Even in 2014 gay men in Britain still suffer discrimination and insults. It happens more rarely nowadays but there’s little doubt that there are still people around who believe homosexuals should expect to be treated badly because of our ‘perverted’ lifestyle.
But gay men have it easy compared to the nation’s lesbians. When I was a teenager I assumed there were far more lesbians around than gay men mainly because you saw them on TV more. As time went on that changed , but even now a lesbian character in a soap opera causes more negative comment than a gay male one.
Not that long ago I read a review in The Spectator of a biography of Dusty Springfield, which my company Biteback had published earlier in the year. I read the review after our marketing manager, Katy Scholes (herself of the lesbian persuasion) sent me the online link. Her email read: “Have you bloody seen this?” She’s direct is Katy.
The review was written by Roger Lewis, who’s a big shot reviewer for the Mail on Sunday, and someone who my company would want to stay on the right side of. The review started off with this pearl of a paragraph: “Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sackville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples.”
Once I picked my less than chiselled chin off the floor, I read on. There was more… “I myself can recall heaps of furious married dragon-women in Wales, who wore wrinkle-resistant Crimplene trousers and sublimated their feelings working with horses or running Girl Guide camps.”
Obviously Mr Lewis is familiar dealing with stereotypes. He continued: “If actresses, they played tweedy old maids or sour housekeepers, like Agnes Moorehead. Or perhaps they became dog breeders or managed a garden centre. Maybe they became nuns. If you were Noele Gordon, you ran the gamut.”
He concludes with this stonker of a question: “did Dusty really have an affair in Mustique with Princess Margaret? If I am sceptical it is only because Hanoverians have small chins.” No, really.
Katy then reminded me that my company was due to be publishing Mr Lewis’s next book. I replied: “Fuck me gently. Are we really publishing him?” It turned out that contracts had not yet been signed so I decided to tell Mr Lewis to find someone else to publish his book as I didn’t and don’t want to be associated with someone who can write such utter homophobic garbage.
So I’ve burned bridges with one of the Spectator’s and Mail on Sunday’s leading book reviewers. Hey ho. Sometimes commercial considerations have to take a back seat.
Had I not done this I couldn’t have looked myself in the mirror, let alone Katy and several other members of staff who had expressed similar outrage.
Roger Lewis is a highly respected, well-connected and prolific book reviewer. Indeed, he’s reviewed a great many of our books in the past. The decision that I made and the action that was taken could conceivably come back and bite us. But the company’s not called Biteback for nothing.
We naturally informed Lewis that we were pulling his book. His reaction? “I can’t stand political correctness and the denial of freedom of speech that it can (and does) impose. I think Iain Dale sounds an idiot, with no sense of humour. It was a brilliantly written piece, and funny.” Even if he does say so himself.
I don’t like political correctness either and I know something funny when I see it. This wasn’t funny, or even remotely amusing. What I do not understand is why The Spectator saw fit to publish it in the first place.
Homophobia needs to be called out whenever and wherever it raises its ugly head, even at some commercial or public relations cost. If we just ignore such things what kind of people are we?
Writing in that style about jewish people, or ethnic minorities would not be considered acceptable, so how can it be acceptable to write in that manner about lesbians?
By the way, Katy Scholes has a lovely chin. And she thrusts it very well. So she tells me.
This article first appeared in the October edition of Attitude Magazine
