David Laws: The Vortex

David Laws is interviewed in The Times today.
Windswept hair, unironed Indian cotton shirt, but that's not the main thing...
David Laws breaks his silence on being gay and why he kept it secret.

“Certainly becoming a public figure, if you are also a very private individual, doesn’t make it a more obvious time to be open about your sexuality. In fact you become even more sensitive about it.”

At the risk of repeating myself yet again, I abhor Laws' politics, but feel much sympathy about how he ended up in a crazed vortex of denial about his sexuality.
And I hate hearing gay men - whose circumstances have been very different or more fortunate - gloating over his closetry and downfall.
The interview is behind the Murdoch paywall, but may be posted below...

David Laws: Knocked For Six

Looks like it could be game over for David Laws.
Last year he resigned as Chief Secretary to the Treasury after just 17 days when it emerged he'd claimed £40,000 to pay rent to his boyfriend - the first big fuck-up of the Coalition government.
Apart from the Coalition itself.
Laws had claimed this was because he was trying to hide he was gay - which is sad, but perhaps understandable.
But BBC News reports; "The standards and privileges committee is understood to have decided Mr Laws broke 'around six' expenses rules."
Oops!
More on this story later...

Election Results: Bareback Coalition

Although the results of the various elections on Thursday gave various reasons to be (reasonably) cheerful, Fagburn spent the next few days with a certain sense of dread.
A year ago the Con-Dem Coalition was welcomed with a rapidly cliched series of gay love and marriage-metaphors, The Brokeback Coalition, A Very Civil Partnership etc etc etc...
So it was inevitable that the newly gaping Con-Dem faultline would be described in terms of a a not so gay divorce.
Adams in The Sunday Telegraph was one of several cartoonists who rose to the distinctly unchallenging challenge.
Fagburn hopes that last Friday proves to be the beginning of the end, and that the Liberal Democrats and this rotten Coalition government will now both tear themselves apart.

Update: "David Laws, the Liberal Democrat former cabinet minister, may have his return to Government blocked this week with the publication of a report into his expenses [paid to his boyfriend] that is expected to be highly critical" reports the Telegraph.
Telegraph anti-gay bias?
The Torygraph has been arguing for Laws to be back in the cabinet since November.

Stupid Poll Watch: Many Gay Tories Voting Tory

'Clegg Tops Gay Poll — But For Looks Rather Than Policies' reports The Sunday Times.
Message: Nick Clegg is a joke. Being gay is a joke.
Wait there's more...
"The poll, conducted among 1,100 mainly city-dwelling gay men, also reveals that 36% would vote Tory if there were a general election tomorrow.
"Labour comes second with 34% while, regardless of Clegg’s personal appeal, the Liberal Democrats trail with 22%."
Really? So who's behind this poll?
"The survey was carried out by Jake, a gay networking organisation, run by Ivan Massow, a businessman and Tory supporter."
Ah Jake - the site for "the UK's gay professional community".
So, it's not for gay men that are "city-dwelling", but gay men who work in the city - gay businessmen, guppies.
And 36% of these rich queens say they'll vote Tory - you amaze me!*
The tragedy is that these completely unscientific online "polls" are often quoted back at us as evidence of gay mens' actual voting habits - even when they're distinctly partisan and/or they've clearly been targeted by political parties so the results go up and down like a rent boy's knickers.
And don't get me started on that foxhunting fuckwit Ivan Massow...

* This is also marginally less than the proportion of the general population who say they'd vote Tory in the latest YouGov/SundayTimes poll.

Morning Star: Letter To The Editor

During the national demonstration on March 26 I was very pleased to receive a free copy of your paper.
However, I was not pleased at all when I saw that you chose to publish a picture of a protester bearing a sign saying: "Clegg get out of Cameron's bumhole."
It is already sad enough to hear or see homophobic comments to discredit our political enemies within the labour movement without having to then see them published in your newspaper.
I would like my comrades to stop using language or images describing Clegg and Cameron as a gay couple or having sex with each other in order to attack them.
I am fed up seeing gay sex and passive penetration in particular used as a metaphor for betrayal or simply to insult our political opponents.
I wish we had more intelligent things to say in order to oppose the Con-Dems.
This is not what I expect from the Morning Star nor the labour movement and I am really sad to observe homophobia discouraging LGBTQ people to be part of our common struggle for liberation or when they feel that they have to hide themselves among their own comrades.
Our liberation can't be if it's not a liberation for all.

