THEGAYUK

Author: Skylar Baker-Jordan

  • COMMENT | Gay Media… Do better

    COMMENT | Gay Media… Do better

    Gay Times never should’ve hired Josh Rivers…20 days.

    That’s how long Josh Rivers lasted as editor-in-chief of Gay Times, Britain’s oldest and arguably most prestigious gay men’s magazine. Yesterday, the magazine suspended him following a Buzzfeed article which exposed bigoted and offensive tweets Rivers sent between 2011 and 2015 in which he attacked just about every marginalised group you can imagine.

    “I’ve just seen a girl in the tightest white tank & lord help me if she’s not pregnant, she should be killed. #gross” reads one tweet. “I wonder if they cast that guy as the ‘The Jew’ because of that fucking ridiculously large honker of a nose,” he tweeted in 2011. “Look here, tranny. 1) you look like a crackhead 2) YOU’RE A TRANNY & 3) your wig doesn’t deserve a mention. Avert your eyes, honey,” he said in a transphobic post.

    These are just the tip of the iceberg. While he did apologise, it clearly wasn’t enough. Following a public backlash, Gay Times sacked Mr Rivers today, effective immediately.

    The saga of Josh Rivers begs a lot of questions. Previously Gay Times’ marketing manager, Mr Rivers was promoted to editor despite having no discernable journalistic experience. A Google search on Wednesday turned up a negligible web footprint for any journalist, let alone the editor of one of Britain’s premier lifestyle magazines.

    This was part of the magazine’s “reboot,” an attempt to diversify their staff, output, and appeal beyond white gay men. Mr Rivers, who is multi-racial, was to head this reboot and make the magazine more appealing and relevant to a wider audience.

    Obviously, that failed. Instead of finding a bright young writer or editor to take the magazine in this brave and laudable new direction, James Frost – the man who bought Gay Times back in March – hired a bigot with a Twitter history to rival Donald Trump’s in the breadth of communities he’s insulted.

    “To every single person who is hurt, offended, and disappointed: I’m sorry,” Mr Rivers said in a tweet on Wednesday. “The tweets are horrible. They are abhorrent. They are ugly. They are so hateful. These tweets from my past show a deep self-loathing that I’ve worked hard to overcome.”

    This apology did little to placate many in our community, including me. I tweeted at Mr Rivers that “I’m just curious what you’ve done that shows you’ve changed and repudiated these horrible views.” Mr Rivers never responded.

    He should have. I firmly believe people deserve second chances. We’ve all had messy politics before. People grow and change as they mature. I wouldn’t want some of my opinions as a 17-year-old to be held against me at 31.

    But here’s the crux of the issue. Mr Rivers wasn’t 17 when he sent these tweets. He’s my age, which means the bulk of his offensive tweets were sent when he was about 25. 2011 wasn’t 1911. He should have known better. That he didn’t shows, at best, a stunning lack of judgment and at worst a strain of hatred and bile that shouldn’t be tolerated in a locker room, let alone on Twitter and certainly not in the pages of a national magazine.

    The issue is further complicated by the fact that the only way we know Mr Rivers disavows his old tweets is by his most recent tweet. He’s gone radio silent since Buzzfeed published its piece, and as I said, he has little web presence to go on. It’s hard to judge his sincerity because we don’t have a body of work to read. He’s as green as they come, which really begs the question – why was he promoted to editor in the first place? How did Mr Frost and Gay Times not know about Mr Rivers’ past? Buzzfeed found these tweets with little more than an advanced Twitter search. It’s clear nobody did their due diligence before Mr Rivers took the helm.

    That’s beyond unfortunate, especially given the circumstances. Trying to diversify Gay Times – and gay media in general – is a noble goal, and many (including me) were excited that a Black and Minority Ethnic gay man was at the helm of one of our most notable publications. Gay media has for too long been dominated by fit young white men, and it’s high time that we include more voices more regularly.

    For their part, Gay Times sought today to assure readers that even though Mr Rivers has been sacked, the magazine plans to continue with its rebranding. In a statement, Gay Times promised that it “will relaunch on 30 November, with what is quite possibly the most significant overhaul in its 33-year history.” Articles by Mr Rivers will be removed, but the “new-look magazine will feature submissions and significant contributions from the far reaches of our wonderful and diverse LGBTQ community.”

    What this “overhaul” will look like is anyone’s guess, though. If the debacle of Mr Rivers’ hiring-and-firing shows us anything, it’s that this diversification of gay media is off to a rocky start and will be harder than perhaps initially thought. Without announcing an interim editor-in-chief, it’s unclear what the future holds for Gay Times.

    Hopefully the magazine will again be helmed by a BME editor, preferably one with journalistic experience who has been thoroughly vetted before being hired. But it’s also important that all gay media, not just Gay Times, continue to bring in diverse writers, photographers, editors, and staff.I’m interested to see how Gay Times (and gay media generally) proceeds after this.

    Whatever happens, though, we need to not let this set us back on our road to including move voices. Mr Rivers is one man who should never have been given the job he had, but he’s not the only gay BME writer. There are hundreds of talented young BME LGBT people ready to take his spot. Hopefully, Gay Times will hire one of them – preferably one who doesn’t have such a checkered past.

     

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • MONEY | In a changing world, gay couples plan for their financial future

    50 years since the decriminalisation of male homosexuality, Britain has come a long way in equality for same-sex couples.

    As the law and society have become more accepting of gay and lesbian families, more and more of our community are opting to start families of their own. A 2015 report from the Department of Education found a record number of children are being adopted by LGBT parents, and within 18 months of marriage equality taking effect in England and Wales, over 15,000 same-sex couples had wed. Still, there are unique challenges and prejudices facing gay and lesbian families. The most recent British Social Attitudes survey found that only 48 percent of respondents felt that same-sex couples should be able to adopt as freely as straight couples. It was only this year that gay couples won full equality in pensions, when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex widows and widowers are entitled to the full pension as opposed to simply the amount placed into the pension after the Civil Partnership Act took effect in 2005. This represents a massive step forward in financial stability and equality for gay and lesbian families.

    Increasing financial stability and equality for gay and lesbian families is something Liverpool Victoria is trying to do. The largest insurer of individual incomes in the UK, LV= (as they’re styled) offers an array of products including car insurance and life insurance policies. The largest friendly society in the country, LV= is owned by its policyholders who number 1.1 million out of over 5 million customers throughout the United Kingdom. LV= recently profiled four shareholders who are in same-sex relationships as part of their examination of what the “traditional” British family looks like today – and what that family’s financial needs may be. Iain and David, from Sussex, have been together for 23 years and are raising their two adopted children, biological brothers Christopher and Anthony. Over the course of their nearly quarter-century together, Iain and David have faced discrimination in financial services.

    “When I applied for my first mortgage with my previous partner in the late 1980s, we weren’t allowed to have an endowment mortgage because we were a gay couple,” Iain said. “There were concerns about AIDS and at the time we were asked to have an HIV test.”

