Friday 16 August 2013

Gay Community: Why The Right Hates It

A leading academic has called for the terms 'gay pride' and 'black pride' to be scrapped because they are 'meaningless'.
Broadcaster and educational consultant Dr Tony Sewell has argued that instead of defining people as minorities, society should be instead striving to define people as 'what they know rather than what they look like'...

In an interview with the Readers Digest [!], Dr Sewell said: '"Minority" should be the badge that people are trying to rip off.
'Instead, in the case of certain musicians, authors and others, it can bring you money and fame. This is a corruption and a deceit.
'We need to ditch gay pride and black pride. Both are meaningless.
'The gay rights movement is surely a human struggle for homosexuals to be treated equally. Who said anything about a community?'

Unsurprisingly the Daily Telegraph also thought these remarks deserved a lot of space.
Basically, right-wing people - gay or straight or black - don't like anyone thinking in terms of "community" - gay or straight or black.
Odd how some gay men who consider themselves on the left think that regurgitating this reactionary rhetoric is somehow "radical".

3 comments:

  1. Fagburn, you are difficult to understand. I'd have thought you would agree with the idea that there's no gay " community ". I've always found the idea of a gay community to be a bit ridiculous. By the way I consider myself to be on the left but Thatcher was misquoted on her famous " there's no such thing as society " remark. I don't like people being misquoted no matter how much I dislike them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hmmm.
    Should we only think of ourselves as selfish atomised individuals?

    Here's the transcript form the Thatcher Foundation website.

    http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689

    She did say "There's no such thing as society",, though - the rest here has been bowdlerised/prettified, admittedly, but I don't think it changes her intent.
    She wasn't stupid, like her "swamped by people with a different culture" remarks on immigration she knew how it would be read.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm certainly opposed to selfish individualism !! I only meant that there are so many different kinds of gay people that ' community ' is a misleading word. And I wasn't trying to defend Thatcher - I agree that she didn't believe in society but her famous remark was taken out of context nonetheless Perhaps she was trying to sound moderate and reasonable in her original comment..

    ReplyDelete