Heavy Issue 67 - ScotsGay Magazine

Since the last Scottish Media Monitor there has been a sharp increase in
media homophobia and religious propaganda. Shortly before Garry Otton
put his last column to bed, after ten years, he received a call from The
Sunday Herald asking him to write a piece for them.
It was pulled at the last moment before being asked to make substantial
alterations. Immediately prior to publication, he was told the article was
unsuitable and was persuaded to allow a ‘sympathetic’ expert to write his
piece for him. Garry Otton has been subjected to ten years of media
censorship, distortion and misrepresentation and has been forced to
close thecolumn following warnings of up to six years imprisonment
should proposed legislation protecting religion become law. Garry’s
article appears here, in its uncensored form, exclusive to ScotsGay.
This is his story…
My first brush with the media was
through my London agent selling illustrations
for love stories drawn for magazines like
Jackie. The illustrations sold in nine countries
but after 500 or so, I felt the magazines
weren’t being particularly honest. They were
asking me to promulgate a heterosexual
dream. But it was a lie. Not just for me: The
reader too. If they had let me do some gay
ones, perhaps I might still have been doing it!
The Scottish Media Monitor was
launched in Gay Scotland magazine while
Dominic d’Angelo was editor in January 1996
following the brutal murder of 35-year-old
Michael Doran in Glasgow’s Queen’s Park in
the summer of 1995. A gang of three lads and
a 14-year-old girl went on a queerbashing
rampage putting a hammer through one guy’s
head, beating another so badly, he was unable
to walk and finally murdering young Michael.
He received 83 blows to his body. They
stabbed him several times in the groin,
stamped on his face until they had broken
every bone in his head and left him in the
bushes, choking to death in his own blood.
With their clothes still bloodstained, they
joined their friends at a nearby party and
bragged about what they had just done. (A
similar murder of a gay man had taken place
in Queen’s Park during the sixties. The murder
of John Cremin led to the last hanging at
Barlinnie Prison of 19-year-old Anthony
Miller, his accomplice, James Denovan was
imprisoned indefinitely after acting as a
decoy). A gay friend of mine who I had
worked with in London was also murdered
after someone put a bottle over his head and,
in a separate incident; another gay friend was
jumped on after leaving a gay club in North
London. They dragged him into their car and
knifed him to death. Michael Doran’s murder
produced a column in The Herald that
described one of the girls who participated in
the attack as a “beautiful child…” whose conviction
had “came as a shock to most people”.
The writer deplored the fact that no attempt
had been made “to help this child come to
terms with the experience of seeing a human
being stabbed and kicked to death”. 12
weeks, later, Herald columnist, John
MacLeod, (before he was sacked for suggesting
murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and
Jessica Chapman might’ve been alive if they’d
been in church), described gays as “unnatural,
dangerous, evil” and “simply not
equipped to live”. They inspired me to launch
the Scottish Media Monitor. With the ‘militant
homosexual’ such a favourite icon for media
vitriol, I headed the column kitted out in combats,
brandishing a rifle from Toys R Us and
set out to use one of the few weapons in my
armoury: Ridicule. For it would take a seachange
in attitudes for reporters to stop
attaching comments from the Church to every
report on sex. In those days, whenever any
issue of sexuality appeared in the Scottish
media - as it did on a daily basis - it was rarely
academics journalists turned to, but a string
of religious and conservative ‘spokespeople’.
In Scotland it was usually the ‘Sexfinder
General’, the late Monsignor Tom Connelly
from the Catholic Church, or the Kirk’s Mrs
Ann Allen or the Rev Bill Wallace from their
ridiculously named Board of Social
Responsibility, or the deposed Tory MP, Phil
Gallie, or spokespeople from any number of
partisan organisations like the Christian
Institute and Family and Youth Concern. This
laziness on the part of journalists to latch on
to sound bites or PR machines attached to
religious organisations both distorted and
misrepresented Scotland’s sexuality. In colluding
with moral conservatives; serving a
regular diet of propaganda and misinformation
on sexual issues, the Scottish press have
failed the public they are supposed to serve;
contributing to Scotland’s appalling record of
sexual repression. Scotland has Europe’s
highest rate of teenage pregnancy (some
seven times higher than Holland) whilst sexual
pathology, crime, ignorance and disease
are rife.
I’ve since donated boxes of news cuttings,
the fruit of hundreds of hours scanning
the Scottish press in libraries and newsagents
to Glasgow’s Women’s Library, although
much of my time was spent reading the news
on the Internet. Much of the comments that
find their way onto the Media Monitor website
from readers are uncensored. Amidst the
messages of support and criticism that are
regularly sent to me are painful stories of
abuse, moving responses from victims of
salacious media reports and lately, a very
public spat between Bronski Beat’s Steve
Bronski and Jim Glancy.
I’m astounded at the prudery of the
Scottish media. I would occasionally be asked
to review the press on Real Radio. That was
before I was joined by a Scottish Sun journalist
attempting to justify the paper’s exposure
of a dentist for placing a sexy picture of himself
up on an adult website. The Glasgow dentist
was sacked. Not very moral for a paper
otherwise so full of wank fodder! I said so on
air. Believe me… My arse was out of those
swing doors so fast…!
When my book Sexual Fascism was
published in 2001 after five years of monitoring
the Scottish media, The Dundee Courier
refused to review it because “it contained
sex”. Both BBC Scotland and The Herald also
refused to review it, unlike The Sunday Herald
which I enjoy reading because I’m such a big
fan of Muriel Gray. After ten years, scottishmediamonitor.com
was averaging almost
1,000 hits a day. It’s read by hundreds of
MSPs, MPs and journalists and, thanks to the
valued support of ScotsGay editor John Hein
- himself a brilliant Scottish commentator
who, regrettably, won’t be found in the pages
of any Scottish newspaper - is published
monthly. Be they the politicised religionists
who dragged Gay News to the courts – (do
not blaspheme)! – or those who pasted
homophobic posters on every billboard they
could find in Scotland – (Keep the Clause)!
Gays have been at war with such extremists
for years. If this new bill against ‘incitement to
religious hatred’, one of the most illiberal
measures attempted even by this prescriptive
Government – and those were the words of
The Daily Mail, not me! – were ever to
become law, could I chide politicised religionists
for the over-generous provision of media
rent-a-gobs; accuse them of spluttering
quotes backing an iffy moral conservatism on
matters sexual, or name those who are hijacking
the media for their own pernicious ends?
Will it be easier to challenge those who promote
female genital mutilation, physical chastisement,
forced marriage or child abuse in
the name of religion? I don’t think so! The bill
has been rejected by the House of Lords, but
that won’t necessarily stop the Government
forcing it through. I have a great respect for
the spiritual aspect of religions, but I have
become increasingly nervous of the developments
surrounding the introduction of this
bill. Such a bill, designed to protect religionists
(the idea of also including some protection
for gays has been rejected), if it became
law, would be very tricky and also very subjective
as ‘hatred’ is almost impossible to
define. I don’t want to risk up to seven years
in prison for challenging religionists and
therefore made the decision to close my column
on its tenth birthday. Quite apart from
anything else: I really don’t need the hassle.
Ten years of writing my column, five
years either side of the turn of the century,
was an extraordinary period to chronicle attitudes
to sexuality in Scotland. The column
captured everything from the insidious peddling
of religious propaganda by media
columnists to seemingly benign stories like
the man arrested with a snake down his
trousers or the doll found with a penis under
her dress. Although my interest in sexual politics
is wide-ranging, as the column appears
in a gay magazine – and being gay myself -
I’ve focused on the struggle for gay emancipation,
such as the initial failures to equalise
the age of consent by politicians, the obstruction
of the repeal of Section 28 by militant
religionists, the rounding-up of gay men in
police operations across Scotland and the
string of subsequent suicides. Ten years
reflects a time when Scots actor Robert
Carlyle joined a band of unemployed men to
strip for The Full Monty and radio stations
banned the Bloodhound Gang from doing it
like they do on the Discovery Channel. Only
months after my column began, Thomas
Hamilton tragically gunned down a classroom
of children and their teacher in a school in
Dunblane. Despite no evidence Hamilton sexually
molested children in his care, or was
himself gay, the Dunblane tragedy was sexualised
to the extent gay men were swept up in
a tidal wave of moral panic. Scoutmasters and
gym teachers, boys’ club managers and
priests were dragged across the pages of the
Scottish press in frenzy. One ‘sex beast’ after
another was ‘caged.’ A 24-year-old was jailed
for three months after being found on school
grounds in Paisley. A 77-year-old man was
sentenced to four years for taking pictures of
kids at the seaside in Ayrshire and a drunken
37-year-old priest faced shame and retribution
after allegedly groping a 16-year-old.
Public toilets, saunas, parks and swimmingpool
changing areas throughout Scotland
became flash points of moral warfare. A
swimming-pool attendant warned parents “all
their children are at risk”, and was reported in
a tabloid begging more staff to patrol open
changing-rooms. “The only way to clampdown
on this kind of thing”, he said, “is by fitting
screens to the top and bottom of cubicles
and security guards watching at all times”.
Much of the Scottish media both protects
and excludes readers in a process of
restraint, contraction and limitation on sexual
issues. A perceived threat to children from
‘perverts’ was trumpeted by tabloid campaigns
such as The Daily Record’s
‘PervertWatch’ campaign and The News of the
World’s ‘Name and Shame’ which leant credence
to the media attaching a sense of
shame and fuel moral outrage to almost any
legitimate means of sexual expression. Most
prominent amongst these campaigns was the
attack on ‘Channel Filth’ on Channel 5’s late
night depiction of erotica and The Daily
Record’s ‘SmutWatch’ campaign. An increasingly
politicised church, fearful of moral
decay and advances in sexual liberty and
expression succoured these campaigns. A
major victory for the Church and their media
crony’s was the banning of an exhibition of
erotica in Glasgow. Such a campaign, however,
paled into insignificance to what the fledgling
Scottish parliament faced when they were
caught unawares by the longest political
debate in its history, the bankrolling of a cam-