Injustice: Gambo, Cliff and Nigel Unite!

Sir Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Nigel Evans will campaign for a change in law to protect the anonymity of those accused of sexual assault and rape.

The singer, broadcaster and MP met in Surrey over the weekend to discuss plans to set up a victims support group, to highlight 'the unnecessary pain and suffering' felt by those wrongly accused, and to campaign for anonymity for sexual assault defendants before charge.

Nigel Evans, who was acquitted of nine charges of rape and sexual assault in 2014, said: “We have got common ground but there are also a load of other people we have common ground with… some are famous before it happens, others become famous because of it... And if we can do without [and] other countries can, why don’t we just get on with it?”

English law protected the identity of rape defendants until the 1980’s and several European countries, such as Germany, ensure anonymity until conviction...

Telegraph.

Nigel Evans is probably a bit of an old lech, but who ain't, it's not a crime.

Paul Gambaccini: Fame & Fortune

Quite bizarre interview with my close showbiz pal Gambo in today's Sunday Telegraph.

Best question...

What impact did your arrest in 2013 have on your career?

LOL etc!

Ann Widdecombe: What Happened?

WHEN Paul Gambaccini issued his account of being falsely accused of child abuse, he noted several instances of the police or CPS releasing news about dropped inquiries or rebailing to coincide with more successful or more sensational news of Operation Yewtree.
 
I shuddered when I read that because if either the police or CPS should be adopting “a good day to bury bad news” mentality or “guilt by association” news management then another precious cornerstone of our justice system is crumbling.

Justice agencies in this country should be concerned with justice and nothing else.
 
News manipulation should never be attempted and statements about the course of an investigation should be determined by facts not convenience...

Yet I suspended judgment because I had the fairness to accept that it could all be coincidence, even if the regularity suggested otherwise.

Now it looks as if that fairness was misplaced as I cannot have been the only person to notice that the long overdue apology to Lady Brittan for the police’s failure to tell her dying husband that he was no longer under any investigation (and had not been for quite some time) coincided with the news that a bishop had been convicted of sex offences.

Is that what they were waiting for?...

Ann 'Not Anne' Widdecombe, Daily Express.

Sad that this has divided people on party lines, and many Labour Party supporters knee-jerk that this is all a Conservative Party conspiracy to cover up some secret Tory paedophile ring.

Whilst much of it is partly just an excuse to bash Labour via its new deputy leader, it is obvious that Tom Watson is a power-crazed delusional thug who has behaved appallingly.

PS And not forgetting... Zac Goldsmith urged to withdraw paedophile ring allegations: Ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor says Goldsmith should rethink mayoral bid unless he retracts claims of VIP abuse at Richmond guest house, The Guardian.

While The Telegraph's rottweiler, Dan Hodges, urges - hilariously - Put down your pitchforks and stop the Tom Watson witchunt. LOL!

Paul Gambaccini: Only Connect

Oh, yes. I mentioned the last line. There has not been a month in my life when I have not thought of it. The message from downstairs reminds us that circumstances may be individual but humanity is universal: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” 

Paul Gamabaccini chooses Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as his Book Of A Lifetime, The Independent.

It's not hard to see why.

For what it's worth, it's a favourite of Fagburn, too.

Gambo's memoir, Love, Paul Gambaccini:My Year Under the Yewtree, is reviewed here.

Paul Gambaccini: Guilty Until...

It’s a witch-hunt that will be regarded by history with the same disdain and derision with which we now regard the Salem witch trials in Massachussets,” he says. Having lived through the McCarthyism era in the United States as a boy, he sees clear parallels between the hunt for reds under the bed then and the search for paedophiles.

“The FBI couldn’t arrest Stalin, so the authorities either blacklisted or arrested folk singers and screenwriters as if that could contain him. And now, having failed to stop Jimmy Savile in his lifetime, the police have diverted the spotlight on to persons who had been alive in his time as if sexual perversion was an airborne contagion.”

Of Operation Yewtree, set up in response to the Savile affair, he says: “If it had been a football club it would have been relegated. It lost such a high percentage of its cases.” The Crown Prosecution Service is in his view “the ministry of lies”.

Having talked to many of the other high-profile figures involved in cases like his, he is convinced that the justice system has got out of balance, with the rights of accusers put before those of the accused. “There has been an inversion of the principle of the foundation of the British justice system: innocent until proven guilty.”

