Light Issue 73a - ScotsGay Magazine

THE VAGINA
MONOLOGUES
delighted to be linked to LGBT History Month
Clear The Shelves!
The march of the militant prudes
mediamonitor
Garry Otton
garry@scottishmediamonitor.com
Written by EVE ENSLER
Starring CAROL SMILLIE, JO FREER and JULIE COOMBE
Tue 20th Feb - Sat 24th Feb 2007, 8pm
at the Festival Theatre, Nicolson Street, Edinburgh
After two sell out performances last year, Carol Smillie returns in the smash hit
The Vagina Monologues and will appear alongside our very own Ugly Sisters,
from this year’s King’s Panto, Jo Freer and Julie Coombe.
Based on author Eve Ensler’s Vagina Interviews conducted with women all around
the world this hilariously funny and moving collection of tales gives voice to a
chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, brave and thoroughly human stories.
A staggering number of the world’s most famous and talented women, from Kate
Winslet and Whoopi Goldberg to Sophie Dahl and Jerry Hall, have chosen to take
part in the show in New York, Los Angeles and London.
As sharp as Sex And The City, as unmissable as Friends and as funny as Smack
The Pony, this riotous evening is the ultimate girls night out. Trust us!
Suitable for ages 15+. - contains explicit language.
Opening Night, all tickets £15, Wed - Sat £13.50 - £19.50
To book tickets please call 0131-529 6000
or book online at www.eft.co.uk
Ever wondered what our Balls are for?
SWITCHBOARD NEEDS YOU!
We’re recruiting now for new volunteers for our frontline
support services:
Mainline, Lesbian Line, e-mail support,
Icebreakers, face to face befriending,
sexual health promotion & community website development
Do you identify as gay or lesbian?
Good listening skills? Non-judgmental?
Spare a few evenings each month?
Able to commit to a rigorous training?
Want to be part of a great team?
FOR MORE INFO & AN APPLICATION PACK:
e-mail lgls.switchboard@btconnect.com
or visit www.lgls.co.uk > Volunteer
or call 0131-556 4049, 7.30-10pm
WE’RE VOLUNTEER LED AND VOLUNTEER RUN
Scottish Charity No SCO 03403
Member of Telephone Helplines Association
Are Scots finally cool with sex? Last
September in Edinburgh the
Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art managed to erect
photographs of Robert
Mapplethorpe’s depictions of S&M
sex.
His floral portraits had his camera
touching on every wet, vulva-like lip
and crevice of the ovary and dribbled
tantalisingly along the flesh-like
stamen of each magnificent floral
erection, poised in various states of
sexual arousal without a hint of
outrage. Moral conservatives ran out
of the necessary steam to lay their
concerns on the laps of Catholic
reporters in the Scottish press.
And there was more! Po-faced
monarchs were brushed aside at the
National Portrait Gallery in
Edinburgh recently to show two-floors
of naked flesh. (Adults could
accompany children under 12). An
excited art historian, Professor
Duncan MacMillan, enthused in The
Sunday Times Scotland: “Standards
have changed so much that shows like The
Naked Portrait are perfectly possible. The
types of images which people see on the
television and in the newspapers are
scandalous compared to 30 years ago. The
nude has lost its power to shock.”
Hmm! Open the pages of selfprofessed
Glasgow-based “family
newspaper”, The Sunday Mail and
dip into ‘safe’ gay, home-crimping TV
guru’s, Justin and Colin’s ‘Right at
Home’ supplement. Readers, over
Christmas, were assailed by the sight
of an advert featuring (gasp)! a naked
man running into the sea. Steady
though! A quarter-of-an-inch of naked
backside was blacked out. It promoted
the delights of buying overseas
property with Let’s Live Abroad! in a
country where its prime minister, José
Luis Rodríguez Zapatero stuck two
fingers up at the Catholic Church to
guarantee equality to all its citizens,
where there are naked beaches all
along its coasts and erotic mags are for
sale in corner shops alongside Haribo
sweeties. All the same, this is clearly
not the sort of crack Glaswegians like!
Censorship is frequently covert
and disceptive. When the ad was due
to appear on Glasgow’s buses, agency
Viacom quietly hinted to Let’s Live
Abroad! they might want to cover the
sight of this exposed bottom with a
wee pair of trunks, thereby passing
onto the company the responsibility of
censoring. A good first option. When
Let’s Live Abroad! threatened instead
to expose the censorship with a black
patch and the word ‘CENSORED’
clearly written across it, the story was
picked up by Glasgow’s Evening
Times. Viacom backed down, the
swimmer wriggled out of his
PhotoShop trunks and Glasgow lived
to see another day.
