It’s been forty years since British parliamentarians signed the Sex Offenses Act, thus decriminalizing faggotry. The social sea change helped millions of homos ride on out of the closet. It also thrust homosexuality into the cultural spotlight, making gays – and their sex lives – one of the most talked about subjects in all the land.
Now, British journo Simon Fanshawe wants everyone to “bloody” shut up about the queers and focus on the person, not the sexual position.
How things have changed even since I came out, in 1976. Endlessly now, I get asked on to chatshows and debate programmes to discuss the state of homosexuality. Over a hundred years after the wonderful Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde termed it “the love that dare not speak its name”, it has become the love that won’t bloody well shut up.
Eeks! Do you think he’s talking about us?
Fanshawe argues that rather than focusing on identity politics, we need to be more concerned with human rights – rather than just gay rights:
The time has come for the end of the heterosexual, the end of the homosexual. It was just a phase we were going through. And the only people who believe it any more are the gay identity freaks, the religious nuts and the bigots. Individuality is the new black, don’t you think?
We’d rather say “individuality is the new pink”. It’s better for summer. But otherwise we agree, yes.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Leland Frances
Oh, pish posh. While giving new meaning to the term, “egghead” [bald, myopic, and with patented bad British choppers], and demonstrating what a sciolistic “journo” he is to use a play on words [“won’t shut up”] coined by a homophobe decades ago, and repeated by countless others since [even set to music by a drag queen in the early 90s], Fanshawe is a fool. Yes, yes, by all means, let’s just start talking about “individuality” while clicking our heels together and all those “religious nuts and bigots” [since when is there a difference?] will melt away like a green Margaret Hamilton, no longer trying to inflict upon us a worst fate than his “wonderful Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.”
Thank you, THANK YOU, for enlightening us, whoever you are that we’ve never heard of. Now that all of this is settled, you’re next assignment is to convert all those mean old Islamists. Maybe you should start in Amsterdam.
Crashed
Simon Fanshawe should know that it was Wilde’s fop-tart Alfred Douglas who termed it “the love that dare not speak its name,†not Oscar himself.
Rowen
I hate that whole, “why do we need labels? Can’t we all just be human-becomings together?” bullshit. Labels exist for a reason. There is a fundamental difference between myself and one of my straight male friends, and frankly, I like it that way. No amount of wishing, or delabeling is going to make him become inclined to sleep with men or me to sleep with women.
Paul Raposo
So, to be individuals, we must become homogeneous? Why is it people like Fanshawe never tell straight people to be more like gay people, it’s always the other way around?
BillieXX
What’s the big deal? He’s saying we are more than gay. We can acknowledge our individuality and still fight the homophobes.
Martini-boy
“Eeks! Do you think he’s talking about us?”
No, Queerty, I don’t think he’s targetting the gays specifically. In fact, I think all you guys are way off: he’s in support of labels. Fanshawe is calling not for their abolishment, but for the “toning-down” of the overt attention ‘gayness’ begets — in other words, its spectacularism and moralism.
Hence his targetting of “the gay identity freaks” who see it as the be-all and end-all of their identiy; and “the religious nuts and the bigots” who see it as a way of de-humanizing the gays.
Let the gays be gays, he suggests, but don’t make use of ‘gayness’ for the sake of television ratings or gay bashing.
Mr. B
I think Martini-boy has a pretty relevant point.