The police have, he believes, embarked on what he calls a “reign of terror” — going on fishing expeditions rather than following leads. “They had a dedicated phone line and they invited members of the public to accuse celebrities and they said: ‘You will be believed.’ ” When a fellow broadcaster, Liz Kershaw, told him she had been telephoned by the police out of the blue and asked whether she had ever been groped by Dave Lee Travis, Gambaccini concluded that there had been a “mutation of the British justice system from a centuries-old internationally respected evidence-based system to one based on subjective rumour and accusation”.

He was horrified to hear Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, describe accusers as “victims”. Some “of the people who make allegations of sexual abuse aren’t telling the truth . . . The overwhelming majority of allegations made against celebrities during the witch-hunt have been false, many of them preposterously so.” While the price paid by those accused of sex crimes is enormous, he points out that there are no consequences for anyone fabricating allegations. “It’s a win, no-lose situation.” ...

Gambaccini — who has been openly gay for decades — is convinced that homophobia has also been involved. “There is a disturbing tendency in these cases to think that gay men have underage partners, for which there is no validity and statistics. It’s a merging of concepts by an undiverse police force. When I came to this city I was horrified by the ‘pretty policeman’ campaign — when the police would tart up their youngest and best-looking police officers and have them go into public parks and toilets and seduce gay men into making propositions at which point they would be arrested . . . The institutional homophobia of the Metropolitan police has evolved.”...

Profile in The Times.

Fagburn is trying to think of a word or phrase for when the British police are too corrupt and crooked for words, but I guess it's just 'policing'.

PS Extracts from My Year Under Yewtree.

Paul Gambaccini: Live From The Witch Trials

With his warmth, humour and supreme knowledge of music, broadcaster Paul Gambaccini is loved and respected by millions. So when he was arrested over flimsy abuse claims, there was disbelief.

Yet within weeks he was out of work, denounced, shunned by former friends – a witch-hunt worthy of the Soviets.

Until today he has kept silent. Now, though, in this truly disturbing first account of his ordeal, he describes becoming the helpless victim of official prosecutors – who seemed determined to stop at nothing to secure a celebrity conviction... 

Mail On Sunday serialistion - now read on...

PS And here's how the Mail reported Gambo's arrest; 'Not suspected of commiting paedophile offences with Savile'.

Harvey Proctor: Fly Swatting

Needless to say the media had been tipped off. The BBC bulletin that morning said: “Police investigating allegations of an establishment paedophile ring have searched the home of former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor... fined in 1987 for gross indecency.” As it happens that was Alan Turing’s crime in 1952.

Mr Proctor’s comment may not surprise you: “I do not think I’ve been oversensitive in thinking that there is an element of guilt by association in your report.” In fact the police haven’t even suggested Proctor is a suspect, but he has now been cornered into denying what nobody has alleged — triggering a new round of media headlines “Harvey Proctor denies . . .” etc. Kafkaesque is precisely the word.

I watched the BBC’s footage (some of it filmed from a helicopter) when Cliff Richard’s place was raided in his absence and without his knowledge, after an exclusivity deal had been done between the police and the BBC: footage the corporation then had the impertinence to enter for a Royal Television Society award. I’ve never met Cliff Richard — but heaven knows some astonishing unlikelihoods have turned out to be true in other cases — so I said nothing.

I followed the year’s hell the broadcaster Paul Gambaccini went through after his arrest on suspicion of historical sex offences as part of Operation Yewtree (dropping him as my guest on my Great Lives radio series) until, finally, no charges were brought. I do know Mr Gambaccini slightly and seriously doubted there’d be anything in this — but, heaven knows, etc — so I said nothing.

I was a friend of Harvey Proctor during his ordeals; and if Harvey (a very private man who never talked about his homosexuality even to me as a fellow-gay, fellow-Tory MP, but has had, so far as I know, not the remotest interest in children) was ever involved in a “ring of top people”, then I’ll eat my hat. But, heaven knows, etc . . .

Or, rather, no: this time I’ll say something. I think the story’s absolute b****cks. The comment about Mr Proctor from the MP-turned-witchfinder-general John Mann, that “the police have said they will go where the evidence takes them and that’s exactly what they should do” is disgraceful. What evidence? Does Mr Mann know of any here? I very much doubt the police do. This is nothing to do with evidence: it’s the police canteen culture talking: “He’s gay, he’s got a conviction, a loner and he was an MP, hey — let’s check him out. And tell the media. Who knows — maybe someone will ring in.”...

