Skip to main content

Far too simplistic, Simon

On the 16th of August, Simon Fanshawe wrote a piece in the Guardian advocating the need for gay choirs to move away from camp and try and focus a bit more on quality of performance; Something I, as a member of a gay chorus (the biggest in Europe), completely agree with.

In the same article, Mr Fanshawe made a few comments about what it is nowadays like to be gay in Britain. I did not agree to this and was not the only one:
Far too simplistic, Simon

I am fed up with Simon Fanshawe thinking he is being clever by sucking up to his straight friends (Telling tales, August 16). It may be fine for a writer and broadcaster who lives in Brighton to pontificate as he does, but for the rest of us being gay is still fraught with threat and difficulty, as well as joy and love. He needs to expand his gay world view and realise that all is still not well.

I would suggest he: try being a gay man who is a teacher, a builder, unskilled, or a professional footballer; a young gay man in one of our schools; a gay man who prefers hip-hop to opera, or football to ballet; a gay man who lives outside a major city; a gay man who, outside one of our few "gay-tolerance zones", wishes to display the same signs of public affection to his partner that heterosexuals daily take for granted; a gay man who wishes to marry his partner in a church, temple or mosque; a gay man who wants to give blood; a gay man born into any family or community where homophobia still runs rife, where abuse and violence remain a day-to-day reality.

In fact, try being any gay man who does not inhabit the cocooned world of Simon Fanshawe.
Paul Patrick
Burnley
Paul Patrick, an aquaintance of mine, is the co-chair of Schools Out and is also involved with LGBT History Month.



Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at

Rev. Peter Mullen's Blog

Rev. Peter Mullen is the chaplain to the London Stock Exchange and the rector of St Michael's Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City. Rev. Peter Mullen was also until recently a blogger. Sadly the result of his cyber labour seem to have been deleted but Google has thankfully cached some of it and I have saved a copy for posterity, just in case. The deletion of Rev. Mullen's writings might just have something to do with the fact that last week, the Evening Standard and then the Daily Mail published an article (the same article actually) about some of those very writings (even though the elements of said writings being quoted had been published in June this year, at the time of the blessing ceremony which took place between two members of the Church of England in St Bartholomew the Great - picture ). In the article, we learned what the Rev. thinks about gay people and what should be done to them: We ["Religious believers"] disapprove of homosexuality

Liam Messam and Tamati Ellison Swap Jerseys

I am having a bit of a vacuous evening looking at images of pretty rugby players. Addidas, with its latest viral campaign, Jersey Swap , seems to be squarely aiming at the gay market with a selection of five antipodean rugby players, visitor to the website can select and see take their tops off and... well... swap jersey (those interested can create posters too). My favorites of the bunch are Liam Messam and Tamati Ellison . The pictures of their pretty faces and bulging naked torsos (excuse me while I sit down for a second!) included to this post should tell you why. A job well done for Addidas. This will go round the Internet for a while, I think.