly it is because queers will turn out against the EDL and the rest almost automatically.  Possibly it is because they are decent human beings.  (Mr Murad didn’t actually have to mention LGBT people.)

Leroy Rosenior and Paul Mortimer, Show Racism the Red Card Ambassadors talked about homophobia in the sports – particularly soccer – field.  Paul mentioned that when Justin Fashanu signed up to his team most other players refused to share the communal bath with Justin.  He was not fussed, he wasn’t asking for applause for this – it was at the opening open session.  He said that Justin was physically beautiful, he had a very ‘athletic body’.

An afternoon Workshop was Pushing back hatred: Racism, Islamophobia and Homophobia.  This was held in a serio-comically small room, which took some time to locate, and had very few chairs.  (In hindsight, was it an example of what Thierry Schaffauser complained about regarding Morning Star‘s 31/03/12 conference?  A bit of tokenism?)

We gathered-in chairs and eventually got started.  Salman Farsi Media Officer, East London Mosque Trust was there accompanied by an extremely handsome, slightly nervous-looking, man with chin beard.  I thought at first that they were ‘family’.  And was disappointed to find they were not.  Salman, a very attractive young man, is pretty relaxed about queers men and women.  He knew some of the other speakers, Denis Fernando of One Society Many Cultures (and Rainbow Tower Hamlets) has been to have tea in the mosque.  There wasn’t much to say at this Workshop, apart from the time in getting set up nearly everyone was agreed about the connection between homophobia and Islamophobia.  It might have been useful if we had touched on the ‘racism’ element in the discussion.  The carrying of the rainbow flag in EDL demonstrations was dismissed as significant or even window-dressing.

But Chas Newkey-Burden, a (Gay) pop journalist vastly different from Hari is frantically Islamophobic.  Apparently there are a billion Muslims determined to inflict Sharia Law (that great fiction) on the ‘West’.  Which is why we ought to allow ourselves the right to invade their lands and kill lots of them. That they might attempt to strike back gives us the excuse needed to kill even more of them).  There are more lurking in the media, the specialised press, local papers and radio stations.  This is the intellectual sub-soil out of which EDL and such-like groups spring.

My own contribution to this was to defend the Pope (sort of – Denis, like myself is a ‘collapsed Catholic’ a young man said he was ‘a recovering Catholic’ – but didn’t say what that meant.  He was complaining about the Pope – allegedly – denouncing queers, again.  My problem is that the British media has not been specially scrupulous in regard to Popes.  (John Paul 2 was ‘hailed’ as a great anti-Communist – until it became apparent that he wasn’t fond of capitalism either.)  He rather poignantly said he wished he’d told his (Irish) mother before her death about his sexuality.  A sister had told him that owning up would have had no effect on her love for him.  I made a pitch for LAGNA (the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive), now in Bishopsgate Institute and the Hall-Carpenter Archive, LSE – in relation to material about East End Pride.  Colin Wilson an ‘organiser’ of the Pride noted this.  Phyllis Opoku-Gyimah PCS Head of Equalities was not able to show, her place was taken by a startlingly beautiful young Anglo-African woman.

Returning to the main hall a number of people ‘addressed’ us – so far as I recall only Martin Smith of Love Music Hate Racism mentioned LGBTs.  He could be accused of being from the ‘airy-fairy’ end of the movement, but his speech was eminently sensible.  A European survey claimed that Britain’s ‘fascist problem’ has diminished almost to nothing.  He was quite surprised to read that but then remembered that the BNP (British National Party) – riding high less than a year prior to this conference was in tatters.  A tiny pup called the British Freedom Party has emerged out of it, and some militants have moved over to the EDL (though whether the disgruntled ‘white van men’ will be able to rub along with right wing ideologues is problematical).

