Kitty Wake's blog

Casual homophobia is insidious

I don't get things. Yesterday I tore down a BNP poster in the neighbourhood because I'm not having racist shite around where I live. (Also the act of ripping the poster into shreds fulfilled my entirely non-sexual resistance kink, although I doubt it can be called resistance if I've got millions of people on my side. Although I suppose it may not be entirely legal to rip down posters, come to think of it - it might be vandalism - but surely a racist poster is more an act of vandalism than tearing the poster down, right?) I told my mother what I did and she congratulated me.

Also yesterday, I went to a gay club with a couple of gay friends. There, I saw lots of gay kisses. And I'm thinking "Hey! Cool. People in love. Sure, falling in love is not for me, but it's good for them!" (Well, actually I was thinking "VK tastes like crap", as I drank a couple of bottles last night and it was only by the grace of the DOYC that I didn't chuck in a gutter and get filmed as an example of a binge-drinking bird. I wasn't drunk! I was merely disgusted by the taste of cheap booze!) As you may have noticed, there's a big hoo-ha in the UK right now over a Heinz ad that happened to feature two men kissing. The first time I saw that ad, I was all "Cool! Gay kisses in ads!" But now Heinz have pulled the ad because they received complaints about the ad. Not complaints about the fact that a mother was treated as a short-order chef in a New York deli, but complaints that gay kisses are immoral/hard to explain to children/disgusting/unnatural/insert bigoted excuse here. It's on the BBC website. The BBC had allowed the article to have comments. Most of the comments (unusually for the BBC) either spoke of puzzlement about the negative response to the ad, or had a somewhat legitimate complaint about the treatment of the mother etc.

But jesus, the casual homophobia! No, I'm not going to pretend to be reasonable here. If you ever go to spEak You're bRanes (go on, it's funny), yeah... this is what I'm aiming at.

The MPs calling for this ad to be re-instated shows how disgusting our representatives have become.
Brian Keith, Ellesmere, England

Meanwhile, Brian, by posting this comment you've just shown what a pigeon's minge you are. (There's a long-standing - which, in web terms, means about three months - tradition of calling people animal fannies on the blog.)

I also did a double take when I saw this advert. Having grown up in the era where homosexuality is regularly shown on screen even I thought this was a step too far. It is not only unnecessary and confusing for young children, but also serves to emasculate the man even further. He is essentially ordered to kiss the "Deli Chef" which he does full on the lips. This emasculation of the male character within household adverts is insidious with many adverts of today, now showing men being bullied into homosexual acts in their own kitchens is taking it to a new extreme.
Andy, Stourbridge

Ok. "A step too far"? Technically, it wasn't even a gay kiss. The chef was presumably supposed to be the mother. "Unnecessary and confusing for young children"? Er, do you even know how adaptable young children are? If they see two men engaged in a healthy relationship, they're just going to grow up to think it's normal - as they should. Little kids just don't think like that. They see a person in a wheelchair, they don't think "ooh, disabled person, must be patronising". If they grow up and have stuff currently thought of - baselessly - as "freakish" or "unnatural" presented to them neutrally, they're going to be more accepting. In short, they don't give a shit that two men are kissing. "Emasculating the man" - I don't know about you lot, but I'm pretty sure most gay men don't think they're emasculated. Surely emasculation requires unwillingness on the part of the person being emasculated...  and I hardly think the guy on the ad was "bullied into homosexual acts" - meta, he's an actor, he gets paid to do this. And guess what? Some people are, in fact, homosexual, and don't see homosexual acts as something they're bullied into! In short, Andy of Stourbridge is a kittiwake's cootch.

Not seen it. Don't want to see it. If equal sexes want to kiss etc then it's up to them. I don't want it pushed in my face as normality nor to see it advertising any type of product. This is just cheap marketing to cause a big stir.
Phil Ashton, Sheffield

My last comments were wordy, so I'll just say that Phil is a turtle's vadge. OK, I can't stop being wordy. Surely "equal sexes" could also refer to a feminist heterosexual couple? And, get this, homosexuality IS normal!

I was appalled at the advert. Having young children calling a man "mum" was sad, confusing, and so very wrong. Seeing same sex kissing is stomach-churning to most people who are not homosexual. Please keep adverts to appeal to the majority. I feel this was possibly deliberate to get discussion going and to brain wash people into eventually seeing these things as normal. What a sad reflection on life today.
Joan Bailie, Grimsby, Lincs, UK

I suppose a male gay couple with children don't exactly want one of them to be referred to as "mum" (but whatever floats their boat floats mine), yeah, but again, let's look at the reality of the advert. The New York deli chef was only figuratively a bloke. So she is "mum". See above for my view on how young children see the world. And same-sex kissing is precisely as stomach-churning as opposite sex kissing. I don't personally relish seeing any saliva-swapping - other people's mouths taste yucky - but IT'S ALL NORMAL. "Keep adverts to appeal to the majority"? Adverts nearly all suck donkey balls. How come this ad gets pulled, but the terribly acted ads featuring insurance claims for falling off a three-step ladder and the sodding Cillit Bang advert stay on the air when they're offences to the ear and so badly acted? Who exactly does the Cillit Bang ad appeal to? Well, I can certainly agree that the ad got discussion going, but "brainwashing" (one word, Joan, please) - surely the true brainwashing is committed on the part of the homophobes, who are hell bound to make sure there's only one normal way to be? "A sad reflection of life today? Get a grip, Joan, you duck's dick.