    Still, things are improving, according to Sarah and Laura, another same-sex couple insured through LV=. “Society is increasingly inclusive as more individuals are finding the courage to be themselves openly,” Sarah said. “It has led to an increasing presence of families like us in daily life and in the media. The progress is slow but it’s heading in the right direction…”

    Sarah, from Reading, married Laura, from Idaho in the USA, three years ago. Civil partnerships and marriage equality have made it easier for same-sex couples to traverse the difficult immigration process, but there are still financial concerns these couples have to consider. “Our experience of life insurance was that it wasn’t as straightforward as expected,” Sarah said. “We took independent advice when looking as there were a lot of questions we wanted clarification on, and a lot of future-focused parts that we weren’t sure how to answer.” Not being from “traditional families” can present unique challenges at work and when applying for insurance and other financial products, as Iain explained. “I have experienced people at work thinking that David and I fill traditional roles most of the time, I’ve earnt slightly more than David and there’s been an assumption that he’s the primary carer and I’m not.”

    Same-sex couples also have more typical financial concerns, especially in our tumultuous world. “Things are moving so fast, with Brexit, with what’s happening America,” Iain explained. Planning to use the equity in their home for their own future, they’re unsure they’ll be able to give their children enough to get on the housing ladder. “[I]f we have to rely on the equity in this house, their inheritance will be less – and there’s a worry about the housing market.”

    Sarah and Laura don’t have children, but plan to in the future. “We have a checklist that is a mixture of practical and financial factors we want in place before trying, which includes priorities such as buying a home, paying back any loans (excluding mortgage), finishing our travel wish list (for now), and having enough in savings for fertility treatment.” Fertility treatments could become even more expensive as the NHS has considered cutting funding amidst an ongoing budget crisis. This uncertainty about the future is why Sarah and Laura are planning ahead. “Our plan is to take as much control as we can as early as possible, rather than relying on government pensions when we get to retirement age,” Sarah said. “We both contribute to private pensions and are focusing on building up savings.” They say they worry about unexpected expenses, preferring to pay for insurance on their home and car “so that we don’t have to find large sums if something goes wrong.”

    50 years since decriminalisation, gay and lesbian British families have come a long way. But while we look at the past, it’s also important we look towards the future and plan ahead. Getting a sound financial footing now can help gay and lesbian families achieve even greater personal happiness as we continue to benefit from and enjoy the fruits of equality.

  • COMMENT | A “Sassy Gay Republican” is being dragged over healthcare, but it’s his support for the alt-right which should concern us

    Life comes at you fast and furiously, as one gay conservative recently discovered following a horrifying auto collision.

    A Twitter user who called Alex, who bills himself “Sassy Gay Republican” went viral after establishing a GoFundMe campaign to help pay medical bills he alleges his insurance is unwilling to cover. This in itself is an all-too-common occurrence in the United States, where healthcare is not considered a fundamental right but a luxury.

     

    For argument’s sake, though, let’s assume everything Alex is saying is true, because it provides an interesting news angle into something the gay community needs to reckon with: the growing number of young, white gay men attracted to the far-right and neo-fascist movements.

     


    First, let’s clear something up. Debating Alex’s views on health care misses the wider point and is, in fact, a waste of time. He isn’t a hypocrite. Alex has said he is against state-funded healthcare but has no problem begging strangers online for a handout.

    American conservatives opposed to public health care contend that individuals are responsible for their own medical coverage, and charity (including crowdfunding on sites like GoFundMe) is one way to do that. The argument isn’t that people shouldn’t willingly pool resources to help one another, but rather that they shouldn’t be forced to pool resources through taxation, which is what socialised medicine requires.

    Regardless of what you think about the state’s role in providing healthcare (and I fundamentally disagree with Alex here), but he’s not a hypocrite. This is ideologically consistent.

     


    Yet debating this one point is to miss the forest for the trees. While this whole incident raises a lot of interesting questions – about healthcare, about the role of Twitter in political discourse, about the power imbalance between celebrities and the rest of us (Chrissy Teigan helped this story to go viral) – the most jarring question is why Alex is a Trump-supporting “redhat” to begin with. How did this young white gay man arrive at such a radically different worldview to the majority of our community and why do so many other young white gay men seem to be following down the same path?

    I touched on this earlier this year in an essay for my blog, The Curious American. It largely piggybacks off an article by Laurie Penny which discusses her experiences with Milo Yiannopolous – the standard-bearer for the gay hard right – and his acolytes. Since then, several other pieces have been written on the gay attraction to neo-fascist movements in the US, UK, and Germany. In an article for the New Yorker (which later appeared at The Cut), Maureen O’Connor explains that “gay men are remarkably prominent – if not exactly abundant – in the alt-right universe,” mentioning Yiannopolous, the journalist Chadwick Moore (whom I wrote about for the Independent in February), and “Twinks 4 Trump” founder and Gateway Pundit blogger Lucian Wintrich as standard bearers of this homofascist movement.

    O’Connor, as I did in my essay for The Curious American, links the gay appeal of the “alt-right” (which to be clear is really just doublespeak for far-right, neofascism, and white supremacy) to a hypermasculine yet camp aesthetic. It sounds paradoxical, but it makes perfect sense that hypermasculinists such as Trump would appeal to camp, flamboyant men like Yiannopolous and Wintrich who fetishise “Daddy” (as they call Trump) and Black men (in the case of Yiannopolous).

    In doing so, they knowingly play on the stereotype of Black men as “bulls” who are hypersexual and dominant – a trope that goes back to Jim Crow when Black men were painted as sexually predatory and a threat to white women and white womanhood. Meanwhile, other gay men swoon over the leader of the so-called “alt-right movement” Richard Spencer, who has been held up as a far-right sex symbol by even the mainstream media.

    Still, other gay men are attracted to the far-right movements currently gaining traction in the mainstream because of an innate Islamophobia. Trump and his ilk used the Pulse massacre – in which an American-born Muslim slaughtered 49 people at a gay dance club in Orlando – to stoke Islamophobia within the gay community. It worked remarkably well, not just in the United States, but abroad. As CNN reported earlier this month, many German gay men are turning to the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party because of anti-Muslim prejudice. The party opposes same-sex marriage, yet that doesn’t matter to their gay supporters who view Islam as a violent, existential threat to themselves.

     

    While ISIS clearly has some medieval views on homosexuality and routinely throws gay men off roofs, this is like comparing Ugandan Christians (who routinely execute LGBT people) to MIke Pence, whose own evangelical beliefs are used to justify his opposition to LGBT equality. In America, the majority of Muslims think it’s fine to be gay – far outstripping their evangelical Christian counterparts.

    In Britain, the picture is bleaker – just over half of British Muslims polled think homosexuality should be illegal while most Christians have liberalised their views on homosexuality since 1990. But when you look at hate crime statistics, most anti-gay violence in the US, UK, and Germany is perpetrated by non-Muslims – complicating the argument that Islam is the greatest threat to Western gays, regardless of polled views.

    Which brings us back to Alex, whose tweets (two of which I’ve posted above) illustrate a deep but unwarranted Islamophobia. Whether this was the primary motivation for him to support Trump, I don’t know. After all, whilst he’s vehemently pro-Trump, he seems to oppose Vice President Mike Pence, who is notoriously homophobic and anti-gay.

     

    This really underscores a key point. Many of these gay men who are fascinated with the alt-right are turned off by traditional conservatism as defined by the Tory Party in the UK, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany, and the Republican establishment in the USA. That is a conservatism that plays on outright prejudices (making opposition to same-sex marriage a key platform, for example) whilst the “alt-right” – while nearly universally opposing LGBT civil rights – feigns acceptance and even borrows from gay culture (with the camp shtick of Yiannopolous and Wintrich and the hypermasculine ideal of others).

