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On the much hyped Question Time debate, BNP spokesman Nick Griffin caused a storm – well, a mild squall, anyway, he’s not really worth a full on gale - by saying that he thinks gay men kissing is ‘creepy’. He hasn’t exactly divided the nation on this subject. There are plenty of people still who would say ‘Who’s Nick Griffin’. That’s political apathy for you! But there are some opinions going around and they seem to be split three ways.

First there are the basically ‘nice’, basically ‘decent’ people who, while not necessarily considering themselves homophobic, and certainly unlikely to vote for the BNP, nevertheless think “kind of”, “sort of”, “well, you know”, that it is a bit odd when they see men kiss each other, and broadly agree with him.



And there is what seems a much smaller camp of people who have no problem with gays kissing whatsoever, who think the act of kissing, of one Human being pressing lips against the lips of another Human being is a beautiful expression of warmth, affection, love, passion, devotion. This group seems to be drowned out at the moment by the other two groups.

Happy, smiling, open display of affection. This would be perfectly socially acceptable for a heterosexual couple.

But anyway, a couple of things struck me about the statement and the reaction. The first was that I disagree completely with his comment, and that he is utterly and completely wrong, and he would still be utterly and completely wrong if he wasn’t a bigot who nobody likes very much anyway.

The second was, actually, he is right. Not, of course, that gay men kissing is creepy, but that a lot of people think – like him – that it is creepy. And I can personally vouch for that. I’ve experienced that reaction a lot more than you might expect, seeing as I’m a woman!

Science fiction kissing! Captain Jack on Captain John!

 Anyone who knows me knows that my laptop goes wherever I go. I am a writer, and I write wherever the mood takes me. And if I stop writing for more than 60 seconds my screensaver kicks in. The screensaver is a slideshow of pictures of my favourite entertainer. For anyone who doesn’t know me, that would be the lovely John Barrowman. I’ve got pictures of him singing on stage, acting in Doctor Who and Torchwood, attending celebrity parties, all the sort of pictures you can find with a concerted Google image search - nothing especially shocking. But among the pictures there are quite a few that are of John and his civil partner, Scott. And of those pictures there some in which they are kissing. The screensaver programme randomises the pictures so you don’t know what’s going to come up next.


Now, I have noticed whenever the  screensaver kicks in, that people will sit watching the pictures change every eleven seconds. When one of the pictures of John and Scott kissing comes up I have noticed their reactions. They vary from a twitch of the face, to a drawing back of the whole body, to a full recoil or exclamations of disgust. These friends of mine, incidentally, range from little old Irish Catholic ladies who I know from volunteering on a Saturday in church to young adults, male and female, who I worked with in another volunteer job during the summer.

The full recoil tended to be from the little old Irish Catholic ladies who were brought up in places where that sort of thing just didn’t happen and couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. They had been happy looking at pictures of a good looking man who they thought had a lovely singing voice and seemed to be rather nice on whatever daytime TV programme they had seen him on recently. When the pictures of John with Scott popped up they said things like ‘oh, they look like brothers’. But the pictures of the two of them kissing left them stunned and confused.

The exclamations of disgust tended to be from the young adult males between 17 and 25 who were perfectly ok with pictures of the star of an action television programme they’ve all watched until they were faced with him kissing another man. These young adults, incidentally, were sitting under one of those big red Stonewall posters with the ‘Some People Are Gay’ slogan on it, and open expressions of homophobia could get them chucked out of the centre. And it is true that they weren’t really being homophobic – as such. Some of them said they had nothing against gays – as such. But when they saw a picture of a gay kiss for eleven seconds their reaction was one of embarrassment, confusion, disgust.

Another straight man kissing a gay man – David Tennant snogs John Barrowman at the 2009 Comic-Con San Diego.

But we all see kissing going on all the time on TV. Not on the aforementioned porn, but in ordinary programmes. It’s on the soaps, it’s on Casualty, it’s on The Bill. It’s on Doctor Who!  TV is where most of us see the most kissing going on, unless we’re lucky enough to have a fair share of it from our significant others. And there isn’t as much of it on TV as some people make out. Even Torchwood only averages one snog for every three episodes. The soaps have had their moments. Coronation Street and Eastenders have had a couple of storylines and the kisses have been headline news. And that’s the problem. If gay kissing wasn’t so rare a sight, it wouldn’t be headline news. It would be just another soap storyline. And if gay kissing happened more often on TV, people might get used to it. They might start to find that latent homophobia falling away.

In short, they wouldn’t agree with Nick Griffin that gay men kissing is “a bit creepy”. They would start to join the camp that thinks people exchanging expressions of affection with each other openly and happily, regardless of gender, is a beautiful thing.

