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As a boy growing up in the 1960s and 70s I was raised to fight the second world war all over again. Airfix models. Commando comics. Air tattoos in June. Watching The Battle of Britain and The Longest Day on telly with my dad, just so I’d know what to do if I ever found myself pinned down on a Normandy beach or with an Me109E on my tail.

All of which made me easy prey to an RAF recruiting film about a buccaneer squadron training sortie from Gibraltar, set to a Vangelis soundtrack. I promptly signed up to the air cadets and spent Tuesday afternoons and a week or two in the summer hols wearing itchy shirts and a Frank Spencer-style beret, learning how to march without falling over. I loved it, and would probably have signed up for the real thing if it hadn’t been for a sixth-form flirtation with Quakerism….

Read ‘A backwards salute to recruitment films’ by Mark Simpson in today’s Guardian.

By Mark Simpson

So the Scots Nationalist Party has failed in its court action to force the BBC to include their leader Alex Salmond in the final TV leaders’ debate. Everyone south of the border in politics and the media seems to be very much agreed that this was the ‘right’ outcome. Except for this Englishman. Not least because of the breath-taking, downright imperious hypocrisy of the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg.

Clegg couldn’t wait for the court decision. He claimed a few days ago that Salmond was “stamping his foot on the sidelines in fury that he’s not on this debate programme. The broadcasters have arrived at the particularly reasonable position that the debates should be held by the three people fighting this campaign up and down the UK.”’

A ‘particularly reasonable decision’ because the chief beneficiary was Nick Clegg – someone who, if you remember, was mostly stamping his foot on the sidelines until he appeared on the TV debate himself a few weeks ago, upstaging the other two party leaders and provoking a wave of Cleggmania by calling for an end to the ‘old politics’. Perhaps he’s worried that if Salmond is permitted to appear beside him he might be upstaged by the new boy the way he did Brown and Cameron.

Especially since Salmond has a cheeky, Shrek-like, twinkly-eyed man-of-the-people quality that would probably play very well next to Cameron and Clegg’s silver spooning and Brown’s apparatchik chic. The last thing that Clegg wants is to be out-Clegged.

Of course, none of the three main Westminster parties – or the BBC – want to share the limelight with Salmond on their political X Factor show. David McLetchie, head of the Scottish Tories’ election campaign was equally dismissive of Salmond’s bid, invoking the ‘British’ thing: “It’s British general election. Alex Salmond isn’t a candidate in this British election and he doesn’t want to be prime minister. In fact, he wants to destroy the UK.’

In other words: we don’t want him on the show because he won’t play by our rules. But contrary to how it has been portrayed in the media, this isn’t an American Presidential Candidate debate – this is a party leader’s debate. And Salmond is the leader of a party that has several MPs in Westminster – and is running Scotland.

What these arguments overlook – deliberately – is that post-devolution, and with a party devoted to total independence for Scotland in power at Holyrood, ‘Britain’ as a political project has largely already ceased to exist. This is the really ‘old politics’ that the Palace of Westminster doesn’t want to give up. The Union and the imperial identity it engendered is pretty much a dead letter. We’re just waiting for the decree nisi.  Which admittedly has probably been delayed in the post by the recession – but rest assured a Tory Government in Westminster would certainly help focus Scottish minds on their future again.

North of the border almost no one with a Scottish accent is ‘British’, while south of the border it’s usually a way of not talking about the English – or letting them have their own Parliament, or National holiday. Or in the case of the TV election debates, ‘British’ means two slick, super-posh Englishmen in nice suits laying into the plain Scots guy in a bad one. Which is no doubt part of the reason why Salmond wants to muscle in.

Allowing Salmond on the show would be an acknowledgement of how out of touch the ‘old politics’ really is. It would break the spell of ‘let’s pretend she’s just having a kip’ that surrounds the demise of Britannia. Neither Clegg, nor Cameron nor Brown, nor the British Broadcasting Corporation, want to do that because it would severely puncture their own imperial and imperious self-importance.

