Iain Dale today pointed to an article by Graeme Archer at CentreRight on ConservativeHome - How to be a Happy Homosexual. In it, Graeme puts forward the suggestion that:

if you had any chance of achieving psychological maturity, was self-reliance.

...

You're fine. You're OK. It doesn't matter what they think about you, or write on some website: you're OK. You either develop that ability for yourself, or you will suffer. No amount of legislation will alter that, still the first and most important lesson any gay person has to internalise.

Or, society is so against us that we have to be self reliant little fuckers. For that reason "Gay men are naturally Conservative." To me there is also an implicit idea that those who aren't self reliant not only "will suffer" but that they deserve to suffer and we shouldn't bother about them. After all, "You're OK".

Leaving aside the fact that he charges the decimation by HIV/AIDS of the gay community as a phenomenon of a mere ten years ago rather than 15-20 years ago, does his argument hold any water? I've certainly seen the idea before. The major argument in his article is that we have to rely only on ourselves not on other people and that this is the Tory philosophy. I actually find the idea offensive. I think it's offensive to think that I could have come out alone. That the support of many other people means nothing. The people I knew online before I came out who supported me. The people who congratulated me after I started coming out. The people who respected my decision not to tell other people. The people who didn't respect my decision not to tell other people. The people who supported me when I rang them in a panic after I accidentally outed myself to people I hadn't planned on. All of that means nothing? Sorry guys, my coming out was all me. Bollocks to that.

I also find it offensive to suggest that because an individual managed to do something on their own that means they should not give a flying fuck about how others are managing: "I'm alright" so why shouldn't you be? Because I came out and didn't get beaten up it means that nobody else has been beaten up when they came out. Because I still had parental support through university after coming out, no-one has ever been estranged and had a problem going to university. Because I have a job and comfortable existance, so does everyone else. It's an attitude I find aborhant. And it's the attitude that strongly runs through this article. It's this attitude which was prevelant in Margot James' declaration that it was my duty as a gay to vote Conservative. I didn't like it then, I don't like it now.

His article does however make some other good points which I'll discuss in a later article.

Alex
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