Some Thoughts on #ToryCunts

Tonight, along with a friend, I started hashtagging my tweets with '#torycunts.' My girlfriend took offense to this. She's not a Tory, and finds much of their policy abhorrent, but she has a friend who is a staunch Tory supporter, and felt like I was being unnecessarily cruel. We argued back and forth, but I wanted the opportunity to lay my thoughts down in a more coherent and lengthy form than twitter and text messages allow.

So here goes.

We're scared. We're fucking scared, and our votes count for next to nothing. I can vote for a left-wing candidate in my constituency until I die but it’s always going to be a Tory seat. We’re all of us crowded round our TVs and computers with our fingers crossed, hoping against hope that we’re not going to wake up to a Tory government tomorrow morning. Our worst nightmare of a Tory majority might be coming true and childish name calling is the only thing we have left.

We’ve seen the Polls. We’ve seen the Exit Poll prediction. We wonder, are they really representative? We think, no one asked me, how can my voice be heard? We take to twitter to try to feel less powerless. We're just shouting trying to make our voices heard, and if we shout loud enough, and hard enough, then people might take notice. It’s all bravado. We're like little kids in the playground trying to make ourselves feel brave so we can stand up to the bullies. We're calling people cunts because it makes us feel big and hard. We're calling people cunts so they'll leave us alone and stop bullying us. We’re calling people cunts because it’s the only thing we can do. It's not big and it's not clever but we do it all the same. We're hiding behind words, yes, but words are all we have left.

A Tory government wouldn’t stand for me. They’ve consistently voted against my rights, and what I believe in. I hate what they stand for, and they hate me. My vote won’t change that so all I can do is shout. And I choose to shout ‘cunt,’ halfway between what I think of them and what I think of the situation, because it’s all I can think of to do as I wait for the results to come in. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but it’s all I have left.

Gately's "Unnatural" Death

Breaking: Gately death due to complications of queerness. 

So says the latest homophobic hate piece from Jan Moir over at the Daily Mail.  Not in so many words, of course, but the message is clear nonetheless.  Gately’s death was not natural, screams the headline.  What’s not written is the implied justification for this opinion: because Gately’s sexuality was not natural.  Sad and homophobic as the piece is, it’s also rather funny the lengths that Moir will go to to blame Gately’s sexuality for his death.  Moir’s concluding piece of evidence that his queerness killed him? Gately and his husband may or may not have had a threesome on the night that Gately died.  Because straight couples never have threesomes.  Or, for that matter, engage in sexual practices more often associated with gay men. 

What is more troubling about the article is Moir’s insistence on turning Gately’s death into an argument against “the happy ever after myth” of marriage equality. 

"Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

It is important that the truth comes out about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death."  (Emphasis mine).

The fight for marriage equality has nothing to do with Gately’s death.  She is taking one possible case of something that might not have even happened as proof that gay marriage doesn’t work.  By the same logic I could point to a divorced couple as proof that all heterosexual marriages don’t work.  You can’t base any conclusions on a sample of one.  For that matter, I wasn't aware that (possibly) having a threesome automatically meant your marriage was dysfunctional anyway.  I'm sure it works for plenty of people.  There are happy and unhappy same-sex relationships just as there are happy and unhappy heterosexual relationships, and besides, I think straight people have the monopoly on dysfunctional marriages, don’t you?  They’ve been doing it a lot longer than we have (if we can do it at all, that is.)

In Moir’s world all queers are promiscuous, and destined for an early death.  The use of the phrase “strange and lonely” brings to mind Dyer’s “sad young man” of the Hayes Code era films; a stereotypical character that was frequently made ‘safe’ and/or ‘saved’ through death.  And that, it seems, is Moir’s final point.  Gately deserved to die for daring to be queer.  That he did so in a way that Moir believes condemns his “very different and more dangerous lifestyle” all the better. 

After all, how can someone who lives an “unnatural” life have a natural death?

UPDATE: This issue has been getting a lot of coverage on twitter today, with the result that the Mail has changed the headline on the article but not on the links to the right (via: @charltonbrooker).  
UPDATE 2: They've changed the links on the right now as well (via: @charltonbrooker).