Nobody really put the tooth to it, but Islamophobia is quite respectable – and it is a form of racism – white European Muslims are either those handy villains’ ‘asylum seekers’ or Brits who should know better.  It has taken the place of homophobia in Sun, Star and the rest.

poems from the Morning Star

ISBN 978-1-90582-42-1

Edited by John Rety

John Rety (Rety Janos) who chose these poems was a Hungarian Jewish anarchist who survived Auschwitz (1944-45) because as a healthy youth he was sent to a labour battalion.  He escaped from the camp and trekked westwards to what became the British Zone in western Germany.  From that time until Hungary joined the EU he rejoiced in his ‘Stateless Person’ papers.  He recounted this in delightful article in Peace News.  Faced with having to choose a State he decided on the UK.  He had, after all, lived for more than six decades in England.  He ran poetry ‘sessions’ in the Quaker meeting house on Torriano Avenue, north London, (within shouting distance of Holloway and Pentonville prisons).  Morning Star, a Communist journal, – now decidedly non-sectarian – offered Rety another platform.

So what are the poems like?  Mostly excellent, and in all styles from offerings by Johannes Kerkoven his ‘visual [it used to be called 'concrete'] poetry’ includes Scrabble and Out of Work which is sardonically funny.  The oldest is Robert Burns’s Auld Lyne Sang there are a fair number of translations (Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo appear) some are ‘political’, and none the worse for that.  A fair number are by ‘displaced persons’ / political exiles like Rety Janos. One offering, Jennifer Johnson’s Disconnection and Reconnection is about surviving the bombing of London Underground (specifically the Edgware Road station attack. in 2007).

It would be nonsensical to pick out a ‘best’ poem, or even a favourite the stuff is too good for that, and Rety was not in the business of pushing a particular ‘line’.  I (and it is emphatically a persona ‘ting’) was struck by Jeremy Kingston’s three poems.  The Taste of His Hair (p 69) is the only poem about sexual love – and is addressed to another man.  Paying for the Games is a (slightly) tiresome attack on the ‘trimming’ of other budgets to finance the Paralympic and Olympic Games.  How does Jeremy know that Shakespeare and Goethe weren’t sports fanatics?  The latter was a tennis player – I think?  We have, of course, been promised an ‘Olympic legacy’ – the ‘legacy’ will probably be a huge debt.  The Olympics really ought to be permanently centred on Athens, where they started.

Jeremy Kingston’s Being Pius is a wonderful piece of writing.  The sort of concentrated venom and hatred is startling – and very unusual, even ‘out of place’  – in the genteel purlieus of Anglo (even ‘Anglosphere’) poetry.  Here it is in full:

Observe Pope Pius, scraping Jews

like shitballs off his neat white shoes;

the gold for his pince-nez he took

from a girl’s jaw in Ravensbruck;

but now his pale eyes brim with pity

for the art-works in the Eternal City;

daily he offers prayers for them

at a statue of the B. V. M.

carved in white wood from Bethlehem.

Mary’s a Jewess he’ll accept,

he weeps remembering how she wept

to watch her son die on a tree

more slowly than with Zyklon-B.

We are naïve to be surprised

Pope John Paul wished him canonized.

— Deep in the Pit Pope Pius flits.

Now John Paul joins him there and sits

smirking with the hypocrites.

This was published on 24 October 2007.  It a fine example of Anglo self-satisfaction — and self-delusion.  Pius was personally involved in saving scores of thousands of Jewish people.  The Catholic Church in the Nazi Realm was under suspicion.  The encyclical Mitt brennender Sorge published under the name of Pope Pius XI, but written by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII from 1938) based on a draft by Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich did not help matters.  It had been ‘brewing’ for several years and published on March 10, 1937 – but dated March 14.

The Encyclical was written in German, was printed secretly in Germany, and circulated secretly to every Catholic church in the Nazi Realm, and thereby read publicly at every Mass on March 14, 1937, – Passion Sunday.  Some historians seem surprised that the Vatican did such a thing.  The consequences did not help Catholics in Germany, workers and masters who had printed the Encyclical lost their livelihoods.  Hundreds of priests, nuns, and other ‘religious’ were imprisoned and show trials mainly for alleged sexual offences took place.  Catholic groups that survived when Communist organisations had been dissolved were broken up.  Catholic politicians were put in concentration camps.   It’s possible to pick holes in the text – it did not specifically denounce Hitler or his Party by name – but at one point he and it are described as ‘monstrous’.