Now that it’s clear that the TV election debates effectively are the election campaign, let’s have the SNP in one of them next time – and why not Plaid Cymru, UKIP and, if they win any seats, the English Democrats?  Let’s take an honest look at the crazy-paved, devolved nature of post-imperial 21st Century UK politics. After all, 90 minutes is a very long time to spend watching two Blair impersonators and an automaton audition for the part of Emperor With No Clothes.  Especially without a camp Irish compère to lighten the mood.  Bring on, I say, the political version of Britain’s Got Talent.

Clegg talks a lot about an end to the old politics, the urgency of the need for Proportional Representation and how coalitions are not something to be afraid of, but instead welcomed: politics as complicated, grown-up stuff.   But of course coalition government and PR mean taking ‘fringe’ parties that don’t happen to be the Lib Dems a little more seriously.  It means an end not just to two party politics but also and end to three party politics.  And the fond notion that Westminster is still the centre of the world.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2010

Mark Simpson on the way public information films about policing and justice throw an arresting light on our recent past

The London Times

Some trace the demise of the British way of life to the day when RAC patrolmen stopped saluting. In fact, as Police and Thieves, a marvellous two-DVD collection of historical documentaries on policing and the justice system from the vaults of the Central Office of Information, shows, the rot set in when bobbies stopped wearing skin-tight white gloves.

The reassuring paraphernalia of policing that I remember dressing up in as a kid to play cops and robbers has pretty much disappeared from our streets today, along with kids playing cops and robbers (everyone wants to be a robber). But in The British Policeman, in 1959 to teach the Commonwealth about the Mother Country, is nothing less than porn for hardcore nostagalics. Pointy helmets and chunky handcuffs, shiny whistles, wooden truncheons, police boxes and those white gloves — perhaps intended as a reminder that, as the very received-pronunciation voiceover intones, “The British policeman is a friend to all except the criminal … he is taught that he is the servant not the master of the public.”

And not a high-visibility jacket or stab-vest to be seen. Back then bobbies were a comforting symbol of the order of British society and the invincibility of its class system. This is underlined by the way that no one shown in the film actually speaks: the clipped voiceover speaks serenely for everyone. Today, of course, police are seen only when there’s trouble — if you’re lucky.

Filmed in crisp black and white on a warm sunny day in a Leicester that looks more like Trumpton than a major Midlands industrial town, this was the high summer of Ealing Englishness, before the 1960s ruined everything. The clumsy propaganda of The British Policeman, like many COI films collected here, is easy to ridicule now — and probably was then too — but it also provides a priceless glimpse of a world that now seems at least as quaint and foreign to us as it did to its intended audience.

No one, except the avuncular bobby protagonist of the film, is overweight. Almost everyone in what may soon be Britain’s first majority non-white city is Caucasian, save for a Commonwealth gentleman at the beginning of the film who asks our helpful bobby for directions. Middle-aged women wear scarves like hijabs. Sullen bequiffed Teds hang around all-night coffee stands. Our bobby helps old ladies to cross the road, untangles schoolboys’ fishing lines caught in trees and attends to a pig-tailed girl’s grazed knee. Proving he’s no pushover, he also apprehends a burglar in a donkey jacket, his pocket full of chisels, who practically shrugs and says, “Fair cop, guv”. Only one female PC makes an appearance, turning up to babysit a runaway girl who has been hanging around with the Teds.

This world thought it was going to last for ever, but the end was waiting just around the corner, cosh in hand. In Unit Beat Policing, a 1968 recruiting film, the white heat of technology has replaced white gloves — and bobbies. Filmed in Chester, it’s a celebration of hardware: panda cars, walkie-talkies, central radio control, electric typewriters and “collecting information”, complete with a Z-Cars-style theme tune. A technocratic chief constable enthuses: “A squad car can do the job of five men on the beat. Which in turn allows us to spend more money on technology that saves manpower . . .”

