Right, before I get onto the main rant I need to hock up a warm up rant about how Nick Griffin is an immature, bigoted, vapid cockwomble and anyone who has ever even considered voting for his band of knuckle dragging, neo Nazi, scumbags deserves to have white hot needles pushed through their eyes. Fair enough, you’re probably thinking, I already knew that Griffin was an immature, bigoted, vapid cockwomble. What has he done now?
What he has done is tweet the address of the couple who just won their case after a court decided they were unlawfully turned away from and B&B because they were gay. The High Priest of all Fuckwits then told the couple to expect legions of his grunting supporters to pay them a visit and tell them, somewhat bizarrely, ‘an English couple’s home is their castle.’
Apparently Lord Cuntbucket thinks this is acceptable behaviour. Intimidating someone because they had the audacity to be right in the eyes of the law is not big and clever you utter bellend. Not only have this couple gone through the stress and inconvenience of the court case but now they’re potentially going to be hounded by pond scum. Fortunately Griffin has made their address public so I can send them some homemade jam to keep their spirits up. I’m sure the police officers who now have to keep an eye on the house would appreciate some as well. Wasting police time as well Nick. Tut tut.
I sometimes think someone created Griffin just for me. It’s so easy to argue against his ridiculous party when he’s in charge of it. There is very little excuse for most of the things he does (including breathe) and this is a particularly shitty example of a coward who is being ignored (because he’s wrong) so he gets all nasty and playground bully-esque and just makes himself look like a snivelling childish waste of oxygen. Fuck Nick Griffin. Fuck him with a crowbar until his spleen explodes.
But what I really wanted to rant about is what I heard on the Jeremy Vine show concerning this story. My Mum’s lived here longer than I have so she gets first dibs on the radio, although she is fully aware that they often pick people to go on Jezza’s show on based solely on how much they will annoy me. She knew this, she could have switched over to Lauren Laverne on 6, she didn’t and this is the result.
The guest they dug up from some unknown cavern (supposedly Vanity Fair magazine where she is the contributing editor) was Victoria Mather I’m not completely sure what kind of magazine Vanity Fair is so I’m not going to comment on it, but I will comment on one particular sentence she said which demonstrated perfectly to me that she is at least semi-detached from reality, or at least any reality that I’ve ever had any dealings with. This sentence was;
‘In contemporary life it’s cool to gay but it’s not cool to be Christian.’
I’m assuming that you’ll want to read that several times to make absolutely sure you got it right so take your time.
Yep, this woman thinks it is ‘cool’ to be gay. There’s so much wrong with that statement I’m not entirely sure where to start, but I’ll give it a go. The word ‘cool’ carries connotations of being both a conscious choice and temporary. Being gay isn’t a trend. You don’t stop being gay when some other sexuality comes into style. I won’t even go into the nasty little notion this woman hinted at that there is an element of posturing to being gay, that people do it because it’s the thing to do at the moment.
Actually fuck it I will. Does anyone really genuinely think that people are so shallow that they will pick their partner on the basis of which gender it is currently fashionable to date? Besides I’d put money on it actually being far more common for the opposite to take place. People who fancy others of the same sex will likely pretend they don’t. These days, thankfully, stage relationships and marriages to hide a person’s sexual orientation are pretty rare in the UK but it’s still at work on a more subtle level. If you have a partner of the same sex chances are, rather than lie, you just won’t mention them or use gender neutral terms particularly with people you don’t know. If being gay was the next big thing there wouldn’t be the fear of rejection sitting in your stomach every time you reach that first point in a conversation with someone when you have to reveal the gender of your partner.
If being gay was cool you wouldn’t be accused of ‘waving it in people’s faces’ just by acknowledging that your partner exists. You wouldn’t think twice about holding hands in public. You wouldn’t feel just a little bit nervous when you leave a gay bar late at night.
But, and I wish dearly this wasn’t so, there is a tiny grain of truth embedded in Mather’s bigotry. There are prevailing narratives surrounding queer people in popular culture at the moment and this might be what she was getting at (although quite what that has to do with a couple being turned away from a B&B is beyond me).
Let’s start with the trope of the young, urban gay man with a lot of disposable income who is well dressed, quick witted and faaaaaabulous, darling. Some gay men are like that, some aren’t, and the ones that are (unless they stay constantly in Brighton, Vauxhall and Manchester’s Canal Street, which I will be coming back to later) will probably get a fair amount of abuse for being so visible. This is probably the man she had in mind when she uttered that stupid statement. I have an idea that Vanity Fair is connected in some way to fashion and I’m also given to understand there’s quite a lot of camp gay men in that industry. So, at the very best Mather is generalising her experience to the whole world. That’s naughty and every fucker else that does it gets rightly told of for it.
Let’s move on to the other narratives, specifically the ones that concern women (sorry lads, if you don’t act like a character out of Queer as Folk your visibility in popular culture is pretty low). The ‘cool’ one Mather was probably thinking of is young women who are openly bisexual. There’s a pretty disingenuous theory currently being grumbled around that these women do this to attract men. This is because porn has taught a generation that lesbianism only exists to turn men on. Think I’m stretching that a bit? Go look up some generic, badly made porn. You won’t get far without some HotGirl4GirlAction or whatever they tag it as these days. So, naturally, a young women who finds herself attracted to women as well as men or who is exploring her sexuality is faking it. Because what’s the point of women having sex if men get no pleasure from it? Oh, and male bisexuality appears to not exist.
Beyond that you have the tried and tested lesbian stereotype. You know the one. It involves short hair and dungarees. A gay woman can’t win. If she wants to rock the DMs she is told she’s feeding into this stereotype and should stop it as well as getting so comprehensively mocked no one in their right mind could consider that image ‘cool’. If she doesn’t she’s a ‘lipstick’ lesbian and this renders her, like the non-camp gay man, invisible. It’s hard to be cool if you’re not even acknowledged.
I’m not saying the LGBT community is immune from this petty pigeonholing, because it certainly isn’t. They appear to have bought wholesale into the myth that the only group worth catering for is the affluent city dwelling gay men. The advertising on Canal Street is pretty squarely focussed on this demographic. This is a situation hampered by the one remaining lesbian bar being run by the most arrogant, self-aggrandising tosspots this side of the X Factor.
So, basically, not being straight is still pretty hard Victoria, and saying pointless tripe like the above does no good. Also, when was the last time being ‘cool’ got you a room in a B&B? Oh, that’s right, you work for a magazine. You probably really think that’s how the world works. Maybe you’re not a bigoted heterosexual threatened by the fact that loving someone of the same sex is no longer a mental illness. Maybe you’re just deluded. Either way I’m not taking a word of what I said back.
That goes for you too Griffin.
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