To blog or not to blog

I’ve had a somewhat musical few days one way or another although at times deteriorating into discord and approaching cacophonous, but I shall start with something altogether more melodious. Let me confess a guilty sin: as I was growing up I was a huge fan of ABBA and listened to their music pretty much constantly. Don’t hate me – I was young, impressionable and had a crush on Bjorn! Coming out as an ABBA fan was a somewhat brave thing to do, when considered in the context of my peer group and the bullying I endured at school. I could have made my life easier by liking Adam and his Ants or Dire Straits, Duran Duran, Genesis or OMD, but oh no, I had to go for the group with the least possible street cred and the worst stage costumes ever designed. I was a bully’s wet dream, pre-packaged and offering all the ammunition they could ever need. Even I will admit that I was a misfit, speaking with a non-indigenous accent, short, unsporty, academically engaged (or a ’swat’ if you prefer)  and struggling with my sexuality; I was bound to be a target and the slings and arrows of outrageous children found their mark. What do you do when all the kids are calling you a puff and you think they are probably right? So I escaped into art and music; headphones cut out the taunts and I took my comfort there. Don’t pity the child though as those experiences have made the man. Music gave me the escape I needed; I remember the euphoria of hearing that a new album or single was due for release and the excitement of getting the train from the village where we lived into Middlesbrough on a Saturday morning with my saved-up £5 note and a ritualistic trawl around Woolworths, WHSmiths and Our Price to see which shop sold the album at the best price. Then the decision – cassette or LP? Record departments had their own unique smell, vinyl and cardboard, which you just don’t get these days. I remember when “The Visitors” was released (Nov 30, 1981) my parents told me that they would buy me it for Christmas, but that was a month away! It was one of the first albums in the world to be recorded entirely digitally (ABBA pioneered quite a few musical advancements) and I had to have it! I managed to buy the cassette version without anyone knowing, and listen to it in secret. Then on Christmas day I acted all surprised and delighted. Sorry Mum, but a boy has needs!

Buying music now holds none of those joys with downloads and app stores providing instant, but shallow, gratification. Maybe I should blame ABBA for that and for the development of all-digital recording techniques which paved the way for the ephemeral music download.  There’s just no excitement any more, at least not the excitement born of anticipation and the pleasure of ownership. So ‘thou shalt not covert’ may be a good principal when applied to a neighbour’s wife (or even his ass, no matter how pert it may be) but those discs really meant something to me, I was proud of them and I kept them pristine, scratch-free and perfect. It isn’t the same waiting for Amazon to deliver a CD or a tune to download from the interweb. You can’t hold an mpg file in your hand, you don’t have a tactile relationship with the physical album; material music on palpable plastic has become, well, immaterial.  I mourn that but, when all is said and done, the world moves on.

As did ABBA who, as a group, didn’t last forever although a few solo projects kept my addiction sated and the collaboration with Tim Rice that resulted in the musical ‘Chess’ gave me many hours of pleasure. I saw Chess in London in its first week of opening – a big adventure for me as it meant getting the bus for a six-hour trip to the city and an overnight stop amid the bright lights, turmoil of cars, dazzled by the crazy magic and city chaos.

Last week, by complete chance, I spotted that our cinema was showing a recording of Chess, filmed in the Royal Albert Hall last year to mark the 25th anniversary of its release. So I had a wonderful few hours in an almost deserted cinema in the middle of the afternoon belting out show tunes and reliving some of the guilty pleasures of my youth. Thank God that nobody was there to see me and that the sound system drowned out my caterwauling. I’m such a hypocrite – as I’ll demonstrate later.

Musical theatre, I admit, is one gay stereotype to which I subscribe, and my record collection (well, CD collection really although I have boxes of vinyl in the loft and ironically no deck on which to spin them) includes Les Misérables, Evita, Cats and Jesus Christ Superstar as well as several recordings of Chess. I like the extended narrative that these shows bring and the songs are iconic. Like ABBA songs, even if you don’t profess to ‘liking’ then, you recognise them and probably in moments of weakness might even find yourself singing along. I know you know “I Know Him So Well”! You maybe even recall “One Night in Bangkok” – and remember, Confucius say, “Man who walk through revolving door at airport with erection, going to Bangkok.”

