General Election 2015: Oops!

We apologise if yesterday's sharing graphic caused any confusion and have taken it down following your feedback: https://t.co/Dpg9pL4kbE

— Stonewall (@stonewalluk) April 28, 2015

Here's the first version, that made LGBTory, Lib Dem, SNP members have kittens, saying it was misleading.

Compare and contrast to Stonewall's breakdown of the major parties LGBT manifesto pledges.

Stonewall have often been accused of cosying up to Labour - most notably when Angela Mason backed Frank Dobson, a Labour MP not noted for his support of LGBT equality, in the Mayor Of London election in 2000, over Ken Livingstone, who had been a pioneer and public champion for some 20 years.

After leaving Stonewall in 2002, Mason was made head of the Women And Equality Unit quango by the Labour government, doubling her salary to £80,000. In 2007 she was made Dame Angela Mason.

Unthought For The Day: Benedict Cumberbatch

‘For me there’s explicit love in the film, and the fact of his sexuality being homosexual doesn’t make any difference. If it would have added to the film, we’d have done it. I’d have no qualms about filming those scenes, expressing that side of a character’s relationship to his body. It’s partly to do with the logical loop of the film, the poetical loop. It’s about what’s not seen, it’s about secrets, what’s repressed – and his sexuality was. This is a man who’s never going to be allowed to love, and that’s really his tragedy and the tragedy of the film...

‘It sort of is, but more important is the idea that the man at the centre of it, who was persecuted for being different, still stands sadly for a lot of persecution that goes on around the world today. That’s what terrifies me – that it's as prevalent now, and that this is how we treated one of our war heroes, and a great scientist, someone who’s up there with Charles Darwin; he should be on banknotes. I don’t think Alan set himself up as a martyr, but he sure as hell was treated as one in a sense.’

Cumberbatch’s voice rises in indignation. ‘This was 60 years ago – here, in this country! Giving a man injections to turn him into something desexualised, that ruined his brain. He was being given weekly oestrogen doses and at one point the doctor said, this is a bit embarrassing for both us; why don’t I give you an implant so you don’t have to keep coming back for these appointments every week. He was given the implant in his thigh. It was supposed to stop after two years, and it didn’t.

‘A colleague of his whom I spoke to told me Turing had said, “It’s not really cricket, is it” – being wry and humorous about it. But then one night he pulled out a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and tried to gouge it out of his body.’ Cumberbatch sighs deeply. ‘To reach that state of mind... The only thing he had left to love – that he was legally allowed to love – was his work, and even that was denied him, to the extent that he took his own life by swallowing cyanide.’

The hilariously thick and insincere Benedict Cumberbatch in the Sunday Telegraph. 

Oh do shut up!

Alan Turing probably didn't commit suicide - though that rather spoils the myth of The Great Gay Martyr - and I'm pretty sure he'd shudder at the very thought of being put on a sodding banknote. 

This profile also contains the classic line/lie; Turing 'invented the early computing machine that cracked the German Enigma code.'

It didn't - that was the work of three Polish mathematicians; Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski.

Can they be on a banknote, Ben?

• Images by Darren and Polari magazine. x

I'd rather catch my Dad dancing in a local night club to Rhianna or wearing a nose ring than to see him like this: pic.twitter.com/1X1S0w6ykb
— Madeleine Teahan (@MadeleineTeahan) October 28, 2014

£45 t-shirt made in 62p an hour sweatshop claim.

These 'This is what a feminist looks like' t-shirts were made for the Fawcett Society - current chair, Angela Mason, ex-head of Stonewall and former cadre of anarcho-terrorist gang, the Angry Brigade.

The Angry Brigade: Where Are They Now?

There is an interview with John Barker in today's Guardian.
Once a member of Britain's most notorious anarchist terrorist cell, the Angry Brigade, he and five comrades were convicted of a series of bombings and sentenced to ten years in prison in 1972.
We learn John is 'angrier than ever', but now leads a quiet life, working as a freelance indexer of books and spending most of his time in Greece.

But this led Fagburn to wonder whatever happened to the other angry brigadiers?

Above we see a poster in support of the Stoke Newington 8 - as the arrested members were known during their trial.
Yes, I know there are nine of them, but that's crazed anarchists for you.
That's John, bottom right.

In the centre is a certain Angela Weir, who was not convicted, so what happened to her?
You may know her better as Angela Mason, chair of Stonewall between 1992 and 2002.
Rather coyly, she now refuses to discuss her days as an angry young woman.
Awarded a CBE in 2007, Angie is currently chair of the Fawcett Society, an adviser to some bizarro government quango, and a Labour councillor in Camden.
Didn't she do well!

Next Week: Stuart Christie.

PS You may also enjoy the essay, Carnival Of The Oppressed: The Angry Brigade and the Gay Liberation Front by Lucy Robinson.

Letter To The Editor: Queer Theory

In his hilarious interview with Decca Aikenhead (22 December), Tory MP David Davies advances the "erasure" theory of homosexuality, akin to similar theories such as the "Sound of Music" and "Judy Garland'. This may be extended to a wider range of tastes than music. For example, when, a few years ago, I owned a large and aggressive poodle, I and my partner were often accosted – in a perfectly friendly way – by individuals who would regale us with jokes about poodles suggestive of effeminacy.

I had a less warm encounter with a gent in blazer and grey flannels in a newsagent's in a Suffolk village. When I wandered in (with dog) to buy a Sunday paper the gentleman recoiled, gasping, "Is that a homosexual dog?" By contrast, a theatre director friend told me how when he and his boyfriend were mincing (his word) down the street accompanied by their pitbull (or it might have been a staffie, I forget which), burly lorry drivers would lean out of their cabs, thumbs up, with a "Great dog, mate!". Clearly, in consumer society, we really are what we buy.
Elizabeth Wilson
London

I think this letter in The Guardian has been buggered by a sub after one too many Christmas sherries.
The correspondent surely meant "Erasure theory" - capital E, after the electropop group - and not the more high-falutin' and po-mo sounding "erasure theory".
Mr Davies was quoted as saying;

"Can I say something else as well?" he adds. "It may or may not be relevant." When Davies was 16, a popular school friend had announced he was gay. Davies ran into him again at 19, "And it turned out the guy had got engaged. To a woman! And he absolutely didn't want to talk about what had gone on between the age of 16 and 19. He'd started coming down to the pub at 16 with, you know, splits in his jeans, and started buying Erasure albums, and all the rest of it – and three years later he's suddenly horrified by the whole thing!"

Oh dear.
People like this are now running the country, guys and gals.
Oh, and this letter is presumably by the noted Marxist feminist queer academic, Elizabeth Wilson, whose partner is Angela Mason, of both Angry Brigade and Stonewall fame.
Respec'!