Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Eek! Gay people! Ooh!

For those of you in a comfortable metropolitan cosmopolitan metrosexual tolerant nice kind of place in the fluffy clouds where people are nice to other people and being gay isn't seen as being the mark of Satan himself, can I just remind you of the British press.

I mean, you may well live in the kind of urban or suburban community where gay people, far from being reviled and driven into shameful obscurity, are quite openly accepted as being equal human beings, despite not being in the majority. Who knows. Where you live may even be creeping into the latter part of the 20th century, where homosexuality is legal, gayness is understood as being something quite normal and people are allowed to be open about their proclivities. But one thing's for sure: the British press don't live there.

They live in a world that is forever the 1950s, where it's always winter and people are always happy, despite their families having been wiped out in the war, despite their houses having been turned into rubble, despite rationing and being half-starving, because there aren't any black or Asian people around, men are allowed to beat and rape their wives and, for one thing, gay people certainly aren't allowed to be open about it, for fear of having the shit beaten out of them.

Ally Ross of the Sun has the ability to be funny and clever. He is neither in this piece of sub-Garry-Bushell shit where he slags off John Barrowman - not for being shit, but for being gay:

There are side-splitters from the moment Barrowman — “The man who can do everything”, except impersonate a heterosexual — opens the show singing I’m So Excited by The Pointer Sisters.

Hoho, Ally. Top skills there, pal. Keep going though. Let's see if we can really find something funny in there:

Pelvis thrusting, capped teeth a-rattling, he rocks it like Val Doonican, in an iron lung, and I’d urge anyone who missed it to watch the routine on The BBC’s iPlayer. You’ll witness something “special”.

Do you mean 'special needs'? Bonus points for a disability jibe on top of a gay sneer, though, if you do. I mean, that's really quite excellently done. And so hilariously great, as well.

The [show] they eventually settled for was a camp twist on Jimmy Savile’s old format. It’s Hom’ll Fix It. “The show that makes your performance dreams come true.” Except they’re not your dreams and they don’t come true.

Oh Ally! Stop! That's far too clever for me! Instead of Jim'll Fix It, it's, heh, and this is great, Hom'll Fix It. Haha! Do you see? Do you see? Isn't it funny though? Isn't it? Eh? Isn't it? See, it's funny because he's gay and so therefore he's a Homo! Hoho! Eh! Eh!

The cause, however, was definitely John Barrowman. A man who, for box-ticking reasons, I assume, is allowed to run amok at the Barrowman Broadcasting Corporation.

And there's the nastiness behind the smile on Ally Ross's pigshit-ugly photo byline. Barrowman must have got his job, not because people like him but simply because he's gay. Because this is the BBC and that's what they do - they ignore their entire viewership to give a job to someone who's not good enough but who is gay. According to Ross. Mind you I wonder if the same box-ticking is at work at the Sun? Maybe Ross ticks the one marked 'unfunny cunt'...? Who knows.

This is the same Sun, of course, who unhilariously called Derren Brown a 'mind bender' and couldn't help chuckling away with sub-playground insults. It's as if they haven't even grown up and can't be bothered to. Which I suppose is fine unless you're a national newspaper. Which they kind of are.

Not that it's just the Sun, though. The Mail is even more vitriolic in is hatred of otherness, especially gayness, and roars against the very idea that children might be told that it exists - for fear that they might experiment and become teh evil gayz themselves.

What the Mail would like, I think, is a return to the cosy world of Section 28, where teachers were banned from 'normalising' gayness. Not that it killed off homosexuality, mind, which somehow still managed to exist despite children not having been told about it - why, it's almost as if people might be naturally gay and not conditioned into being so by evil sex education... but no, surely not - but that establishes the good/bad dynamic to make sure the 'normal' people are straight and the 'abnormal' people are gay. They wheel in an idiot, who says:

Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, said that 'pressing the virtues of homosexuality' could lead to more experimentation, which could be 'harmful' to children.
He said: 'What we don't want to see is vulnerable young people being exploited by outside groups which want to normalise homosexuality.

It's a classic example where a quote has been found to say a certain thing. Of all the people they could have quoted - all the Christians they could have quoted, for that matter - they find someone who's dead-set against 11-year-olds being told something that in all probability they're pretty much aware of already: gayness happens.

Is it really something to be afraid of? Are our newspapers forever doomed to be stuck in that "see no evil" void of consciousness? Must we forever pretend these things don't happen, or sneer at people who are openly gay and claim that the only reason they got their jobs was for 'box-ticking' reasons? Well, if we're in the press we must. But the rest of the world is thankfully a little different. This isn't the village, and there isn't only the one gay in it. It's about time newspapers fucking well grew up and accepted it.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related posts:

1. It’s because they work with sick people
2. Mail: People who retouch photos are bastards
3. Mail: People who complain about homophobia are Nazis