A rightly and righteously impassioned piece by Matthew Parris in The Times.

It was well-known while he was alive that Cyril Smith was guilty of the most heinous crimes against boys,  and he was allowed to get away with it, but the Dolphin Square story sounds like complete fantasy.

Or, as Mr Parris so eloquently puts it, 'absolute bollocks'.

Paul Gambaccini: Fly Paper

Paul Gambaccini, the broadcaster, has backed a 28-day limit for police bail after telling how the police and prosecutors “sat on me” for 12 months before he learnt he would not be charged over an allegation of sex abuse.

Mr Gambaccini told MPs that he had forfeited more than £200,000 in lost earnings and legal costs over a year on bail in which he was unable to work because of publicity surrounding the allegation.

The former Radio 1 DJ, who has since returned to work on Radio 2 and Radio 4, said he was used as “fly paper”, as his arrest was publicised by police in the hope that other people would come forward to make allegations against him.

He said he suspected his bail was extended until the end of high-profile cases involving other celebrities, because detectives on Operation Yewtree — the investigation into historical sex offences — did not want juries to hear that a former DJ had been cleared.

Mr Gambaccini was giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committe after Theresa May, the home secretary, announced in December that she was consulting on a 28-day bail limit in all but exceptional cases.

She said that it “cannot be right that people can spend months or even years on pre-charge bail with no oversight”.

Mr Gambaccini said: “I faced the full weight of the state with unlimited financial resources for 12 months for no reason — it was a completely fictitious case, a science fiction case which would have required time travel, and I don’t have a time machine.”

The broadcaster was arrested on October 29, 2013 and police handed papers to the Crown Prosecution Service on February 10, last year, but it was October 10 before he was told no case would be brought against him, he said.

By Christmas 2013, the press regarded it as a “nothing case” and a character witness later told him police had stood him down because there was no prospect of a trial, Mr Gambaccini said.

He said that his bail was extended on seven occasions with only “vague” explanations from the police, but he gradually realised that the dates often coincided with important developments in the Yewtree investigation...

The Times.

What a world, what a world!

Paul Gambaccini: Free At Last!

BBC broadcaster Paul Gambaccini will not face action over alleged historical sex offences, prosecutors say.

The 65-year-old DJ was held at a south London address in October last year as part of the Metropolitan Police's Operation Yewtree investigation.

The Crown Prosecution Service said a 75-year-old man arrested at the same time will also face no further action.

It said the inquiry concerned allegations of sexual offences against teenage boys in the early 1980s.

Mr Paul Gambaccini has always denied the claims.

Baljit Ubhey, the Chief Crown Prosecutor of CPS London, said: "Having carefully reviewed this case, we have decided that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute." ...

BBC News.

Good news - always thought this case stank.

Bad news - the Met held him on bail for a year, well done Plod!

Hope Gambo is back on the wireless soonest.

How The Sun 'broke the story'...

Update: Paul's statement...

‘There may be members of the Press who will ask me to give interviews or make provocative statements. I will politely decline.

‘To discuss horror in this way is to trivialise it. I will never trivialise the 12 months of trauma to which I have been unjustly subjected. I would like to thank my friends, my lawyers and the people of this country for their support during the past year.

‘Wherever I have gone, I have been stopped in the street by members of the public offering encouragement. I am very grateful. I’ll be back at work soon. Thank you.’

Paedomania: Spectating

Rod Liddle and Matthew Parris in The Spectator on a very British witch hunt.

This is all going to get so ridiculous...

'People can make accusations, can infer guilt by association, can assert grandly. They can draw cartoons of murky establishments and of eyes under lifted stones. They may be right, they may be wrong. But only the evidence can tell you which it is. And in the past fortnight we have entered a zone heavy on claim and light on substance.' David Aaronovitch, The Times.

Sad but true - this bout of paedomania seems to be bringing out a lot of people's inner David Icke.

PS And Stephen Fry speaks out against Operation Yewtree at a Labour party do, in apparent defence of his chum Paul Gambaccini.

Fagburn: Backpfeifengesicht

Ver actual media is full of stuff about Ukip and that smug posh twat Nigel Farage today, but here's a quick round-up of some other stuff that caught my red eyes recently...

Chris Denning: Shameless Ex-BBC DJ busted BBC News.
Burn the witch! etc etc.

