hono

Initially Stephen Gately was a cog in a cynically manufactured boy band, a spot on a cash cow with little artistic merit and in this respect there is no ‘gaping hole’ left behind, certainly not a hole that can’t be filled by yet another dead-eyed X Factor/Pop Idol/Got talent/Big Brother etc., wannabe prepared to shed all aspects of their personality and conform, obey to the desires of their employer. In the case of Stephen it would seem that one aspect of his person that didn’t conform to the prescribed boy band brief was his sexuality.

Under these homophobic circumstances it’d be unfair to criticise Stephen for being dishonest about his sexuality in the early days of his career. It may well have remained his secret but one of Boyzone’s security threatened to go to The Sun. Sensibly Stephen got there first and ‘left’ the troupe and became a somewhat unlikely pin-up boy for the homosexual community he’d previously spurned.

I’m still not entirely sure why there has been such a big fuss made of his death, of course it’s sad when anyone dies before their 3 score years and 10 and I’ve got it on good authority he was a nice bloke but we’ve not lost a cancer cure here to coin Bill Hicks (who himself has something to say about boy bands, see below) and Gately was no Jimi Hendrix, let’s face it. But fuss there has been, largely generated by controversy, and it’s here I feel the leftwing press has missed a golden opportunity to address institutionalised homophobia. In fact there is so much institutionalised homophobia surrounding Gately you could start a republic. This nasty seam of intolerance doesn’t get addressed as much as, say, racism and it would seem it’s still fairly acceptable to casually discriminate someone on the grounds of where they like to put their penis or tongue.

Allow me please.

Fellow journalists were up in arms about the nasty diatribe bestowed upon Stephen by Jan Moir but is it any surprise that a columnist for The Daily Mail found the whole idea of homosexuality biblically repugnant and presented a thinly disguised ‘serves the bummer boy right’ article as one would a turd to a vagina. But, really, what do you expect from the mouthpiece of cunts? Well, just that sort of thing depressingly.

The Daily Mail isn’t the only tabloid fucker in all this; The Sun gloatingly announced Stephen’s ‘outing’ in 1999 and has done most of the hand wringing after incorrectly barking out that Stephen had choked on his own vomit after a bender, when in fact the poor bastard died of genetic cardiogenic pulmonary oedema which doesn’t quite have the same seedy ring. It’s not as unsubtle as The Mail but the rhetoric that Stephen’s lifestyle was somehow to blame for his demise is palpable.

But again, what does one expect from these sorts of papers? This doesn’t make it right though and whilst The Mail got rightly trounced for its diatribe, The Sun seems to have glossed over its finger-pointing with disproportionate saccharine which even featured a front cover of the Boyzone Chief in Command Louis Walsh claiming that Stephen Gately was ‘my very, very best friend.’ What disgusting insincerity, was that an attempt at pathos?

Walsh once publicly stated that he was unaware of Gately’s sexuality when he selected him for Boyzone and has said that, had he known, he would have thought twice before picking him. He also claimed last year that, “it wasn’t cool then to have a gay guy in a band.” Cool ‘then,’ you mean way back a decade ago? I mean so much has changed hasn’t it, Louis you fat little shit, especially in the light of an increase in homosexual assaults.

No, thanks to the non-apologetic, laissez-faire attitude of people like Walsh where homophobia is a given, not something to be knocked back or condemned, then we shouldn’t be surprised people like Jan Moir and her editor even think about writing such bigoted shit let alone being able to publish it with impunity -and people like Stephen Gately don’t have to hide behind a hetro-cloak in order to further their careers.