As a child of the Eighties and Nineties, I remember well that homosexuals were fair game in the mainstream media. One columnist in The Star railed against “Wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers, lezzies — the perverts whose moral sin is to so abuse the delightful word ‘gay’ as to render it unfit for human consumption”. After the death of Freddie Mercury, sympathy in The Mail on Sunday was limited. “If you treat as a hero a man who died because of his own sordid sexual perversions,” one writer cautioned, “aren’t you infinitely more likely to persuade some of the gullible young to follow in his example?”
It was sadly inevitable that the AIDS crisis would exacerbate this ancient prejudice. A headline in The Sun declared that “perverts are to blame for the killer plague”. And while a writer for the Express held “those who choose unnatural methods of self-gratification” responsible for the disease, letters published in its pages followed suit. One reader called for the incarceration of homosexuals. “Burning is too good for them,” wrote another. “Bury them in a pit and pour on quicklime.” Someone had been reading his Dante.
I happened to come out in a much less hostile climate. In the early 2000s, we were enjoying a kind of Goldilocks moment, neither too hot nor too cold. We weren’t generally on the receiving end of homophobic slurs, but nor were we patronised by well-meaning progressives. My memory of this time was that no one particularly cared, and I was more than happy with that. Being gay for me has never been an identity, it’s simply a fact, as unremarkable as being blue-eyed or right-handed.
And so it has been troubling to see a resurgence in the last few years of the kind of anti-gay rhetoric that was commonplace in my childhood. Of course, it could be argued that the rise of social media has simply exposed sentiments that were previously only expressed in private. As Ricky Gervais has pointed out, before the digital era “we couldn’t read every toilet wall in the world. And now we can.”
Yet the most virulent homophobia appears to be coming from a new source. Whereas we have always been accustomed to this kind of thing from the far-Right — one recalls Nick Griffin’s remark on Question Time about how he finds the sight of two men kissing “really creepy” — but now the most objectionable anti-gay comments arise in online spheres occupied by gender ideologues, from those who claim to be progressive, Left-wing and “on the right side of history”. The significant difference is that the word “cis” has been added to the homophobe’s lexicon. Some examples:
“Cis gay men are a disease.”
“Cis gay men are truly some of the most grotesque creatures to burden this earth.”
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SubscribeIn a way, I found the old homophobia of the 80s/90s preferable to today’s. At least its proponents were upfront about why they wanted to stamp us out. Today’s homophobia comes wrapped up in ‘be kind’ rhetoric and uses LGB in that infernal construction ‘LGBTQ+etc’ as a Trojan horse to further the aims of, largely heterosexual, trans and ‘queer’ progressives who similarly wish same-sex attracted people ill. They’ve even co-opted the old slur, ‘queer’, which was the last thing gay men like me and uncounted others heard before the ‘queer bashers’ of yore put the boots to us in the 90s and before. I work in a university and have discovered that ‘queer theorist’ academic colleagues, to whom university mangers seem in thrall, feel quite free to proclaim the new homophobia in research seminars, doctoral student presentations etc. There are now not one but two months devoted to ‘celebrating’ the LGBTQ+etc ‘community’ (in fact, no such thing exists) in which the trans and ‘progress pride’ flags, the latter signifying the literal penetration of gay and lesbian people’s rights, lives and bodies by the sinister TQ+ movement, fly alongside that of Ukraine, insolently implying some kind of equivalence. I’m older than Andrew, on the wrong side of 55, but like him find it incredible that gay and lesbian people are having to fight the same battles all over again. I’d thought, after we’d won our equality, that we could go about our lives as full contributory citizens like everyone else and put the period of activism behind us. How strange that we’re now being traduced and abused once more, this time not from a conservative direction, but from the allegedly ‘progressive’ left.
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