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Gay Shame

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
224 Seiten
Englisch
Forumerschienen am25.04.2024
'Boisterous and uncompromising ... An important argument' The Times Only a few years ago, it seemed that the fight for gay rights was won in the UK: legal equality was achieved, prejudice rapidly dying out. Mission accomplished, right? Wrong, argues Gareth Roberts. Homophobia is making a major comeback under the guise of the ideology of 'gender identity'. The enforcers of this new creed insist that attraction to people of the same sex is 'hateful'. They argue that effeminate men and butch women can't just be gay, but must 'really' be trans. Worse, this ideology has colonised the gay rights movement, capturing institutions like Stonewall and the gay press completely. Anyone who disagrees risks professional suicide. So what happened to the funny, grown-up culture, truth-telling and knowing irony of many gay men? How and why was the older gay rights activism, which gifted such progress to homosexual people, hijacked? In this passionate, witty polemic, Gareth Roberts answers these questions and argues that we need a new gay liberation movement.

Gareth Roberts is a writer and journalist. He has a weekly column for The Spectator and writes regular pieces for UnHerd and Spiked. His television writing credits include Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Doctor Who, and many others.mehr
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Produkt

Klappentext'Boisterous and uncompromising ... An important argument' The Times Only a few years ago, it seemed that the fight for gay rights was won in the UK: legal equality was achieved, prejudice rapidly dying out. Mission accomplished, right? Wrong, argues Gareth Roberts. Homophobia is making a major comeback under the guise of the ideology of 'gender identity'. The enforcers of this new creed insist that attraction to people of the same sex is 'hateful'. They argue that effeminate men and butch women can't just be gay, but must 'really' be trans. Worse, this ideology has colonised the gay rights movement, capturing institutions like Stonewall and the gay press completely. Anyone who disagrees risks professional suicide. So what happened to the funny, grown-up culture, truth-telling and knowing irony of many gay men? How and why was the older gay rights activism, which gifted such progress to homosexual people, hijacked? In this passionate, witty polemic, Gareth Roberts answers these questions and argues that we need a new gay liberation movement.

Gareth Roberts is a writer and journalist. He has a weekly column for The Spectator and writes regular pieces for UnHerd and Spiked. His television writing credits include Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Doctor Who, and many others.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781800752849
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum25.04.2024
Seiten224 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1546 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14507436
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe


1
Behind the Painted Smile
Anthony Shaffer, dialogue of Hotel Porter in Alfred Hitchcock´s (1972)

The lives of homosexual men are now out in the open. We beam from television commercials, we populate the soaps and the TV dramas, we are sportsmen and soldiers, we present and we host. Our weddings get covered in the press with nary an eyebrow raised. We bring up children. There we are, right in the mainstream. The job is done. Supposedly.

So much representation´ - and yet so much unexamined. We live in an unprecedented time for homosexual men. Men can set up home together in a couple and are increasingly less likely to experience overt disapproval or stigma (or worse). There is also much less pressure (at least in some settings) to shack up with an unfortunate woman and breed (regardless of what we might be getting up to behind her back).

This is all so brand new, and we treat it as nothing worth writing home about, as if we´ve been doing it for years. We have yet to even develop cultural touchstones about male relationships and the roles we play in them. For example, in real life I´ve often heard people remark that in male couples it tends to go that there´s the Fun One and the Sensible One (sometimes the Dull One). But things like that haven´t even started to make their way into the wider culture, or even into gay culture. For all the incessant talk of homosexual men, we hardly ever actually talk about ourselves. We don´t have anything akin to the cultural superstructure of heterosexuality - no codes and caveats, no centuries of example to fall back on, no lore of what works and what doesn´t. We´re making it up as we go along, and it often seems like we can´t even be bothered to do that.

I think before we head directly into the gender wrangle it´s important to look at the lives of gay men, so often ignored because everybody´s wrangling about gender. (I´m going to confine my remit to gay men here - lesbians are not so much overshadowed by the other letters of the LGBTQ+ as blotted out entirely, despite going ladies first´, and in this as in the physical world they deserve their own place.) I think this journey will illuminate and inform the main topic when we reach it. There are reasons why some gay men have taken to genderism like ducks to ducks.

These are the secrets, dirty or otherwise, the talking points about homosexual men that nobody wants to talk about or make a point of. The things we keep to ourselves, the things we all know´ but that nobody wants to discuss, at least in public. Acres of gay press and no actual coverage (and even less since the rise of genderism). We are legally equal, and yet in our comprehension of ourselves and our place in the world I would suggest not much further forward.

Pretty much nobody is examining these issues, as we are scared of what we might have to confront, and everybody must wear the rictus grin of LGBTQ+. The common thread linking the following issues is a lack of depth, a failure to think and an unexamined acceptance of certain things without stopping to wonder either why they happen, or who benefits.
What is gay?