    Indeed, Alex himself, in a filmed diatribe released following his viral tweets, says that his sexuality isn’t an issue at Trump rallies. Yet this anecdote isn’t backed up by any polling data currently available: 59% of Trump supporters oppose same-sex marriage according to a Rasmussen poll from June. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this month found only 37% of Trump voters back equal marriage.

     

    Alex is but one young man, but he is indicative of a larger trend of white gay men moving to the far right. His sudden viral fame provides an excellent jumping off point not to debate the merits of crowdfunded healthcare but rather to ask ourselves, as a community, why so many of our young men are being drawn to a decidedly anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim movement.

    This is something the wider LGBT community is going to have to grapple with over the coming years, and while I fully recognise I don’t present many answers here, I think it’s time we start talking about why young white gay men like Alex are radicalising, and what it means for the wider LGBT movement. Because right now, these alt-right gay men are driving the entire community towards a head-on collision with fascism.

     

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • Why Trump banned trans people from serving in the US military and what it means for trans service members

    Earlier today, US President Donald Trump announced – via a series of tweets – that transgender Americans will no longer be allowed to serve in the US armed forces. This reverses a policy implemented by former President Barack Obama last year and was, according to sources close to the Pentagon, completely unexpected.

    Why Trump banned trans people from serving in the US military and what it means for trans service members

    The move has caused a wave of controversy throughout the country and reignited a social war many Americans thought was behind them. It has also baffled many people, who fail to see exactly what this is supposed to accomplish. Trump mentions the “tremendous medical costs and disruption” that transgender troops entail.

    Yet thousands of trans people are already serving – many of them openly – in the US armed forces, and the Department of Defense has found no evidence that they undermine unit cohesion. Additionally, a 2016 study commissioned by the Department of Defense to study this very issue found that an “exceedingly small portion of active-component health care expenditures” was spent on trans people, with trans healthcare representing only a .0005 to .017 per cent total increase on defence spending.

    These facts are leading many in Washington to speculate that the ban is actually intended for political reasons. Whether to distract from the investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russia to sway the 2016 election or from the Republicans’ shambolic attempts to repeal Obamacare, people are being left baffled by what exactly this ban is meant to accomplish.

    Why now? What does this ban mean politically?

    A Trump administration official may have cleared it up though, telling Axios reporter Jonathan Swan that this was designed to be a wedge issue between Democrats and Rust Belt voters in the 2018 midterms. Indeed, the move may well help rally his base – which sees what they call “identity politics” issues as distractions from the economic concerns (though largely remain oblivious to the fact that by making this an issue they are the ones playing “identity politics”) – and win him some votes if he is able to use this as a distraction from other issues.

    This strategy worked for former president George W Bush in 2004, when he successfully used a proposed amendment to the US Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage to turn out evangelical voters. Of course, that year Mr Bush had several referendums on whether to ban same-sex marriage at the state level, and Mr Trump is unlikely to have anything similar to draw attention to this particular issue, especially given the gravity of the Russia investigation and the gridlock his party has perpetuated in Washington, where the Republicans hold the Oval Office and both houses of Congress. And the 2018 midterms are a long way away, politically speaking, so whether this will pay off the way Trump hopes is unknowable right now.

    Activists at the ready to rally against the trans ban

    Still, the move has mobilised LGBT activists, who have roundly condemned Mr Trump’s announcement. “Trolling at tis finest from a man who’s never served & shown up the way trans servicefolk have & are,” trans activist and author Janet Mock tweeted. Meanwhile, disabled retired army Sargent Shane Ortega told MSNBC that Trump is using trans service members “to invoke some sort of emotional reaction from the public to circumvent his own investigations that are going right now towards his impeachment.”

    Along with the questions about why the president did this, some people are raising a very real concern about what happens to the trans troops already serving openly. “The DoD has released many videos this year of trans service members telling their story,” Gizmodo’s Matt Novak tweeted. “What happens to these people now?” It’s a question that the thousands of trans people who are already serving will want answered, and quickly. Whether they will be discharged or not remains to be seen.

    Another question we don’t yet have answered is how this ban is going to take shape. Trump has announced it on Twitter, but that does not an executive order or bill make. Defense Secretary James Mattis is on vacation and the Senate Armed Services Committee and Pentagon were both blindsided, the latter referring questions on the policy to the White House. We don’t yet know the exact terms of this ban or whether a court would uphold it when its constitutionality is invariably challenged.

    Whatever the final outcome, Mr Trump can no longer pretend to be an ally of the LGBT community – something he has routinely claimed to be since his days on the campaign trail – nor can Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump pretend they are “moderating forces,” as they decided the president wouldn’t listen to them on LGBT rights and their “political capital” was best spent elsewhere. It is clear that the social conservative wing of the Trump administration, led by Vice President Mike Pence, has won out.

    What this means for the LGBT community going forward is unknowable at this time, but undoubtedly has many trans service members and activists on edge as they wait to see if the president follows through with his tweets and turns bigotry into policy.

  • SNP seeks assurances from Theresa May that the DUP won’t halt LGBT+ equality

    The SNP has sought assurances from the government that LGBT+ equality would be preserved and advanced after the Conservative Party struck a deal with Northern Ireland’s anti-gay Democratic Unionist Party.

    SNP Equalities spokesperson Angela Crawley said the Tories “have questions to answer” on equality after a confidence and supply deal was struck yesterday between the Government and the DUP which would keep Prime Minister Theresa May in power without formalising a coalition.

    The DUP “agrees to support the Government on all motions of confidence and on the Queen’s speech; the budget; finance bills’ money bills, supply and appropriation legislation and Estimates,” as well as any legislation pertaining to Brexit. In return, a “coordination committee” will be convened to “ensure the necessary support can be established by both parties,” which could give the DUP say on any bills the government seeks to introduce.

    “LGBTI people across the country have deep concerns that the Tory backroom deal with the DUP could halt progress on equality,” Ms Crawley said. “Before the election, Theresa May and Ruth Davidson both committed to changes in the law to improve LGBTI equality – but these commitments were entirely absent from the Queen’s Speech,” she said.

    Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, earlier this month said that she had been assured that the deal would not hinder LGBT+ rights. “I asked for categoric assurance that if any deal or scoping deal was done with the DUP there would be absolutely no recession of LGBTI rights in the rest of the UK, in Great Britain, and that we would use any influence that we had to advance LGBTI rights in Northern Ireland,” she told the BBC. “It’s an issue very close to my heart and one that I wanted categoric assurances from the prime minister on, and I received [them].”

    The DUP themselves have promised that they have no desire to roll back equality measures elsewhere in the country. “We want to ensure that every one of the LGBT community have rights and their rights will be maintained, the DUP equality spokesman Jim Shannon told Premier Christian Radio. “There’s going to be no changes to that whatsoever.”

    Still, the DUP’s opposition to same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland – which it has used peace deal powers to oppose – and support for a “conscience clause” to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people on religious grounds has caused concern for many activists. Protests against the deal have occurred since the election resulted in a hung parliament, with the campaigner and Guardian columnist Owen Jones warning that “an alliance with the gay-hating DUP extremists threatens the Northern Ireland peace process”

    It could also threaten progress on LGBT rights, warns the SNP. “Will the Tories finally amend same-sex marriage legislation to allow couples from Northern Ireland, and elsewhere, to convert their civil partnerships to marriage? If not, why not?” asked Angela Crawley, who also wanted to know if the government will extend discrimination protections to all LGBTI people and eliminate inequality in pension rights, as well as extending gender recognition reforms passed by Holyrood to the rest of the UK.

