Is it just Fagburn, or does The Independent's gaylord columnist Philip Hensher come across as a monumental snob in this piece? It was last Thursday, taking a small train from Exeter to the small town where I live part of the time. Two teenage girls sat down opposite me. Both of them had attained the results you get if you ask a Devon hairdresser to try to make you look like Cheryl Cole. From their conversation, I wouldn’t say that they had troubled the educational system for very long. They had clearly spent the afternoon going up and down the high street, and now, from the ziggurat of tat on the floor, they started extracting their purchases for comparison.
The first one got out a pair of shoes. “Look at that,” the other one said. “That’s just so gay.” I looked up, startled. But then the second one got out a belt – I admit, not very lovely – and it was the first one’s turn. “That really is gay,” she said disparagingly.
Should you say something? Say: “Look, even a thick yokel like you should know that it’s not acceptable to use ‘gay’ as a derogatory term?”
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It wasn't just me!
ReplyDeleteLetters, 13th October
'Gay' becomes a term of abuse
Philip Hensher's piece about homophobia (11 October) would carry more weight if it were not accompanied by his own display of intolerance and misogyny. He had already taken a dislike to the two girls with whom he shared a train carriage, before he heard them use the word "gay" to disparage some clothes they had been buying. He describes them in sneering terms solely because of their hairstyles and (assumed) lack of education.
As we know from recent correspondence in The Independent, young people use words in ways that shift and change meanings according to fashion. It is decades since "bad" and "wicked" started to mean "good". "Gay" to a man of Hensher's age means "homosexual". To older people it used to mean "cheerful". To some young people it can mean, applied to clothes, cheap and trashy. It is very doubtful that this correlates with any active dislike of homosexuals on the part of the girls on whom he was eavesdropping.
Hensher's narrow-mindedness does not contribute to a tolerant society.
Peter Benson
London NW2
Let's hope the two girls on the train to my hometown of Exmouth read Philip Hensher's piece about them. They would have learned the valuable lesson that it is offensive to use "gay" as a derogatory term when describing clothes.
And since they had so clearly not "troubled the educational system for very long", they would doubtless have lacked the intellectual wherewithal to take offence at being described in turn by metropolitan Mr Hensher as unattractive, tasteless, "thick yokels".
Haydn Middleton
Exmouth, Devon
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-using-the-term-gay-2104787.html