SubscribeThe truth about my views on the tragic death of Stephen Gately | Mail Online.
After reading Stephen Fry’s blog addressing, amongst other things, his take on the recent MoirGate, I found myself content to lave it alone, having expressed my annoyance already. I had assumed that Jan Moir would have quietly gotten on with some more mundane and safer journalism whilst her name faded from the public’s attention.
Well no, Jan has the benefit of being able to continue to write and her response to the critisms levelled against her published. This should sort it all out for us.
Last week, I wrote in this column about the death of Boyzone star Stephen Gately.
To my horror, it has been widely condemned as ‘homophobic’ and ‘hateful’. Obviously, a great deal of offence has been taken and I regret any affront caused. This was never my intention.
A good start.
To be the focus of such depth of feeling has been an interesting experience, but I do not complain. After all, I am not - unlike those close to Stephen Gately - mourning for the loss of a much-loved partner, son, family member and close friend.
To them, I would like to say sorry if I have caused distress by the insensitive timing of the column, published so close to the funeral.
Sorry for the timing but not the content?
The point of my article was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, Stephen Gately’s death raised many unanswered questions. What had really gone on?
After all, Stephen was a role model for the young and if drugs were somehow involved in his death, as news reports suggested, should that not be a matter of public interest?
We were told that Stephen died of ‘natural causes’ even before toxicology results had been released. This struck me as bizarre, given the circumstances.
The autopsy was pretty clear. A court statement read “The signer of the British group Boyzone died from natural causes, owing to an ‘acute pulmonary edema’”…“The autopsy carried out this morning showed there were no signs of violence to the body.”
This is pretty clear. It’s prettty definitive. Jan should just stop being evasive, and admit she pulled the suspicious cicumstances stuff out of her arse.
Absolutely none of this had anything to do with his sexuality. If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band, I would have written exactly the same article.
Yet despite this, many have interpreted my words as a ‘bigoted rant’ and suggested that my motive was to insinuate that Stephen died ‘because he was gay’.
Not really. She insinuated that because a Bulgarian man was invited back that some strange gay debauchery was going on that endangered Stephen’s life. Does she not realise we can all still read the original article? INTERWEBS.
Anyone who knows me will vouch that I have never held such poisonous views.
Maybe she get someone to do that.
It is worth stressing that the version of events I recounted in my column had already been in the public domain, having been described in detail in several newspapers.
What had been reported about that night is that Stephen and his civil partner Andrew Cowles went to a nightclub and brought back a Bulgarian man to their apartment.
There were also reports of drug-taking. Following this, it was reported that Cowles went to the bedroom with the Bulgarian, while Stephen remained on the sofa. I have never thought, or suggested, that what happened that night represented a so-called gay lifestyle; this is not how most gay people live.
I really would stop with the assumptions about gays.
Rather, I thought it a louche lifestyle; one that raised questions about health and personal safety.
Unrelated to Stephen’s death.
There have been complaints about my use of the word ’sleazy’ to describe this incident, but I still maintain that to die on a sofa while your partner is sleeping with someone else in the next room is, indeed, sleazy, no matter who you are or what your sexual orientation might be.
Is that what was happening? Is it any of your business, or any of ours? Even if it is true, is it sleazy if all parties were consenting?
My assertion that there was ‘nothing natural’ about Stephen’s death has been wildly misinterpreted.
What I meant by ‘nothing natural’ was that the natural duration of his life had been tragically shortened in a way that was shocking and out of the ordinary. Certainly, his death was unusual enough for a coroner to become involved.
Jan Moir wrote: “Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered.”
As for Stephen’s civil partnership, I am on the record as supporting same-sex marriages.
The point of my observation that there was a ‘happy ever after myth’ surrounding such unions was that they can be just as problematic as heterosexual marriages.
Indeed, I would stress that there was nothing in my article that could not be applied to a heterosexual couple as well as to a homosexual one.
Jan Moir wrote “Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael. Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately’s last night raise troubling questions about what happened.”
It is Jan’s fault, not everyone elses, that her commentary has been interpreted as homophobic.
This brings me back to the bile, the fury, the inflammatory hate mail and the repeated posting of my home address on the internet.
Yeah I can’t agree with posting someone’s home address. Or…internet fury…but if you’re going to sling shit about, you should be ready to get a faceful yourself.
To say it was a hysterical overreaction would be putting it mildly, though clearly much of it was an orchestrated campaign by pressure groups and those with agendas of their own.
Nope. I can’t speak for overreaction because althought I’m writing about this I find Jan Moir largely irrelevant to gay rights issues, the larger discourse, or anything else important.
It’s not a campaign either. There was no agenda other than simultaneous anger at Jan Moir’s nasty little article, expressed across the internet in that fast sweeping fashion that is increasingly disarming the old media and political dinosaurs. Everyone I know who’s read her article and found it inflammatory decided that quite independently. That said, any attacks beyond writing are excessive, and if there are indeed people going further than this I must defend Jan Moir.
However, I accept that many people - on Twitter and elsewhere - were merely expressing their own personal and heartfelt opinions or grievances. This said, I can’t help wondering: is there a compulsion today to see bigotry and social intolerance where none exists by people who are determined to be outraged? Or was it a failure of communication on my part?
No. She either meant what she wrote or she didn’t, in which case she wrote a strangely bad article.
Certainly, something terrible went wrong as my column ricocheted through cyberspace, unread by many who complained, yet somehow generally and gleefully accepted into folklore as a homophobic rant.
I don’t think so. It is easy enough to go and read the article.
It lit a spark, then a flame and turned into a roaring ball of hate fire, blazing unchecked and unmediated across the internet.
Sorta like a Daily Mail campaign?
Yet as the torrent of abuse continued, most of it anonymous, I also had thousands of supportive emails from readers and well-wishers, many of whom described themselves as ‘the silent majority’. The outcry was not as one-sided as many imagine.
They described themselves as the silent majority? Hahaha.
Their view, and mine, was that it was perfectly reasonable of me to comment upon the manner of Stephen Gately’s death, even if there are those who think that his celebrity and sexuality make him untouchable.
The view that she was squirming about further back in this very article? I think Jan has some problems with her memory.
Can it really be that we are becoming a society where no one can dare to question the circumstances or behaviour of a person who happens to be gay without being labelled a homophobe? If so, that is deeply troubling.
Jan can say what she likes and she can be called out on her bullshit. That’s a pretty free society. I wouldn’t call Jan a homophobe, because a homophobe to me seems a stupid little creature that can’t help but get all worked up about something that confuses and conflicts them. That’s not what Jan Moir is. I would say that Jan Moir is a journalist who made some snide, innapropriate and homophobic comments in a misguided attempt to work an angle - for her job. She’s now trying to squirm out of that mistake. I don’t think she’s doing a good job of that either, but I don’t hate her for it, and I don’t care what she finds troubling.
Finally, I would just like to say that whatever did or did not happen in Majorca, a talented young man died before his time. This, of course, is a matter of regret and sadness for us all.
Indeed.