Unreported World: Jamaica's Underground Gays Channel 4.
Tonight at 8pm.
RT with a :( if you want to pretend you care, but won't actually watch it.

Gambo: Shameless BBC DJ hosts Ivor Novello Awards Daily Express.
The 30th year he's done it. Good for him. x

Adorable!: The most pukey kid reacts to gayers 'viral' video EVER! Daily Mail.
It's rather instructive that only naff right-wing dweebs like Mail Online and Gay Star News like sentimental gay crap like this.

Old Vic: Matthew Warchus taking over from Kevin Spacey Daily Telegraph.
Old Vic? Queen Vic more like!
[Edit: Apparently Warchus, director of the new film Pride, isn't gay so... 'Old Vic? Old queen more like!' Not that I'm suggesting Spacey is a big gayer, either].

Disco Damaged: London website relaunched!!! DiscoDamaged.com.
Good news.

Brian Paddick: Ex-lover 'threatened to kill me' Via Gay Star News.
No comment.

Brighton Pride: Will they charge for the St James's Street party? GScene.
Probably. They always do what Sussex Police tell them to.

Sitges: Never Mind The Buggers Guardian Travel.
Fagburn's stepsister [Is there a nicer term to use?] used to live there with her kids and they all loved it.

RuPaul: Responds to 'tranny' 'controversy' HuffPost Gay Voices. 
Context is all. If The Sun used 'tranny' in a cruel, sensationalist story about a trans woman that would be offensive, but I really don't think that's what going on here. 

Harvey Milk: A frigging stamp unveiled at the White House! The Independent. 
A stamp!!!! Wow. It's the least they could do - they checked.

Edward Carpenter: Fundraising drive for a memorial in Sheffield Morning Star.
The pioneering radical gay socialist Edward Carpenter is one of Fagburn's heroes. Born in Hove, he didn't stay long...

Fred Phelps: Did a dying Fred come out for LGBT rights? Via Queerty.
Doubt it. This has apparently come from a member of the Phelps clan and they say all kinds of crazy shit.

Giovanni's Room: The last day at America's oldest gay bookstore Rolling Stone.
Thanks amazon! Maybe since your minimum wage slavery and tax avoidance helped put them out of business, some of the money you so publicly gave for mc same-sex marriage could go to help a community LGBT bookshop for gay people who like books. Ah, just realised the flaw in that plan...

PS Backpfeifengesicht is a German word for a person who should be punched in the face.

No idea why Fagburn kept thinking of that today.

Anyway, here is the real news!

Leave me alone, I can't fucking take it anymore

Daily Star: Here Is The News!!!

Daily Star.

Ban Gambo!
Ban the Beeb!

PS And as if this wasn't terrifying enough, The Sun reports that Gambaccini recently left his house and went to see Dame Edna Everage!!!!

Paul Gambaccini: When Salem Came To Broadcasting House...

Daily Star.

The Sun: We Will Bury You!

Despite splashing this across their front page, The Sun has no story, except that they named "gay Gambaccini".
Gambo, you are the quarry!
What a bloody country.
"If we was smart we'd emigrate..."

"What I want to suggest is most emphatically not that the problem of paedophilia does not exist, but that as a society we have become unhealthily obsessed by it. A kind of madness is gripping our age: I felt that as I pictured the terrified Bijan Ebrahimi, the crowd chanting “paedo, paedo” outside his flat, and nobody daring to try to protect him. And this in my own country.
"It has reached a stage when (as a friend ruefully observed recently) “I caught, without context, the name of a once-well-known 20th-century broadcaster on the news the other day, and found myself thinking: “Dead or Yew Tree?” I worry nowadays even about smiling at children on trains."

Matthew Parris writing in The Times today on our new witch hunts and witch trials.
Parris's article must have been filed before he heard about Gambaccini, but sadly, in our current climate of hysteria, would be apposite any day it was published.

PS The Sun is currently being seriously outshat in the tabloid sheer shittiness stakes by the Daily Express's racist "Crusade" against Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants. 

Paul Gambaccini: Join Sun+ To Find Out More!

Shameless, sickening promotion by The Sun.

Thanks to Scott Bryan.

For the record, five of the 14 other men arrested under Operation Yewtree were later told they won't face any charges.
No-one's been convicted yet.
One man has committed suicide.