I hadn’t listened to Chess for years but was still word-perfect in all but the parts where they had changed the lyrics. (Note: THEY changed the lyrics, I didn’t get them wrong!) Word-perfect doesn’t mean pitch perfect though and I’m sure the melodic accuracy I heard in my head would have sounded less tuneful had anyone been sitting close enough to hear! I don’t care; I haven’t had as much fun for years!

There was a concert in Hyde Park at the weekend to celebrate ABBA, their songs and subsequent ventures including Mamma Mia, Chess and some of the work they have been doing since the group drifted apart. It was broadcast on Radio 2 and I bloody missed it! I will be making full use of the iPlayer to correct that error, although I shall do it alone, secreted away, so as to not inflict my addiction on anyone else. We addicts like privacy.

I missed the tribute concert broadcast because David and I went out for the day for a drive up the Pennines and over Saddleworth Moor to take some photos. It was most refreshing to get out into the wilderness, although Myra Hindley country has an unnerving quality at the best of times. We came back through some of the Yorkshire mill towns, with their huge, imposing factories and warehouses, blocking the light and blackened with an age of grime, the colour of their industrial past. William Blake was spot on when he wrote about our ‘dark, satanic mills’ in the poem that we now recognise as the hymn “Jerusalem”. I like a bit of Blake, both the William and the “…’s Seven” varieties. The Jerusalem connection takes me neatly into the last night of the proms…

…which is what I ended up watching on TV on Saturday for lack of anything better to do. I rather think that with my complete inability to sing in tune I somewhat crucified Jerusalem. The poem refers to the suggestion that a young Jesus was brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea (where they allegedly visited Glastonbury). There are many tales rooted in this concept, including stories that the Holy Grail is buried under the Tor, but they can wait for another blog. Jerusalem is constantly proffered as England’s National song ( see http://anthem4england.co.uk/ ) and it gets my vote over Land of Hope and Glory or Rule Britannia any day.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant Land.

But the ‘music’ didn’t stop there as the peace and tranquillity of England’s green and pleasant land – well, our back garden – was utterly smashed the other evening by the most astonishing sonic performance I have ever heard. Chinese-man-next-door (not to be confused with Chinese-woman-over-the-road) seems to have invested in a Karaoke machine and with abundant amplification was assaulting all auditory acceptability with an absolutely atrocious acoustic accompaniment. I failed to categorise the wailing as pop, rock, opera or ballad: It was indefinable although I would say it definitely would NOT be found listed under ‘easy listening’.

I find the Chinese language somewhat shrill and uncomfortable at the best of times but this was a combination of fighting cats, strangled wife, nails on chalk board, baby crying and emergency siren, punctuated with an attempted baritone that resembled the noise you’d get if a fog horn tried to mate with a buffalo at the bottom of a very deep well. He reached a crescendo and I hoped I could get the rest of the washing off the line in relative peace, while I still remained tympanum-intactus, Oh no. The second track began and Chinese-man-next-door started up again. Now to give you an idea of how bad this was I will tell you that it took me a good first verse and chorus to recognise that the tune was in fact not a Chinese funeral hymn but was actually the Rod Stewart hit, “Sailing”. At least that is what the karaoke machine was playing. Chinese-man-next-door somehow seemed to be trying to rearrange it to fit a pentatonic scale (which he then managed to massacre). Ironically, for a song about sailing, it doesn’t travel well, and the translation into Chinese had all the elegance of an epileptic sperm whale, mid fit. I was reminded of the Morecambe and Wise sketch with Andrew Preview/Andre Previn where Eric plays the piano and Previn accuses him of playing all the wrong notes. Eric’s reply is, “I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”. Well, Chinese-man-next-door went one step further and managed to sing all the wrong notes all in the wrong order, plus I think he invented a few new ones along the way too.  So, you would think that the wailing and straining couldn’t get much worse? Think again. He then started to vocalise the instrumental break, “Ahhh, Ahhhhh, Ahhh, Ahhhhhh” etc (sort of like the sound you might make whilst trying to sing at the same time as having one of your teeth filled) but now accompanied by bloody bagpipes – the most un-musical instrument ever inflicted upon human kind, with the only possible exception being the School Recorder!

