I had thought that enough had been written in response to Jan Moir's disgraceful homophobic rant in last Tuesday's 'Daily Mail' and that, anyway, it probably wasn't the stuff of a blog from Bardies. As someone who would rather eat wild toad droppings than buy a copy of the loathesome 'Daily Mail', I must confess that I have only just downloaded the offending article. My reason for doing so is simple. When I opened my emails this morning, there were two from my closest, and gay, friends here in France, lamenting their shock and horror at the implications of Jan Moir's article.
Their request that we all boycott the newspaper is easy enough to deal with in my case, but their emails instantly prompted me to discover for myself just what she had said. It is, indeed, a shocking piece of 'kneejerk' journalism and one that must have broken the heart of poor Stephen Gately's mother. To use the story of his sad demise, of which to date none of us knows the exact cause, to legitimise in some perverse way, the consequences of being gay is media fodder for all homophobes. At a time when we know from police figures that homophobic crime is on the increase, such irresponsible journalism merely serves to stoke the fires of hatred.
Those who abbhor the idea that two people of the same sex can not only love each other but can also consolidate their union through a civil partnership ceremony, must have opened their paper of choice and rejoiced at Moir's statement that "Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships." Excuse me! How? Why? A young man dies tragically in the home he shares with his same sex partner and the whole legal edifice of civil partnerships can be doubted? What sort of distorted logic is this?
My friend Giovanni, quite rightly, is beside himself with anger at the implication that Stephen Grately must have died as the result of drug-taking and a sleazy gay lifestyle. How easy it is for right wing homophobes to link drug taking with sleaze and being gay! It reminded me of something that Rabbi Lionel Blue once said. "Just because you're in the gay world doesn't mean you go to orgies. You've also got to deal with relationships." In a heterosexual world, with a great deal of drug taking, pornography, prostitution and child sexual abuse, we don't question the legitimacy of marriage, do we?
It is the last line of Moir's article, though, which is the most shocking. In a chilling line, which Josef Goebbels himself could have written, she says, "For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see." In a week when the BBC, wrongly in my view, gave Nick Griffin of the BNP a voice on the 'Question Time' panel, my thoughts turned to parallels with 1930's Weimar. The similarity is clear: gay equals deviant, and therefore dangerous.
Alan Cumming, the Scottish actor, who has played Emcee in Kander and Ebb's stage version of 'Cabaret' and is himself gay, presented a fabulous documentary on BBC 4 this week called 'The Real Cabaret'. It followed a showing on the same channel of Bob Fosse's 1972 film with Liza Minelli and Michael York, one of my all time favourite movies [thank goodness for satellite TV!]. The real cabarets were often run by Jewish impressarios, many of whom finished up in the gas chambers. What the 1972 film didn't show, was that the likes of the fictional Emcee and his coterie of homosexual and sexually ambivalent musicians and dancers would have finished up in the gas chambers too.
Not so long ago, we went to see Julian Clary in Rufus Norris's revival of the stage version. Norris, bravely, took Fosse's narrative all the way to its logical conclusion. In the film version, Emcee closes the curtains with the camera panning round the Kit Kat Klub to show swastika armbands on many of the visitors. In Norris's revival, Clary and the other performers slowly and subtly remove their clothes, turn round with their backs to the audience and huddle together at the back of the stage. As the light shines on them, the shower above them rains down. No one leaving that show would have been under any illusion about what happened to many of Berlin's homosexuals under Nazism.
Of course, this may sound a little over dramatic in the context of a second rate piece of journalism in a right wing 'red top'. We live in liberal times, don't we? Nick Griffin, thank heavens, has none of the misplaced abilities and political canniness of Jean-Marie Le Pen. But both Jan Moir and Nick Griffin have become major players this week in a debate about the sort of society we all want to live in. We have fought hard for our freedoms, for the right of all human beings not to live in fear of their lives for their race, their religious beliefs or their sexual orientation. Why does anyone care what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes? Sadly, for all of us, it appears that fascists and fundamentalists still do.
In December 2007, on a bitterly cold, damp, grey day we went 'en famille' from Oskar Schindler's factory in the majestic city of Krackow to Auschwitz-Birkenau, less than an hour's drive away. The museum at Auschwitz is a true and fitting memorial to its lonely ghosts, but it is at nearby Birkenau that their souls speak to you. As we stood in the watchtower, alone, looking through the wintry mist at the forked railway line where Rabbi Hugo Gryn had waved 'goodbye' to his little brother, where Irene Nemirovsky and countless others were herded to their deaths, and Jacob Bronowski wept into the red earth for the failings of mankind, I knew why we were there. I said to the children, "This is what happened when people stood by and let injustice take hold. We must never let it happen again."
........... 'Auf Wiedersehen........ auf Weidersehen........ auf Weidersehen...........'
Their request that we all boycott the newspaper is easy enough to deal with in my case, but their emails instantly prompted me to discover for myself just what she had said. It is, indeed, a shocking piece of 'kneejerk' journalism and one that must have broken the heart of poor Stephen Gately's mother. To use the story of his sad demise, of which to date none of us knows the exact cause, to legitimise in some perverse way, the consequences of being gay is media fodder for all homophobes. At a time when we know from police figures that homophobic crime is on the increase, such irresponsible journalism merely serves to stoke the fires of hatred.