No female PCs are to be seen in 1968 either, but we do see some women pushing prams and a gossipy lady reports a neighbour for being unmarried, living with a girl, not having a job and generally being shifty. By 1973 in another recruitment film, Anything Can Happen, excitement is now the selling point: big sideburns, action, mateyness, sexism: Life on Mars without the irony. While the young male bobby protagonist is now allowed a voice (albeit a slumming RADA one), female PCs are just dumb bait for recruiting male PCs — two years before the Sex Discrimination Act.

In the 1970s the COI started to move away from documentaries and towards the TV shorts that it is most famous for. Bicycle Thefts (1974) stars a suspiciously pretty, fey young man in a fedora and cravat who seems to have inspired much of David Walliams’s oeuvre: “I’d rather not say what was in my saddlebag. It’s personal.”

Police and Thieves also includes some COI documentaries showing the workings of the post-war justice system: Four Men in Prison (1950), Probation Officer (1950), and the remarkable Children on Trial (1946) (pictured). The public-school paternalism of the age is evident in all these films: “At work and at play we expect you to act like men — we run a civilised, high-class community,” says one governor in his welcoming speech to the new intake. But it is a surprisingly enlightened paternalism that has rather more faith in human nature and rehabilitation than we do today. The future turned out to be much more democratic, but also much less forgiving than class-bound Britain, white gloves and all.

Police and Thieves, the COI collection, Vol 1 is released by bfi

Last Sunday’s News of The World carried a ‘JORDAN’S LOVER BOMBSHELL’ expose on Jordan’s ‘hunky cage fighter boyfriend’ Alex Reid.  What was the bombshell?  He’s sexually open-minded.

‘”I’M TRY-SEXUAL: JORDAN’S MAN SAYS “I’LL TRY ANYTHING ONCE!’”’ was the shocking headline for the two page spread. The piece, cobbled together from interviews with ex-friends, and some snaps of him in drag with his mates – obviously for a lad’s night out – did its best to keep the (now old) tranny story going, further undermine his masculinity and suggest that he’s even worse than a tranny – he’s probably a poof! After all, any bloke who says he’s a ‘try-sexual’, even one who doesn’t wear women’s clothes, is obviously a bender….

So far, so NOTW. It is, after all, a famously narrow-minded newspaper catering to people who don’t get much.

But rather confusingly, the front of the NOTW glossy magazine inside the very same edition that mocked and ridiculed Reid for his cross-dressing and daring to step outside prescribed gender roles featured TV celeb Myleene Klaas shaving her face on the front page, the with the come-on coverline: ‘MYLEENE MANS UP! – Tough talking and too feisty even for Cowell. Yes, this girls got balls.’ Inside she poses for a glamorous photo shoot in a suit and a side-parting.

Klaas doesn’t describe herself as ‘try-sexual’ in the interview (though she does talk about comparing ‘boob sizes’ with female friends in toilet cubicles), but if she did it would probably have been presented in the same yay! good on ya! girl power!! fashion as her ballsiness. ‘Try-sexuality’ when undertaken by women now seems, even in the NOTW, to be both a measure of both female empowerment and also their new assertive sexuality.  It tends to enhance their femininity rather than bringing it into (fatal) question.

But when men try to join in the experimentation and step outside gendered sex roles themselves, by for instance cross-dressing or expressing an interest in same-sex fantasy, the opposite appears to be true, at least in the public sphere.  They are merely deviant, ‘gay’ or ‘sad’ – and instantly shorn of their masculinity. A joke.  Even cage fighters. Attitudes towards male bi-curiousness show that for men being ‘half gay’ is tantamount to being ‘half-pregnant’.

This new double standard for male and female sexual behaviour which in contrast to the old ‘stud/slut’ one, penalises men rather than women was documented earlier this year by Canadian sociologists, who found that men were expected to be up for sex all the time – but only very straight sex. Women were allowed much more latitude in both whether they actually wanted to have sex – and what kind of sex they wanted to have.

This double standard is endemic in the UK, as is painfully evident in the recent case of the barmy woman boxer (also Canadian) found guilty of a violent and unprovoked attack on a couple of drunken squaddies at a disco for kissing and dancing with one another and ‘pretending to be gay’ screaming ‘THIS SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED IN THE BRITISH ARMY!’.