Maybe Chinese-man-next-door should get together with Chinese-woman-over-the-road and form a group with him on ‘vocals’ and her on the bagpipes, which, let’s be honest, are really just a recorder with an airbag attached – I could probably make one with a penny whistle and an old hoover bag (you don’t get them any more these days either). They could call themselves “The Take Aways”. She has a face on her that could sour milk and he looks like he’s been hit very hard and at speed by a projectile wok – his ears even stick out like the handles on either side and I’m pretty sure his hair is made of Teflon. They’d make an ideal double-act. They could sing songs by Tim Rice, or release a cover version of such hits as “You’ll never Wok Alone”, “Wok on the Wild Side” or the Simon and Garfunkle classic, “I am a Wok”.  I shall write off, on their behalf, for an application form for next year’s “X-Factor” as I believe the nation deserves to hear this awesome new talent.

But good news dear reader, for Chinese-woman-over-the-road has started hanging her underwear in the bedroom window again. I know not why she stopped, but her smalls are back with a proliferation of panties and gussets galore. Maybe, like the amount of wool on sheep, or the quantity of berries on a bush, this is a portent of a bad winter. Perhaps I should start an “old wives’ tale” of my own:

When the panties are none
We will have sun

If you see her trolleys
You will need brollies

When the gussets show
There will be snow

Now you may be wondering how, when my theme for today has been musical, I feel I can link in the window wonders of woman Woo, well I shall avoid the obvious references to “Chinese Laundry Blues” and simply state that she wishes to get some Air on a G-string. Over to you, Mr Bach.

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I’m starting out with the intention that this will not be a long blog today, but if I get molested by my muse, who knows?

I have been away for a few days, stopping with my parents in the North East – a place that will always feel like home to me. It took the train over as driving that sort of distance is way beyond me at the moment. The place still has more than its fair share of problems, and the pall of depression has never really lifted from it since the decline of the ship building industry. I watched the last ship being launched into the Tees in 1986, when I was a kid – it was a very sad day and with it went the hopes and aspirations of a whole workforce and, it transpired, those of generations to come. The demise of ship building and the fall of the iron and steel industry (even to recent news that Corus are laying off more of their workforce) is a sad epitaph to a once world-renowned area at the forefront of industry, innovation and invention.

Middlesbrough (so named as it was originally a farming hamlet [with about 25 people in 1801] at the half-way point on the Monk’s trail between Whitby and Lindisfarne) has always owed its existence to industry. Before the town as we know it today came into being coal was brought from the Northern coal-fields and collieries in Teesdale and shipped around the world from Stockton, Yarm and Darlington. The deeper waters downstream around Middlesberg or Mydilsburgh meant that larger ships could be loaded and so a spar was added to the Stockton-Darlington railway line allowing the coal to be transported to these huge cargo carriers. Dalliances with Salt mining and then the discovery of iron ore in the Cleveland Hills saw the growth of the iron and steel industry and at one point Teesside set the world prices for these commodities. With the biggest blast furnace in Europe situated at the mouth of the Tees, and miles of rolling mills to turn the ore into sheet metal, Teesside ship-building became a mainstay of the local industry, but also the area became famous for bridge manufacture. The Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, Aukland Bridge and Sydney Harbour Bridge were all fabricated and manufactured in Middlesbrough. The Transporter Bridge stands iconic of an industry long gone; spanning the river like a dinosaur, a relic of a once glorious past.

One of my favourite places in the world is South Gare, at the mouth of the Tees. On one side, miles of totally unspoilt sandy beaches, behind, the massive, bellowing beast of the blast furnace, spewing sulphurous steam as white-hot iron pours into ‘torpedo’ containers destined for the rolling mills, the river (once the busiest port in the country) and the North Sea, sometimes still and calm, sometimes raging with fury. It is a place of contrast, nature against industry, but I see beauty in both landscapes.