One looks forward to an Anglo poet wondering in print why (just as an example), the RAF and USAF never bombed Auschwitz.  They turned every German city and nearly every town into dustbowls, including Königsburg (now Kaliningrad) the capital of East Prussia hundreds of miles to the north east of Auschwitz.  They had the Nazi Realm’s air space at their mercy from at the latest mid-1944.  Not one bomb was dropped on a concentration or an extermination camp.  Was the fact that hatred and contempt for Jews was respectable in the US and UK a factor in this matter?

Seán McGouran

Secretary’s Report 1984

(edited)

For Gay people in this region, 1984 was more interesting for general themes, rather that specific incidents, one specific incident must be mentioned, the death in Bristol of Graham Carter a former President of the Association.

One major theme of the year was the desire on the part of NIGRA to unite the Gay movement throughout these islands on the questions of law reform and the rights of Gay women and men to a livelihood.  This culminated in the [Inter-Insular] Conference held in the Carpenter premises in early November.  We feel that this event will be seen in the future as at the very least a useful exercise and possibly a turning point for the movement in these islands.

The Conference led to a misunderstanding with one of our most powerful allies, the NI Public Service Alliance; this will, we hope, be cleared up shortly.

Another ‘theme’ early in the year was the rather large number of ‘stories’ in the local – especially Sunday press – about Gay matters.  Some of these stories were absurd, and on in particular, about the plans of the Gay Christian Fellowship, actually damaging.  These stories, no matter how absurd they were, did actually inform the general public, and isolated Gay women and men, about a number of facilities.  Our various organisations were able to use the letters columns to good effect.  In many ways the early pat of the year was quite fruitful as getting Gay people’s perspectives into print.

The latter part of the year has been less useful.  But the papers have to some extent redeemed themselves by publishing a fair number of letters of relevance to Gay people.  Those on the judgement handed down in Downpatrick Crown Court on a number of young men from Kilkeel, for example.

This leads to another theme of the year — AIDS.  Nobody has yet contacted this condition in Ulster.  We have been able to head-off incipient hysteria by organising a discussion on the matter (organised by Cara-Friend and NIGRA) addressed by doctors from the main Genito-Urinary clinic, and from the Blood Transfusion Service.  While hardly a happy occasion, it indicated that the local medical establishment is going to co-operate with the Gay community and is willing to take advice on ‘community’ matters.  The press locally have not — yet — indulged in horror ‘AIDS’ stories.  Should they do so, we urge people to write, in a personal capacity, as well as in their capacities as officers of their various organisations.  The receipt of even relatively small numbers of letters impresses most newspapers and magazines.  Such letters need not be masterpieces of literature, to convey their point.

1984 was a good and useful year, we suggest that the implications of the drive for unity [among Gay groups] by co-ordinating our responses to the flood of mendacity about AIDS in the Fleet Street press.  The hysteria being whipped up would be comical if it were not for the tragic implications, for Gay men in particular.  The situation being created by the gutter press has bad implications for the employment prospects of Gay women as well as men.  One of our major organisations could be entrusted with the handling of press relations on this matter, with consultation with other groups being by telephone, rather than by letter.

During the year social connections were kept up with groups and individuals in the Republic, in particular by way of the weekend away in Mullingar.  We attended such social, events, as the tenth anniversary commemorations for Cara-Fiend, and for Dublin’s Tel-a-Friend.  The Inter-Insular Conference in November was partly a social event.

There were two other, different but important, events in the course of the year.  In January, we brought two members (Eric Presland and Norman ?) of the Consenting Adults theatre group to Belfast.  It resulted in a very large and uncensorious write-up in the main local daily (the Belfast Telegraph) – and a good audience for the performance.  Terry McFarlane did a magnificent job in turning a collection of books and journals into a functioning and efficient library.

Needless to say, Kincora was with us still.  With a modicum of good luck the Hughes Inquiry will kill the ‘scandal’ for good.

Written on Thursday, February 7th 1985, a ferial day.

Seán McGouran

What I can report on is a beautifully delivered, well-rounded concert that would satisfy the most ‘picky’ audience round the corner in any of the South Bank venues. (Except that St John’s has a lovely acoustic, like the Ulster Hall’s, and unlike the RFH (Royal Festival Hall)). It may be a matter of my hairy lugs playing tricks but the RFH’s acoustic has always sounded cotton-wooly to me. We got the Mendelssohn No. 3 – the Scottish Symphony. My subconscious kept wondering why it wasn’t the Italian. (I’ve been in a state of confusion since the age of six, being a sexagenarian has little to do with the matter).