Despite being a violent foreign criminal on the run from the law for assaulting British soldiers (from behind) – and moreover a woman who stepped outside of gender stereotypes herself – she was feted by the British popular press as some kind of have-a-go a heroine.

Why? Well, partly because she was quite ‘tasty’ (in the sense of ‘not looking like a dyke’), but mostly because she was punishing men for daring to break the gender rules themselves.

21st century trysexuality is, you see, just for girls.

by Mark Simpson (A shorter version originally appeared on Guardian CIF November 2, 2008)

“It’s better to marry than burn with passion,” declared St Paul. But now marriage itself seems to have become a burning issue – or at least, gay marriage.

The re-banning of gay marriage in California earlier this month with the passage of Proposition 8 has been presented by gay marriage advocates as a vicious body-blow for gay rights. Angry gay people and their allies have protested across the US, some reportedly even rioting. The timely release of the Gus Van Sant movie Milk, about the murder in 1977 of Harvey Milk, the US’s first out elected official, has fuelled the sense of gay outrage and defiance. Surely only a hateful bigot like the one that gunned down Harvey would be opposed to gay marriage?

Gay marriage is the touchstone of gay equality, apparently. Settling for anything less is a form of Jim Crow style gay segregation and second-class citizenship.

But not all gays agree. This one for instance sees gay marriage not so much as a touchstone as a fetish. A largely symbolic and emotional issue that in the US threatens to undermine real, non-symbolic same-sex couple protection: civil unions bestow in effect the same legal status as marriage in several US states – including California. As a result of the religious right’s mobilisation against gay marriage, civil unions have been rolled back in several US states.

Perhaps the lesson of Proposition 8 is not that most straight people think gay people should sit at the back of the bus, but that if you take on religion and tradition on its hallowed turf – and that is what marriage effectively is – you’re highly likely to lose.  Even in liberal California.

Maybe I shouldn’t carp, living as I do in the UK, where civil partnerships with equal legal status to marriage have been nationally recognised since 2004. But part of the reason that civil partnerships were successfully introduced here was because they are civil partnerships not “marriages” (the UK is a much more secular country than the US, and somewhat more gay-friendly too – but even here gay marriage would almost certainly not have passed).

At this point I’d like to hide behind the, erm, formidable figure of Sir Elton John, who also expressed doubts recently about the fixation of US gay campaigners on the word ‘marriage’, and declared he was happy to be in a civil partnership with the Canadian David Furnish and did not want to get married. Needless to say, Mr John wasn’t exactly thanked for speaking his mind by gay marriage advocates.

But amidst all the gay gnashing of teeth about the inequality of Proposition 8 it’s worth asking: when did marriage have anything to do with equality? Respectability, certainly. Normality, possibly. Stability, hopefully. Very hopefully. But equality?

First of all, there’s something gay people and their friends need to admit to the world: gay and straight long-term relationships are generally not the same. How many heterosexual marriages are open, for example? In my experience, many if not most long term male-male relationships are very open indeed. Similarly, sex is not quite so likely to be turned into reproduction when your genitals are the same shape. Yes, some gay couples may want to have children, by adoption or other means, and that’s fine and dandy of course, but children are not a consequence of gay conjugation. Which has always been part of the appeal for some.

More fundamentally who is the “man” and who is the “wife” in a gay marriage? Unlike cross-sex couples, same-sex partnerships are partnerships between nominal equals without any biologically, divinely or even culturally determined reproductive/domestic roles. Who is to be “given away”? Or as Elton John, put it: “I don’t wanna be anyone’s wife”.

It’s increasingly unclear even to heterosexuals who is the “man” and who is the “wife”, who should cleave to the other’s will and who should bring home the bacon. That’s why so many today introduce their husband or wife as “my partner”. The famous exception to this of course was Guy Ritchie and his missus, Madonna – and look what happened to them. Pre-nuptial agreements, very popular with celebs (though not, apparently, with Guy and Madonna), represent the very realistic step of divorcing before you get married – like plastic surgery, this is a hard-faced celeb habit that’s going mainstream.