So my trips home always evoke a lot of feelings for the area and the places where I grew up. It is always good to touch base with your heritage, your background and your family. Needless to say though that these visits are challenging despite the fact that I love my parents and I know how much such a trip means to them. This last year has been hard for them, I have put them through the kind of hell I cannot begin to imagine and I owe them things like these visits, but I’m not sure the debt extends to being inflicted with 3 days of ceaseless sport – I mean, me, sport? Oil and water. I’m afraid I do fall into the sport-phobic stereotypical gay man clan. I have never been a sportsman and sport, over the years, has caused me pain, embarrassment, humiliation and torment. Being the anti-Adonis that I am, I was never cut out to be sporty, and all my failings in that area were pointed out and used against me during my formative years. If hell hath another name it is PE. Not helped of course by well-meaning parents who think that the answer is ‘extra lessons’ – “Join tennis club” only resulted in further opportunity to show how uncoordinated, inept and ultimately ‘gay’ I am.

If I could go back in time and give my parents three pieces of advice that would have made my life so much better, these would be:

1. Don’t try to force an un-sporty kid to do sports – there are plenty of other ways to be physically active that don’t involve having projectiles thrown or kicked at you, sticks smacked around your legs, or being humiliated to within an inch of suicide.
2. If you want your child to grow up with any interest in gardening, even if that just means keeping a lawn tidy or a flower bed free of dandelions, then you should not use ‘go and weed the patio for an hour’ or ‘cut the front grass’ as a punishment.
3. No man will ever be able to ‘cure’ homosexuality, so suggesting a specialist doctor, a shrink or a vicar really isn’t a helpful contribution to the ‘Mum I’m gay’ conversation. And no, I didn’t do it just to piss you off!

So back to the trial by sport: tennis one night, cricket the next afternoon and football that night. But you have to know the true nature of this – we are talking simultaneous broadcasts of each on TV and radio – telly in the living room and radio in the conservatory. The radio allows for other activities, such as reading a book during the boring bits, and then when a goal is scored it is a dash into the other room to see the replay on Sky. Both have to be ‘on’ all the time, and at a volume that probably breaks sound pollution legislation, but everyone else in the village is probably deaf now already so they are not going to complain.

When the sound is louder than your own internal dialogue and you literally can’t hear yourself think, I have to say that you just can’t protect yourself from the inane ramblings of the commentators. I don’t care that a butterfly has just landed outside the commentary box or that there is someone in the crowd with a green wig. Is the cricket really so boring that this is all you can think of to say? Ah, yes, it is.

My attempts to engage failed miserably when all I could comment on was how colourful cricketers’ clothes have become these days, that the tennis court was a particularly pleasant shade of blue and I wondered if Victoria Beckham was in the crowd to watch David play. I tried my best! I did, after a while, learn the appropriate times to groan – there is a particular noise you can make that can be interpreted as very enthusiastic, very disappointed, frustrated or delighted. It’s a sort of ‘Ahhhh’ sound and is pitched so it would work equally well preceding:

- that was a brilliant shot,
- that shouldn’t have been allowed,
- that was a close one,
- very skilfully played or
– you complete moron.

(You don’t need to SAY the second part, the parent, hearing the ‘Ahhhh’, assumes that you were going to say what they were thinking anyway.) Another good technique is to just repeat the last thing they said, so he says, “that should have been offside” and I say, “well, it looked like it was offside to me”. She says, “that was a superb lob”, and I say, “yes, superb, a VERY good lob” – then they go away thinking you are very knowledgeable!  The same works well in most conversations with them, with topics ranging from the unreliability of the woman who comes round to perm hair to the problems of carrot fly.

I try to fit in around my parents’ routines, but this means dinner at noon, tea at 4:30 and bed before 10:30. I’ve not been to bed at 10:30 since…well…the last time I went home. At least this time I managed it on my own, and schemed it so that David did not have to go over there too, although he’ll not escape the next time, oh no; Mother will already have washed the spare bedding in preparation and the hints will start in the next day or two. I don’t mean this in a nasty way really, it is lovely that they care as much as they do, but the child/parent relationship is always a difficult one for either party to play and we all fall back on learned patterns of behaviour. If I were an evil person I would point out to my folks that the routines they now follow are a mirror to those of my grandparents 30 years ago. The justifications they use are identical, the values they hold, and the assumptions they make, the games that they play, the rules they create: it is indeed a case of history repeating. They would hate it if I said that, and deny it absolutely, but I see it very clearly. Maybe that is the path laid out for me too, if I ever make it to my ‘silver’ years. Maybe it is about time I learnt how the scoring works in cricket or what the ‘off-side rule’ could be.