Next came a Beethoven Romance for fiddle and orchestra (in F) the soloist was Ed Price. He is the Leaders’ ‘sub’, when she is not available. There was a handout complete with mug shot of Master Price. He got an Associated Board Performance Diploma in 2005. It was clearly well deserved. It was a strikingly elegant performance —though Beethoven is not really supposed to do ‘elegant’. I must admit that I have always thought that Beethoven’s Violin Concerto has a fairly high GEF (glazed eye factor), but I’d really like Ed Price and the LGSO, to tackle it at some point. Ed Price is a Silly Servant in the Dept of Works and Pomps (um… Pensions) and is an “”official geek”". Surely the proper technical term is ‘nerd’?

The concert ended with a beautiful performance of the Brahms third symphony. His ‘pastoral’ – it was a most elegant and – genial, is the only word, performance.

Nights Beneath The Nation

Denis Kehoe

Serpent’s Tail

ISBN 9 781846 686795

This is a novel about ‘Daniel Ryan’, who is in his late sixties, written by Denis Kehoe, who is in his early twenties.  The blurb on the cover of this edition quotes a review by David Norris.  He says, among other things, that it is a “a feat of creative memory”.  The ‘memory’ is what disturbs me, rather than the ‘creative’.  Daniel Ryan is from a hick town in south west Ireland.  The people who live there are boring and lead dull straitened lives.  The Spanish Civil war erupts into the narrative at one point.  A “red faced” priest denounces the Spanish Republic and urges support for a man called Franco.  Daniel’s father, who fought in the War of Independence (but appears never to discuss the matter), for no clear reason wants to go and fight against Franco.

Franco (not particularly prominent at the start of the military rebellion) and the Falange (which he gutted of its radical politics) were not nice, but there are problems with this cliché.  The pro-Franco Irish Christian Front was a mass movement, and the Connolly Column (whose personnel included an Irish Christian Brother) was small.  The Spanish Republic might have become the ‘last great cause’ in the Irish Republic relatively recently, but contemporary Christians had a right to be affronted by the behaviour of some of the Republic’s supporters.  They burned down churches, monasteries, and nunneries, and killed priests, nuns and other ‘religious’, in their thousands.  They alienated the peasants who would have supported the Republic if it had simply redistributed the land.

Some other matter does not ring true.  Daniel’s father is a barber by trade, young Daniel helping out on busy days.  The men talk dreary ‘culchie’ talk of the sort one would hear in any market town.

Really?

Was this the only town ‘Éire’ that did not have clashes (especially one would have thought on market-day) between the Blueshirts and the IRA?

Did nobody discuss Fianna Fáil’s policies, like redistribution of the land into thirty acre parcels, the introduction of Búnreacht Éireann (De Valera’s Constitution – ‘bunreacht’ implies ‘fundamental law’)?  Did the ‘Economic War’ between Éire and the UK pass these agricultural producers by?  Was nobody in this (cough) bog-standard Irish town interested in ‘the Missions’, that gigantic enterprise which absorbed the energies of millions of Irish Catholic women and men over generations?

On a mundane level was it only town in the ‘Free State’ not wangling for a sugar factory?

There are other un-truisms.  Már shampla, WW2 was ‘the Emergency’.  A trip to the National Library and a squint at war time newspapers (they were the size of restaurant menus) would demonstrate this to be drivel.  So, too, would a scan of Parliamentary Reports.  Debates, in the Dáil and the Seanad, about – nearly everything – contained references to ‘the war’.  ‘Emergency’ regulations were introduced.  Technically, some were not lifted until 1973.  That would certainly have been made the occasion to belittle ‘Ireland’, if the pretence about the war had not proved more useful.

A fib bruited about over decades is still a fib.

In 1950 Daniel goes to Dublin as a civil servant, (Department unspecified), it too, is full of dreary people.  He joins the Dramatic Society.  It is going to put on Easter Parade.  That seems a bit unlikely.  A recent (1948) musical Easter Parade would have needed singing actors, dancers, dance directors, a choreographer, musicians, a full orchestra, music directors and a conductor.  Possibly another music director would be needed for the chorus.  The composer, Richard Rogers’s contribution is pretty lavish.  This is apart from an over-all producer / director, and money for royalties.