If Christians and traditionalists want to preserve the “sanctity” of marriage as something between a man and a woman, with all the mumbo jumbo that entails, let them. They only hasten the collapse of marriage. Instead of demanding gay marriage, in effect trying to modernise an increasingly moribund institution, maybe lesbian and gay people should push for civil partnerships to be opened to everyone, as they are in France – where they have proved very popular.

I suspect civil partnerships, new, secular, literally down-to-earth contracts between two equals, relatively free of the baggage of tradition, ritual and unrealistic expectations, would also prove very popular with cross-sex couples in the Anglo world at a time when the institution of marriage is the most unpopular it’s ever been among people who aren’t actually gay. Yes, cross-sex couples can have civil marriage ceremonies, but they’re still marriages, not partnerships. If made open to everyone, civil partnerships might eventually not just be an alternative to marriage. Marriage might end up being something left to Mormons.

Perhaps my scepticism about gay marriage and marriage in general is down to the fact that I’m terminally single. Perhaps it’s all just sour grapes. Or maybe I prefer to burn with passion than marry. After all, St Paul’s violently ascetic world-view which regarded marriage as a poor runner-up to chastity, also ensured that the Christian Church would burn sodomites like kindling for centuries.

Either way, I think it needs to be mentioned amidst all this shouting about gay domesticity that, important as it is to see lesbian and gay couples recognised and given legal protection, probably most gay men (though probably not most lesbians) are single and probably will be single for most of their lives. With or without civil partnerships/unions.

Or even the magical, symbolic power of gay marriage.

Postscript: The Voice of Gay America responds – loudly.

I’m still in shock after watching the handover to the London Olympics in Beijing. Please tell me it was a bad dream and that on your goggle-box you saw something much less horrifying.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson looked like he’d put on his worst suit – sorry, someone else’s worst suit – and slept in it all the way to China.  Adding to his impact, he generally behaved like someone from a Home for the Terminally Bewildered on a rare day out.

As for the show the Brits put on, featuring a morphing red London bus, hordes of annoying dancers – it looked like a Cliff Richard film directed by Brent Council, but less fun.

And then the climax: David Beckham popping out of the top of the bus like Samantha Fox out of a birthday cake, to the tunes of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ warbled by crummy TV talent show winner Leona Lewis in crinolene, stuck on the end of a pole like a dodgy Christmas decoration.

How the world went wild as he showed us his latest cosmetic surgery! (My tranny friend Michelle tells me he’s had his eyes done, the upper bags – and I never doubt her judgement about these things).  Before expertly kicking a ball into the wrong part of the stadium.

It was a complete and utter disaster and embarrassment.  A comedy of errors with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Welcome to London.

No, really, you’re welcome to it.

Well, not quite.

But almost. Someone arrested in the same sting, using the same entrapment who decided to fight the charge – as Craig now wishes he had done – has been acquitted. Somehow I doubt this news story will get much coverage, because as everyone knows that Craig is GUILTY! and GAY! and a HYPOCRITE!, right?

A jury Friday acquitted a Minneapolis man arrested in the same airport bathroom sex-sting operation that snared U.S. Sen. Larry Craig.

Vince Tuzon, 39, of Minneapolis, claimed he couldn’t be guilty of interfering with the undercover officer’s privacy because the officer is the one who invited the invasion with foot-tapping. That is an argument Craig has raised in trying to withdraw his guilty plea.

In Tuzon’s case, a Hennepin County jury agreed.

“My client really feels that he was set up,” defense lawyer Jeffrey Dean said after the verdict. “He stopped in to use the restroom. He was using the toilet when he was essentially bombarded with overtures.”

Dean said his client would not comment, but he said he hoped the verdict would deter similar sting operations.

“The police created a situation where there was none,” he said.

