AS I WAS SAYING
Homosexuals must lower their expectations and not frighten the horses
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE
Never having sat on a real commission, royal or otherwise, and never being likely to, I decided, a few months ago, to accept an invitation to sit on the next worst thing — a mock-up of one on television. So, in the company of my fellow commissioners — a delightful black lawyer who works for Michael Mansfield, the radical QC, a jolly life peer of Indian extraction, the glorious gold-medal-winning javelin-thrower Fatima Whitbread, and a gay broadcaster called Simon Fanshawe, not to mention, of course, the omnipresent camera crew — I have been touring the country searching for the causes of, and possible cures for, hate crimes: not the normal sort in which spouses attack each other, but the other sort to do with race, colour and sexual orientation.
Am I any the wiser as a result of my trav- els? Not really, if only because we were unable to interview anyone who has ever committed a hate crime; and no one mind- ed to do so would be foolish enough to con- fess such an intention on television, except perhaps to Oprah Winfrey who, fortunate- ly, was not part of our show. In fact, the nearest the Commission came to anything Which might conceivably have thrown light on hate crimes was when the gay commis- sioner, enraged by something I had said, cursed me on camera as 'a fucking bigot'. Sadly, I rather doubt whether this bit of our deliberations will ever be shown, which is a pay because, if Simon Fanshawe's looks could kill, the commissioners would have witnessed a hate crime at first hand.
Nevertheless our time was not entirely wasted and, for my part, the most interest- ing conclusion reached was that there is far more hostility to minorities nowadays on grounds of sexual orientation than on grounds of race or colour. We found this to be so both among schoolchildren and their Parents. While nobody we talked to was Prepared to express racist sentiments, there Was no such universal inhibition about giv- ing voice to homophobia. Living, as I do, mostly among metropoli- tan professionals — i.e. the chattering classes — this surprised me. For in those Circles hostility to homosexuals is quite as much frowned upon as hostility towards blacks and browns. But this most definitely was not the case among the children and parents, for example, in a middle-class area of Glasgow, all of whom — white as much as black and brown — were exceedingly uncomfortable about homosexuality. Nor did teachers make any effort to disguise this. They made it clear that, whereas par- ents have no objections to lessons intended to eradicate racial prejudice, they would be passionately opposed to any such pedagogic efforts to create a more sympathetic atti- tude to homosexuality. If this finding is generally true — and I have to emphasise that I heard nothing to suggest that it is not — then surely it should have an important bearing on what could and should be done about hate crimes, the subject of our report. For it would seem to suggest that while the policy of educating a new generation about the realities of race, with a view to increasing tolerance and understanding, does seem to be working, no comparable reliance should be put on education to reduce hostility to sexual deviance. Indeed, the opposite may be true: that the more the public learns about the reality of homosexuality, the less they are inclined to approve. In short, familiarity may be breeding disgust. So where do we go from here? So far as race is concerned, we must press on with policies which are working. The climate is definitely changing. A minority of louts may still commit hate crimes against ethnic minorities, but in so doing they are going against the grain of public opinion. This, however, is not to anything like the same extent the case with hostility to homosexuals. Nobody decent approves of homophobic crimes, of course, but they do feel that sexual deviancy is wrong and alien in a way that they no longer think colour and racial differ- ences are. So while they are beginning to make light of racial differences, and, indeed, positively to relish and rejoice in their vari- ety, they are not willing to make the same allowances for sexual orientation.
Of course, this may change with time, but the process will be a slow one. For while colour prejudice is a relatively new devel- opment — little more than 100 years old and only legitimised by a few 19th-century crackpot scientists — hostility to homosex- uality, which has much deeper roots in his- tory, has always been encouraged by the major religions for reasons — a whole tra- dition of moral philosophy — that tran- scend anything that can be dismissed as mere prejudice or bigotry. For what the Gay Pride people seem too narrow-minded to understand is that for many people of all races — Muslims and Jews as much as Christians — homosexuali- ty, even between consenting adults, is, quite simply, wrong; wrong not because it harms other people, but because, like any other sin, it is offensive to God. But sins endan- gering only one's own soul are not neces- sarily crimes — i.e acts which endanger society as a whole — and nowadays, thank God, most thoughtful people of all reli- gions have no desire to see the state punish, let alone persecute, homosexuals. But while tolerance is one thing, approval, which is what the Gay Pride community are now demanding so vociferously, is quite anoth- er. Hence the need, I argued, for homosex- uals to lower their expectations, to adopt a lower profile that does not frighten the horses; and it was when I sought to spell out what I meant by this that the enraged gay commissioner started his abuse.
My point was that very public erotic embraces of an intimate nature by mem- bers of the same sex (I tried to put it polite- ly), by no means uncommon nowadays, were asking for trouble. Even holding hands, except in gay pubs, was probably inadvisable. A provocatively mincing walk, too, might be imprudent on a housing estate. Like it or not, I argued, the thought of homosexuals 'at it' did still distress many people and therefore it was only good man- ners — a reasonable regard for the sensitiv- ity of others — for homosexuals to avoid giving more offence in these respects than was absolutely necessary. Heaven knows, this need not be regarded as requiring superhuman restraint or sacrifice. Until very recently heterosexuals did not think of fornicating, or even of giving each other more than the most chaste of kisses in pub- lic. All that I was suggesting for homosexu- als, therefore, was a standard of modesty which was, until recently, the norm for everyone.
The late Quentin Crisp, after all, never expected a quiet life; he fully recognised that his outrageous style was likely to pro- mote hate crimes. But the great majority of homosexuals are not heroes and want a quiet life; and, in my view, nothing would contribute more to their enjoying what they want than for the Gay Pride militants to shut up — or even down.
The C4 Hate Commission is to be shown next month on Channel 4.
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