O TEMPORA, O MOIRES

It’s pretty hard, I suggest, for any sentient being to hold back from weighing in against the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir and her drippingly poisonous piece about the death of Stephen Gately. For a gay man, it is impossible.

The column in question may be read at the following address:

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death--.html

The title of the article has been changed; it was originally “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”. The headline change does not remove the first version’s implication from the article itself. Moir – who is not, as far as I am aware, medically qualified, a coroner, a resident of Mallorca (where Gately’s death took place), an intimate of Gately’s circle or indeed an investigative journalist with particular contacts in, say, the police – is evidently just another homophobic bigot who has decided on a whim (or under deadline pressure) to air her prejudices to the naturally receptive Mail readership.

Unfortunately for her, there is a big online community with a fast response capability these days and if, in years gone by, one could let off a fart in a newspaper and not have it smelt, nowadays the public domain knows no limits. I have not had a copy of the Daily Mail in my hands since before David English’s time but I have read the column. One should declare one has read it because Moir’s first line of defence is as pathetic as her column is nasty: “I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read [my column]”. Well, dear, it’s not like the Christian lobby bleating about Jerry Springer – The Musical, the seeing of which would require effort and expenditure of time and money when obeying what the flock leader prescribes is so much easier. Reading an article as thin as yours takes two minutes and can be done online. We don’t need to leave ourselves open to being caught out in not having read it. We’ll leave unthinking bias to you.


Stephen Gately, a natural

Nor, also unlike those censorious delusionists, are we organising to bring you down. Moir complains of “what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign”. Who does she think organised it? The Stasi? Just because many people have a similar response to a piece of junk, it doesn’t render that response illegitimate. I have not discussed it with anyone else and I have read almost nothing of the complaints, over a thousand, made about the piece to the Press Complaints Commission. In that case, Moir will probably dismiss me as a lonely crank. So be it.

Moir’s defence concludes that “it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones’. I agree. Her homophobia and bigotry is far more than mere undertones. It is out front. Her central point is that “whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one”. You could argue that, not being privy to the coroner’s evidence, the events of the night when he died or any other germane material, Moir is simply in no position to pontificate on the nature of Gately’s demise. But that isn’t the fox she is after. The clue is in the word “natural”, the age-old complaint against homosexuality.

Moir says in her defence that she is “on the record in supporting” civil partnerships. In her article, though, she says that this event “strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”. I know of no one in a civil partnership (I and my partner included) who subscribes to such a myth. It is one of Moir’s making. She goes on that “gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages”. No they aren’t. It is only heterosexuals and gay Christians who ever use the term “gay marriage”.


Gately: a nice cup of tea

My partner and I did not enter into a civil partnership because we wanted to ape straights, nor do we think of our arrangements as remotely like marriage. We did it so that, if I should die first, my estate will go to my partner rather than to my alcoholic cousin whom I haven’t seen for years, who has never been to the house and who would only drink away the money he made from its sale.

Moir links Gately’s death to the suicide of Kevin McGee, the former partner of Matt Lucas (she calls McGee “the former husband” of Matt Lucas, another term gay people don’t actually use; I am not my partner’s husband or his wife; we are not heterosexuals in drag). This is of course, in Moir’s own term, “mischievous” to say the least. Apart from sexual orientation, nothing links the two cases. But Moir wants to propose that Gately’s life was “shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice”. She has no evidence to describe Gately’s life in those terms – or, for that matter, to accuse him of “public” vice, which I guess she would find preferable. Unless, that is, being gay is to still to be considered a dark appetite or a private vice. To consider so would reasonably enough be dismissed as homophobic. If not, what could be termed homophobia?

In her completely speculative account of the night Gately died, he and his partner Andrew Cowles took another man back to their apartment. “It is not disrespectful” she essays “to assume that a game of canasta … was not what was on the cards”. It is certainly presumptuous. Moir assumes that her readers imagine, as she evidently does, that gay men go at it like knives and that no encounter with another man can possibly be with anything non-carnal in mind. Who knows? Maybe they did play canasta. People do and gays are people too. Maybe, as Boy George once put it, they’d “rather have a nice cup of tea”.

Moir says that Cowles and the guest went to the bedroom together. She has no basis for that assertion. Gately died asleep on the couch. He wasn’t conscious. I don’t know what makes his death “lonely”. Like most other people, he died alone because, save in war, large-scale accident or explosion, people are apt to die one at a time. She says that “it has just been revealed that [Gately] smoked cannabis on the night he died”. Big deal. But hardly a dark appetite or a fracturing shadow.


Frump and looker

Like so much journalism, Moir’s piece is full of innuendo – the “undertones” she affects to scorn – that doesn’t stand up and, because it’s not spelt out, doesn’t need to, she believes. Well, I don’t go in for innuendo, I call it as I see it. Jan Moir is a nasty old frump, no doubt jealous of Gately’s looks and charm. After all, as can be seen from the likeness here, her glamorous by-line shot is extremely flattering. If she thinks that’s what she looks like, she’s living in cloud cuckoo land. So, like frumpy high-horse merchants down the ages, she is terribly afraid that someone somewhere might be having fun. She wants the world to know that, if you have fun and follow your heart, you will be punished, even unto death. And she doesn’t care if what she sicks up in her column turns people’s stomachs and greatly distresses the bereaved. It’s easy for journalists to imagine that, because of the hallowed “freedom of the press", they can write what they affect to think without any consequence. So it’s bracing that so many companies have withdrawn their advertising from the Mail’s website, reluctant to be associated with such primitive views. Next time she airs her narrow little prejudices, perhaps she will think before committing herself.

A LEGG to STAMP ON

A few belated words on the recent developments over MPs’ expenses. Politicians get a bad press on the whole; as I have just indicated, I think the press deserves a bad press. But I do believe that members are justified in objecting to the rewriting of history that has been indulged by Sir Thomas Legg in his letters to MPs. Members who broke the law – and there clearly are some – should be prosecuted. But all those who put in claims that were accepted and ratified by the proper offices are justified in feeling aggrieved that they are being caned for it now. If the rules were bad, unclear or full of holes, someone – probably any one of decades’ worth of Leaders of the House – should have addressed them.


Not a pop star, just an old Legg

I had rather hoped that Jacqui Smith, in her formal apology to the house demanded by Legg, would get up on her hind legs and tell him to blow it out his backside. But she is an obedient soldier and she is quietly taking a peerage after the election. Others who are steaming about it, and steaming rather more because their leaders are telling them to pay up and shut up, ought to get together and act. Some of them are not standing for re-election, others know that their chances of re-election are slim. Those who believe they are hard done-by should jointly resign their seats forthwith, thereby forcing a fusillade of by-elections.

For Labour that would be disastrous. It might be less than good news for the opposition parties too. Those with the stomach for it could further stir the pot by putting in a last-minute candidature as an independent, thereby further damaging the chances of the defending party. The widely touted public outrage may be less deeply felt than the conventional wisdom has it. Had the evidently popular Ian Gibson, forced to stand down from his Norwich North seat by the Labour Party, stood as an independent at the by-election that his angry resignation precipitated, the result might have more interesting than the comfortable win for that nodding-donkey girl for the Tories.