Tory gay squirming continues; Ed Milliband LGBT-gay’s choice; Ulster Unionist won’t go in Pride Parade; and Reading Pride biggest ever

It’s been a very strange week for the tories here in the UK when they’ve been wallowing in gayness, or suspected gayness. The fallout continues with the foreign secretary William Hague, and his supposed gayness. His extraordinary response to the rumours have come under attack from his own, and many people are shaking their heads at this storm in a tea-cup.

On the other side of the political spectrum it is a more sedate affair where people speculate who is the best candidate for gay labour members, and it seems that Ed Milliband is the current favourite there. The gay news site PinkNews polled its members and found that 42% of identified labour voters preferred Ed Milliband.

And the more sedate political debate continues in Northern Ireland, but from the opposite view of the Labour one. There the Ulster Unionists are choosing between the traditionalist Tom Elliot and the more liberal Basil McCrea. Mr Elliot will give those gays the least, and will certainly not attend either the Gaelic Games (GAA) or the gay pride parades.

And speaking of Pride, Reading Pride was reportedly the biggest ever with 12000 participants, according to the organisers.

William Hague, Chris Meyers steps into an episode of Soap

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality, as Thomas B. Macaulay, the 1st Baron of Macaulay and Paymaster-General during Queen Victoria’s reign between 1846 and 1848, once wrote.

And this blog nods sagely back through the decades as we read on about the days dealings in gay politics in the United Kingdom.

Follow this, because this is going to read like the script of Soap, and I do mean that seminal 1970s comedy show lampooning the soaps.

As you may be aware, we had a little election this year in which the old regime under Gordon Brown got soundly tossed out in favour of bright new faces in the form of David Cameron and his side-kick Nick Clegg. Hilarity or tragedy ensued, and the characterisation is much dependent on who you ask.

One of the faces, bright and scrubbed, and not having that haggard ‘been-in-office-for-a-while’-look yet, was Mr William Hague, who got the nod to become the Foreign secretary.  And as any high rank profile politician he needed his own retinue of advisors.

One of these advisors hired was a Mr Chris Meyers, a 25 year old graduate from Durham County university, with no experience at all in the higher levels of the Conservative Party, or in any workplace at all for that matter. The British tabloid press, in the form of the Daily Mail, hint that there might be a reason for the hiring beyond mere competence.

In other words, “OMG Hague has hired his male lover!!!! xD”. Okay, maybe not expressed like that, in so many words, or in those words at all, but rather through some serious innuendo. Mr Meyers promptly quits, and Mr Hague delivers a tearful denial involving his family and attempts to form that family.

In other words, it has been a few eventful days, particularly in the light if Prison Minister Crispin Blunt’s coming out the other day, and it all leaves this blogger with the question: does it matter at all? Is it a storm in a tea-cup?

The outing mechanism should be used sparingly and with care, and be reserved for cases where you know for certain that a politician is working against gay equality while actually being gay. We don’t know if this is true with Mr. Hague. There are very thin evidence about it, as far as we know.

William Hague certainly fits the criteria for someone that should be outed if he was indeed gay: voting against the repeal of the notorious Section 28, voting against gay adoptions, and so on and so on. If he turns out to actually be gay, then he is certainly fair game. But we don’t know yet.

That hasn’t, of course, stopped the British public – and its medias – from being gripped with one of its fits of morality. And the words of Thomas B. Macaulay floats back to us from the past, as true today as it was when he uttered them. Or to echo the old saying, with its very queer connections: There’s nowt so queer as folk.

Welcome to the ghetto

I’m a gay man, and one of the things I do is to write fiction. I write in a genre called contemporary or mainstream. It’s a bit blurred what that actually means. My subject matters tend to be about this time, about the real world, about some social problem. My characters tend to be straight, white youth.

I am wrong in choosing these subject matters because an American organisation feels thusly about writers working with characters beyond their own sexual orientation. Bolding below is mine.

In a world where Lisbeth Salander is tearing up the bestseller list with her clunky motorcycle boots and her refusal to fit neatly into the category of gay or straight, it seems the revival of queer sensibilities has come upon us. This is something that the expanding genre of Male/Male fiction tackles head on. Although these novels are described as gay historical fiction they are (as the press release details) “written primarily – but not exclusively – for women”. This complicates how M/M fits into the genre of LGBT fiction. How does a genre of fiction that is exclusively centered around homosexual love, and largely written by and for explicitly straight writers and readers challenge the typical notion of what LGBT fiction is? Perhaps more significantly, how does it problematize the mutual exclusivity of homosexuality and heterosexuality?

A while back the gay entertainment site AfterElton.com wrote an absolutely brilliant article about slash fiction, and I recommend that you go and read it here. Brent Hartinger describes how slash fiction writers have made it possible for gay characters to exist on television in the first place, and how slash fiction writers have enlarged the audience pool by normalising gay male relationships. Yes, he’s saying that those badly written Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy stories actually made it normal for a large segment of the population to relate to gay characters, and I think he is right.

