The moment I heard the bare headlines about the murder of a 28 year-old barman in Ayrshire last weekend, my gaydar detected a homophobic element. At the time of writing, this instinct has yet to be wholly justified by what has been publicly disclosed, but if the evident fact of Stuart Walker’s relaxed and unconcealed sexuality proves to be a total red herring, I’ll be very surprised.
An 18 year-old has been detained by the police. Only very sketchy details of the killing have been released. Initially, Strathclyde Police declared that, while it was not “a random attack”, there was “nothing to indicate that this is a homophobic crime”. However, it was “an extremely violent attack” and Walker’s body was found to be “charred”. Reports have conflicted as to whether he had been tied to a lamppost and whether torture and/or a weapon were involved.
There has been a moving response from the public, both in Cumnock itself and in the wider on-line world. Evidently, Walker was well-liked. The nature of his death – outdoors at night but in an urban area where the events leading up to the attack and the attack itself might easily have been witnessed – has clearly shaken locals, but so has the possibility that someone might have been bludgeoned merely because of his sexuality.
Stonewall Scotland says that its researches indicate that two out of three Scots are relaxed about the question of gay marriage. The campaigning organisation also reckons that there has been a five-fold increase in “hate crimes” against LGBT people in Scotland in the last five years. But of course this calculation may be tempered by a greater readiness to report such crimes and a greater diligence on the police’s part in recording and following up reports.
For the police and for other public services, sexuality has become a subject to be treated as if walking on eggshells. This is not to say that institutional homophobia has significantly lessened in those services, only that it is much less often openly expressed. We can only count this “improvement” a mixed blessing.
Elsewhere, there is clearly a long way to go. In recent weeks, there has been much comment about alleged racist remarks made on the pitches of the premier football league in England. The sport’s authorities, the clubs and the media have scrupulously maintained a fierce disapproval of such behaviour, while simultaneously reserving the fallback position that some such allegations might be erroneous, unjustified or even malicious. One suspects, though, that disobliging remarks made in heat about sexuality would provoke rather less soul-searching, let alone official investigation.
The notorious lewd pantomime performed in 1999 by the then Liverpool player Robbie Fowler in order to rile the Chelsea player Graeme Le Saux was penalised by the Football Association and the club. Le Saux was sometimes “accused” by fellow players of being gay on the basis of his distaste for the raucous and drunken celebratory culture widely indulged in top-flight football and – bizarrely – because he read The Guardian rather than The Daily Star. However, it is difficult to determine the degree to which either the FA or Liverpool disapproved Fowler’s behaviour because his offence was processed simultaneously with a further example of juvenilia at a different match when Fowler pantomimed snorting the touchline. The player was fined for both incidents by both club and regulatory body. The FA did, though, impose a four-match suspension for the “cocaine” business and only a further two-match suspension for the “bum-waving”. I wonder what penalty would be imposed today and whether calling another player a “poof” would be deemed an offence.
In the media and of course on-line, anti-gay sentiment is much more rife. Some of it is intended, some of it merely thoughtless, born of an instinctive but unexamined response. Though the coverage of Walker’s death has generally been treated with as much persuasive horror and concern as, say, the murder of Jo Yeates, you don’t need to look far to find the attitudes that still lurk beneath the professional surface.
On the Daily Mail’s on-line site, for instance, there is a piece headlined: “Man held over inquiry into death of gay barman who was facing child sex probe”. The “child sex probe” is not, the report goes on to explain, some kind of medical device or sex toy but a legal procedure. “However,” says the report (and it is not wholly clear why that particular word is used), “it has come to light that the 28 year-old had only recently been questioned over an alleged incident involving a 12 year-old boy in August and a report was sent to the Procurator Fiscal”. In fact, as the report goes on to make clear, the Procurator Fiscal had closed the case. Hence there is no earthly reason why the “alleged incident” should have been mentioned, especially as the report quotes the Strathclyde Police thus: “There’s no suggestion that this incident is in any way connected to the murder”. The website is either flying a kite, hinting at something the reporter has heard but cannot publish, making mischief or appealing to the perceived homophobia of its readers (this is the Daily Mail, after all, a rag known to many as the Daily Hate-Mail). The on-line report, by the by, is credited to a certain “Oliver Pickup” and if, as seems likely, that is a pseudonym, it was singularly insensitively chosen.
Daily Mail writers and other right-wingers implicitly subscribe to a view, whether expressed outright or not, that attraction to members of the same sex is “unnatural”. If these objectors also embrace supernatural delusions of one stripe or another, they then frequently deem homosexuality “sinful” and “corrupt”. As one who spurns supernatural delusion as itself unnatural, I cannot spend precious time on the notions of sinfulness and corruption. As for the “unnatural” argument, I offer that it is natural for me. Humans do many things that are not found in nature: cooking food, driving cars, firing missiles, taking part in “reality television” programmes, claiming to be divinely inspired. When homophobes argue that god did not intend humans to indulge in sodomy, for instance, I want to ask why in his infinite wisdom he went and made the anus an erogenous zone. Did he know his business?
For aeons, greybeards have attempted to “explain” homosexuality, as if it needs to be swaddled and safely buried in theory. Every so often, it is thought that some breakthrough is about to demonstrate conclusively that attraction to the same sex is a product of nature rather than nurture or, just as often, the other way around. As a gay man myself, I would much prefer the issue were left alone, because I know in my bones that whichever comes to be pronounced “the definitive answer” will be used against us. If it’s nature, prospective parents will require the sexuality of the foetus to be revealed and, in some cases, will demand that this is sufficient justification for a termination. If it’s nurture, the behavioural experts will be put to work to determine those gay responses that are indeed “learned” so that they may be eradicated with extreme prejudice.
Rather than burning brain cells on futile attempts to account for what makes individuals gay, I propose that the homophobia mystery be the one that is solved. That would benefit society a great deal more. Actually, of course, it is not such a mystery, especially to anyone who has encountered it. Many people’s homophobia is merely an outward manifestation of their supernatural delusion – or, to give the dog its name, their religious bigotry. It is in the nature of being a subscriber to a religion that intolerance of those who differ follows. A righteous person by definition measures herself against the “wrongeousness” of others. Nowhere is this expressed more forcibly than in Islam, according to which anyone who does not embrace the Muslim faith is an infidel and hence not fit to live. I don’t know any lesbian or gay people who consider that heterosexuals should be put to death, only that they are missing out. Mostly, though, we just hope that straights will let us alone.
There is another view of homophobia – more a theory than a study – which is that those whose hatred and fear is not taught and motivated by scripture may be driven by an insecurity about their own sexuality. This is a perception akin to that of the Jew-hating Jew, save of course that Jewishness is rather more clearly a fact about a person, whereas sexuality is a lot to do with movable positions on a spectrum of behaviour and instinct. At any rate, my own anecdotal evidence does suggest that those heterosexuals who are most relaxed at being around gays are themselves the most comfortable in their own sexual identities. I remember back in the 1970s, during the week of one of the first of what were then called Gay Pride marches in London, I was working at Time Out magazine. The editor of the theatre section was a lovely man called John Ashford and, for the duration, he sported a lapel badge that read “Sad to be Straight”. It might not be thought exactly correct now, but back then I was grateful for such fraternal solidarity, particularly as so much of the left was extremely tardy in understanding and responding to sexual politics.
LGBT people do not ask for special consideration. We only want a shake equivalent to that enjoyed by everybody. In particular, we want to be able to go about our business without being persecuted, abused or despised. Or indeed murdered.
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