    Indeed, the DUP has already sought to interfere with LGBT rights in Scotland. Arlene Foster, the DUP leader and erstwhile First Minister of Scotland, sought to prevent Northern Irish citizens from accessing same-sex marriages in Scotland. Scotland allows couples from Northern Ireland (and elsewhere) to convert their civil partnerships to marriage without having to first legally divorce.

    Foster expressed her opposition to this in a series of letters to former Scotland minister for community empowerment, Marco Biagi. She said that she sought to achieve “legal certainty” over the status of same-sex couples by “exclude[ing] civil partnership[s] which were entered into in Northern Ireland” from being converted to marriages. For his part, Biagi tweeted simply “I said no” to this request.

    Whether Foster and the DUP seek to interfere with LGBT equality through their new deal with the Conservatives and their place on the “co-ordination committee” between the parties remains to be seen. Regardless, Crawley plans to fight to ensure progress continues. “The SNP will continue to champion LGBTI equality in government at Holyrood, and SNP MPs will hold the Tory government to account at Westminster so that LGBTI equality does not fall of the agenda,” she said.

    It’s not just publicly that the SNP is defending LGBT+ rights. In a letter to Prime Minister Theresa May, Crawley expressed “concerns that LGBTI equality is being sidelined for reasons of political expediency.” She outlined a series of policies – from strengthening the Turing Law to ensure all those convicted of having gay sex are pardoned to devolving equality law to Holyrood – where the SNP feels the government must act. Whether Theresa May champions equality or the DUP exerts its influence to halt any advances, though, remains to be seen.

  • COMMENT | No, Tim Farron wasn’t persecuted for being Christian – he’s just a terrible politician

    Tim Farron has resigned, and he’s martyred himself in the process. Amidst a disappointing election result for the Liberal Democrats (in which they didn’t earn the dividends expected off their hardline opposition to Brexit) and questions about Farron’s ability to control the narrative around him and his party, he is stepping down.

    Farron, though, blames his departure not on any failure of his campaign but because of some imagined persecution. “The consequences of the focus on my faith is that I have found myself torn between living as a faithful Christian and serving as a political leader,” Farron said upon resignation. “To be a political leader – especially of a progressive, liberal party, in 2017 – and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.” The kicker, though, was when he complained he was “the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in,” adding that “we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal, society.”

    The sheer gall of this man.

    At the start of the general election, I wrote a piece for The Independent defending Tim Farron’s waffling on whether gay sex is a sin. While as a gay Christian I was annoyed he wouldn’t simply say “no” (though he eventually did), I pointed out that “Tim Farron isn’t standing to be Pope,” and that “if his religion stays out of his politics, which it largely does, it shouldn’t matter what he believes in church, only how he votes in the chamber.”

    “This self-pitying, self-indulgent statement from Farron proves not that Britain is some illiberal Christophobic hell, but that Tim Farron is a spineless, whinging loser”.

    I stand by this principle. But Farron wasn’t subjected to extra scrutiny because he is a Christian, nor are Christians persecuted in Britain. This self-pitying, self-indulgent statement from Farron proves not that Britain is some illiberal Christophobic hell, but that Tim Farron is a spineless, whinging loser.

    After spending the first week or two of the campaign dodging the question of whether gay sex is a sin, Farron finally came out and said that no, he doesn’t think it is. It’s reasonable to ask why, if Farron truly doesn’t believe gay sex to be sinful, that it took him so long to simply answer the damn question.

    Farron could have nipped the whole thing in the bud by answering no the first time. He didn’t. He answered “no” only after it became apparent that his campaign was in crisis. At the time I took him at his word, as did many LGBT people, including within his own party. But the persecution complex in his statement makes me wonder whether Farron ever truly believed gay sex wasn’t sinful, or whether he was himself sinning by lying to us all about that.

    Many, many Christians – myself included – do not think gay sex is at all sinful. We don’t need to waffle on about not being theologians to say so. The implication in Farron’s statement that he is being persecuted for his faith, because he wouldn’t answer about gay sex, is that the only way to be a “faithful” Christian is to follow some sexual orthodoxy that is not present in every denomination. Farron therefore insults millions of Christians who don’t subscribe to a medieval notion that same-sex sexual activity is innately sinful.

    That he seems to have lied is the only logical explanation for why he’s so hell-bent on playing the victim now and why he wouldn’t answer the question directly to begin with. Instead, Farron now pretends that he’s the victim of some anti-Christian witch hunt. But this ignores the fact that other politicians have faced scrutiny over how their faith impacted their stance on LGBT rights, too. The most famous example is probably Sayeeda Warsi, whose Muslim faith has been credited with her own spotty record on LGBT equality. In fact, the LGBT community is frequently used to pinkwash Islamophobia by the Christian right who themselves oppose advances in LGBT equality.

    It is insulting to those Muslims who actually face persecution in society to cry wolf here, and Farron should know better. Beyond this, though, it is absurd to insist that there is an anti-Christian prejudice in Britain. The state religion is Christianity, for God’s sake. The head of state is the head of that church. The BBC has a Christian programme – Songs of Praise – on every Sunday. There are Christian radio stations, Christian tv channels, Christian holidays legally celebrated (Christmas, anyone?), Christian names, Christian schools, and even Christian Bale. Hell, a Christian political party that refuses to work on Sunday is set to be the kingmaker for the next government. A country propped up by the DUP is not a Christophobic country.

    Other politicians haven’t had to explain themselves the way Farron has, despite their Christianity, and this is entirely down to him. Tim simply hasn’t handled this issue well. I’ve defended him on this before, because I don’t think he should have to answer for his private faith, but this is entirely a mess of his own creation.

    “People didn’t dislike Tim Farron because he is Christian. They disliked him because he’s a waffling, spineless elf of a man who even as he resigns cannot accept any responsibility for his party’s defeat”

    By refusing to take responsibility for it – and for the Lib Dems’ electoral disappointments – Farron is portraying himself as the victim of some imaginary puscht. It is insulting to the LGBT community, insulting to religious minorities who are persecuted, and mostly, it’s insulting to voters who rejected a frankly untalented, uninspiring politician who misjudged the nation’s political temperature. People didn’t dislike Tim Farron because he is Christian. They disliked him because he’s a waffling, spineless elf of a man who even as he resigns cannot accept any responsibility for his party’s defeat – or that maybe it wasn’t his God, but him, that voters couldn’t stand.

     

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • What do LGBT Conservatives think of Theresa May’s deal with the DUP?

    Ahead of next Wednesday’s Queen Speech, Prime Minister Theresa May is still attempting to solidify a deal that will keep her in Number 10. It looks likely that a confidence-and-supply arrangement could be reached with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, but their stance against same-sex marriage and other issues have divided LGBT Tory activists.