And back to my mother. She agreed with Duck's dick Joan that homosexual kisses are stomach churning. I just started laughing my head off when she agreed with it and said "I'll assume you're having me on" because I don't want to have a bigoted mother who acts like a turtle's wang.

I think I'll get a T-shirt printed with this ad with a picture of John Barrowman next to a caption saying "Some people are gay. Get over it." I love John Barrowman, and I love that ad. Let's see if I can find it... Here it is.

Some links for your edification:

The BBC article avec comments

The ad in question (I read a comment on youtube saying that the ad should only be given out in adult entertainment shops. Either - I hope - the person is saying it tongue in cheek, or the commenter is really prudish.)

In other news, I saw Prince Caspian last night. Pretty good, quite funny, although the actor playing Peter is some gormless Southern twit. I wish Robert Pattinson - the Cedric guy in Harry Potter - was playing it instead, because he has better hair and doesn't look quite so gormless. The Edmund actor also looks gormless, but he's not shite. Everyone else - good. Though I sincerely wish Trufflehunter hadn't said the like "shut up or I'll have to sit on your head again" to Nikabrik, because in front of an audience of 16-25-year-olds... er... the implied dwarf bestiality can only produce helpless giggles.

Eighteen plus Four

Do I prefer adulthood or childhood?

I don't know! I know I like reading about other people's childhoods, which is why I've got a zillion copies of And There Was Light and have a crazy fascination with all the books I read and wanted to read as a child. It's why I buy Chalet School books (but Jesus, I've got to say the religious fervour in those books scares me), and why the first pages of biographies are always much more thumbed through than any pages that cover the subject's life past the age of eighteen.

I can tell you that the four years that I've experienced being older than eighteen were infinitely more interesting than the eighteen years before that, though.

So you've got four years before you go to school where you piss about and watch Thomas the Tank Engine and draw crap, wasting lots and lots of craft paper with little squiggles of nothings.

Then there's primary school, a salutary lesson which teaches you how to eat virulent pus-like custard and curiously gristly meat if you take school dinners (shudder), or how to eat deformed sandwiches and heavily bruised bananas if you're, er, lucky enough to have a parent who will make lunch for you. You might pick up a few bits of education along the way - Nelson joined-up handwriting, exactly where the answers are in all editions of Heinemann maths books - but mostly you learn to eat horrible food and to win games of marbles in the playground. And break stuff trying to do cartwheels while dodging footballs. If you are exceptionally unlucky, you'll be sent to a religious school, which adds half an hour of dreary hymn singing and a lifetime of Catholic guilt to your day.

Following this is secondary school. The food is, if possible, worse. The pizza looks like someone's vomited on a slice of toast, and those, as well as all the other food (which includes swede, a vegetable used only in school dinners - seriously, I have never seen it before or since), are served by aggressive fifty-year-old dinner ladies with about three teeth and pockmarked faces. The library is staffed not by a human being who resembles a teddy bear but by a martinet with a newspaper face and a desire to travel through time and become a Stalinist lackey. Teachers are divided into three broad groups:

a) young, fresh-faced, deadly serious about their subject, still enthusiastic, set homework because they truly believe it'll help you learn

b) old, prematurely greying, jaded by years of teaching students who don't give a toss, teach with an air of tired detachment, hate mankind, set homework because they've grown to hate anyone under the age of eighteen

c) varying ages, man are slightly bald and women have desperately unflattering hairstyles, still like their subjects but have adapted to teaching it in a way that involves as much acting and blowing stuff up and playing on computers as possible, set homework only because the school says they have to and you do it because you like them, not so much because you have any great interest in what you're meant to be learning.

I only remember a couple of teachers from groups a) and b). They were OK, I suppose. I didn't have any overwhelming urges to set fire to a bag of dog shit and leave it on their doorsteps, except for one A-level physics teacher who constantly bullied and belittled one of my friends. Clever girl, utterly crap teacher. I hope he's lost his job, because he was in group b) - except he hated anyone under the age of forty-eight. What an old fart.

But group c)!

Mr. P was an excitable young bloke who loved his subject (Physics) - at least he liked teaching A-level classes. (Which have a distinct advantage above any other level of education because people want to be in those classes. You have to stay at school until you're 16 and people buy their way into uni "because it's expected", but A-levels are full of people who are neither stupid - well, this holds true for science lessos - nor disinterested in the subject.) So what did I do for him? There was a transit of Venus across the sun in 2004, and I turned up at school at about 5.30 am to set up several observers with him so that year 8s could see a little dot on the sun. It was great. I was a morning person that day. I evern saved a thirteen-year-old boy from blinding himself. Fantastic. This guy was also the teacher I had a discussion about War and Peace with, prompted by seeing a bunch of History students reenacting Austerlitz on the playground with a short-choleric teacher as a French-spouting, victorious Napoleon.

Mr. G was a chemistry teacher, and looked it. He had a teacher jacket - a tweedy affair stained with years upon years of excitingly explosive chemical reactions and burns from the bunsens. He constantly used the word "bleeding". Whenever a lesson was getting slow, he'd shout "Come here!" and drop a little potassium in water to produce pinkish-purple flames, or sublime some iodine (I found out the hard way why halogens were used as tear gas in WW1). And he liked playing the Tom Lehrer Elements song. Hooray!

Mr. and Mrs. L were my biology teachers. Mr. L was a Welsh eccentric. Once, he gave homework that consisted of collecting woodlice, in December. I used a bandanna to cover one eye, to acclimatise the other to the dark. I carried a torch (to avoid stumbling into our bramble bushes), a twig, and a jar half-full of soil and a stone, and, so armed, jumped into the back garden shouting "Right, you bastards - I'm coming to get you!"

Two and a half hours l had caught two woodlice - one was a geriatric and the other  was a baby. I went in, defeated, and ate dinner. Checking the jar afterwards, I found the geriatric one dead. The next day, I took the jar into school and showed my slim pickings to Mr. L.

"Is that all?" he said. "I found over two hundred last night. You're just not applying yourself! Buck up, girl!" and poured ten into my tiny jar. (Why woodlice? We were investigating phototropism.) And all this over some sodding woodlice.  really liked Mr. L, because he and Mrs. L were really nice teachers. They were the ones you went to if you had a problem. They told jokes in class. They rarely got angry. And although they had to mention creationism in their biology classes, they spent about 0.5 seconds on it. Which is about as much consideration as it deserves, going on the proportions of evidence available for each one (we had a month about evolutionary principles beforehand).

So, teachers. But there's also other kids, and secondary school is the worst possible place if you, say, like reading during lunch, or spend time on your homework, or don't make it a death-or-glory mission to have more friends than anyone else. I was in a solid group of six during the latter years there, which suited me down to the ground, and I gained a certain measure of notoriety for being both intelligent and off my nut. Unfortunately, if you're under fifteen-sixteen, the intelligent/off-nut combo doesn't gain you friends unless they're really nice people. I mean, look at Luna Lovegood, from Harry Potter. I survived the other kids, but I still expect people to think I'm boring and not worthy of attention. I just can't quite shake off the feelings of being deemed socially inadequate at eleven. I'm surprised when people want to be friends with me.

Then, assuming you're at a school with a sixth form, you finish school at 18 and go off to uni. This is outside the scope of this entry. Suffice it to say that uni was exciting, but my first extended contact with people from Down South who still thought everyone from Yorkshire kept whippets and racing pigeons and had dads who worked down t'pit was a bit chafing. But I got to live in Germany and I met cool people who weren't obsessively interested in other people's sex lives and I made friends with actual adults. I won't knock uni life - if you want to be there and you're prepared to work, go. It's not for everyone, but it's cool.

I described my Great British childhood in a few paragraphs I typed in about an hour or so. Thing is, it took eighteen years to live. When you're five, December lasts for about six months. A shopping trip with your mother, that according to her lasts a couple of hours, feels like a week (unless you get to go to Waterstone's). And you can't go anywhere on your own. I ran away with the neighbour's dog when I was two, and that was the furthest away I got from my parents with them not knowing exactly where I was until I was sixteen and wandering from Leicester Square halfway to St. Paul's in a vain attempt to get to the National Gallery (get a map of London to see just how stupid I was).

So childhood was OK to write about. OK to live, unless you're allergic to boredom. I think it's all in the description, really. I can read about eighteen years in an afternoon. I've experienced parts from lots and lots of childhoods. But I'm an adult now, and I can do stuff. I can vote! I can go to Berlin and walk through the Brandenburg gate, something impossible as recently as the day of my birth - you could get shot for it. I can drink as much as I want. I can own a pub and stand for Parliament (well, now I'm over 21). The sky's the limit now. I liked childhood, and OK, now I've got to start paying bills and all that, but you know what? I'm looking forward to it. 18+4 years, and now something new! Well, let's start.