Because it is.

 

I was just reading a new article on Pink News about comedian and TV presenter Paul O’Grady possibly moving to ITV from Channel 4 due to issues about the budget for his show. I was not entirely surprised to see that the very first two words in this article were ‘openly gay.’

A link at the bottom of the page to an old article about Graham Norton possibly taking over O’Grady’s Channel 4 slot begins with the same two words ‘openly gay’.

A few days ago the same two words ‘openly gay’ opened the first paragraph of the report on the tragic death of singer Stephen Gately.

On the same day an article about Stephen Fry’s TV series Kingdom being axed began with the words ‘gay broadcaster’.

Two weeks ago, there was an article about John Barrowman that spawned all kinds of criticisms and comments. The headline of the article was ‘Gay Dr Who and Torchwood Star…” And in the links below was another article about John that opened with “Gay actor…”

At this point let me quote John Barrowman in a Times article marking the anniversary of the Stonewall riots which makes the same point.

“If there’s one thing that annoys me it’s the media that calls me “gay” as a prefix to everything….”

See, even he’s noticed.


Looking further back in the Pink pages I came across further examples of this lazy journalism. These three were one after the other.

“Gay comedian Matt Lucas….”
“Openly gay fashion designer Tom Ford….”
“Gay illusionist Derren Brown….”

And then Graham Norton and John Barrowman popped up again, both still openly gay. As if we didn’t know that. If you took a poll in any high street and asked people to name two gay celebrities chances are those two would be mentioned. Nomad tribes deep in the Sahara who don’t even have a word for gay know that John Barrowman and Graham Norton are gay. Ok, I exaggerate. But you get the point. They’re gay. We don’t need to be told they are every time their names are mentioned in the press.

And it’s the same for the women.

 “Lesbian rock icon Melissa Etheridge…”
“Bisexual singer Lady Gaga…”
“Bisexual actress Megan Fox….”

Has anyone ever seen an article that refers to “openly heterosexual actor Brad Pitt” or “completely straight singer, Beyonce” or “pathologically non-gay politician’s wife, Iris Robinson…”

Heterosexual people are not defined by their sexual preferences. Why are gay people?

Why, especially on a website specifically for the LGBT community, is it necessary to keep using phrases like ‘openly gay’ to describe the subjects of the article?

Even if the article is about the fact that the person is gay, such as the recent one about John Barrowman that we all had such fun with, ‘openly gay’ don’t need to be the first two words in the sentence. They don’t need to be in the title. The subject matter speaks for itself.

It is even less necessary when the article is nothing to do with the subject’s sexuality. Paul O’Grady is not moving to ITV because it is a more gay friendly channel. Graham Norton isn’t going to Channel 4 for that reason, either. Kingdom was axed because ITV has budget problems, not because Stephen Fry is gay. And Stephen Gately, bless his poor soul, didn’t die at the terribly young age of 33 because he was gay. The lazy journalism that pigeon-holes people so conveniently seemed all the more annoying in the articles that covered that tragedy.

If gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals are to have a truly equal place in society with everyone who doesn’t fit into one of those categories, then we all have to stop using easy labels, and it ought to start with the people who write the news, especially those who write the Pink News.

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Roberta

Today the LGBT Network submitted its petition to the Scottish Parliament, calling for the Marriage (Scotland) Act of 1977[1] to be amended to allow two persons of the same sex to register a civil marriage and to register a religious marriage, where the particular faith institution allowed it. In short; to bring marriage equality to Scotland.

The Civil Partnership Act of 2004[2] was passed by Westminster for the whole of the UK. The Scottish Executive consented to Westminster legislating a Scottish section within the Act. When a Civil Partnership is registered, the law mandates that it is performed in a secular manner. Therefore gay people of faith whose religion may wish to celebrate their marriage are not allowed to have that done. Nor does the Act offer any provision for a ceremony to be held when the partnership is signed, as opposed to marriage where words have to be spoken as well as the register signed.

The Scottish Parliament was founded on the value of equality; that every citizen is entitled to the same rights as all others, and to be respected and protected by the government we elect. Although the Civil Partnership Act was and is groundbreaking, the status quo remains that there is one law for straight couples and another law for gay couples. The fact that they have equal status does not detract from the fact that they are separate and different.