These kind of entrapments of mostly married men like Craig rely on them not daring to contest and go to trial – and who can blame them, given the treatment that has been meted out to Craig by the public and his colleagues once his misdemeanour was made public? Out of 41 men arrested during this sting operation at Minneapolis airport, only two fought the charge. One was convicted, one acquitted.

The haste and undisguised glee that liberals – and gays – displayed in rushing to condemn Craig and their willingness to believe everything the entrapping, toe-tapping pretty policemen had to say – compared to, say, a jury – was much more indecent than anything he was accused of.

But of course, Craig can’t be allowed the benefit of the doubt by liberals because he’s a Republican.

Nor by his own party because they don’t want to seem… liberal.

Larry Craig has decided not to resign from the Senate after all and vowed to fight on, despite a judge’s rejection of his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea to the ‘disorderly conduct’ charge levelled at him after his arrest in that airport men’s room.

‘[the judge rejected that as a good reason to withdraw the plea. Any pressure Craig was under “was entirely perceived by the defendant and was not a result of any action by the police, the prosecutor or the court,” he wrote.’

The police tape flatly contradicts this. The first question Craig asks is ‘Will I have to fight you in court?’ It’s clear his main concern, like most of the married men arrested in these situations, let alone conservative politicians, is avoiding publicity – at whatever cost. The entrapping/arresting officer repeatedly mentions the ‘jail time’ and courts that loom if Craig doesn’t ‘cooperate’ – and plead guilty. In which case: ‘There’ll be a fine. You won’t have to explain anything.’

In fact, the whole of America has demanded – and keeps demanding – Craig explain himself.  To come out – with his hands up.

In the tape, Craig never accepts that he was looking for sex.  The arresting officer becomes hotly indignant when Craig contradicts his version/interpretation of events in the men’s room (interpretation is what it comes down to since this is, in effect, a ‘crime’ of intentionality – or foot-tapping). In fact, he seems outraged that someone could dare to do this. No doubt most of the cop’s victims, horrified at the thought of ‘jail time’, or simply drawing attention to the case by fighting it, comply meekly.

And it was certainly true that Craig was under unusual pressure as his local newspaper was on an (anti) gay witchhunt against Craig.

Even if you consider entrapped, pressured Craig, now denied his day in court, guilty as sin, because you always believe policemen – he’s only guilty of a demeanour.  Something which should not end his career.  Unless of course you think that tapping your feet in a men’s rom is much worse than, say, using female prostitutes (after admitting he used female prostitutes, Senator David Vitter was greeted with a standing ovation in the Senate from his Republican peers).

I say: best of British to Craig in his fight to stay on. Unlike most of liberal America, which jeers at every attempt he makes to fight for his career and name, I don’t suddenly think that sex police are a great thing if they entrap a conservative and then pressure them into an ill-advised confession. Nor should the GOP be allowed to hurriedly flush him like a dirty tissue as they have repeatedly tried to do.

Everyone’s had their fun now and made all their sophomoric Larry Craig jokes – so perhaps American liberals can now wake up to the real issue here and stop scoring cheap shots and show some non-partisan principles.

What’s the real issue? Well, it’s a bigger issue than Craig, bigger than accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ (which often turn out to be. er, hypocritical), bigger than ‘coming out’, and bigger than Republicans v Democrats.

It’s about justice.

Retrosexuality Islamic stylee – which until recently was possibly the only un-ironic or non-fashion-accessorised kind of retrosexuality left – seems to be in a bad way in the Islamic heartland. Medievalism just isn’t what it used to be.

Yesterday’s London Times carries a news feature on what’s termed “Pakistan’s metrosexual revolution”. The local Mullahs’ fatwahs on beauty salons for women as ‘un-Islamic’ appear to have provoked Pakistani men into an inspiring act of solidarity with their countrywomen: they’ve been selflessly queuing up for waxings and facials themselves and splashing out on Western vanity products for their own bathroom cabinets. Male cosmetic surgery and hair transplants are sprouting up everywhere – including on the previously shiny bonces of former Prime Ministers such as Nawaz Sharif who recently tried to return to Pakistan (the bad quality of his implants and dye job led to his immediate deportation back to Saudi Arabia).