    “There’s no point in denying that working with the DUP makes me personally uncomfortable,” said James Sean Dickson, a British-Irish dual citizen and Conservative Party Member. Dickson, however, has not resigned his membership and is a tad more optimistic about any deal struck between his party and the DUP. “It is quite clear that LGBT+ rights are not up for negotiation.” Former Conservative MP Ben Howlett – who lost his seat at the General Election – also made it clear that any deal needed to draw a hard line between the Tories and the DUP. “The message needs to be loud and clear that there will be no backtracking on LGBT issues in the UK.” He expressed an optimism that the deal could, in fact, give the government some leverage in pushing for further LGBT rights advances in the province. “I think this is a good opportunity for the UK government to negotiate a better deal for LGBT rights in Northern Ireland,” he said. “It is an opportunity the government should not pass up.”

    Chris Taylor, a party member since 1995 who served as a London Councillor from 2002 – 2014, was more unconcerned than some of his fellow party members. Taylor, who describes himself as “ideologically centrist,” says he feels, “completely comfortable in regards to any deal with the DUP.” “It is important to remember that although I do not share the social beliefs of the DUP, they are the democratically elected majority party of Northern Ireland, and were seen as perfectly legitimate prospective partners for the Labour Party back in 2010.” He pointed to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s own support for Sinn Fien, the nationalist republican party in Northern Ireland, as well as Corbyn’s support for what he calls “some Islamic fundamentalist groups that advocate death to gays” as evidence of the hypocrisy around the deal.

    Dickson expressed a similar feeling on the perceived hypocrisy, saying that, “if Labour Party members are displeased by this election outcome they ought to ask themselves whether their leader should have utilised Press TV (the Iranian state-owned news channel) to air his views in the past, given the troubling Iranian LGBT* rights record.” Cautioning that, “we must not allow ourselves to be taken in by a bogeyman caricatures of the DUP,” Dickson told me that the party “is no longer the fire and brimstone expression” it once was.

    Still, the party’s record has many people nervous about what this means for the Tory brand and for LGBT rights. I reached out to LGBT+ Conservatives for comment, but they instead referred me to a HuffPost UK blog by their chairman, Matthew Green. (In the interest of disclosure, the author of this piece is also a HuffPost UK blogger.)   “Let me be clear from the outset,” Green wrote, “the DUP and some of its MLAs hold some pretty appalling views on LGBT rights.” However, he adds the caveat that “given the need for stability ahead of the Brexit negotiations,” he – and it is assumed LGBT+ Conservatives, endorse a “loose co-operation” with the DUP “to ensure that Britain is able to get the right deal as it prepares to leave the European Union.”

    Brexit was brought up by the individuals I spoke with, as well. “Even if [the DUP] wanted to, which they don’t, there is no time available to change equalities legislation given the timescale of Brexit,” Ben Howlett assured me. Chris Taylor agreed, saying that “we need to move forward, in a stable manner, [to] deliver a successful Brexit…” And James Sean Dickson also stressed that “with… days until Brexit negotiations begin, working with the DUP is the surest way to secure stability.”

    Not everyone within the party agrees, though. James Wharton, the openly gay ex-soldier and author of Out in the Army, resigned his membership from the Conservative Party last week. “I’ve left on a point of principle,” he told me. “I can’t happily continue to spend money on my membership and willingly support the party when it spends that support on partnerships with political organisations who make people’s lives less enjoyable than they might otherwise possibly be.”

    In a statement posted on Twitter and sent to his local Conservative Association, Wharton stated that, “as an active LGBT activist, proud of the direction our party has taken since 2010 where LGBT rights are concerned, I’m upset to see Theresa May establish this arrangement with an organisation so vehemently against gay and trans equality.”

    He accused Mrs May of “throwing thousands of LGBT party members under the bus.” “How am I supposed to convince gay and lesbian friends of mine to support a party so in-bed with homophobia, intolerance, and discrimination? The answer is, of course, that I cannot,” he adds.

     

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • What The 2017 General Election Result Could Mean For The LGBT Community

    What. A. Night.

    Defying all expectations, Jeremy Corbyn increased the number of Labour seats in the House of Commons as Prime Minister Theresa May lost her majority, leading to a hung parliament and casting doubt on Mrs May’s future as the Conservative Party leader. Right now she looks like she’s hanging on by the skin of her teeth, looking to do a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party.

    This is bad news for the LGBT community. The DUP is promising to “make its influence felt” in Westminster. We should all be concerned.

    Back in 2015, I wrote about what a disaster a Tory-DUP coalition would mean for us. The DUP is deeply homophobic; they’ve blocked same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland at least four times and laid down as a “red line” marriage equality as a condition for forming a stable government at Stormont with Sinn Fien, the nationalist and pro-gay marriage party.

    That the DUP is so anti-gay that they’re willing to send Northern Ireland into political turmoil over the issue of marriage should concern everyone. Theresa May looks to form a government propped up by their 10 MPs, and this could mean a hard stop to any progress the LGBT community has made.

    The majority of Tory MPs voted against equalising marriage in England and Wales. When the Conservatives passed mandatory personal and sexual health education earlier this year, they omitted education about LGBT people and issues, despite the fact that Education Secretary Justine Greening is an out lesbian. The Tories themselves don’t have the best record of LGBT equality.

    So put them with the DUP, we can expect a real halt to any progress we’ve made over the past 20 years. Whilst education and marriage are devolved issues in Northern Ireland, the party is so deeply homophobic that it’s easy to imagine the Tories not bringing up equality votes for as long as the DUP is the linchpin in their government. Why risk losing your tenuous majority over an “identity politics” issue? Beyond that, though, the Tories are unlikely to push the DUP to enhance and equalise the rights of the LGBT community in Northern Ireland – the last legally homophobic holdout in the British Isles.

    This becomes even riskier considering Theresa May’s commitment (that wasn’t in the manifesto, by the way) to scrap human rights laws – notably the Human Rights Act – which protect LGBT rights. This is ostensibly to combat terrorism at home, but has implications for LGBT equality (for example, in the armed services). Whether the Tories would let the DUP dictate which LGBT rights protections are enshrined in UK law as we transfer EU law to our domestic books is an unknowable. But considering how much of a red line it is at Stormont (after all, they’re willing to jeopardise Northern Ireland peace to keep gay people from marrying), it’s deeply concerning.

    The Tories don’t have a good record on LGBT equality, no matter how you cut it. Yes, David Cameron introduced equal marriage, but it only passed because of Labour and Liberal Democrat votes. The Conservative Party has improved, but it’s not at the level of “ally” yet. That they’re considering going into coalition with the DUP jeopardises LGBT rights in Northern Ireland and, indeed, England and Wales as EU laws which protect us are written into British law.

    The news of the night isn’t all bad, though. Whilst some gay MPs – such as Tory Ben Howlett, who I interviewed last month – lost their seats, we look set to have at least 30 LGBT MPs in the next parliament. Gay candidates such as Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle increased their majorities, whilst Mhairi Black and Justine Greening clung on with reduced majorities – is welcome news for the community. I don’t have an exact count on how many LGBT candidates were elected, but I hope to do so by this evening.

    In the meantime, the LGBT community – like the rest of the country – waits with bated breath to find out what is going to happen to the country we love. No one knows the answer. If Theresa May does hang on, though, it is incumbent upon her to put the LGBT community’s welfare beyond her own desire for power and to make sure any deal, including with the DUP, does not sacrifice the progress we have made – or the victories we are yet to win.