Firstly and most obviously, there is the difference between what we might call gayness´ - a modern Western cultural expression of male homosexuality - and male homosexuality . We mistake the two concepts for each other all the time, so much so that it´s hard to keep them distinct in one´s mind.

Men have always had sex with other men, for sure. But being gay - a distinct identity as a sub-category of male with its own supposedly attached codes and behaviours - is very new indeed, newer still than the nineteenth-century coining of the word homosexual´ itself.

The very idea of being openly and exclusively homosexual is shockingly recent. It´s a categorisation that would not have made any sense to generations just a few before our own. (This is not to say that it is necessarily an inaccurate or negative framing - just because a concept is new, it doesn´t mean it´s wrong. We should remember here that before the concept was named, open and/or exclusive homosexuality was simply not practically possible.) In the ancient world (misleadingly similar to ours on the surface sometimes) there were rigid, codified divisions between master/slave, native/foreigner, etc. But there was no such big deal between a man having sex with a man or having sex with a woman. The ancients were certainly aware of the difference - they had no problem distinguishing the sexes - but they didn´t make a song and dance about it like we do (or at least not the song and dance).

This is certainly not to say that this was an idyllic era of unrestrained eroticism and freedom. Only the freeborn citizen had any power to withhold their consent at all, to sex or anything else. Slaves of either sex, and shockingly of any age, were fair game. These status differentials, brutal to our eyes, were the essential of ancient sex. The kind of male homosexuality venerated in most Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman culture is not sex between male equals as we know it, but between adult men and teenage boys: between Socrates and his pupil Alcibiades, or Greek hero Achilles and Patroclus in , or the Roman Emperor Hadrian and his favourite´ Antinous. All three were married to women when they took these teenagers as their beloveds´. The people of antiquity would find the idea of adult male social equals in a marriage-style home-based relationship - something we now view as almost obvious and ordinary - unfathomably strange.

This view of homosexuality, as goings-on between man and teenager, is not so entirely distant a concept, and definitely not so historically remote as the Athenian golden age. We venerate Oscar Wilde, who lived barely a century ago, and quote the words of his younger lover Lord Alfred Douglas in his 1892 poem of the love that dare not speak its name´ as if we were talking about male homosexuality as we understand it. In fact, as the full context makes clear, the love´ in question refers to the relationship between an older and younger man. Wilde was questioned about this line at his trial for gross indecency in 1895, and described it as the great affection of an elder for a younger man´ which had been entirely misunderstood´ and mistaken for sexual love. His most famous speech, and he was lying! It was a lie to cover up sexual behaviour - hiring economically deprived (barely legal in our era) young men for sex - that even now would at least border on criminality.

Open and exclusive male homosexuality between adults is a staggeringly new social and cultural innovation. But then, a lot of modern things are, and it doesn´t make them bad. However, it is, I think, worth bearing this recentness in mind when we talk about it, particularly when people say that being gay is their true´ or authentic´ self. It may well be that technology and modernity have freed Western men (to a certain extent) to live as gay men if they desire - but this carries with it a whole ton of cultural baggage, specific to our times, that we frequently assume is innate and intrinsic but is of more recent vintage than the motor car or the washing machine. Let´s have a look at some of those old bags.
Something to tell you, guys

The gay lifeline is established and repeated across the media and has become embedded in our TV and film culture. It runs like this. As you´re growing up you are terribly - yet photogenically - sad. Things are bleak and miserable. You stare out of rainy windows and sneak furtive glances in swimming baths and showers. (There are always swimming scenes in these things. It´s enough to give you a verruca just watching them.) You realise that in your estimation it is not fat-bottomed girls but hairy-arsed blokes that make the rockin´ world go round. Then you announce your orientation to the world, at which point ! You undergo a soap powder-style before/after metamorphosis into your authentic self. You partake in a parade or two, wave a little flag, meet a similar chap, somewhere a glockenspiel plays, you post nice photos to your Insta, under which people reply you got this babes #loveislove´, and then you never have any problems in life again.

Don´t get me wrong. I think the modern procedure of releasing a considered YouTube video beginning, Hi guys, I´ve got something to tell you all´ is a better way of revealing the dread truth than shouting AND BY THE WAY I´M A POOF!´ at your mother during a row by the cat food in Sainsbury´s.

But there is something so limiting and so pathetically small about it, reducing all homosexual men to cutesy identical drones. There is a seemingly endless string of teen coming out´ stories in films and TV, particularly in soap operas, usually involving suspiciously boy band-looking actors angling for teenybopper hearts and/or a National Television Award. The tradition continues with ever more banal results, e.g. and though it has now expanded to include people coming out as queer´, etc. (which is like confessing that you are a Sagittarius). These stories are always the same and nearly always absolutely terrible, with grotesquely dreary characters, though the possibly semi-psychotic Ben Mitchell of is at least fun. (My favourite homosexual male TV character is Omar Little in . His sexuality was about the one hundred and twenty-seventh most interesting thing about him, which is how it tends to go with real people...

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