On Scotland’s new found liberties,
The Sunday Times Scotland’s Gillian
Bowditch was also in a frenzied state
of celebration in Stirling. Vodkafuelled
juices were surging amongst a
few hundred other lustful females to
watch a theatre production of ‘The
Foolmonty’. With a healthy amount of
sexual energy and not afraid of it, Ms
Bowditch enjoyed watching a bunch of
builders, having devested themselves
of their jackets incrested with the logo
of Stirling Council’s building services
department, prancing around in
nothing more than Jimmy bunnets
and G-strings. Well, OK, the line-up
was 44 year old, 16 stone John Ewing;
25 year old, 14 stone Chris McFadden;
38 year old, 17 stone Alan Morrison;
24 year old, 12 stone Andrew Wilson
and 47 year old, 26 stone brickie Jim
Berry, but it’s a start!
And aren’t we proud of Scottish
rugby champ, Sean Lamont who
graces one of Stade Français’s famous
‘Dieux du Stade’ nude calendars? “It is
a pose that would have been unthinkable in
the macho world of Scottish rugby a decade
ago”, declared a surpringly upbeat
Gillian Bowditch.
Surprisingly, it’s not so much
naked pleasure as moral censorship
that appears to be the subject of
discussion over cups of tea and
Creamed Fancies back at Glasgow’s
LGBT Centre. Directors Gordon Pike,
Alastair Smith, Jean Monaghan,
Gladys Paterson and their manager,
Ruth Black make an altogether
different line-up. According to her
profile on the Glasgow LGBT Centre’s
website, Ms Black is a mother. She also
has a daughter and a 13-year-old son.
You can also read about this in
CentrePoint, their magazine which
she edits. She also runs a lesbian
mothers’ group here. You can read
about that too. As the Centre’s
manager, she is also quite vocal about
banning Scotland’s longest-running
gay magazine, ScotsGay from all parts
of the Centre, including its café; a
punishment not even considered for
The Daily Record whose
homophobic credentials matched Der
Stürmer during the repeal of the
notorious Section 28. “We consider the
sexual content of (ScotsGay) inappropriate
for the Centre,” she told this magazine.
“We have to take into account that people as
young as thirteen are using the place”.
I suppose we should be thankful
she decided not to torch them like
copies of Jahrbuch fur Sexuelle
Zwischenstufen in front of Berlin’s
‘gay centre’ in 1933. Frankly, there’s
not much else in the way of precedents
when it comes to gay centre’s banning
gay magazines. As one of the Centre’s
users told me. “One day, ScotsGay just
wasn’t there!” Director, Alastair Smith,
working in the café, was dismissive.
“We’ve got to consider all users of the
Centre”. He too does not approve of
adverts from sex workers and explicit
personal ads (which, compared to gay
magazines like QX, distributed freely
around London, might’ve been
penned by Beatrix Potter). As one
Centre user told me: “Pinch yourself.
You’re not dreaming. It’s 2007 and we have
the equivalent of Glasgow’s publicly-funded
gay centre run by Mrs Valerie Riches’s
Family and Youth Concern! Halle-fuckinglujah”!
ScotsGay’s publisher, John Hein
has been more circumspect: “I have no
objection to minors using the place as long
as adults aren’t asked to change their
behaviour to accommodate the hangups of
their parents”.
Also based in Glasgow, The
Scottish Daily Mail have been
running a campaign, whipping up
incitement to hatred of gays. (“NOW
GAYS ARE GIVEN RIGHTS TO
CHILDREN. Children from broken homes
will be sent to live with gay couples…”;
“Now the Tartan Army face their biggest
opponent yet after football fans became the
latest group to be targeted by the gay rights
lobby” and “Gay agenda in the NHS is a
sick joke” etc., etc). This was part of a
campaign orchestrated by militant
religionists to draw attention to their
efforts seeking exemption from
equality legislation. So-called ‘equality’
minister Ruth Kelly – a member of the
sinister Catholic Opus Dei
organisation – buckled under the
pressure. What The Scottish Daily
Mail journalists will make of
Glasgow’s LGBT Centre’s latest
contribution to gay culture will be
anyone’s guess. I can imagine them
banging their sticks on their
Axminster, spluttering about the
politically-correct gay lobby banning
their gay magazines from their own
publicly-funded premises before
bemoaning the loss of Tennents Lager
Lovelies and all that Scotland stood
for. What a laugh! And it is… Funny.
Almost.
