marksimpson.com

What a carry on in the dark!

The very widely-reported story of the Avon fire­men dis­ci­plined for bring­ing the Fire Brigade into dis­re­pute and unau­tho­rised use of their fire engine (and torches) is both fnarrr funny and funny pecu­liar. But the most pecu­liar aspect of it, and cer­tainly the most seri­ous, is the light it casts on the minds of news­pa­per editors.

The ‘bare’ facts that can be ascer­tained from the var­i­ous reports are these: on their return to their fire sta­tion, four on-duty fire­men from Avon­mouth Fire Station’s ‘Blue Watch’ (no kid­ding) drove out of their way at night in in a fire engine to a remote cruising/dogging area and shone their very pow­er­ful Fire Brigade torches into some bushes, sup­pos­edly reveal­ing a group of four men involved in ‘a gay sex act’.

Accord­ing to the news­pa­per reports, one of the par­tic­i­pants in this night-time tryst in the bushes illu­mi­nated by the firemen’s torches com­plained to the THT who then con­tacted Avon Fire Brigade. Avon Fire Brigade sus­pended the men on full pay for three months before find­ing them guilty of bring­ing the ser­vice into dis­re­pute, demot­ing, fin­ing and mov­ing them to dif­fer­ent sta­tions and com­pelling them to undergo ‘gay aware­ness’ training.

The Sun, for whom the story was almost tailor-made, devoted most of a page to it: ‘Fire­men expose gay dog­gers’, with the strapline ‘Four fire­men have been car­peted after dis­turb­ing an out­door gay sex romp.’ The Sun sug­gests of course that the case was an exam­ple of ‘polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness gone mad’ (and some of the details, such as the ‘re-education’ of the fire­men appear to lend them­selves to this). It also makes a meal of the ‘crim­i­nal’ nature of the acts these public-spirited fire­men witnessed.

How­ever, per­haps sur­pris­ingly, The Sun, unlike most other news­pa­pers, made some effort to avoid whip­ping up indig­na­tion at the very idea of men hav­ing sex with other men out­doors - e.g. the use of ‘gay romp’ (‘romps’ used to be strictly het­ero in the Sun; gay sex was ‘sor­did’ or ‘sleazy’ or ‘per­verted’) and the inter­est­ing phrase ‘gay dog­ging’ (when dog­ging, a very recent phe­nom­e­non, might actu­ally be described as straight cruis­ing).

Fun­nily enough, The Sun’s sister-with-a-degree-paper The Times, the UK’s paper of record, ran a report that was much more mis­lead­ing, right down to the head­line: ‘Fire­men are dis­ci­plined for dis­turb­ing orgy in bushes’, which in its very ambi­gu­ity (are the fire­man hav­ing the dis­turb­ing orgy?) is rather ‘reveal­ing’. The piece failed to make it clear that the fire­men had quite lit­er­ally gone out of their way in coun­cil taxpayer’s time, in a fire engine bought and fuelled with tax­pay­ers money, to shine their pow­er­ful FB torches on this ‘crim­i­nal activ­ity’ — when they should have been back at the fire sta­tion await­ing a call from a mem­ber of the pub­lic whose chip-fan was on fire.

More impor­tantly, like most reports, it also con­veyed the impres­sion that the (dis­turb­ing) act the fire­men wit­nessed was of course ille­gal and seemed founded on the absur­dity that they should be pun­ished rather than the uppity crim­i­nal ‘gay’. (If you think I mis­read the piece, see the indig­nant com­ments about ‘crim­i­nal gays’ posted at the end — e.g. ‘I am astounded. Fine upstand­ing cit­i­zens, hard­work­ing fire­men who risk there lives to help peo­ple, dis­turb peo­ple in an ILLEGAL act and it is they who get into trou­ble, not the indi­vid­u­als who are behav­ing in an ILLEGAL and immoral way. This coun­try is going to the tubes’.)