Those who abbhor the idea that two people of the same sex can not only love each other but can also consolidate their union through a civil partnership ceremony, must have opened their paper of choice and rejoiced at Moir's statement that "Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships." Excuse me! How? Why? A young man dies tragically in the home he shares with his same sex partner and the whole legal edifice of civil partnerships can be doubted? What sort of distorted logic is this?
My friend Giovanni, quite rightly, is beside himself with anger at the implication that Stephen Grately must have died as the result of drug-taking and a sleazy gay lifestyle. How easy it is for right wing homophobes to link drug taking with sleaze and being gay! It reminded me of something that Rabbi Lionel Blue once said. "Just because you're in the gay world doesn't mean you go to orgies. You've also got to deal with relationships." In a heterosexual world, with a great deal of drug taking, pornography, prostitution and child sexual abuse, we don't question the legitimacy of marriage, do we?
It is the last line of Moir's article, though, which is the most shocking. In a chilling line, which Josef Goebbels himself could have written, she says, "For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see." In a week when the BBC, wrongly in my view, gave Nick Griffin of the BNP a voice on the 'Question Time' panel, my thoughts turned to parallels with 1930's Weimar. The similarity is clear: gay equals deviant, and therefore dangerous.
Alan Cumming, the Scottish actor, who has played Emcee in Kander and Ebb's stage version of 'Cabaret' and is himself gay, presented a fabulous documentary on BBC 4 this week called 'The Real Cabaret'. It followed a showing on the same channel of Bob Fosse's 1972 film with Liza Minelli and Michael York, one of my all time favourite movies [thank goodness for satellite TV!]. The real cabarets were often run by Jewish impressarios, many of whom finished up in the gas chambers. What the 1972 film didn't show, was that the likes of the fictional Emcee and his coterie of homosexual and sexually ambivalent musicians and dancers would have finished up in the gas chambers too.
Not so long ago, we went to see Julian Clary in Rufus Norris's revival of the stage version. Norris, bravely, took Fosse's narrative all the way to its logical conclusion. In the film version, Emcee closes the curtains with the camera panning round the Kit Kat Klub to show swastika armbands on many of the visitors. In Norris's revival, Clary and the other performers slowly and subtly remove their clothes, turn round with their backs to the audience and huddle together at the back of the stage. As the light shines on them, the shower above them rains down. No one leaving that show would have been under any illusion about what happened to many of Berlin's homosexuals under Nazism.
Of course, this may sound a little over dramatic in the context of a second rate piece of journalism in a right wing 'red top'. We live in liberal times, don't we? Nick Griffin, thank heavens, has none of the misplaced abilities and political canniness of Jean-Marie Le Pen. But both Jan Moir and Nick Griffin have become major players this week in a debate about the sort of society we all want to live in. We have fought hard for our freedoms, for the right of all human beings not to live in fear of their lives for their race, their religious beliefs or their sexual orientation. Why does anyone care what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes? Sadly, for all of us, it appears that fascists and fundamentalists still do.
In December 2007, on a bitterly cold, damp, grey day we went 'en famille' from Oskar Schindler's factory in the majestic city of Krackow to Auschwitz-Birkenau, less than an hour's drive away. The museum at Auschwitz is a true and fitting memorial to its lonely ghosts, but it is at nearby Birkenau that their souls speak to you. As we stood in the watchtower, alone, looking through the wintry mist at the forked railway line where Rabbi Hugo Gryn had waved 'goodbye' to his little brother, where Irene Nemirovsky and countless others were herded to their deaths, and Jacob Bronowski wept into the red earth for the failings of mankind, I knew why we were there. I said to the children, "This is what happened when people stood by and let injustice take hold. We must never let it happen again."
........... 'Auf Wiedersehen........ auf Weidersehen........ auf Weidersehen...........'
Photos by Peter Vardigans, Auschwitz-Birkenau, December 2007
I disagree about "boycotting" the Mail or banning Griffin from appearing on TV. (Don't we "boycott" the Mail simply by not reading it anyweay?)
ReplyDeleteAny society - liberal, communist, fascist whatever - will contain illiberal elements. It's inevitable and no-one can stop it. Look what crept out of the woodwork in the former USSR and Yugolsavia after communism collaped there.
Suppressing them merely fans the flames (as, in another context, does fighting jihadist Islam). We should celebrate the fact that we live in a mature, healthy, liberal democracy where people CAN express illiberal views like Moir's and Griffin's and know that, really, it doesn't matter that much, because now they are in a minority. And the best way to keep them a minority is to let them let of steam once in a while.
I agree with what you say about suppression and, you're quite right, not buying the Daily Mail is a form of boycott [actually I do often read it in a coffee shop to see just what they are saying on a given day].
ReplyDeleteMy comment over Nick Griffin, wrongly in my view, being given a voice on 'Question Time' is to do with it being the wrong format. Of course, as an elected politician, he has to be given his rightful voice in the right context. A round table 'free for all', which was skewed to justify the BBC's decision, was always going to be a bun fight, which made for very unpleasant television and gained Nick Griffin a huge sympathy vote.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments.