Don't waste your time going to visit the Daily Mail website to read that Moir article. You can see the whole thing here. (Then, if you are moved by Charlie Brooker's column, you can complain here). As you'll have gathered by now, Mail columnist Jan Moir decided to use the death of singer Stephen Gately to suggest that something terribly sinister is afoot when gay men have relations. Gately died of natural causes, and the coroner's report confirmed this. Moir, though, smells a rat, and for once it isn't a co-worker. She induces that the cause of Gately's death must have actually been 'unnatural', in some sense related to his 'lifestyle'. (Can I just ask, in passing, whether my banal sexual and sumptuary habits amount to a lifestyle? Just curious.) Somehow, quite mischievously apparently, this was construed as homophobic. For, as Moir explains:

"The point of my column -which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all."

Yes. Unanswered questions. About the viability of gay relationships, particularly of 'civil partnerships', in light of the "ooze" of some supposedly "dangerous lifestyle" disclosed in the death not only of Gately, but also of Matt Lucas' partner, Kevin McGee. Those kinds of unanswered questions. Only a sick, politically correct, fascist bastard would construe that as evidence of homophobia. In fact, it's just common sense:

It seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death.

Coroner reports are all very well, but they can hardly be expected to deter the unflabble and infallible inquisitive instincts of the Daily Mail glitterati. And anyway, Moir clarifies that civil partnership stuff:

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Pause for a second and think about this. Moir is "on record" as supporting civil partnerships. That makes her practically a gay rights activist, for fuck's sake. Can you be so intolerant as to deprive a committed Stonewaller of the right to just ask some questions just because it might be a little bit inconvenient to your worn out ideology? Oh, sure. Some of you might have noticed the part of the article where Moir specifically contests the idea that civil partnerships are "just the same as heterosexual marriages", citing two recent celebrity deaths and the "dangerous lifestyles" they supposedly resulted from as evidence of her thesis. You might have even noticed that she appears to take exception to gays "always calling for tolerance and understanding". And, no doubt, in yet another affront to taste and manners, you are already forming your ignorant, ill-conceived opinions about her supposedly contradicting herself in a flatfooted attempt to evade responsibility for having written something vile. You might even be calling her a lying piece of shit at this point. But that's just because you are part of the conspiracy:

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

Quite. This is an orchestrated hate campaign, mounted by you-know-who against a tolerant, inclusive, committed supporter of the gay community. She's not a homophobe, she's just asking questions. Incidentally, something odd happened earlier in the week. A perfectly healthy gay man died, painfully and horribly, in the middle of Trafalgar Square. His lifestyle was definitely related to the cause of his death. I hope Moir will not be put off by this spiteful campaign, and will take the time to examine this case and its implications for those tolerance-begging, understanding-seeking types in our midst. More power to her typing finger.