Thierry Schaffuser, Maria Exall, Anton Johnson & Peter Purton
Left Front Art Collective.

Morning Star.

Fagburn Awards 7: Cliché Of The Year

Brokeback Coalition.

Robbie Williams In Gay Video Shame

Brokeback Mountain - it's the gay cultural cliche that just keeps on giving.
When Take That started out way back in 1991 their "Well, we might be..." schtick seemed ever so modern and rather racy.
In 2010, when Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow exchange longing looks and do some serious shirt lifting in the bromantic video for their reunion single Shame, one wonders if they're referencing those two gay cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, or just Nick Clegg and David Cameron's Brokeback Coalition.
But that's progress for you, I guess.

Brokeback Coalition: There's Always One Who Goes Too Far...

Today's cartoon from The Independent by Dave Brown.
Fagburn has to confess he's not 100% sure what it's meant to be saying.
Answers on a Donald McGill postcard, please...

Brokeback Coalition: Broken Record

Much musing on the newly-minted metaphor "the Brokeback Coalition" - the touching photomontage above comes from the Mirror.
The Daily Mail reports on the formation of a "Brokeback Club" of disgruntled right-wing Conservative MPs.
"Among the rebels are the Eurosceptics, as well as those who oppose the referendum on Alternative Vote, the rise in Capital Gains Tax and Ken Clarke's decision to jail fewer criminals...
"MPs yesterday dubbed the group 'the Brokeback Club' because they want to 'break the back' of the coalition and force Mr Cameron to fight the next election alone to win an outright majority, rather than as part of a non-aggression pact with the Lib Dems."
How apt that this ragbag of assorted right-wing nutjobs were inspired to come together by a comment (allegedly) made by David Davis in a wine bar called The Boot and Flogger.
It also sounds like an S and M club, which may be apt too.
Fagburn believes that the first comparison of the Cameron and Clegg coalition government to the two gay cowboys was also in The Daily Mail.
It was our old friend Richard Littlejohn way back on May 15th.
Littlejohn initially welcomed it, in an anything-but-Gordon kinda way.
"In this Brokeback Mountain-style love-in, Dave as Heath Ledger and Nick as Jake Gyllenhaal have saddled up for the long haul.
The sight of Cameron and Clegg staring fondly into each other's eyes stands in welcome contrast to the ghastly, self-serving politics of venality, resentment, hatred and mendacity honed and prosecuted by Gordon Brown."
But hang on Dick, wasn't it Jake Gyllenhall's character Jack who seduced Heath Ledger's Ennis?
I seem to remember Heath/Ennis's wife walked out on him in a huff.
And didn't Jake/Jack end up getting beaten to death?
Fagburn wonders how far this metaphor can be stretched?

The Brokeback Coalition

The papers are all loving it this morning that David Davis, the former shadow home secretary and eternal Tory shit-stirrer, has allegedly called the Cameron-Clegg marriage of convenience "the Brokeback coalition".
The comment was made in a wine bar, but sounded like a saloon bar sneer.
Davis was only (allegedly) quoting a quip from Lord Ashcroft, and in the past almost every newspaper has light-heartedly compared Nick and Dave's relationship to a civil partnership (Cameron even made that "joke" himself).
The story was broken by The Financial Times; "Davis in ‘Brokeback’ jibe over coalition - Remark exposes rightwing frustration at government."
But the other newspapers seemed reluctant to speculate on what David Davis might actually mean by the comparison.
That even they think it's wrong and it's doomed to failure? ("I wish I could quit you!")
Or that Davis thinks it's rather queer and a bit "funny"?
"You know friend, this is a god damn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation..."