Labour's introduction of legislation, with the aim of protecting gay people from incitement to hatred, has already achieved its expected aim. It is one of the few successes of this dying administration. It has delivered everything which ministers and their advisers wanted of it. Yet the act will never attain the statute book. A contradiction? No.
I am not a cynical being, but I'll overcome my proclivity for optimism, with which I was born, and against which counselling has proven ineffective, to study the heart of this wretched proposal, to peer into the manipulative hearts of those who propose it. It's sole purpose is to shore up Labour's vote in the liberal, educated middle-class, to act as a reminder to them of everything they disliked about the last Tory government.
Indulge me for a moment, and don't argue with the proposition that a large proportion of educated people really did dislike the Tory party a few years ago. David Cameron has been markedly successful at making the Tory party their natural home again. The law is for the Margaret Drabbles of this world, who think it's usually best to be on the side of good things, and see kindness as one of life's immutable good things. They tend to know and like lots of gay people, and so are supposed to draw the inference 'This act will protect my good friend X. So I am in favour of the Act. Moreover, I'm in favour of the people who propose it, and against those who vote against it'. The legislation is designed for nothing more than to give editorial writers at the Guardian the reason they need to decide not to write leaders of cautious favour about David Cameron. Insidious, isn't it?
Insidious, but, I expect, unsuccessful. It would have achieved its objective in 1999, but not in 2009. We've been here before, haven't we? All the arguments against legislating against freedom of expression in the realm of religious belief apply, identically, in this case. If you don't like homosexuality, whose life is improved by making it a crime for you to say so?
Stonewall have fallen straight into Labour's trap, expostulating about Tory opposition as some sort of 'red meat'. Clever phrase, since we tend to be vegetarians - all these liberal shibboleths cluster together, you know - but wrong-headed. I'm not going to attack Stonewall. The life of someone like me has been made better in the last few years, and Stonewall were at the front of most of those improvements. But they are being foolish in acting as Labour's cats paw. I would have thought the mayoral election would have finally cured them of their flirtation with identity politics, with seeing 'gay voter' as a synonym for 'Labour voter'.
They'll get there, eventually. For the big hidden secret of homosexuality isn't to do with checked shirts, or silly dance music, or soft furnishings, or those unpleasant words used by columnists whose favourite activity is to be as unkind as possible about people they've never met. It's even more shocking. Most gay men are naturally conservative.
Think about it. Of course they are. If you grew up in a culture like I did - younger readers will find this impossible to believe, but I'm talking about ten years ago, not a hundred - where there were absolutely no positive images of male homosexuality to be seen, where the very concept was never mentioned in polite society, other than to be sniggered about, where you would cling to any novel you came across which contained a gay character (who usually came to a sticky end), where just as self-expression started to feel possible, an unknown pathology started to wipe out a generation of people, then the one skill which you will have taught yourself, if you had any chance of achieving psychological maturity, was self-reliance.
No-one else was going to tell you: it's OK. Not your church, not your youth club, not your school, not your employer, not your peer group, not the soap opera, not the Hollywood films, not the tabloid press, not your university, no-one. You had to look in the mirror, take a breath, and say: I'm OK. I don't care what they think. I'm OK.
You're fine. You're OK. It doesn't matter what they think about you, or write on some website: you're OK. You either develop that ability for yourself, or you will suffer. No amount of legislation will alter that, still the first and most important lesson any gay person has to internalise. Of course, I assume that the more happy and open gay people there are around, the easier it becomes for the next generation. But that's got nothing to do with legislation, and everything to do with taking responsibility for your own self-expression. The words of the people who hate us are real things, with power, in the universe, and I regret them. But their words are less powerful than our own quiet, confident existence. We really are OK. And just as desperate for a Tory administration as our heterosexual friends.
(Footnote: I nicked the title from a book I remember from the 70s, by Terry Sanderson).