"On Monday night, 28 October, I attended an excellent production of the Kander and Ebb musical, the Scottsboro Boys, at the Young Vic theatre.
"It concerned a group of black men in Alabama in the 1930s who were falsely accused of sexual offences. Within hours, I was arrested by Operation Yewtree. Nothing had changed, except this time there was no music." 

Official statement by Paul Gambaccini.

Lou Reed: He Wasn't Too Keen On Journalists...

Apparently the last portrait, taken earlier this month by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

Only saw two queer-specific articles about Lou in the British media, which seems rather odd considering his stunning impact on your actual gay culture, but doesn't really surprise me.
Here's Paris Lees on the Channel 4 News website on what he meant to trans people.
And Tom Robinson wrote for The Independent on his "implied bisexuality"...

Perhaps it was our own hunger for affirmation that led my generation to try and cast such a complex – and downright ornery – individual as Lou Reed in the role of Gay Figurehead. If ever an artist saw sexuality as a vast, diverse landscape with many bright wonders and dark private places – and if there was ever an artist unlikely to identify himself publicly with just one corner of that territory – it was Sister Lou.

An Independent reader replies...

And let's not forget the Daily Mail's moving eulogy to Uncle Lou...

A VERY debauched walk on the wild side: He did more than any other rock star to give drugs a false and dangerous glamor. Now, after a liver transplant in May, Lou Reed's own excesses have finally caught up with him

Remember, the life of this rapacious, proselytizing drug-taking pervert was cruelly cut short at the age of just 71.

Just say no, kids!

Update: In Wednesday's Mail Jan Moir writes on Lou Reed and our "dysfunctional relationship with celebrity death."
Yes, that's the same Jan Moir who infamously wrote about Stephen Gately's Strange, Lonely And Troubling Death!

Paul Gambaccini: Gaywatch

Veteran broadcaster Paul Gambaccini has shed light on a sinister practice early in in his career at the BBC in which he was marked out in the Corporation's personnel files because he was gay.

Speaking exclusively to the Telegraph, 64-year-old Gambaccini declared himself to be "one of the last of the Christmas trees".

He explained: "I am of the generation whose BBC personnel files had Christmas trees on them. It meant you were 'as camp as Christmas' and thus a potential security risk.

"The country was still obsessed with the Cambridge spies. To some people, a gay man was a potential security threat and might betray his country to the Soviet Union. Utter balderdash!"

Gambaccini who is about to celebrate 40 years at the BBC is openly gay and, last year, married his partner Christopher Sherwood. He has never denied his sexuality. "I was never 'in'," he said.

Daily Telegraph.

The Cambridge Spies was 1951, Gambaccini joined the BBC in 1973, but whatever you say Gambo...
Here's the full interview - he's always struck Fagburn as quite a decent chap.
The Gambaccini Years starts on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday August 8th.

Ricky Martin: Father Figure

On Monday Ricky Martin releases his first album since he came out, Music + Alma + Sexo.*
Nope, can't say I'm that bothered either.
Pop - like Cilla Black's life - is full of surprises, but coming out was almost certainly the last thing Mr Martin does that anyone will take much notice of.
The career's as good as over, has been for a decade - which may have played a big part in Ricky Martin deciding that the time was now right to come out.
Rosie Swash writes about his comeback on Guardian Music Online (Edit: It also appeared in Saturday's print edition).
Swash says "those hoping that Martin's new album will offer a deep reflection of gay life may be disappointed."
But was anyone seriously expecting this from Ricky?
He's not been too big on deep reflection in the past.
"This is an interesting time for homosexuality in pop music," Swash declares - citing the barely literate "I love the gays, me!" lyrics of Born This Way by Lady Gaga by way of example.
There are some - actually quite insightful - quotes from Paul Gambaccini in the piece.
"His decision to come out was not just made possible by his decision to become a father," he argues, "but it was made necessary by it, as it immediately restarted the conversation about his sexuality..."
Paul Gambaccini senses that fatherhood is being used to negate Ricky Martin's sexuality.
"He has positioned himself as a doting father and that in itself is a focus changer, because he's not saying 'I'm in love and live with a male partner, with whom I have two children' – he's saying 'I have two children who I love and am crazy about' ".
Gambo also posits an interesting paradox of the celebrity closet;
"I know many gay musicians who say they still don't want to come out. More than anything, they don't want their fans to feel they've been lied to."

* Edit: It's not actually getting a UK release (see comments). Which says a lot...