Out Out

A couple of days ago, Philip Schofield - UK TV personality, presenter, and generally quite nice man - came out as gay on This Morning.

Long-time readers will already know that I'm in support of people living their lives and am very much against homophobia, so more power to the man.

Not much for me to add to that. What I'd really like to address is how people reacted to this particular bit of news.

There's several brackets of these responses, so I am going to address them in broad groups, without calling out anyone specifically. Understand that - if you take personal offence to me dissecting your response here? I probably still respect you, but you need to think about why your responses are what they are.

I Knew Already, It Was Obvious

You almost certainly didn't unless the man spoke to you or you had any actual direct evidence. What you had was a presumption based on several stereotypical behaviours, stereotypes which are harmful to continue to engage in, simply for fact that telling people that having a certain kind of personality or temperament is indicative of their sexuality is bullshit.

What WAS your hint? Was it the fact that he's pleasant? Polite? Well-spoken, well-groomed, respectful? Was it the fact that he doesn't treat women poorly? Was it the fact that he doesn't tend to make sexist or phobic jokes?

These are things you should do as a matter of course. They don't mean a damn thing in terms of who you are attracted to, sexually, romantically or otherwise. Telling men that they are perceived as homosexual if they're just plain nice is telling.

Question your assumptions.

It Doesn't Make Any Difference To Me, I Don't Care At All

I understand where you are coming from and that probably seems like a sensible attitude to take, it kind of ignores the society that necessitated the very act of "coming out". That is something we should care about - that daily, people need to make the choice whether or not to actually express who they are, or continue to hide it.

There will be those that feel it is "making an undue fuss", because it doesn't directly affect them, and they can't necessarily perceive how it would be important. It is through awareness that we change society. A lot of people change their minds about how they treat minorities when they find out that one of the people they know or respect is a member of that minority.

How many stories have you heard about someone being a massive homophobe until their cousin came out as gay, and then all of a sudden the tables were turned? I hate that it sometimes takes a personal connection to an affected group to change a behaviour, but sometimes that is what it takes. So we should care, when someone decides to open themselves up like that.

This ties in to the next segment.

He's Been Lying To His Wife The Whole Time, That's Not Right, How Can He Be Gay If He Has A Wife And Children

Here's a picture of Phillip Schofield as I first came to know of him as a TV presenter - this would be The Broom Cupboard, from the late 80s. Here he is with one of his co-hosts, Gordon The Gopher.

During this time, a law was brought into effect in the UK. It's a rather infamous law. Anyone that knows their stuff will probably guess which law I am talking about. It was called Section 28 for short - Section 28 of the Local Government Act. It specifically forbade the "Promotion Of Homosexuality," and specifically the promotion of "The Acceptability Of Homosexuality As A Pretended Family Relationship".

Read that a couple of times.

So I have actual personal experience of what this law resulted in, because one of my school teachers - an excellent teacher who encouraged me in my work and led to my love of the written word - was sacked because it became public knowledge that they were homosexual.

Not that they were promoting anything, but then, that wasn't the point of the law, really. It wasn't conceived in the notion that you would have individuals handing out pamphlets trying to convince you to become homosexual because it's better. It was because you could spin "not demonising gay people" as "promotion". It was because you could dress "actually it's not weird or wrong or sinful to live like this" as "promotion of acceptability". It didn't criminalise homosexuality - which had been partially decriminalised in 1967 (Schofield was 5 at the time) but wasn't fully decriminalised in the UK until the 2000s - but it criminalised talking about it, becoming effectively a legally binding ancient taboo.

People were literally being sacked for being gay. Newspapers would run front-page splashes on celebrities for daring to not be heterosexual. It isn't a wonder at all why the term "gay" became an insult in schoolyards in the late 80s - because society had decreed it as something wrong and bad and unjust and awful, that you should be ashamed of and never speak about if you were one of those people that dabbled in it.

That's the world that Schofield - and many others like him who have since had to have this conversation - grew up in, worked in, lived in. A world where your entire career vanished if they discovered your sexuality.

And by the way - if you stayed single for long enough in that era, people assumed you were gay anyway. Heteronormative bullshit also includes a byline in being married. Everyone is straight and everyone gets married and has kids. If they don't there's something wrong with them. Then god help them.

When do you think Section 28 - which, by the way, was the brainchild of the Thatcher government seeking re-election, and deliberately pitched to undermine alliances between LGBT support groups and labour unions - was finally actually repealed?

September 2003. The Labour government brought in a bill to repeal it in 2000, but was shut down by Baroness Young in the House of Lords. Yes, a Conservative. Theresa May - yes, THAT Theresa May - said that the repeal being defeated was a "Victory For Common Sense."

When your government is so thoroughly set against you that they will pass laws against you for forty years, you'd probably hide who you are too. The man said he'd spoken to his wife already; that must have probably been a harder conversation to have. It's none of our business how she took it.

I Don't Like Him Any More, I'm Going To Stop Watching This Morning Now

Congratulations, you are part of the problem. Go away. Don't read my blog any more. If you liked him just fine before you knew he was gay and now you don't, that makes you homophobic. Take a good hard look at yourself.

Who?

I mean, that would be fair enough.