  • THE BIG GAY ELECTION | Interview: Peter Kyle

    Peter Kyle is used to a fight. He has represented Hove since 2015 – one of the few Labour gains that year. Now he’s standing for reelection against Kirsty Adams, who has come under scrutiny for her views on faith healing and connections to a church which allegedly claims to be able to “cure” gay people.  He has also been famously critical of party leadership, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

    Ever outspoken, THEGAYUK spoke with Mr Kyle last month. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    THEGAYUK MAGAZINE: You were one of the few Labour gains from the Tories in 2015, a real success for the party as the only Labour MP in Sussex. How are you feeling this go-round?

    PETER KYLE: This election has a lot more pressure for me and the team, but a lot less stress. The pressure comes from the fact that there are now a lot of people who are really depending on me and the team to win again. I’m very aware of that pressure. And being only two years in, a lot of people sacrificed an awful lot for us to win the first time, and also to contribute to the work we’re doing here. I desperately want to make sure that I can deliver for them, and that we can keep the whole operation here to serve the community in the way we have.

    But a lot less stress, because in the last election there was a lot of battling with the party who kept sending down a lot of – it was very centrally controlled, and I was rebelling against it all the time, which caused a lot of stress and difficulty for me personally, and some of the people helping me to run the campaign. But this time me and the party are completely on the same page. They’ve been unbelievably helpful and supportive. It feels very different and at times it’s still so surprising because it’s such a swift election, unlike the last one. But I’m certainly relishing it and enjoying it.

    TGUK: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the support you have from the party because last year you called Jeremy Corbyn a “losing leader.” Do you still think that and how have you been handling the issue of the Labour leadership on the doorstep?

    PK: The quote you just referenced actually wasn’t solely linked to Jeremy. When I said that quote, the exact quote was, “I’ll be loyal to a winning vision for Britain, not a losing leader.” And that was in reference to, not just to the situation that the Labour Party was in at the time, which was last summer. It was in reference to the fact that in the past that every time we’ve been asked to be loyal to an individual, and not a vision, then the party has stumbled. I was even referencing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Exactly that point when it shifted from being an agenda and a vision for Britain to “who are you loyal to? Are you Tony’s or are you Gordon’s?” then the whole operation, the whole vision, started to fall apart. So that was what I was getting at that point.

    But I do accept there is some relevance to today, and I’ve never recoiled from the fact that I’ve been critical of Jeremy. I didn’t support him in either of his leadership elections. I supported other candidates. I also voted no confidence in him. So it would be completely ludicrous for me to stand here now and say I wouldn’t rather have another leader leading us into this election because my past shows that I would.

    TGUK: Your majority is only 1,236, which is why I imagine you had so many phone calls so early on. Labour is keen to defend this seat. But the Greens have stood down in Brighton Kempton and the Liberal Democrats have stood down in Brighton Pavilion. Any chance they could stand down in favour of you, and would you welcome their support – especially given your opposition to Brexit?

    PK: Well also, don’t forget UKIP have stood down in Hove. You’ve got UKIP, you’ve got Liberals, and you’ve got the Greens all doing deals behind closed doors, and all trying to tell their own supporters whom they should vote for. And then we have the Labour Party, which is the only party which is going out there and just meeting the public and selling a vision to the public and letting the public know who they are, what we stand for, and what we will do if we win their trust. For me, politics starts in a community and it ends in a community. Before I became an MP, I’d set two charities up and I got a doctorate in community development. For me, it is all about the community. The idea that I would try to earn votes by disappearing off into a meeting room and doing a deal is a complete anathema to everything I believe politics should be about, which is about establishing a relationship and earning trust. So I know there is a lot of sort of game playing going on, but at the end of the day, I just think it’s residents and voters who own democracy. It is not political parties.

    TGUK: To piggyback off that, though, doesn’t it sort of make sense if your primary objective is to defeat the Tories to form these electoral pacts? Or is that not your primary objective?

    PK: Well it’s so seductive, and I understand why. But I can’t, as a Labour Member of Parliament or representative go to a voter who has voted for me in the past and say “I want you to vote for someone else.”

    TGUK: Well no, in this case, they would be saying “vote for Peter!”

    PK: No I realise, but I think when you’ve spent so much time door-knocking and talking to people, our job is to get out there and earn the votes. People have fractured and supported different political parties for a reason… And just think – if I was a voter having my dinner and listening to a political party just using my vote as a pawn, as a trading block, as you know, horse-trading my vote. I know exactly how I would feel. It would absolutely drive me crazy that someone would take my vote and assume they can trade it, when I’ve never even met the person. I don’t understand what’s driving it. Can you understand how completely frustrating this would be – or is – for people? …I didn’t go into politics to disenfranchise people and to take the vote away. I went into politics to earn peoples’ votes. So the idea that people could be left with no alternative but to sit at home and not vote for anybody, I don’t know. It’s just, you know, that’s why we can go ‘round and ‘round in circles or we can just do it the old-fashioned way, which is what I like doing. Get out there in communities, tell people who you are, listen to people – because listening is the single most powerful tool in politics – and then put your values and principles to task to solve their problems that they tell you about. For me, it’s simply that straightforward.

    TGUK: Well one of your values has been, as you’ve said, very pro-European. You were against triggering Article 50, even after the referendum vote. Why?

    PK: Because I didn’t see that our country is ready to start the process. And every day since has vindicated the decision I took there. What I was not doing was trying to stop the process of leaving the European Union altogether. What I was doing was just trying to say that if we start this process now, I believe there is a likelihood that my community will be damaged by it, either economically or socially.

    TGUK: So you don’t subscribe to the “now or never” philosophy?

    PK: No. No. We do this when we’re ready because it’s massive. It’s unprecedented. At the time of triggering Article 50, to the best of our knowledge, the European Union has 600 specialist trade negotiators and 3000 support negotiators. As of the latest data coming from our government, we had zero. So we only started hiring trade negotiators late last year. So they could only have been in post a couple months before we start the most complicated set of negotiations our country has ever faced in our history. So is it right to start it at that point, or should we wait a couple months until the team is ready, we know what our negotiation stances are, we understand the breadth of this, this huge endeavour we’re about to undertake. I think it was wise just to wait to get it ready. Triggering Article 50 by the end of March was just totally arbitrary. A totally arbitrary date that Theresa May plucked simply for political expediency and not based on what would get the best results for our country. So could I just blindly walk along with that? I couldn’t.

    TGUK: So much of LGBT equality, from the equal age of consent to military service, was accomplished through European mechanisms (the European Court of Human Rights or the European Court of Justice, in particular). Brexit doesn’t pull us out of the European Court of Human Rights, but the Tories have made overtures to repealing the Human Rights Act in the past. What does Brexit mean for LGBT rights in the UK?

    PK: Well, we already know that Theresa May has said she wants this election to strengthen her negotiating hand with the European Union, in the negotiations. But instantly she has started to talk now about overturning things like the fox hunting ban. So we know for a fact that she is going to use this strong mandate not just for the negotiations. She’s going to use this overwhelming power that she has asked and demanded from the British public to turn the clock back to please people who are ideologically conservative. And what worries me is that we now have this strand of conservatism in this country which is being led by Republican conservatism in the US. It’s starting to talk very openly about small-c conservative values, which include some elements of religious values. I’ve had now several times people starting to talk to me again about whether we should look again at gay marriage.

    TGUK: Are these people on the doorstep?