Most Pakistani women are not complaining about the locked bathroom door. A survey of 25,000 women found that over half preferred men with “a metrosexual appearance similar to David Beckham” to those with “a rugged appearance”. Though perhaps they just preferred a man who looked like they had David Beckham’s money.

But the most important angle to this news about Pakistan’s ‘metrosexual revolution’ has been missed: it confirms that the most wanted man on the planet after David Beckham – Osama Bin Laden – has indeed been taking refuge in the country as many suspected. In his recent cheery ‘anniversary’ video address, the one exhorting Americans to ‘embrace Islam’, Bin Laden appears to have ordered a 9-11 on that tired-looking grey beard of his seen in previous videos and given some major uplift to his Prophet of Doom look with a trim and a dye that has really helped massacre the years. Who wouldn’t embrace him now? Patently, Pakistan’s metrosexual makeover fever has reached Osama, even in his inaccessible mountain redoubt.

Now all the the CIA has to do is find a cave in on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border within easy donkey-ride of a drug store stocking bottles of Arabian 2000 hair restorer.

by Mark Simpson

Whether or not Idaho’s Senator Larry Craig likes cock or not, following his arrest for ‘lewd conduct’ in a men’s room at Minneapolis airport this week one thing is for sure: a lot of cock has been written about him. Here’s Melissa McEwan offering a typical – if relatively kind – commentary in the Guardian:

‘Voting against the interests of the LGBT community displays either a callous lack of feeling towards people with whom he shares a vested interest, or it’s a hypocritical attempt to ensure his longevity as a politician.’

Call me pedantic, but tapping your foot or putting your hand under a toilet stall partition doesn’t make you particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. Or part of any community with whom you share ‘vested interests’.

Judging by the rush to ‘out’ Craig as a ‘hypocritical closeted gay’ by hordes of callous bloggers and columnists, and the scorn poured on his claims that he’s not gay, it seems that liberals are equipped with even better and stricter sexpolicing instincts than Minnesota’s Finest. Liberals don’t just finger your collar, they finger your soul – divine your innermost desires, make identifications on your behalf and work out what your own vested interests are for you. Even though they’ve never met you or shared a bathroom with you.

After all, Minnesota’s sexpolice, as the (cute, young) arresting officer (pictured above) makes clear in the taped interview with Craig, are not concerned whether someone is gay or not – merely whether they might be soliciting sex in a bathroom. Or whether they respond to their own flirtatious footsie. And by the way, I know I’m being pedantic again, but we don’t even know that Craig was looking for sex in that bathroom. Yes, of course, it seems quite possible, very likely even, but we only have a policeman’s word for it. And liberals don’t usually fall over themselves to believe a policeman, especially when he’s paid to hang around toilets all day like ripe cottage cheese in a mousetrap. Let alone one that seems to have, on the tape, possibly a self-righteous political axe to grind (‘no wonder this country is going down the tubes’).

Unless of course they’re entrapping a conservative politician.

Even if Craig was definitely, unquestionably a dick-craving, tap-dancing cottager, it wouldn’t mean that he was gay, or that he should feel any affinity to the gay community. As safer-sex educators can tell you, rather a lot of men have casual anonymous sex with other men without seeing themselves as gay, or even bisexual. Or Democrat.

Now, you may think them wrongheaded. You may think them closeted and self-loathing and in denial. You may consider them creepy. But that’s just what you think – it’s not necessarily who they are. You may wish the world was a tidier place, where any departure from official heterosexuality was ‘Gay’ or ‘Lesbian’ or ‘Bisexual’ – and proudly identified itself as such – but sexual behaviour isn’t like that. Sexual behaviour into identity doesn’t go. Cripes, desire into identity doesn’t even fit very well. As police officials admit, most of the men they arrest in bathrooms are married (and probably the main reason, along with the repeated threats of jail-time from the arresting officer if they don’t ‘co-operate’ and ‘make it easy on yourself’, why most, like Craig, don’t fight the charge in court).

