TiffanyScottMaddox

16th October 2009

Post with 1 note

“Why there is nothing natural about homophobia”.

Well well well, today has been a victorious day for the liberal twitter user. Just in case you missed the shit storm that happened earlier, I’ll fill you in.
Basically a Daily Mail journalist called Jan Moir wrote a bile ridden column which featured her musings thoughts erm… belches on the death of ex boyzone singer and general 90s heartthrob Stephen Gately. Now generally I don’t touch the Mail with a bargepole because of it’s vile lazy sensationalist ‘journalism’, but even I was intrigued to see the Daily Mail in the trending topics and simply had to investigate. What I found was so obviously yet another piece of right wing twaddle not worth the space it’s taking up on the Internet. In the piece titled ‘Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death’ she questions the official coroner’s report insisting;

“Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again. Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.”

Which to be honest is just the beginning of her laborious homophobic tirade, the rest of which I won’t bother going into. Suffice to say the undertone is wildly bigoted.
I’ll break it down for you into her three main points to save you the bother of going and reading that filth.

1) Being gay means you’ll do drugs and it will probably kill you
2  Being gay means you’re probably promiscuous
3) Being gay means your marriage/civil partnership will be fraught with problems.

So, I’m afraid I’m going to have to speak for the people who aren’t able to have a voice and clear a few myths up for Jan.

There are many misconceptions and prejudices that surround gay culture and lifestyle, one of which is the belief that there are drugs in abundance. That young wide eyed boys and girls enter gay clubs at a tender age only to find their heads swiped back like pez dispensers and fistfuls of ecstasy shoved down their throats. I can’t speak on behalf of everyone but I have gay friends, I have straight friends, some do drugs, some don’t. What the fuck that has to do with their sexuality or life expectancy… I can’t tell you, because it just doesn’t.

Homosexuality is somehow connected to sexual deviance in the minds of the bigots. That for some reason being attracted to your own sex is perverse. The assumption is, if you’re a gay man you’re attracted to every single man in the world including fat sweaty homophobes in pub toilets and if you’re a lesbian then your friends can’t change infront of you incase…y’no…you try and feel them up or something. Jan Moir expresses this point perfectly saying;

“Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta … was not what was on the cards … What happened afterwards is anyone’s guess.”

Well, it kind of is disrespectful to assume that they had a roaring threesome. The ‘young Bulgarian man’ in question was a friend of the couple. My mother who is single stays with friends who are married all the time, for some reason though no one accuses her of anything untoward. I wonder why…oh…because they’re straight couples. Big difference. I forgot straight married couples love and respect each other, whereas, according to Moir, gay couples are sexual predators looking for young Bulgarian men to take home and fuck before selfishly dying on the sofa.

Which leads me to my final point. Gay marriage. Why the fuck are we still debating this? What is so terrible about two people being in love and deciding to spend their lives together? Jan of course has an opinion;

“”Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships… Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages”

… and I have my own.

They are.

I dedicate this blog to Michael Causer, Lauren Harries, Gerry Edwards…and well…every single person in the LGBT community that has had to deal with bigotry and closed mindedness in their lives, and to those who continue to do so.