But at least now they have come to accept David and me as a couple, and they treat David as a son. That is wonderful and I am so proud of them for it. I’m sure it has been a huge culture change for them, and I guess it hasn’t been easy. I know in her heart all my mum wants if for me to be happy and healthy, but I’m sure that when, as a young mother, she imagined her son’s life and loves, had her dreams and aspirations for me, wondered what sort of life I would lead, there probably wasn’t a 6ft+ (Northern) Irishman written into the equation. Back then the only ‘queer’ in Mum’s life will have been John Inman, behind his Grace Bros counter, and I’m not even sure that people had started to wonder about Tony Hart. Freddy Mercury, Justin Fashanu or Billy-Jean King!  The world needed to change, and it has dragged people of my parents’ generation with it. Mine have, to their very great credit, gone with the flow. I hope that in our small way, David and I have shown then that gay relationships are just as valid and meaningful as straight ones and we have lead by example. Our nieces have grown up with us as uncles, and our relationship to them is perfectly ‘normal’. They don’t care that we are two men. It is a different world now, and I thank the stars for that. We have come a long way.

It seems only fitting today to also mention the letter issued by the Prime Minister yesterday which shows just how much we have progressed and also highlights how terribly prejudiced the world used to be. The full letter is available at http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571 and is a record of apology for the horrific way that Alan Turing was treated in the 1950s. Turing was a brilliant mathematician and a major player in breaking German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park during the last World War. Every man, woman or child alive in Britain at the time played a huge part in the war effort, the scale of sacrifice is beyond my comprehension;  their contributions should not be underestimated, but there were certain people who’s roles were pivotal in changing the outcome of the war and Turing was such a person. However, in 1952 he was tried for ‘gross indecency’ after admitting having a relationship with another man. He was given the impossible choice of imprisonment of forced chemical castration, and the latter was inflicted upon him by means of injections of female hormones. Two years later he took his own life. He is memorialised with a statue in Sackville Park, opposite Canal Street and at the centre of Manchester’s Gay Village.

Below is an excerpt from Gordon Brown’s letter, which I will let speak for itself.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

This letter will never make up for what has been done in the past, but, as the Transporter Bridge spans the Tees, I hope it goes some way to providing a connection between what happened then and the world in which we live today. We can never alter the past, we are born from it and are influenced by it. Everywhere around we see echoes of what has come before, be that the steel bridges of Teesside or a family member reverting to the idiosyncrasies of their parents, reminders of the struggle of others that have allowed us to live the lives we enjoy today. Just, please, don’t make me watch any more cricket!

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It has been a busy week, concentrated on, in and around Manchester Gay Pride, the annual ‘outing’ of all things camp and tacky for which such events have become infamous.  ‘Gay’ apparently now means “pink, sequinned and with more feathers than granny’s eiderdown”.  If I wanted to look like a flamingo I’d eat more shrimp.

Pride 2004

The Pride ‘celebrations’ take over Manchester’s Gay Village for the Summer Bank Holiday weekend, with a parade, through the city, of floats (or more accurately a traffic jam of cannibalised lorries with balloons, streamers and banners), whistles and much waving of disposable gay pride flags. The Village becomes impenetrable and the whole city turns into a trembling mass of ‘pseudo-support’ for the gay community.

It is sad that for many of the gay men of Manchester though, the so-called ‘Gay Village’ has become an inhospitable place these days, invaded with clucking, squawking hen parties and swathes of Neanderthal straight men, grunting and dragging their bleached blonde conquests by the hair – obviously going ‘clubbing’ (with the original definition of the word). We’ve been forced out, banished, exiled from Oz wondering where Dorothy took a wrong turn off the Yellow Brick Road. Some Saturday nights you can walk past the bars and wonder if you really are the only gay in the Village.

For those who don’t know, Manchester’s Gay Village is centred around Canal Street (apparently the ‘C’ is silent, as is the ‘S’ in Street) and spreads to include venues in the surrounding vicinity. The history of the Village is a study in changing attitudes to gay culture, at one time being the clandestine and ‘underground’ meeting place for gay people through to its height at the turn of the century and the unfurling of the rainbow flag along its cobbled streets where the balconies and pavement tables, echoing the café culture of Central Europe, were seen as progressive, and touching on ‘trendy’. We were Queer as Folk and the height of fashion.