Most amateur drama societies in Ireland were, (and are), quite ambitious.  A number of projects, Belfast’s Lyric Theatre and Circle Theatre (the latter burned to the ground in 1970) arose out of purely amateur endeavours.  The denizens of Donaghmore in deepest culchie-land (Tyrone) built themselves a theatre – because they wanted one.  The Stephens Boyd and Rea, Liam Neeson, and many others, were graduates of this amateur endeavour.  A Civil Service Department DramSoc would probably have had something substantial in mind.

Daniel mentions (p 163) “political plays from England” — in 1950?  English theatre had been plunged into verse drama, stretching the word ‘drama’ a rather long way, for some years by 1950.  It was apolitical (meaning reactionary-to-conservative).  ‘England’ here may stand for the whole of Great Britain.  Wales produced political plays — in Welsh.  Scotland produced some too, mostly written by Paul Vincent Carroll, a native of Dundalk.  John Whiting wrote fairly ‘political’ (prose) plays, he was, and still is, unpersonned.  (The UK’s establishment makes the erstwhile USSR’s look like the rank amateurs they were, at this game).

Daniel joins a ‘real’ AmDram Soc.  It is putting on Lorca’s Blood Wedding.  (Purely as ‘theatre’ is Blood Wedding all that superior to Easter Parade?  I only ask…).  The group is run by ‘Bohemian’ types, one is a Gay man who fought in Spain.  He is famous in Dublin, (‘Ireland’ being put in its culchie, uncultured, box), for being Gay and a former International Brigader.

Both of which seem somewhat unlikely.

Also involved in this, let’s be serious, rather precious venture is Anthony.  He is a perfect example of an ‘Ascendancy’ left-over.  He’s not.  He is from a wealthy Catholic background.  He hates his parents and will repudiate his family.  Just as soon as he gets his (expensive) degree, from Trinity [College, Dublin - TCD].  Why would his backward mere Irish parents allow him to attend TCD?  It wasn’t much ‘cop’ as a tertiary college at that time.  A Fianna Fáil government saved it from closing down.  It gave Trinity a huge grant and sent in the building restorers to save and preserve the fabric of the place.  (The ‘Inter-Party’ Government of the late 1940s engaged in straightforward, (tight-fisted), sectarianism in regard to TCD.)

Anthony’s parents send him to see a psychiatrist because of his homosexuality.  This is deemed to be reactionary and unenlightened.  (In the UK and the US in 1950, he would have been given electric shock ‘treatment’, put in baths of ‘dry ice’, or possibly subjected to lobotomy.   The latter involves flipping the scull-cap off the head, exposing the brain – then flicking a scalpel through the frontal lobes.  These – essentially magical – practices allegedly ‘cured’ the ‘defect’. They often reduced the ‘patient’ to a ‘vegetative’ state – or induced forms of epilepsy.

Were psychiatrists’ particularly prominent in post-WW2 Ireland?  Would not these sad benighted people (his parents) be more inclined to send him to a priest?  Possibly even a priest-psychiatrist.  Though possibly not a Freudian, the Pope (Pius XII)’s denunciation of the ‘pan-sexual’ implications of Freudianism used to be brought forward as evidence of the reactionary nature of Popery.  Then feminists began to say much the same thing…

Daniel becomes starry-eyed about Anthony.  Among other things he can “speak three European languages” whereas Daniel can only speak English and Irish (two European languages, surely?).  Anthony eventually commits suicide in a manner that would satisfy the most demanding drama-queen.  This is made the platform for another attack on Irish mores of the time.  A big fuss is made of the suicide and of the homosexual nature their relationship.  But surely that sort of gross publicity was characteristic of the British press?

