November 4th - November 10th 2002
Sunday We Are Everywhere
Saturday Conflans-sur-Loing
Friday Butled
Thursday Predications
Wednesday Wait no more
Tuesday Hippy birthday
Monday Getting jhiggie
Sunday 10th November 2002
BIG. GAY. NEWS.
The last we heard of Michael Barrymore in the aftermath of the homophobic witch-hunt that followed the death of his house-guest, he was said to be taking swimming lessons; my own theory was that he anticipated a good old-fashioned witch-trial: throw him into the ill-fated pool to see if he drowns.)
Today he returns to the headlines in a truly spectacular fashion, providing a stunning climax to what has been a gala week for gay news.
More of Barrymore in a moment (and if you haven't seen the Barrymore story yet, take a moment to guess; you won't even get close, I promise you). In the meantime, for those of you who are out of the country - perhaps at the closing of the Gay Games in Sydney - more about this week's other Big Gay News.
Do I refer, you ask yourselves, to the election of Israel's first gay MP Uzi Even? No - though the headline Gays get Even is tempting.
The story about the brains of gay sheep? No, though I shivered with fascinated horror at the headline Gay sheep have human ramifications.
The revelation that in the late 1960s the British Admiralty gave up on the idea of hardening its line on gay sailors when it realised that at least half the Navy had had at least some kind of gay experience? Navy goes straight to the bottom?
No, silly, none of the above.
I refer, of course, to the glorious news that the Tory Party is about to sink with all hands following Insipid Duncan-Smith's impressive cock-up over, of all things, the question of gay adoption (okay, okay, adoption by unmarried couples, a group that includes, de facto, gay men and lesbians.)
You'll recall the story: an amendment to the Adoption and Children Bill intending to give the right to adopt to unmarried couples was proposed by a backbench labour MP and supported by the Prime Minister.
When the amendment first came to the House of Commons, in May, the Tories, to no-one's great surprise, opposed it but, to no-one's great surprise, the measure passed, by 288 votes to 133. The Lords however, to no-one's great surprise, rejected it, by 196 votes to 162.
When the amendment was reintroduced this week, Insufferable Duncan Smith (a man who told us in his speech to the recent party conference, "when I settle on a course, I stick to it") found himself almost persuaded by the arguments of several members of his shadow cabinet - including John Bercow, the diminutive shadow work and pensions minister (a man light enough in his loafers to have found himself having to reassure a recent fringe meeting that he was not himself gay).
They told him that the vote should be a matter of personal conscience. Others, the majority, reminded him that the vote had been subject to a three-line whip when first introduced, and should be similarly policed on this second vote.
Imperturbable Duncan Smith agreed, and announced a three-line whip. And then announced that, despite that, anyone who wished to abstain should feel free to do so. Cue multiple palms to foreheads from party whips, for whom abstention on a three-line whip is usually a matter of disgrace, excommunication and internal exile.
Cometh the vote, cometh the men: John Bercow resigns; Michael Portillo, Kenneth Clarke and eight other Tory MPs vote against their party; 35 other Tory MPs take advantage of their laissez-passer and abstain: the amendment passes by 344 to 145.
Norman Tebbit announces he will not, after all, be attending John Bercow's forthcoming wedding. Bercow's bride-to-be heaves a large sigh of relief. The amendment passes to the House of Lords.
And passes to everyone's astonishment, by 215 to 184.
Innocuous Duncan Smith turns a pale shade of green and tells the party it must Unite or Die. Ken Clarke and Portillo publicly tell him he has only himself to blame. A nation giggles.
And then:
The Appeal Court puts itself above parliament and rules, in a landmark judgement on a housing case, that the Human Rights Act requires the law to make no discrimination between straight couples living together as husband and wife and gay partners.
The gay couple who paid £200,000 for surrogate twins after authorities refused to let them adopt announce they are trying for more children.
The Conservatives, still shell-shocked no doubt, announce that they working on proposals to make the notorious Clause 28 redundant by giving parents and school governors the right to decide how teachers approach the issue of homosexuality in the classroom.
And a review led by Barbara Roche, the minister responsible for equality issues, concludes that gay couples should be allowed to register their relationships conferring on them the same next-of-kin, property, and inheritance rights as marriage.
Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society,
And you know the best thing about this? I told you so.
But what, I hear you ask, has any of this to do with Michael Barrymore? Please tell us he is not about to sell his gay wedding pictures to Hello magazine. Or is secretly harbouring plans to adopt the entire underage population of the White Swan.
Gentle reader, fear not. But tiptoe with me to another, darker, part of the forest, the dappled glade where Princess Diana's butler has been defending himself against charges that he made off with several trunks full of her personal possessions shortly after her death.
Paul Burrell has told us (or more precisely the readers of the Daily Mirror) that he gave shelter to the belongings of the People's Princess to shield them from her marauding relatives, the Sssspencersss.
He has told us that no less a person than The Queen (aka "The Lady") warned him to beware of "powers at work in this country which we have no knowledge about."
He has told us, countless times, that Diana called him "her rock" (although "Thanks, Paul; you rock" seems an equally feasible interpretation).
Newspapers that have not invested in Mr Burrell's memoirs have been at great pains to come up with other angles on the story. A thousand conspiracy theories have bloomed, each attempting to explain Mrs Queen's last-minute feat of rememberance that, conveniently, brought the case aginst Burrell crashing to the ground only days before he was due to begin testimony in his own defence.
