Pink List 2013: The Mourning After...

Now that the near palpable excitement has abated a little here are some elementary remarks on The Independent On Sunday's Pink List 2013...

1. This list of 101 LGBT people in the UK who have "made a difference" looks completely random, ridiculous and silly.

2. Newspapers and magazines love lists.
They fill space with hardly any effort; you get the readers to vote, just possibly massage the results a little bit, then get an intern to fill in the gaps via Google and/or Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, if you do it like this you usually end up with a shit list.
QED.

3. Lists - of top gayers or top albums or top pizza toppings or whatever - are guaranteed to "start a conversation".
Or better generate controversy.
Fagburn lives in a rarified world admittedly, but all I've heard people saying (okay, technically, tweeting) is that this Pink List is a complete joke.

4. Just looking at the top ten, whilst all the people listed have done good work, do they all warrant a placing over others?
The only two choices that sound solid and uncontroversial are Paris Lees and Peter Tatchell.

5. An illustrative example; Owen Jones is a very good journalist, he's out and proud, and an all round good egg of the left, but, as I'm sure he'll readily admit, he hardly ever writes about gay issues (as is his perfect right), so should he be here over other writers?
Mind you, by coincidence, Owen is the Indy's hot star columnist.

Similarly, why Out4Marriage not Coalition For Equal Marriage etc etc...

6. Filleting out almost all older people with more established reputations into a quick list of 40something "National Treasures" (BARF! Last year there were Lifetime Achievement Awards) only makes the actual Pink List 2013 look even more random and inconsequential.
Galloping through them and dismissing them with often just a one-word summary ("Writer", "Musician") is, again, insulting.

7. To repeat: The most telling entry is number 16 - the man who thought of dying a Union Jack flag pink, and selling them FFS! - and he got in there with 62 votes!

8. If the IoS don't ditch this list next year, I hope people will realise it'll be easy to rig it and nominate themselves - and why not, you deserve it as much as anyone, ordinary gay person - or propose spoiler/joke candidates.
Fagburn would love to see Dennis Nilsen at number one.

9. There is no gentle or polite way of putting this but many inclusions and placings in the Pink List seem based on tokenism.
This is insulting and patronising to both them and us.
Several entries read like a particularly cruel Private Eye pastiche/pisstake of a painfully "worthy"poll such as this.

10. Take a look at the judges - including a panel from the Independent itself - and see if you can detect any possible "conflict of interest"/favouritism in the Pink List 2013.
No, me neither...

11. The Ones To Watch list appears to resemble many other publications' Ones To Watch lists; how many are chums - or crushes - of someone at The Independent or of a judge?

12. Regular viewers may know that as a general rule Fagburn thinks politicians should be taken out and shot, but the Politicians' Pink Sublist is unbelievably slapdash, and looks like it was thrown together and written by a spectacularly ignorant intern in a panic.

13: Tilda fucking Swinton?????!!!

That is all for now on this IoS Shit List.

Fagburn could rave about some people that I think were glaring omissions.
Or rant about some people who really should not have been included.
But this would be pointless when the Pink List 2013 is so debased, and has now completely negated itself as being any meaningful marker of British LGBT people who have "made a difference".

And finally...
There is an accompanying article to all this pink palaver by Will "Nice-But-Dim" Young; Note to society: We're not G*Y – we're GAY!
I've been struggling with what to say about it, but it's even beyond satire.
Young Tom put it best; "Will Young writes like a 15 year-old school newspaper editor."