When the British stopped sending people to prison for attempting to commit suicide, they took to sneering at Irish attitudes to suicide.  Irish courts and coroners tended to imply that, (to British journalists’ at least) grossly obvious suicides were accidents.  This was due to ingrained stupidity and the (RC) Church’s inculcation of horror at self-murder.  That such verdicts forced insurance firms to shell out money to the deceased’s relatives never struck them.  There was also a tendency, in Ireland, to discretion about such matters.  Ripping open still-throbbing psychological wounds was a Fleet Street speciality.  The police connived at this sort of ‘cover up’.  Daniel, (despite the trauma he has suffered), is put on the boat to America by his loving, but uncomprehending parents.  They (being culchie chumps) had presumably never encountered the names and reputations of Roger Casement or Oscar Wilde.

Daniel rails about Ireland being backward and, in a vague way, not left wing.  In New York City he becomes a wealthy businessman.  Presumably he jettisoned his implied political principles in mid-Atlantic.  (Leftist nice guys don’t make fortunes in New York City).  He returns to Ireland half a century on – and is still annoyed by the place, largely for the same reasons.  The place is still backward.  (The usual expatriate’s reason is that too much has changed — Ireland, and in particular Dublin changed drastically – spectacularly – between 1950 and 2000 – and not necessarily for the better).  He strikes up a relationship with ‘Gerard’  (Denis Kehoe?  Is there a touch of the roman-á-clef about this artistic endeavour?).  Gerard is compiling a history of queer Ireland.  (Or maybe just Dublin.  After all, a queer history of Ballymena or Ballydehob is simply unimaginable).  A lot of the action of the book involves Daniel and Gerard’s – ‘testy’ is the only word – relationship.

This book, you might gather from the above critique is rubbish — it isn’t — it is very well written and is a lively read.  So long as the reader bears in mind that the ‘Ireland’ presented here is as fanciful as the one presented in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man.

Director: Parvez Sharma

USA 2007

I queued for hours for ‘return’ tickets prior to the Sunday 30.03.08 showing of this film.  I am heartily glad I did.  Purely as film A Jihad for Love is not specially outstanding.  We’ve all seen television documentaries just as well photographed.  Heads talked (to camera).  It was their talking to the camera (and what they were talking about) that was crucial.  It was the interface, and tensions, between their Islamic faith and their homosexuality.

Some people handle this, and are forced to handle it, (due to social forces pressing on them), by applied hypocrisy.  They use the ‘inertia principle’: ‘If you don’t ask, I won’t tell’.  There are a number of people who were not prepared to do this, including an effeminate Indian Gay man and an up-front Turkish woman.  She is seen taking the woman with whom she is currently living to see her mother in the provincial town she grew up in.  (The mother is not in the least phased by this, and is very – well – motherly).

The Indian man, a ‘relapsed’ Muslim has cleaned up his act and dresses ‘normally’ and has dumped the slap and jewellery, but has not stopped being sexually active.  Another man, in Pakistan talks with an Imam who simply lays down the law on homosexuality.  It’s the ultimate ‘No, No’.  Quite what the poor soul who happens to be Gay is to do about it is not really dealt with.  There is a vague suggestion that marriage may not quite ‘cure’ him (and others).  But it will occupy his (and their) time to such an extent that they won’t have time for homosexuality.

The main figure in this film is Muhsin Hendricks.  He is a third generation Imam, and a Hafiz (a person who has committed the whole of the Quran to memory).  He is a divorcé, with three loving children, all girls.  He is an out, and campaigning, Gay man.  We hear some wonderful bigoted remarks about him taken from a phone-in radio programme.  One mad bigot ties himself in a knot – suggesting he “should have his anus cut off…”!  Don’t you just love the way the decencies were respected there?  He did say ‘anus’ and nothing as vulgar as ‘arse’.  Muhsin ignores this drivel.  He works for and gets a workshop with the very orthodox Islamic Social Welfare Council of Cape Town.

They are a pretty tough audience, but there is some genuine discourse.  Muhsin himself muses on the same question that exercises the minds of Christians and Jews. Is God / Allah love – does she / he / it forgive all?   Or is Allah / God the vengeful ogre of the religious ‘fundamentalists’, (their self-description).  He visits Mecca (an ‘Umrah’ – it is outside of the ‘Hajj’ period) and decides that Mohamed’s God is in favour of all-embracing love.  This is a very interesting film, especially in some ways, for a person like myself – I am not a ‘believer’ – not a ‘God-botherer’ nor God haunted.

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.