Lee Dalloway asks what does the Daily Mail have against us gays?
Ok, I’m just going to say it: there are far too many straight people on television. I’m sick of the supposedly liberal media forcing their heterosexual agenda on us, with their torrid depictions of man/woman love.
Don’t even get me started on my tax money going towards sending the feral offspring of some dowdy Home Counties housewife or council estate crackhead to school. And why should we pay for old straight people to wither and rot in a nursing home when us homoxuals will surely perish whilst young and beautiful in strange, lonely and troubling deaths?
Sounds ridiculous? Of course, but open up Britain’s second biggest daily “news”paper and you’ll regularly find some rancid, right-wing crust indulging in a spot of socially accepted gay-bashing. It slides in nicely with their yearning to return to a time where everyone in Great Britain was white, heterosexual and munched on powdered eggs round the dinner table whilst leaving their front doors wide open to all and sundry.
The only problem? This time didn’t really exist. It’s a rose-tinted view of our green and pleasant land; skewed by the life disappointments and increasing cynicism of people who can’t handle a world that has, and always will, change around them.
Just a small sample of articles over the last couple of years include Simon Walter asking why Jeremy Joseph was a guest at Downing Street’s LGBT Pride reception, simply because one of his nights happens to be named Porn Idol.
Would a similar article have surfaced if Peter Stringfellow was a guest of Mr Cameron? Maybe. This is the Mail, where the only thing covered with more disdain than sex is immigration.
Then there’s Melanie Phillips, showing zero skills in investigative journalism by claiming lessons promoting homosexuality would be interweaved into the curriculum via maths and geography. “It’s all part of the ruthless campaign by the gay rights lobby to destroy the very concept of normal sexual behaviour,” she bleats.
What she’s actually harping on about is LGBT history month, which looks at the many contributions of gay people to our culture, and includes a lesson or two in equality, so as the next generation will hopefully hold fewer prejudices than the one that preceded them.
And what’s “normal sexual behaviour”, Melanie? Who are you to give something so personal as sex, with all its kinks, quirks and fetishes, a nice little box to fit in?
Former Tory spin-doctor Amanda Platell wrote an article opposing gay adoption, claiming, “Vulnerable children face the best possible life-chances when they are adopted by married heterosexual couples”.
Surely vulnerable children face the best life-chances raised by people who will love them unconditionally and teach them how to be good, honest and hardworking members of society? Does this comment also discount single parents who should be applauded for the difficult task of raising a child alone?
I will concede that Ms Platell’s statement doesn’t make her a homophobe, something she goes out of her way to make clear to us, but it does show a very blinkered view of what a stable home should be. Ironic for someone who accuses pro-gay adoption supporters of being, “Militant gay propagandists who are not remotely interested in child welfare, only in furthering their own narrow-minded agenda.”
Really? Or maybe they’ve simply woken up and realized that the cosy idea of 2.4 children died out a long time before the 90s sitcom of the same name, and that there are a helluva lot of children out there who need loving homes.
Art critic Brian Sewell recently brought politics to the cobbled streets of Coronation Street with a bizarre rant that the show has too many LGBT characters. “Is it true that the lives of heterosexual Mancunians are haplessly intertwined with transvestites, transsexuals, teenage lesbians and a horde of homosexuals across the age range? Is Manchester now the Sodom of the North?” he rages.
The show has six regular LGBT characters out of a cast of almost 70. Either Mr Sewell can’t seem to fathom that more than one gay person could live on one street at the same time, or he’s just moved on to critiquing another medium, as his respect from the art world appears to have greatly diminished.
In 1994, 35 art world signatories wrote a letter to the Evening Standard attacking Sewell for “homophobia”, “misogyny”, “demagogy” and “hypocrisy” – yet seventeen years later, the Daily Mail continues to give this sad duffer column inches. Is a bisexual man who describes his attraction to men as a “disability” really the best person to comment on homosexuality?
And, of course, who could forget Jan Moir’s infamous article about the death of Stephen Gately, which started out as a lament about another talent lost far too young, but somehow turned into a social commentary on same-sex relationships, describing how his death, “strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.” Bizarre.
The Daily Mail, rather too easily, seems to forget that there are people facing homophobic prejudice every single day, and that the words of their writers are still very influential to a large proportion of their readership. It can be far too easy to forget the power of the written word once unleashed on society.
Would a complaint about the Daily Mail to the Press Complaints Commission help? Recent events with the News of the World phone hacking scandal has shown that newspapers seem to find the PCC about as intimidating as a terrorist waving a sparkler.
It’s also interesting to note that the chairman of the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, which sets the benchmark for the ethical standards of the press and reports to the PCC, is Paul Dacre, Editor of the Daily Mail. But it’s all we have, so if you’re unhappy, get writing.
On the flipside, surely people with views that some may consider homophobic, racist, sexist etc should be allowed to have them represented? We do live in a democracy after all. What clear-thinking person wouldn’t encourage that people with opposing points of view should have a platform in which to voice them?
And the Daily Mail must be speaking to a proportion of their audience or they would have stopped printing years ago. But until the paper starts giving more opinion pieces to people with moderate or left-leaning views, or at the very least starts presenting the ‘facts’ of their editorial in a more balanced way, then their publication will be increasingly ridiculed as the redundant, grumbling old lady of newspapers.
Your readership is ageing, duckies. You can give away Kylie and McFly CDs all you like, but unless your worldview relaxes slightly, the next generation may be more than willing to pull the plug on stuffy old Nana.