When married-with-kids Welsh secretary Ron Davies had his ‘moment of madness’, as he described it, on the South London gay cruising ground Clapham Common in 1998 which led to his resignation, there was no ‘hypocrisy’ angle, but he was nevertheless condemned universally in the British press, liberal and conservative alike – not for his cruising, we were told, but for his stubborn refusal to ‘come out as gay’ and ‘face facts’, for ‘his own good’. How considerate of the ladies and gentlemen of the press. But, I wonder, if he had been caught in a red light district would he have been expected to come out as a congenital visitor of prostitutes? Would he have been required to declare publicly that this was the innermost ‘truth’ of who he was? (In the US, Louisiana Senator David Vitter kept his job after recently admitting he used prostitutes.)

If sexuality is a murky business, even what we mean by ‘sex’ is not always as clear as we like to pretend. In the teeth of the state -sponsored witch-hunt by sexpoliceman (and judge and jury) Ken Starr, Bill Clinton’s denial that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky was not simply the lawyerly sophistry or bald-faced ‘lie’ that almost everyone, however they estimated the importance of it, denounced it as being at the time. A good Southern Baptist, Clinton wouldn’t have considered that oral sex constituted ‘sex’ – and in fact he was careful never to have intercourse with Lewinsky. Nor is this simply Baptist, or fuddy-duddy thinking. In the same decade, the American Medical Association found that 60% of American college students didn’t consider oral sex ‘sex’. In other words, probably most of the Americans condemning Clinton for his ‘lies’ were being… hypocritical.

Then again, America is a country that likes to call a toilet a ‘bathroom’ – when there is no bath in it. Or a ‘restroom’ – when there is precious little resting going on. Especially in Minneapolis International Airport.

Now that the shoe is on the other foot (straying under the stall partition) the same kind of sanctimonious solidarity appears to have been ranged against Craig – but with interest. His own party, appalled at the merest whiff of the men’s room, have glanced at the toilet paper stuck to his shoe and run off screaming. Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, just a few days ago, a friend and close political ally, wrinkled his Mormon nose, described the affair in his best Lady Bracknell as ‘disgusting’ and disowned Craig; faced with zero support from his GOP comrades Craig now seems likely to resign. Politically, he’s toast.

Yes, Craig is a Senator for a Party I have no love for, a party which panders to the gay-bashing of the religious right and which launched a criminal war. Craig has supported policies like ‘Don’t ask, dont’ tell’ which drum out men and women from the Armed Forces for less than he was accused of. And yes, he may well be – like much of the Republican Party – pretending to virtues he doesn’t possess. He is, after all, a politician. He may also have lied through his teeth. (Again, he’s a politician.) But I can’t help but have some sympathy for a hunted, rural thing (Idaho is the home of ‘famous potatoes’) and everyone of whatever political stripe in the US appears to want to throw Craig into the nearest deep-fat fryer.

When talking about people’s sex lives, liberals should probably think twice about hurling the world ‘hypocrite’ around with as much relish as conservatives like to use the word ‘immoral’ or ‘pervert’. It’s much the same kind of public shaming. It used to be called stoning. Let him who is without sin cast the first blog.

Moreover, I’d like to venture, somewhat controversially, that ‘hypocrisy’ is a word that has had a bit of a bad press, especially in the confessional culture of the US. What is a ‘hypocrite’ anyway? Someone whose private life fails to match up to his public image? That’s not even the definition of a politician – that’s the definition of a human being. Besides, sometimes hypocrisy might simply be the voice of experience.

Craig may cut a preposterous figure, but what’s even more preposterous is the sight of a long line of liberals forming to hammer on the stall this married-with-grandkids Republican’s been locked in by the media – and his own ‘moment of madness’ – yelling, ‘COME OUT!! YOU’RE GAY, YOU GODDAM HYPOCRITE!! YOU’RE SHOWING A CALLOUS LACK OF VESTED SELF-INTEREST TO YOUR LGBT COMMUNITY!!’.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007