Ban This Filth! posted by Richard Seymour

Johann Hari is eloquent in his affronted dignity in today’s Independent , blasting the petulant homophobia of commentators in the rightwing press, which barely musters remark outside of the liberal press. The Gay Police Association (an unfortunate name, inviting a variety of homophobic sneers) has decided to press an official complaint against Richard Littlejohn, the bigotted nappy-filler who writes for the Sun when he isn’t scribing literary masterpieces about gay lawyers, black crimmos, asylum seekers and political correctness. Political correctness sanctifies a certain kind of ersatz transgression, in which the outraged conservative wimp will pretend to be put upon and oppressed by modern day Jacobins seeking to curb freedom of speech. Couched in the language of rebellion, any old reactionary twaddle can pretend to be slightly subversive – picture the wry old right-wing fox, with a twinkling eye for the ladies and a line in ‘wicked’ humour.

I find it all too easy to patronise liberals like Johann – I sort of think they shouldn’t be allowed to write about international affairs. Editors should restrict their remit to things like immigration, civil liberties, child smacking, gender and sexual liberty. Stuff they’re good at. David Aaronovitch, of course, should not be allowed to write about anything at all until he’s had a few cups of coffee. But Hari does an excellent job of ripping the banausic frontmen for archaic prejudice to shreds. Still, he isn’t too sure about the moves by the GPA, regarding censorship as both morally wrong and counterproductive. I am not so squeamish – lock ‘em up, I say! Throw away the key! Let them have their rectums torn at the altar of Mr Big! Etc. But I’ve always been slightly bemused by the reactionary firebrands of the Daily Mail and the Murdoch stable. Why aren’t there legions of Sun readers desperately trying to gain asylum status, since they believe it will entitle them to a lifestyle of pampered luxury at the expense of yer nanny state? Why aren’t they eagerly renting gay porn and wearing fashionable clothing, since they think the gay lifestyle affords such privileges?

Anyway, as I say, I have no objection to deploying the force of laws and regulatory procedures to stop racists and homophobes soiling the national bed with their sickness. If they give you a handle, turn it (so to speak). Part of the trouble I have with the liberal’s Voltairean dedication to free speech as an absolute right is that the favour is never returned by the Right. Where did all those erstwhile defenders of free speech disappear to when the spotlight was shifted away from Kilroy and onto Jenny Tongue MP? Will we hear from them next time an Abu Hamza raises his hook in public and cries out the evils of Jews and Americans? Another problem I have with Voltaire’s dictum is that a) I wouldn’t die for the right of any racist to utter odious obsequies about the master race and b) anyone who would do so heartily deserves their fate.

This isn’t to say there are no difficulties in appealing to the law, or to broadcasting rules. For one thing, such gestures often are counterproductive even where wholly merited. For another, these rules are applied grotesquely unevenly. Rod Liddle made the excellent point on Question Time that the case of a Muslim extremist sent to jail for eight years for producing racist literature, far from being the hallmark of Enlightenment, was actually the mark of extreme authoritarianism. Indeed, I do agree that eight years is perhaps too long. But he might have added that there is one very prominent and influential racist in Britain who has produced racist literature of the most disgusting kind and only received a two-year suspended sentence for it. The publication was The Rune, and the offending edition carried a picture of a noose on the front page along with the headline “What Has a Rope Got to Do with White Unity?” On the inside of the cover was the answer – “Because when payback time comes, we will be able to put the rope to capital effect”. The author was Nick Griffin, head of the BNP.

Laws publicly intended to defend the oppressed from racist bigotry are often debased in this way. Not long ago, US neoconservatives were appealing on the basis of ‘affirmative action’ programmes for quotas to be set which would force an increase in the representation of conservatives in the academia – it being the case that radicals and Marxists were woefully over-represented. And while these perverse notions do not render those laws useless, they do point to the limits of legalistic logic, insofar as laws do not recognise or account for structural oppression and marginalisation, and render a spurious equality between rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight. One’s attitude to the law in such circumstances has to be entirely instrumental – it has to be reckoned with as a force, and used prudentially, but we cannot afford to rely on such means.

Protest is, at any rate, far more effective in the long term than legal procedure. It creates a climate of intolerance toward bigots of of every stripe, without the attending baggage of ‘censorship’ and so on. In fact, when po-faced defenders of free speech have the nerve to object to Anti-Nazi League counter-demonstrations against the National Front on the grounds that “they’ve got the right to demonstrate if they want to”, there is always the excellent reply that, after all, “so have we”. You can’t demand free speech and then object when the opposing chorus happens to be louder. If there were even an ounce of political nous in the gay liberation movement left, Stone Wall and the Pink Paper would be organising Gay Pride marches through Wapping, camping on the lawns of News International and Express Group Newspapers. They would have spent years beseiging Blind Date for never once having the courtesy to feature gay couples (or perhaps even ‘surprising’ the heterosexual man with three drag queens on the other side of the partition – imagine the hilarity when they go for their trip to Majorca!). They would be demanding the heads of the producers of Queer as Folk, possibly the most empty-headed, foul misrepresentation of gay life thus far produced in the name of liberalism. They’d all be collectively shitting on the heads of New Labour for being so feeble about Clause 28 and for having a homophobic Home Secretary. And they’d be demanding Ben Bradshaw come out as a perfectly straight, heterosexual man.

Above all, gay people must fight for something more than ‘tolerance’ – a misanthropy if ever one was invented, since one ‘tolerates’ burdens not other people. They must continue to fight for respect from straight prudes like me. Just because I like women and keep my socks on while humping is no excuse for my rampant heterosexism. Perhaps “Angels in America”, Tony Kushner’s witty and poetic six-hour epic about American gays in the era of AIDS, makes the point better than I could. When the plague arrived, gays had not a friend left, and were rancorously vilified by pure-hearted Americans. Tolerance amounted to jackshit when the chips were down. The anthropological curiosity underlying such ‘tolerance’ was hilariously exemplified in Meryl Streep’s mormon prude when, confronted with an AIDS sickened gay, she hesitantly asked: “Are you a ho-mo-sex-you-al?” To which the answer should have been “well, I wasn’t before, but…”

The literal-minded dextral dwarfs of the right-wing press are undone somewhat by irony and wit, especially since they believe they are uniquely blessed with a ‘sense of humour’. Yet mockery and criticism do not sufficiently wilt them – as Martin Amis once remarked, where imagination meets un-imagination, un-imagination wins every time, hands down. One wins respect as a minority only by virtue of being assertive and uncompromising. Brute force, either of numbers or of strength, is what in fact wins – as everyone from the Mau Mau to the Black Panthers will attest. And, quite frankly, it’s the only language they understand.