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By Jack Nichols
Friday's New York Times headlined the story "About-Face for British Daily That Scourged Gay Laborites." Sunday's slant in the Dallas Morning News touted: "Revelations about gays in (Blair) Cabinet don't faze most Britons --Tabloids' tactics of 'outing' Blair's ministers backfire, polls indicate"
"Most people," generalized the Telegraph, "still feel an instinctive revulsion towards the idea of homosexuality ... This deep suspicion is not unreasonable. One of the most powerful human urges is to love another person permanently and to have children. Homosexuals cannot do the latter and this is the cause of great unhappiness to very many of them." Lord Tebbit, former chairman of the Conservative Party during the Thatcher era—a politician remembered for having told the unemployed to "get on yer bike," pontificated that gay men and lesbians should never hold high office. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, he wrote: "However, in a world where Freemasons are being asked to identify themselves as such in order that the public may judge if they are improperly doing one another favours, surely it is important that homosexuals in a position to do each other favours should similarly be outed." In public rebuke to such Victorian moralizing, however, Lord Tebbit, The Daily Telegraph and The Sun have reportedly been trounced for their anti-gay stances. It appears, according to polls, that the British people—by a margin of 56% who say that homosexuality is morally acceptable-- are hardly focused on politicians as homosexuals and regard the matter as a private one and, as in the U.S. where sex-obsessed conservatives seek the impeachment of the American President, citizens are concerned more about the jobs their representatives are doing than about their sex lives. As reported in Friday's postings in GayToday, Matthew Parris an openly gay journalist who was a formerly-closeted politician himself, had blithely outed a Blair cabinet member, Trade Minister Peter B. Mandelson, on a popular BBC program, Newsnight.
Matthew Parris maintains that the outing he performed was neither premeditated nor malicious, and that he had acted on the belief that "openness" helps rather than hinders the nation's political life. Since the end of last week, however, Parris, an employee of both London's Times and of The Sun, has been fired from The Sun which has apparently repented its homophobic references to a fifth of those running the Blair government. Parris retains his job at the Times, however. The Sun, in an extraordinary about-face, now seems to regret having sensationalized Blair's cabinet ministers and says that it will no longer reveal the sexual orientations of government officials except in instances where there is an "overwhelming public interest." Only two weeks previously The Sun had attempted—with its lurid front-page headlines-- to trigger public fears of "a gay Mafia of politicians, lawyers, palace courtiers, TV bigwigs or even police officers". The tabloid had called on the Prime Minister to "Tell Us the Truth, Tony!" Michael Jacobs, general secretary of the Fabian Society, a research institution, said: "The polls show that people think homosexuality in public figures is not an issue, that it's irrelevant, with younger people much more tolerant than older people…We think that's very heartening." Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who now lives in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, and who owns The News of the World and The Sun, has long allowed his editors to stir up anti-gay hysteria in both Britain and America. Murdoch also owns The New York Post. Of Murdoch's homophobic editors Mr. Jacobs was quoted as saying: "What they are trying to do is deeply sinister…They are claiming there are conspiracies and hidden cabals. That's how the Nazis got started. The general reaction of the public is to reject that venal journalism." |