So far, so very very straight (though very entertaining).
But.
One of the more widely-touted conspiracy theories holds that the only really meaningful part of Burrell's plunder is a wooden box that contains several extremely personal items: a signet ring belonging to one of her lovers, some letters to her children, and a tape recording that she made in which one of her husband's ex-employees gave details of a hushed-up rape case.
A gay rape case.
The laws of libel being what they are (up to a point, cf John Leslie) nobody has rushed forward to speculate on the identity either of the rape victim, or the rapist - though several papers have maintained that the latter remains in the employment of the Prince of Wales "in a very senior position".
Until today.
Three Sunday tabloids today make separate and equally shocking claims.
In The Mail on Sunday, George Smith - a one-time valet to Princess Diana, a married man with two children - claims that an aide to the Prince of Wales raped him while he slept after a drunken Sunday lunch (an allegation that will raise a few eyebrows amongst those of us with, um, first hand experience of buggery, but we'll let that pass for now.)
The identity of the alleged rapist remains undisclosed as I write (but you may care to note the otherwise irrelevant references to the - aptly-named? - "Michael Fawcett, 41, the former butler, now the Prince's personal assistant, a man with a flair for design that Mrs Parker Bowles has regularly drawn on" in a recent Telegraph story).
Meanwhile the News of the World and the People, in a further, even more shocking, development publish stories from not one, but three, people claiming to know, at first-hand, that Burrell himself is gay.
The first of these is Australian Greg Pead who says he met Burrell "at a gay bar called Scandal near the palace" and went on to have a passionate month-long affair before returning to Australia. (He further alleges, shock, horror, that Burrell "invited him to drink gin from the Queen's private stock."
The second is "Kevin, a respected charity boss and former Tory councillor" who claims that Burrell tried to kiss him at a charity dinner and then suggested "a gay threesome in Burrell's four-poster bed" (a case of three into four won't go, it seems.)
The third is a man who describes Burrell's heavy-handed (but, he says, unsuccesful) attempts to flirt with him:
"I found his manner to be what I call slightly camp. And because of the job he did I did wonder w'ether he was that way inclined. I asked him, 'Are you married?' And he said, 'Oh yes. I've got two children'.
"As I started to go round to see Diana regularly, Burrell started to get more chatty. Then he said, 'Perhaps we should meet up and have a coffee'. I found it all very strange.
"Eventually I asked Diana, 'Is he gay?' She said, 'I think he might have some problem in that department.'"
"I knew it was building up to something. And it did... He stared me straight in my eyes and said, 'I like you a lot. Actually I love you. I love you very much'.
"Then he put his arms around me, kissed me full on the lips and that's when he started to fondle me. He went for the full snog.
"But I just thought, 'Well, he's not my type anyway'. I like blokes who seem like straight blokes. I found him a bit too effeminate. He floated around a lot - you know what I mean."
The name of this lover of straight-acting men?
Saturday 9th November 2002
Conflans-sur-Loing - such a pretty name.
Friday 8th November 2002
Looks like we won't be able to use The Butler did it after all.
Never mind. How about What the Butler saw instead?
Thursday 7th November 2002
Complex predications based on a rigorous scientific analysis of the hectic 60 hour period surrounding my birthday indicate that this coming year I can look forward to:
4 months sleeping the sleep of the just
1 month being treated (by the Best Friends A Guy Could Hope To Have) to dinner in the Campest Restaurant in the World Ever (Where the Food Was, Surprisingly, Excellent)
1 month working for not quite enough money
1 month reading under the duvet
3 weeks avoiding sex with unsuitable men
3 weeks failing to have sex with suitable men
3 weeks having sex with men who'll do at a push
3 weeks flirting and getting drunk in East End hostelries (Hi Steve! Hi Dane! Hi Dane's raaather attractive colleague Raaavi!)
2 weeks buying, cooking and eating the Biggest Fried Breakfast Ever (Sausage, Bacon, Potato Gratin, Bubble and Squeak, Mushroom, Tomato, Baked Beans on Fried Bread. And Two Fried Eggs)
2 weeks enjoying minor domestic triumphs (Clean sheets! Clean underwear! Clean dishes!)
2 weeks staring at rather bad television (Byron! Babyfathers!)
1 week bumping into familiar friendly faces in assorted bars (step forward Sven! Step forward Lil Steve!)
1 week titting about in Photoshop
1 week worrying about my blog
1 week fielding text messages
1 week tramping the frozen streets
4 days waiting for nightbuses
3 days stepping over a matful of unopened brown envelopes
Sounds do-able. Bring it on!
Wednesday 6th November 2002
Look what they bought me for my birthday!
Tuesday 5th November 2002
Happy birthday to me.
(Meeting David, as instructed, in the West End: events theretoforward unknown, up to, but hopefully not including, surprise parties.)
Monday 4th November 2002
I've complained before about how the onset of winter closes down the possibility of conversation at The Vauxhall Tavern - anything less cursory than "Did y'go out last night? I said, did y'go..?" is impossible when you're cocooned inside in noisy warmth rather than promenading on the pavement or nattering on the knoll.
Strange then, that this Sunday I managed at least three substantive conversations, one with Wesley, one with Steve, and one with a not-unattractive South African emigre.
Stranger still that the one person I didn't manage to talk to was Chig. Not to worry: we smiled and jiggled next to each other for quite a while, which is the next best thing, I guess.
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