    PK: Not many. But it’s now – one person has suggested to me that liberal values like gay marriage was one of the reasons they voted for Brexit, and that they’ve been kind of allowed to believe that by UKIP and some conservative elements within the Tory party. So we need to make sure – I think what we need now is a period where we really defend what we’ve achieved in the last couple decades.

    I went to high school in the 80s and I remember vividly Section 28 being read out in school. We were reading a book and the teacher had to read a text that basically clarified that by reading this text they were in no way condoning the actions of the two characters. That’s a state comprehensive school in Sussex. So to go from that which led up to 1996, and then suddenly in 1997 to have such a swift pathway towards a whole bunch of things, using the European Union and civil society campaigning groups like Stonewall and all of the other local ones which were incredible.

    We had such rapid progress that I understand some people were unsettled by it, because rapid change always unsettles people. But we now need a period where we’re not just looking to what we need to achieve in the next ten years.

    TGUK: Her Majesty just gave royal assent to mandatory sex and relationship education, but it doesn’t include LGBT people. My question is are we ever going to have LGBT-inclusive PSHE?

    PK: A school in my constituency here has won a Stonewall Award for equality in education. One of the other schools here has a gay group where – it’s very interesting, it’s not just for students who are gay. It’s for other students to show support for or learn how to talk about gender or sexuality in, not in a sensitive way, but in an inclusive way. I sat in and observed one of these groups and it was absolutely inspiring. Young people sort of, I don’t know, they have a particular way of dealing with these issues which is for people of my age, in their mid-40s, is quite emotional because it’s just so profoundly different to how it was done in my day. Well, it wasn’t done in my day. I grew up, I didn’t know another gay person growing up. So when you read this Section 28 stuff, it has this profound impact on you because you can’t really go talk to anyone else and ask “how do you feel about this?” It was a very isolating experience, whereas in progressive schools now and I believe in a majority of parts of the country now, having a diversity challenge – whatever it might be- is becoming a much more inclusive and shared experience which you can talk about openly and share, even if it’s not an experience shared by others, if you know what I mean?

    TGUK: You’ve advocated outlawing sex in return for housing accommodation – something many people undoubtedly support. But what does this trend tell us about the state of housing in this country, and what can Labour do to fix it?

    PK: Well I mean I live in Brighton and Hove where we have an absolute housing crisis and because not only do we have a housing shortage, we are short by about 13 or 14 000 homes. On top of that, we’ve got two universities. We have a very specific challenge and I think we’re an outlier city when it comes to housing, because other cities are moving in the same direction and we need to be really upfront and honest about this.

    What that means is we have some people who are being made vulnerable by it and these are people who are, I say that young people who grew up in a family with assets will always succeed. If people grew up in a family where the parents own the housing, they have assets, they have capital, then they’re going to succeed in life. But increasingly people who don’t have capital are going to struggle. So if you’re talent rich but capital poor you’re going to really struggle in life, and these are the people who are becoming increasingly susceptible to exploitation. And the sex for rent is the latest incarnation of it.

    The solution is quite simple: we need to build more houses. In a city like Brighton and Hove, we need to build more houses for people who are growing up here, have a connection to the city, because 40 percent of the housing transactions here go to people from London.

    TGUK: I hesitated to bring this up, but I have to ask, what do you make of claims your Tory opponent, Kirsty Adams, believes she healed a deaf man by laying hands on him and praying? Could faith healing replace the NHS?

    PK: The thing that worries me more than this being uncovered is the fact that she did an interview last week where she refused to answer questions about her faith, and she refused to even answer the question about whether she had faith because she said it’s a private matter. I believe that is much more of a worry than the claim to have healed someone by laying her hands on them. The reason is this – if you stand up in front of sixty or seventy thousand people and say “I want to be your advocate, I want to be your voice in the House of Commons,” people need to know what motivates you, what drives you, what is your decision making process?

    That’s why I think it’s absolutely fair for people to ask me if I’m gay or not. I think the line gets blurred when people ask about your history or your sexual history or more intimate details. Then the line gets blurred. Obviously, there is a limit. But faith, sexuality, family background, these are all things that speak to who you are and how you make decisions and what gets you out of the bed in the morning and motivates you in life. These are fundamental parts of your being, and therefore to refuse to even discuss it or acknowledge it in public worries me far more than claims that she can cure the deaf.

    TGUK: What’s the biggest issue facing the LGBT community in this election?

    PK: Hate. I think it’s hate. I think there is, something has happened in our community, in our society in the last few years. I think politicians should use the platform they have to bring people together. Yet in the last few years, very unusually in British politics because – Karl Marx said that Britain is the rock on which the waves of revolution break. And he was right about that, at least. We’re not a revolutionary society. We are actually a phenomenally accepting community.

    Indeed, we accepted him when every other country repelled him. But recently, unusually for us, we’ve had people who have exploited difference for political gain and have actually driven a wedge between groups of people by age, by gender, by sexuality, you know?

    Nigel Farage choosing to sew the seeds of fear about HIV, people living with HIV, during an election period is one of the most hateful things I’ve ever experienced in my life. Instantly when I saw him do it brought tears to my eyes. Tears of anger. That is something we have to stand very firm against because I think it is still there. There are some who are still doing it. And there are some in our society who are susceptible to the lure of the simple answers the peddlers of hate have. And that makes us as a community, as an LGBT community, extremely vulnerable.

     

  • THE BIG GAY ELECTION | Week in review, we’re in the home stretch!

    With only two days before the nation votes, we again stand in the shadows of tragedy. The terrorist attacks at London Bridge and Borough Market on Saturday have proven another unexpected development, changing the narrative of an already convoluted election. What Theresa May billed as the Brexit election when she announced it back in April has quickly become the security election. Both the Prime Minister and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have faced criticism over their records on terror and security – Mrs May for cuts to policing and intelligence failures on her watch, and Mr Corbyn for his links to the IRA and other terrorist organisations.

    It’s easy to look at what happened over the weekend – and in Manchester last month – and lose sight of other issues as they pale in comparison. But alas, there are stories worth bringing your attention to as we enter the home stretch of election 2017 – which has proven to be gayer than we ever thought possible.

    That could be down to something in the water. That is, at least according to Susan King, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Telford. In a web chat with the Shropshire Star last week, Ms King – a former anti-fluoride campaigner – claimed “there are a lot of feminising hormones getting into the environment and that has to be taken into consideration.” As if that weren’t a peculiar enough statement for a parliamentary candidate to make, Ms King continued by adding that “it’s affecting people’s sexuality basically,” whilst insisting that “people are at liberty to interpret how they want to live themselves.”

    The notion that British water is making people gay has attracted a lot of criticism, not only because many people think it’s borderline homophobic but because it’s also just quite daft. In a way, though, I kind of wish our water were making people gay. Maybe then I could marry Prince Harry.

    Of course, then Caroline Ansell might try to cure us both. Ansell, the incumbent Conservative candidate in Eastbourne, accepted funding for an intern from the homophobic and transphobic Christian Action Research and Education (CARE) charity. According to the Metro, CARE funded a conference on conversion therapy back in 2009. It shouldn’t be so surprising that Ansell would take money from CARE,  as she is also a member of the Kings Church Eastbourne, which the Metro reports is a part of anti-LGBT churches that preach gay people can be “cured.”