Then go and read the articles that gave rise to the one I linked at the top of this post: this, this and this. All of these articles are a very strange attack on women writing M/M romances. That is romances featuring gay men rather than being about ‘boy meets girl’. Those three articles set emotions in high gear among writers like LA Witt, and her “rant” can be read here. Another can be read here.

It all boils down to the question of whether straight women can write authentically about gay men, and whether they should be allowed to. Never mind that the two women in the Out-article aren’t actually straight. What the articles in LAMBDA, Out and on Gawker question is a fundamental question of whether those outside the LGBT-community should be allowed to write LGBT-fiction. LAMBDA doesn’t think they should, and they have barred straight writers from competing in their awards.

What they are saying is that we should live in the ghetto and that people who write about our lives without living in the ghetto should be shamed from doing so. This of course also invalidates all my writing, because by their reasoning, how can I write about heterosexual youth with social problems?

LAMBDA is propagating a ‘separate but equal’-theory that should be fought anywhere and anytime. It was not right in the sixties, and it is not right now. Lambda is not the Malcolm X:s of the gay community. I, as a gay man in England, will continue to write what I damn well please, and I hope the women and men writing M/M romances continue to do so, regardless of whether they are straight gay or bisexual.

It all started when I was thirteen

I wrote a description for my coming-out process for a site, and I was pretty pleased with it. So here it is.

My little mates were dreaming about pissing their wages up the wall in the little fishing village I grew up in, in the extreme north of Norway. The big ambition was to get into the co-op house for the Saturday night dances that the local municipality arranged. If you got into those dances you were adult, and you grown-up. And being grown-up was big.

Oh, and my little mates had also started to hold hands with girls and snog with them. At least the boys wanted to snog – the girls weren’t always so keen on that.

I, however, wanted to hold hand with Peter, and wanted to snog with him. I had enough sense not to try this at home, except in steamy dreams in my bedroom at night. There is nothing more tragic and pathetic than a thirteen year old boy with unrequieted crushes, let me tell you.

The only problem was that Peter was one of the cool kids. As an adult I could look back on the delicious irony that Peter’s favorite sport was graeco-roman wrestling… I however never dared sign up for that, as the thought of grappling Peter in certain places embarrassed me greatly and forced me to run home before anyone could spot what my traitorous body was doing to me.

Since I generally sucked at sports – and still do – my dreams of doing graeco-roman wrestling with my sweetheart never materialized, but since he was one of the cool kids I did get some exercise from him. He was part of a gang that made sure they were top dogs in the school yard, and though he was not the leader of that gang he did occasionally run me down to punch me up a bit. For the record you know. So, my sweet heart was the one hurting me.

My world was ending, and my heart was breaking. And then my parents told me we were moving to the big city. I never had to worry about getting into the co-op dances again, and with time Peter faded to be a flabby beer-gutted fisherman just like his father. And his breath was horrible too. But he was my first crush, and how can you forget that?

Now, fourteen years old, and in the big city – fresh from the innocent wastes of the Atlantic nowhere – ‭I could let my rebellious hormones loose and dive into a life of hedonism and wanton debauchery. And possibly even graeco-roman wrestling. Right.

In my first month at the new school our tech teacher decided that this was a good day to inform his charges about gayness, and the fact that he was gay. During the two hours of the class, when we were supposed to be making metal ash trays and throwing stars he told me about this thing called homosexuality.

Oh my god, that was me. I was like him! How awful!

The next day we had a new teacher, and we never saw our old tech teacher again. Whispers flew. He was sick, dead, abducted by aliens. Freddy Kreuger had got him in his sleep. But he had just been fired, and the truth got out.

And the boys from the gang that ruled this school ran me down to punch me up a bit. For the record, you know. Just to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.

So, being me was bad. Into the closet, deep into the closet, i fled. And didn’t come out for another eleven years. I had moved back to the area of my origins, near the fishing village I had grown up in, although I chose to live in the town. Peter the fisherman was 150 km away. I went to visit and saw his new him, and wasn’t impressed. But there was this guy that worked for the same local newspaper that I worked at. And he was looking at me at the oddest times and in the oddest ways.

Demonstrations of my masculinity and absolute heterosexuality aside, and sad sad sad attempts to get that girl who could cure this silly condition, I was just not very good at living in the closet and it chafed. New Year came around, and the office New Year’s party, and the fireworks. And at the stroke of midnight someone kissed me. A bloke. That bloke. My co-worker. It’s true, and I melt every time I think of it – and of me. In a split second, as I was kissed by this bloke, I thought ‘Fuck it’ and didn’t run away as I had always done before.

And here I am, writing this.

The co-worker? A week later he was shagging Pål (Paul in English). New guy, new conquest.

How did you come out?