If we truly believe in equality; if we actually want to live in a society where citizens are treated the same no matter what their sexuality, then allowing separate but equal to remain the law of the land simply cannot stand. The era of discrimination and segregation based on the colour of a persons’ skin began to be dismantled with the US Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal is inherently unequal.”[3]

Yet more than 50 years later, we are still denied access to the basic institution of marriage in the UK. Instead we have been given something that although is considered equal under the law, is also considered separate. A gay couple that is legally married in Spain or South Africa has thier marriage changed to a civil partnership when they come to the UK. A Canadian couple went to the High Court in 2006, seeking to have their legally valid Canadian marriage recognised as such under UK law, just as heterosexual marriages are recognised no matter where they are performed in the world. Sir Mark Potter, the High Court Judge rejected their plea in Wilkinson v. Kitzinger[4]. In his judgement he stated how civil partnerships were indeed different from marriage, and that the government, in denying gay couples the right to marry, was engaging in a legitimate attempt to protect marriage and family life. He also effectively fined the couple £25,000 by making them pay the governments legal costs.

More recently in October 2008, Lord Bach, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Ministry of Justice reaffirmed the British governments opposition to same sex marriage. He states that when the government passed the bill “we made a distinction in it and did not call single-sex partnerships marriage… it did not call those partnerships marriage, and that remains the Government’s policy.”[5]

That blatant inequality is incompatible with the values of the Scottish Parliament. It conflicts with the principles of Scottish law, and is contradictory to the inalienable rights of every citizen.

The definition of marriage is not static; it changes as our society does. For many centuries, marriage was a mere contract to better the position of one family or to remove rivalry with another. Our interpretation of what constitutes a relationship has progressed from a wife being considered little more than the property of her husband to a partnership of equals; and our society now stands at the point where it affords equal protection to couples regardless of gender. So what then are the reasons for allowing only marriage for straight couples and civil partnership for gay couples? If they are really the same, why are there two different laws and two different forms to fill in at the registrar’s office?

The word marriage evokes timeless values of love and commitment, and it radiates a clarity of status in society as well as a subtle collection of personal, social and spiritual meanings that two people are united in all aspects of their life. Marriage is the strongest word we have for a declaration of total love and commitment to one another; and to deny any person that opportunity is to deny the full measure of dignity and humanity that we are all endowed with.

Can our society not be one where two people decide what status is best for them? Straight couples who wish to get married already get the choice between having a religious or civil ceremony. But of course there are some straight couples who would balk at the thought of even entering into a civil marriage, and would perhaps prefer a civil partnership, free of some of the associations and imagery that marriage brings. Just as how there are gay couples, who embrace the concept of marriage, and wish to celebrate their love by entering into this ancient institution, be that as a civil ceremony or one conducted by a progressive religion.

By denying same sex couples the right to marry on the grounds that some religious groups are opposed to it, enshrines that particular religious dogma into law, and ignores the diversity of faith groups that exist who would willingly marry two people of the same sex. In terms of performing religious marriage, it must be up to that particular faith to decide who to marry, not any government or parliament. Our 21st century state must respect the pluralism of belief and the diversity of faith that exists in Britain.

This petition is but one small step in the road to full equality and participation in every aspect of society. As we have seen from the battles over same sex marriage in the United States, there are those who will spend all they can and will fight to the very last to prevent gay couples being married. This does not mean we should run from the fight. We should not be afraid of standing up for what we believe in just because someone else is preparing to knock us down. And we should never be willing to compromise on our fundamental values, on our basic human rights or on our belief in the morality of equality.

This makes it incumbent on all of us who wish to live in a more equal world that we do not let someone else fight for a right we wish to enjoy. This is not the LGBT Networks campaign for marriage equality, this is simply a petition we thought was a good idea.

The campaign must come from all of us; from the group of friends who debate amongst themselves whether they would really be happy with a civil partnership; from the young person who isn’t happy to accept she is growing up in a country that wont afford her the same rights enjoyed by others; and from the happy couple who go down to the registry office, and instead of asking for civil partnership documents, demand that they be allowed to marry.

Some will say that there are more important things to do, and in some ways that’s true. But we can do more than one thing at a time. Putting your name to a petition or starting a conversation doesn’t detract from anything else that needs done.

But change doesn’t just happen. If we want it, we have to act like it. We have to stand up to those that say marriage should only be for straight people, or that civil partnerships are enough for us or don’t rock the boat to much in case some people don’t agree. Of course there are going to be people who are against this, but we should never shrink from the fight just because we might get hit.

In 2009, the 40^th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, I think about those courageous individuals who fought hand to hand with the police, to assert their right to exist, to be themselves openly and to be with the people they love, free from intimidation and harassment. Their legacy is not the laws that favour us, but our desire, our passion, and our right to be equal.

Nick Henderson

Director, LGBT Network
9/1/09