    Another church that allegedly believes gay people can be “exorcised” of the demons of same-sex attractions is Jesus House, a fast growing church in London. Last week, Theresa May stopped by to worship with its controversial and anti-gay marriage pastor, Agu Irukwu. Pink News reports that Pastor Irukwu wrote in 2006 that the Sexual Orientation Regulations was “the latest discrimination against Christians” and that it would “force Christians… to accept and even promote the idea that homosexuality is equal to heterosexuality.” (Spoilers: it didn’t.)

    If it seems I’m beating up on the Tories and Liberal Democrats here, it’s because they’ve given me the most fodder over the past several weeks. I’ve been keeping a keen eye out for any interesting gay gaffes, and other than Kezia Dugdale telling people to vote for the Tories (seriously, that’s a really bad electoral strategy, Kezia), Labour has been fairly gaffe-free on issues of equality. The Tories, with their notoriously checkered history on issues of equality, are continuing to experience growing pains as they try to balance their conservative base with their more progressive front bench (and a more enlightened electorate). The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, literally started and ended this campaign talking about gay sex.

    When we wake up on Friday morning we could have the gayest parliament in history. The last parliament already saw a world record number of gay MPs. Yet in a report for Pink News, Professor Andrew Reynolds of The LGBT Representation and Rights Research Initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill predicts that “the gains made by LGBTQ candidates in June 2017 will outweigh any losses.” According to Professor Reynolds, there could be as many as 24 new LGBT MPs elected of the 147 openly LGBT candidates standing this year.

    So all and all, not a bad gay election. Of course, I don’t know who is going to win on Friday (the polls show Labour pulling close, but it’s still likely to be a Tory majority), but I do know that this election has been more of a whirlwind than any in my lifetime. I’m kind of glad it’s almost over, and I live for politics, so I can’t imagine how you must be feeling. Just hang in there and know that no matter who emerges as Prime Minister at the end of the week, THEGAYUK Magazine will be there to bring you all the details.

    [os-widget path=”/thegayuk/who-should-i-vote-for” of=”thegayuk” comments=”false”]

     

    Opinions expressed in this article may not reflect those of THEGAYUK, its management or editorial teams. If you’d like to comment or write a comment, opinion or blog piece, please click here.

  • THE BIG GAY ELECTION | Week in review, manifestos and more

    After a few sombre days of mourning the victims of the Manchester attack, the Conservative and Labour are back on the campaign trail

    With less than two weeks until the country votes on the 8th of June, you can bet they’re ready to make up for lost time and make their final pitches to the public.

    The biggest political story of the past two weeks is undoubtedly the release of the party manifestos. Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives all released their manifestos last week. I blogged about what they pledged to the LGBT community for HuffPost UK, while THEGAYUK’s editor-in-chief, Jake Hook, put together a quick guide for your easy reference.

    Labour and the Lib Dems specifically made pledges to the LGBT community, but the Tories didn’t mention us once. This is, to put it bluntly, unacceptable. Regardless of political position, that one of the major parties—never mind the Prime Minister’s party—would neglect to mention the LGBT community or make any specific pledges to us seems almost unfathomable. It is yet another gaffe in an already controversial Tory manifesto, which has seen the Prime Minister U-turn on her plans for a so-called “dementia tax” (which would use the homes of deceased dementia sufferers to subsidise the care they received whilst alive).

    Why the Conservatives didn’t think to include us in their vision for the country is beyond me, but it’s nothing short of an astonishing. This is all the more galling when you consider that UKIP, of all parties, managed to remember us when they controversially released their manifesto yesterday, ahead of the resumption of campaigning by the other parties. Granted, they only mentioned the LGBT+ community in a pledge to “test the social attitudes of migration applicants” towards women and gay people.

    Whilst this sounds nice on the surface – nobody wants a bunch of raging homophobes coming into the country – many on social media have pointed out that a lot of UKIP’s own members wouldn’t pass this test. In the last week alone it was revealed that Iain Kealey, the UKIP candidate for Bristol South, once compared gay people marching against Islamophobia as “Jews for Hitler,” whilst their candidate in Witney has a penchant for referring to our community as the “gaystapo” and allegedly has ties to those who practice gay conversion therapy. Oh, and he’d like to repeal gay marriage.

    UKIP wasn’t the only party with a gay cure controversy though. The conservative candidate in Brighton and Hove, Kirsty Adams, is reported to have links to a church that believes LGBT people are possessed by demons, which they then try to cast out. Ms Adams, who is standing against openly gay incumbent Labour candidate Peter Kyle, refused to say she doesn’t believe in the practice of casting out demons, but did say she has “never been homophobic” and supported equal marriage. “I am committed to all forms of equality,” she said in a statement.

    Never mind casting out demons, though. Some trans people won’t even be able to cast a vote. The deadline to register to vote was Monday night, but as Pink News reported, several trans people were having issues registering after they legally changed their names or had protected National Insurance numbers (which some trans people opt for so their gender identity is less likely to be revealed).

    If they do manage to vote and live north of the border, Kezia Dugdale – the out leader of Scottish Labour – has a novel suggestion for how they should vote, and it isn’t for her party. Ms Dugdale came under fire from many on the left when she seemingly encouraged some constituencies to vote Conservative in an effort to defeat the Scottish National Party. “The reality is the vast majority of seats across Scotland, it’s only the Labour party that can beat the SNP,” she told Sky News, before adding “there are a few differences in the Borders and the Highlands where the Tories might be better placed…” Suggesting people vote for your opponents is a novel way to win seats, but takes all sorts, I suppose.

    Meanwhile, another out lesbian north of the border – the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson – has made the exact same pitch. That is, she’s asking Labour voters to support the Tories to oust the SNP. Of course, the SNP holds all but one of the constituencies in Scotland, so they’re unlikely to be completely wiped out. But Davidson’s Scottish Tories are doing remarkably well, currently polling in second place – their best showing in decades. They look poised to pick up at least one or two Scottish constituencies.

    Meanwhile, back in England, the Liberal Democrats faced a backlash from their own members for an allegedly transphobic poster. “Vote her, get him,” says an image depicting Nigel Farage’s face imposed upon Theresa May’s body. According to the Telegraph, the chair of LGBT Lib Dems, Jennie Rigg, tweeted that the sign is “bordering on transphobia” and that the press team was “making her life difficult.” This is on top of the brouhaha that erupted earlier in the campaign when Lib Dem leader Tim Farron took weeks to publicly say that no, gay sex is not a sin. Judge for yourselves whether the image is transphobic:

    In yet another bit of bad news for the Lib Dems, former Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes – who is openly bisexual – was reported to the police by his Labour opponent, the incumbent MP Neil Coyle who defeated Mr Hughes in their Bermondsey constituency in 2015. In leaflets which allegedly looked like newspapers, Mr Hughes claimed Mr Coyle was being investigated for abusing members of his party’s staff, which Mr Coyle categorically denies.

    Despite his sexual orientation, Mr Hughes has a spotty history when it comes to LGBT+ rights. He led a notoriously homophobic campaign against gay rights activist Peter Tatchell to win his constituency in 1983. More recently, he refused to vote for same-sex marriage, instead abstaining from the vote whilst outlining his opposition to same-sex marriage in a 2013 blog for the Liberal Democrat Voice. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

    On that note, I’m off to make some enemies of my own by knocking back a few pints and challenging my local bartender to an ABBA sing-off. Blame the demon homosexuals in me, I guess. Until then, stay strong and stay fabulous.

     

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