Stephen Fry's Out There: No Gay Sex Please, We're British!

In part two of Around The World In 80 Gays, national treasure Stephen Fry pays (literally) flying visits to Brazil, Russia and India...
Same as before, two things were striking; Fry does seem to have a big problem with (gay) sex - you may recall he was famously and vocally celibate for many years, and often spoke of his disgust at the very thought of making the beast with one back.*
In this context his simple, simplistic conclusion to the programme, "It's all about love" seemed telling.
Or do I mean damning?
The only bodily fluids Stephen Fry enjoyed sharing were tears.
And boy did he cry a lot, with joy and with pain.
Boo hoo, squish squish.
TV documentaries rely on this emotional pornography.
They are politically crude, tending to go to extremes - here the grieving mother, the pantomime villain politician - that may cast more shade than light on the viewer's understanding of what life's really like for ordinary LGBT people.
Fry also went into one of his trademark patronising patrician rants about how these people are not "educated".
See also him saying they're "backwards" and "uncivilised".
You can take the man out of the public school, but you can't take...
On the positive, he was good again at reminding viewers how anti-gay laws and prejudices are a legacy of colonialism.
In the final scene, he's speaking at a gay bar in Mumbai, congratulating the patrons, and just as you're thinking; "Yes, Stephen, but you're talking to members of the English-speaking, western-oriented, middle-class elite...", he basically says this himself - and signs off by hoping their freedoms will soon come to the hijras in the slums.
One of the strengths of this episode was how he repeatedly stressed that trans people - from drag queens in Sao Paolo to the hijra of Mumbai - are often the worst treated of all the four letters in the LGBT community, by both the straight world and our own.

The segment on Russia - boo hiss etc - was by far the weakest and seemed rather odd.
He interviewed Vitaly Milonov, the St Petersburg politician who'd introduced a local law banning "promotion of homosexuality", which has now notoriously gone nationwide.
But everything we saw suggested this wasn't actually being enforced; Fry, a best-selling celebrity over there we learned, began by meeting members of a lesbian and gay group still freely operating out of their nice offices, and ended by promoting homosexuality to a large group of Russian journalists.
At one point he asked a lesbian mother; "Do you think that we'll see a day when you will be threatened by this law?"
Note this is a hypothetical question about the future, not what's happening now.
Similarly, despite all the "This is how Hitler started!" hysteria by some in the West over Russia's own Section 28, several Russian LGBT campaigners have said they doubt the law will be applied generally.
The take-home quote from this programme, instantly, endlessly tweeted and RT-ed as soon as the credits started rolling, was; "Homosexuals aren't interested in making other people homosexual; homophobics are interested in making other people homophobic."
A nice platitude, though for the  record, can Fagburn put the record straight and state he is interested in making other people homosexual?

* See this post on the blog, Towards Queer...