QX has been trolled before by a blog named Fagburn

By Patrick Cash

Describing itself as a ‘a blog about gay men and the media, politics and your actual gay culture’, the writer’s ostensible aim is to single-handedly shear away the stereotyping fluff that surrounds the reporting of gay men in various outlets, with targets ranging from The Sun to The Guardian. Some of it is incisively brilliant – certain gay publications themselves often come under repeated fire for sometimes appearing to cover nothing more than Dan Osborne’s abs –, but a lot of it reads like a bitter queen sitting in an armchair in Brighton, spitting cocoa apoplectically at their antiquated laptop’s screen and spraying the venom of chocolate hobnob crumbs over their keyboard as they furiously jab out their entries one-fingered. All of it purports to give the reader ‘truth’, and this is when it gets dangerous: for of course, all that Fagburn really gives his readers is his own swivel-eyed opinion of the world. Fagburn is, ultimately, a professional troll.

The QX trolling in question was served on our ‘In Conversation With: David Stuart’ interview transcript, where Stuart talks in depth about the scale of chemsex amongst gay men in London, also providing some pertinent theories about its possible psychological origins. Fagburn posted in a comment below the piece: ‘This reads like he was interviewing himself, which presumably he was… Maybe journalism is about challenging what people say, particularly when they talk nonsense like this fame-hungry posh fool’. What’s significant is not the lazy insults, which scream out to be more Dorothy Parker-acerbic than they actually are, but the dismissal of Stuart’s theories as ‘nonsense’.

Type in ‘chemsex’ to Fagburn, and an almost obsessional denial of the modern gay picture pops up, with terms like ‘crystal meth myths’ invoked repeatedly. This directly contradicts statements by Public Health England, the National AIDS Trust, medical journal The Lancet, and recent studies by Gay Times and the peer-reviewed ASTRA. You see Fagburn is not motivated by truth, for he has the same motivation of all trolls; a fear of his certain, very codified view of the world being changed. Fagburn is, perhaps understandably, scared by gay men doing drugs to a dangerous extent, and therefore he safeguards his illusion of reality by aggressively attacking those who threaten this façade. What’s worrying is that he’s burning not only himself in this bubble of misinformation, but also anyone who strays across his blog.

We all know that trolls are everywhere on the internet, and it can always boil down to that same motivation, of fear of change, as the spur to their vitriol-filled words. When Tom Daley came out as gay in 2013, below the golden ripples of congratulatory praise on the Twitter pool, the dark, green weeds of the trolls also thrived. Two examples, amongst a sad many, read: ‘1’ @NoamiCampbell – (not Naomi) – ‘You just lost a fan, go to hell!!! faggot @TomDaley1994’ and ‘H’ @HM_PSE ‘Tom Daley uno i was cheering for this faggot in the Olympics aswell.. Na bro you went out wrong maaan .. Bent angle’. Daley has rocked their safely constructed world view of ‘straight’ sports stars, exposing it as wrong, and their reaction is to lash out: wanting to make him feel unsafe and wrong in return.

Possibly the biggest troll in the whole business is The Daily Mail, which has regularly trolled its own readership into believing the world is less safe than it actually is long before the trolls’ current internet heyday. Because if you believe that every fruit, immigrant and non-traditional sexual position is going to give you cancer, then you are more likely to buy into (and buy) the Mail’s apparent offer of protection. The paper constructs itself as the last bastion of ‘Britain’, standing like a pompous and portly lighthouse within a swamp of merciless benefits-scroungers, povvo lefties and thieving Romanians; a vision which it also tirelessly creates. It does so for the same reason as the trolls pouring out their hate into Twitter and onto the comments of YouTube videos, because it knows the modern world is in truth a rapidly changing, uncertain place.

But why be so scared of a changing world? In a sense, it is about an imminent loss of power and status. The Mail is so embittered with the thorns of division at its flame-driven heart, it would melt away like the wicked witch should someone throw the bucket of a more harmonious society over it. Fagburn purports himself as an authority on ‘gay men and media’ yet he knows nothing about the drugs gay men are using, which renders him obsolete as the issue garners much-needed, sensitive attention. And Tom Daley’s trolls show not only an intolerance of difference and homosexuality, but are symbolic of an even deeper fear. For it seems a more equal society is beginning to blossom beneath the capitalist-lead patriarchy we are currently witnessing burn itself out; a world where to be a straight, white man is merely to be an equal, not automatically elevated.

Perhaps this particular paranoia of the trolls is best displayed in the case of Mary Beard. Beard, a Classics professor at Cambridge University, appeared on Question Time in January 2013, speaking positively about Eastern European immigrants and casting doubt on some stories about strains on public services. She describes the misogynistic web reaction she got from her, mainly male, trolls afterwards on her personal blog: ‘[it has] prompted a web post that has in the last few days discussed my pubic hair (do I brush the floor with it), whether I need rogering (that comment was taken down, as was the speculation about the capaciousness of my vagina, and the plan to plant a d*** in my mouth).’ Individual comments included ‘an ignorant cunt’.

Yet Beard has been in the press very recently in a far more positive manner about her trolls. She recently wrote a job reference for a twenty-year-old student named Oliver Rawlings who gained national notoriety after Tweeting to her ‘you filthy old slut. I bet your vagina is disgusting’. After Beard retweeted it to her 47,000 followers, Rawlings swiftly apologised, but his name was shamed throughout the newspapers the following day. When Rawlings travelled down to Cambridge to offer to buy Beard lunch and apologise, she accepted and they’ve since stayed in touch. She said of her character reference to the New Yorker: ‘He is going to find it hard to get a job, because as soon as you Google his name, that is what comes up. And although he was a very silly, injudicious, and at that moment not very pleasant young guy, I don’t actually think one tweet should ruin your job prospects.’

Of course, the ultimate prevailing avenue for trolling is the supposed anonymity of the internet. Because comments are not being said to people’s faces, voices emerge that undermine the often enforced political correctness of the modern age. But it does not always mean that these voices are spoken in ultimate truth; many trolls have been revealed to have personal problems, which leads them to project their disaffection onto societal patterns in homophobic, racist or misogynistic ways. It is even understandable how people are psychologically scared of equality: we are born into and brought up in a meritocracy, where we are in competition with one another from the exams and essays of school age and throughout our working lives and fiscal earnings. When we realise this is a fallacious method of living compared to emotional wellbeing, hopefully we could all – trolls included – be happier.