The Daily Tele­graph, which doesn’t pre­tend to be as met­ro­pol­i­tan as The Times does these days, man­aged a bet­ter fist of it, despite their equally confusing/revealing head­line: ‘Fire­men rep­ri­manded for dis­turb­ing gay sex act’. The arti­cle seemed like the oth­ers to pre­sume the ‘ille­gal­ity’ of the dis­turb­ing gay sex act, and the out­ra­geous­ness of the uppity gay who com­plained, but, cru­cially, included (in the print ver­sion) a small box at the end by their legal cor­re­spon­dent which con­tained the rather impor­tant point — neglected from all the other reports I saw — that reforms to the law in recent years, doing away with dis­crim­i­na­tory laws that crim­i­nal­ized only sex between men, and intro­duc­ing the con­cept of ‘rea­son­able expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy’, mean that con­sen­sual sex between men — or any­one of any gen­der — in a remote place (in the bushes, at night) isn’t ille­gal.

So the angle pre­sented in the Sun, The Times, the Tele­graph (main story) and the Mail, and in count­less Richard Lit­tle­john style rant­ing blogs — crim­i­nal gays get off (arf) while upstand­ing straight fire­men are pun­ished; strewth, what’s this coun­try com­ing to? — wasn’t an angle at all. Or at least, a highly debat­able one.

Even the ‘gay-friendly’ Guardian, in a lengthy report, failed to men­tion this rather salient fact and con­veyed the same erro­neous impres­sion, despite quot­ing promi­nently, as most if not all of the reports did, an ‘unnamed fire­fighter’ (who wasn’t present on the Downs that evening) com­plain­ing: “This is a com­plete farce. All four offi­cers have been let down by their senior offi­cers when they needed their sup­port the most. They have been treated as the crim­i­nals in this case and it has been com­pletely for­got­ten that they wit­nessed crim­i­nal activ­ity occur­ring in a pub­lic place.”

Umm, nice try mate, but they didn’t. And they didn’t report what you now say they claim they saw, either.

The Telegraph’s use­ful lit­tle box also men­tioned that unwanted voyeurism was poten­tially ille­gal. In other words, if you want to get all hoity toity and talk about ‘crim­i­nal acts’ the fire­men should per­haps con­sider them­selves lucky that they weren’t dis­ci­plined and pros­e­cuted.

It’s dif­fi­cult not to con­clude that the fire­men, homo­pho­bic or not, were in that place at that time of the night shin­ing their torches around in the bushes because they wanted a cheap thrill. They were dog­ging them­selves — but on our time. (Though of course we now get to dog as well by read­ing the news­pa­per reports.) If they had observed the usual eti­quette of such places and not shone their bloody torches in everyone’s eyes to get a bet­ter butch­ers no one would have com­plained and they wouldn’t have got into trouble.

As some­one who has been cruis­ing in such places myself in the past and know how long it takes to get your night vision back after being blinded by some idiots undipped head­lights, I think they deserve every­thing they got.

But the news­pa­pers deserve much, much worse for their dere­lic­tion of duty.

As part of the same mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the story, most of the reports refer to the (anony­mous) four men sup­pos­edly involved in the pub­lic sex scene unequiv­o­cally as ‘gay’ or (in The Times) ‘homosexual’.

How do the news­pa­pers know this as a fact? Were they there in the bushes them­selves? Would this have even helped? This was, after all, a pick-up area, we’ve been told, pop­u­lar with ‘gays’ and ‘straight dog­gers’. Even exclu­sively ‘gay’ cruis­ing areas, if there are any left now that straight dog­ging has become so pop­u­lar, are not that gay, which is, after all, the point of them: they appeal to mar­ried and bisex­ual men, and men who regard them­selves as straight but like a bit of cock every now and again.

And from what I’ve seen of dog­ging, quite a few ‘straight dog­gers’ will get involved to some degree with the all-male action if it’s a slow night — or at least have a good look if someone’s putting on a show. Dog­ging by its very nature tends to wan­der out­side the the usual bound­aries of ‘straight’ and ‘gay’.