I get it, straight folks. I know it can be difficult to work out why people react the way they do. That's mostly because until recently the western world was pretty much exclusively set up to cater to you. We have a lot of preconceived notions we have to start chipping away at before we have actual equality. It isn't that people should feel safe coming out - they SHOULD - we should work toward a world were somebody doesn't have to come out at all.

Fair enough, right?

Well done, Phil.

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Shedding The Shroud

Yesterday, Andrew Turner - MP for the Isle of Wight - resigned.

The resignation's timing was almost guaranteed to be a response to the revelation that he'd attended a publicity event in a school, at which he had expressed some very backwards and highly homophobic views.

Andrew Turner has been our MP since 2001. Previous to this he ran in Hackney South and Shoreditch in 1992 and European elections in Birmingham East in 1994. In 1997 he finally decided that if he couldn't get in anywhere else, he'd show up here, and in 1997 lost to Peter Brand of the Lib Dems.

Some people believe that we get the political representation we deserve.

I'm going to dismiss anything and everything he has said in press appearances and in parliament. It is very easy for anyone to say anything. What I will discuss, what I will expose and lay bear, is his voting record. Any MP can lie. When it comes to their voting, that is where they truly show what they are all about. You can't vote against something and then claim to be for it.

He's consistently voted against every kind of welfare and benefits, and voted for reductions in spending on benefits. Contrariwise he votes consistently against taxing those who earn more than £150,000, mansion tax, corporation tax and capital gains tax. A believer in trickle-down economics, it seems.

He wants the NHS privatised. This is usually phrased in a mischeivous way like "against restriction of private provision of health service" or "reforming the NHS to allow purchasing of private treatment" or any other way to make Literally Selling Our Health Service sound like a positive thing.

He votes to defund local government, votes against more proportional representation, votes for tuition fees to go up pretty damn consistently. Against younger people getting the vote. For stronger border controls. Against regulation on Fracking. For selling off our national forests. Against stopping train fares increasing. For privatising Royal Mail. Against secure tenancy. For tearing apart foxes with packs of hounds.

We're building a picture of who this man is, at this point. He's pretty much everything that a left (or centrist even) hates in this world. Combine his consistent refusal to vote in favoure of equal rights of ANY kind, and he's that stereotypical right-winger that wants to buy the community centre in a kids film. You know the one? Wherein the protagonists have to take part in the dance contest to win the prize money to buy it first? He's that guy.

This island can be beautiful.

I have often spoken about it in a disparaging way, and I don't think I have done so unfairly. For all the gorgeous coast and for all the particular things which are considered positive and good, this place has big problems, which can only be solved by doing difficult things. A recent article in Vice actually very eloquently addressed this.

A big part of the problem is that a significant proportion of those who live here - not all, maybe not even most, but definitely a large part - lean to the right. Older people, traditionalists, wealthy people who have second homes or retired down here; this island houses many of them, and isn't helped by the fact that representation of non-white folks has classically been very small. (I mean for god's sake there's a shop somewhere on this island that still sells gollywogs, as if that's fucking clever.)

I don't believe a lot of these people are actively bigoted, or purposefully hurtful toward others. I don't think they take time out of their day to write thinkpieces about how wrong homosexuality is or how asian people are ruining everything. I DO think, however, that these beliefs are in there, somewhere; and they're never really questioned or challenged by the island as an environment, or the majority of the British press, which has a well-defined and globally recognised right-wing bias. 40th most free in the world. Isn't that something.

So of course they vote for this guy, because he reflects all the things they quietly assume to be true, and have never had to disbelieve, even if it would make the world a better place.

I daresay there's also a large proportion of voters here that voted for Turner over and again because he's the devil they know. For the same reason as many people stay in bad jobs or bad relationships, because they are afraid of the alternative. Whatever that alternative might be.

I've written to Andrew Turner on many occasions. I only received an actual reply from him once, and that was in my first letter to him - wherein I asked him to challenge Tony Blair's appointment of Ruth Kelly, a highly relgious woman and member of Opus Dei, as the Education Secretary (and subsequently Communities Secretary). Something he did, with applomb, and I will give credit. I saw the PMQs in which he questioned this appointment.

I now recognise the distinct irony of asking a bigoted MP to score political points by taking down another bigot. Every other letter I had written since called on him to question his party on matters of rights, equality and welfare, and I received a stock response from the desk of his secretary and little else.

The kind of people that actually have a lot to lose under Tory governance, the kind of people who are directly attacked by Andrew Turner's voting record, find a lot of problems heaping on them. It's easy for those whose lifestyle and welfare is threatened to not pay attention to the political issues that cause those problems. That's an old trick. It's the trick being played on all of us, consistently, and has been for years. We're discouraged from caring about anyone else, because we've got our own shit to worry about. Why should I help put up the tent? My hands are full holding onto this guy line.

That's how Turner came to hold the seat for as long as he did. That's why it took actually being a bigoted asshole in public for him to be forced into resignation, as I have no doubt he was. It wasn't that he was a poor-hating homophobe - it wasn't even that anyone else KNEW he was - it was that he said as muchm and was called on it by a teenage girl who deserves the heaps of praise heaped on her for standing up for what we should all know is right.

For as long as I have been politically aware, this dinosaur has represented dinosaur isle.

Now he's gone.

It's time for us - for the people who have been the target of his parliamentary attacks - to put someone in place that actually represents us. The real us. Not the dying, decaying holiday town that the money has made us.

Let's go.