In case you thought I was referring to a coveted Pink Award, the title is  just a pun on the year’s end! Hope the rest won’t disappoint, however, as I want to firm up a few highlights of 2010.

Let me start with the recent news that the US Senate has finally given approval for openly gay men and women to serve in the military ( something the UK allowed ten years ago) - another small but significant step for gay rights, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. One elderly Senator spoke of a gay soldier he knew, saying: “He’s big, and he’s mean, and he kills lots of bad guys”, as if that was the test of all gay people had to offer.

Nearer home, as a former student of the London School of Economics, I’m reminded of this year being the 40th anniversary of the first gathering of the Gay Liberation Front there on 13 October, 1970. It was also the year we wore badges declaring, Gay Is Good, an echo of black being beautiful, which was  bright, bold, and concise. There have been many reasons this year why I think that slogan holds good. Read the rest of this entry »

Mae West

When Mae West famously quipped, “a hard man is good to find”, she could not have envisaged the extent of the modern gay movement’s reliance on porn from mags to movies to the proliferation of domestic cam sites. She was a truly modern woman whose sexual awareness,  electrifying satire,  and forthright feminism were castigated by the moral majority in 1920s America.

Imprisoned on Devil’s Island for “corrupting the morals of youth”, Mae saw enough homosexuality to turn it into a play called The Drag. It was promptly dropped when she refused to rewrite it to please a nervous theatre manager.

For all her renown, she would have seen the gay porn now surfeiting the scene as pernicious. It is a revelation to look at her career again, which, she claimed, had “a redeeming social purpose”, and, in the light of this, to question where our present gay sexual obsessions are leading us. Read the rest of this entry »