Ruth Black’s (hopefully brief)
soirées into sexual politics found her
siding with The Scottish Daily Mail’s
notoriously militant Catholic
propagandist, ‘home affairs editor’,
Graham Grant: “Gay rights MSPs accept
award named after child-sex monster”. The
award was given to Green MSP Patrick
Harvie and Lib Dem MSP Margaret
Smith. The award commemorates the
late Ian Dunn who has been
continuely crucified by the media for
co-founding and offering a post restante
address for the seventies pædophile
organisation, the Pædophile
Information Exchange, (PIE). Some
members of PIE went on to be charged
with “corrupting public morals” for
attempting to change the law. Ian
Dunn has been recognised for
founding the Scottish Minorities
Group which campaigned successfully
to legalise homosexuality in Scotland.
Tapping into that old ‘friends in high
places’ chestnut, Grant’s ‘report’
feared “revelations that MSPs have
received the awards will fuel concerns over
links between gay campaign groups and
Holyrood”.
Grant added: “In 1997, (Ian Dunn)
condemned police over a camera
surveillance operation in public toilets in
Stirling which led to several gay men being
charged – even though the investigation also
revealed that some men had sex with a 13-
year-old”.
Mr Grant forgot to mention that
police were happy to stand by and
watch this gay youth pick up men in
this way during his summer holidays
so they could secure 11 arrests which
resulted in three attempted suicides,
two of which were ultimately
successful. Ruth Black’s extraordinary
contibution to the story was: “Anything
that sexualises the gay community in this
way is unhelpful”.
Excuse me? We are sexualised
from the moment we open our gay
mouths and I am in no hurry to be desexualised!
Grant insisted: “Last month,
MSPs pushed through laws allowing gay
adoption, despite the Executive’s own
consultation showing that 90 per cent of
Scots were against it”.
When was this? I’m sorry, but that
was a referendum I must’ve missed! In
the same paper on another page, the
tireless Graham Grant went on to
suggest the huge influx of Catholicvoting
Poles would “punish Labour
candidates for their ‘anti-family’ policies at
the Holyrood elections”. Not so fast,
matey! Catholic militants are selfishly
putting their interests before those of
children by blackmailing the
Government, theatening to close all its
adoption agencies if it doesn’t grant
them opt-outs from equality
legislation. Even the most stupid can
now see the importance of secularism
in government! With the Scottish
media having suffocated under the
powerful grip of religion for so long, it
is indeed refreshing to see the door
now wide open to leave comments
under their stories on the Internet.
Militant religionists are being
challenged by a burgeoning secularism
like I’d never have thought possible! I
hope the politicians are sitting up and
taking notice! At last, we are a
majority!
Unlike ScotsGay, The Sunday
Mail still enjoys a place in the Centre
for visitors to enjoy its moral
chastisements. From the same stable
as The Daily Record, its content has
consistently challenged sexual
openess. “MAKE PORN A HATE
CRIME”, headlined political editor,
Brian Lironi’s piece of self-flagellation
over a “sex abuse summit” planned for
February. It was an opportunity
militant feminists would be exploiting
to ensure mens’ magazines were pulled
off newsagent’s shelves for good.
Described without compunction by
Lironi as “Scotland’s leading experts”,
they were none other than the
notorious Scottish Women Against
Pornography (SWAP) led by Catherine
Harper of the Scottish Women’s
Coalition. She told The Sunday Mail:
“The message of all pornography is that
women secretly wish to be raped and abused
and enjoy the treatment they receive. We
view pornography as sexual hatred in the
same way racist material is regarded as
incitement to racial hatred… It is about
providing a more equal society and a safer
place for women and children”. To grasp
the amount of debate that we can
expect going into this nonsense, we
can take The Mail’s quote from Elaine
Smith MSP as read: “We need to hear
from academics who work in this field
about whether they think pornography is
harmful and how serious a problem it might
be. We don’t expect any of them to say it is a
good thing so the next question will be what
we can do about it”.
Game set and match to the ladies
in the pinched whalebone corsets,
then!
The last thing Scotland needs is
more censorship. And certainly not in
a space set aside for the very people
who have been the most damaged by
inappropriate moral adjudications and
misguided prudery. So enjoy ScotsGay
while you can; if you can get it. It
might not exactly be your cup of tea.
But at least it’s free. In more ways than
one!
www.scottishmediamonitor.com
www.secularism.org.uk
www.myspace.com/scotsgaymagazine
(to post comments and views on our blog)
Garry Otton is a former ScotsGay columnist,
author of ‘Sexual Fascism’ and forthcoming
book ‘Badge of Shame’, examining the
repeal of Section 28 in Scotland.
16 ScotsGay
ScotsGay 17