Besides, the claim that the fire­men wit­nessed any sex at all, let alone a ‘gay orgy’, is just that, a claim, not a fact as pre­sented by the news­pa­per reports. A claim which seems to have been made only after the fire­men were dis­ci­plined, and by a dis­grun­tled fire­men chum who wasn’t even present that evening. In other words, it’s about as dubi­ous a claim as you could imagine.

So the widely-reported ‘fact’ that it was one of the ‘gays’ tak­ing part in the ‘illegal’ ‘public’ ‘gay orgy’ who con­tacted the THT - and the basis of all the tor­rents of right­eous indig­na­tion - is actu­ally pure fan­tasy.

Absolutely noth­ing is known about the man who wanted to know what the fire­men where doing there at that time of night other than what the THT has put in the pub­lic domain as they were the ones who pre­sented his con­cerns to the Avon Fire Brigade. They (con­firmed in an email to me) have made no state­ment about his sex­u­al­ity — and the THT doesn’t ask any­way. Or about what he was doing on the Downs. And he didn’t report any sex­ual activ­ity to them.

So:

a) the sex­u­al­ity of the ‘gay’ who rang the THT and was sub­jected to national vil­li­fi­ca­tion is in actual fact as unknown as his iden­tity and

b) the only source for the ‘fact’ that he was part of a ‘gay orgy’ is the dis­grun­tled chum of the dis­ci­plined fire­men who wasn’t there that evening. And even if he had been, how the blazes would he know who had con­tacted the THT?

It seems to me that on this one, everyone’s in the dark, thrash­ing around the bushes with their pants down.

—–

An excel­lent piece by Rachel John­son dis­sect­ing the far­rago, set­ting the legal record ‘straight’ and and going some way to restor­ing The Times’ hon­our appeared the day after I posted this blog.

UPDATE 2008: PCC Com­plaint

I decided to shine a torch of my own around and referred this wide­spread mis­re­port­ing to the PCC. Sur­pris­ingly, the sec­re­tariat took up my com­plaint. They don’t usu­ally do this if you are not the party con­cerned (in this case the party con­cerned would be the dog­gers and/or the anony­mous man who con­tacted the THT).

But I explained that as some­one who has vis­ited such places in the past the wide­spread mis­re­port­ing of the state of the law in regard to out­door sex crim­i­nalised me — and made me and oth­ers more likely to be attacked by vig­i­lantes etc. As a result, a few offend­ing news­pa­pers includ­ing Metro and The York­shire Post printed let­ters from me cor­rect­ing their report­ing. The Daily Mail of course refused any such res­o­lu­tion. Despite being the biggest offender — and run­ning a col­umn by Lit­tle­john on the mat­ter which stated as fact that ‘out­door sex is ille­gal’ and essen­tially encour­ag­ing attacks on men who have sex with men outdoors.

In the case of the Daily Mail, the PCC Com­mis­sion (i.e. a panel of national news­pa­per edi­tors, includ­ing the edi­tor of the Daily Mail) ruled against me — stat­ing that there was not a ‘sig­nif­i­cant’ breach of their reg­u­la­tions — and any­way, I was a ‘third party’.

In other words, they couldn’t deny that the story and the legal posi­tion had been mis­re­ported, but it wasn’t worth upset­ting one of their biggest chums over.

Oh, and the Com­mis­sion insisted on refer­ring in its judge­ment repeat­edly to the ‘gay men’ tak­ing part in ‘an orgy’, despite it hav­ing made it quite clear to them that nei­ther of these state­ments were fact but merely loaded opinion/prejudice. Their response to that was to state that ‘because these men were men hav­ing sex with one another [sic] it is rea­son­able to assume they were gay’.

Fal­lacy based on false­hood is an irre­sistible force. At least when it comes to the great British press.