Canal Street

But later years have seen a change to the whole dynamic of the area and not, in my view, always for the better. In simple terms, what happened was this: single straight females found that Canal Street offered them a safe environment for a night out, without the risk of any unwanted male attention.  I guess there is an irony in that on Canal Street we wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole. Of course, once the ‘blokes’ found out about this they too made the area the focus for their libidos and swarmed in for the easy kill. The pressures of commercialism and our new-found equality left us powerless to prevent it.

We got it wrong. We said we wanted ‘equality’ but that is a knife that cuts both ways. What we really wanted was ‘rights’; the right to express our feelings openly, the right to have our relationships recognised in law, the right to ensure that our partners benefit from our pensions and wills, but absolutely NOT equality. Heavens above! What idiot ever thought we did? Equality takes away the things that make us different. Equality does not allow us to have gay bars, men-only venues and exclusivity. It stops the sparkle and homogenises the homos. On paper at least it means that we should be able to walk into any pub, cinema or restaurant and hold hands or kiss just as straight couples do, but it also means we have to allow them to do that in our places as well. And that is what is slowly and surely strangling the Village.

EuroPride 2007

As I said, it was Manchester’s Gay Pride this weekend and the Village was cordoned off for the event. I have very mixed feelings about Pride. It is a huge party, lots of fun for thousands of people; it brings business to the city and a much-needed injection of cash. The pretext is to raise money for local gay charities and that is a laudable cause, however I question the validity of fencing off ‘our’ part of the city and charging us entry to the street where we can walk for free 51 weekends of the year. I wonder how much of the entry price goes towards security, providing the cordon, staffing the ticket offices and access points, paying Police costs for closing the roads, making up for lost revenue in parking-spaces, clean-up bills, promotion, administration…? Could the money not be raised in other ways for a fraction of the cost?

I suppose my core issue though is with the parade and the message it now sends to the world. I have marched in Gay Pride parades in the past, years ago, when their purpose was to affect change, to turn our alleged ‘wrongs’ to rights and change attitudes. These were protest marches, with a clear message. But surely that isn’t needed anymore? Methinks we doth protest too much. Part of my problem is the way the media portrays such events. I bet that if you saw any press coverage of Pride then the foremost image will have been of a drag queen with a huge feathered headdress: it always is.

Pride 2004

But that is not what being gay means to me, not at all. I don’t relate to glitter and glamour, high heels and headdresses, feathers and fringes, make-up and mincing, fag hags and hag fags. And I don’t want the Pride march to reinforce those stereotypes. Of course other types of gay men marched in the parade but it isn’t shocking, illegal, deviant or sickening to be ‘normal’ gay these days, which is why the media have to pick on the most outrageous fringes to concoct a story because just the ‘gay’ element alone isn’t enough.

For example, see the image chosen by the Manchester Evening News to portray Pride : http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1134315_city_shows_its_pride_

Okay, so 22 Police forces were represented in the parade, but so what? That shouldn’t be newsworthy anymore and there is a danger that it is us who are perpetuating the stigma when the world has moved on.

Celebrating being gay is fine, but let’s try to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we really want; our rights, our relationships, our bars, our clubs and our community. There is a huge difference between tolerance and acceptance, equality and rights. What about the guys who attended Pride? Where will they be next weekend – supporting their local gay bar by attending in the aftermath of Pride and then continuing to attend so that the bar CAN remain open and true to its meaning, or sitting at home watching “X Factor” and moaning that, “there’s no point in going out”?  David and I do our bit with our monthly club night, trying to provide an excuse for people to come out, but there is a limit to what we can achieve and gay venues need support the whole year round, not just once a month and not just at Pride.

Pride brings a lot of business to the Village, but for weeks afterwards the city shudders like an addict in withdrawal, suddenly deprived of the huge fix that was just injected into its veins.  Has Pride become that ever more ravenous animal that has grown so big and so hungry that it devours without discrimination?

Maybe if the cordon was there to keep straight people OUT for a weekend then Pride would take on a very different meaning and we might just remember what the Village and its surrounding venues are all about. But of course, that will never happen – that’s discriminating against straight people.

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