Guest post: Wrong umbrella
Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan at Miscellany Room.
Driving home earlier tonight I was listening to Billy Bragg’s Changing Times, a documentary about protest music that originally aired in 2019. Bragg was speaking with the British folk-punk singer, Tom Robinson, about Robinson’s ‘British gay anthem’, (Sing if You’re) Glad to Be Gay.
For those not familiar with the song, here’s a brief précis culled from the song’s Wiki page:
The song was originally written by Tom Robinson [an out gay singer] for a London gay pride parade in 1976.
“Glad to Be Gay” is built on four verses criticising British society’s attitudes towards gay people. The first verse criticises the British police for raiding gay pubs for no reason after the decriminalisation of homosexuality by the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.
The second verse points to the hypocrisy of Gay News being prosecuted for obscenity instead of magazines like Playboy or the tabloid newspaper The Sun, which published photographs of topless girls on Page 3. It also criticises the way homosexual people are portrayed in other parts of the press, especially in the newspapers Daily Telegraph, Sunday People and Sunday Express. The third verse points out the extreme consequences of homophobia, such as violence against gay people.
In the final verse, the song makes a plea for support of the gay cause. This part, originally intended as a bitter attack on complacency of gay people at the Pride march in 1976, became a rallying call for solidarity from people irrespective of their orientation.
So far, so clear. The song was a straightforward protest song about the treatment of and attitudes towards gay men in the 1970s I remember the song well; I even saw it performed live at a Tom Robinson Band gig in 1979/80 and joined in the singing with the rest of the audience. It was a strangely joyous experience being in a throng of spiky-haired punks, young gay men, ‘normies’ like me and a whole lot more disparate groups, all linking arms and belting out the chorus “Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy that way”. I remember hearing him being interviewed about the song many times on radio and TV and he always explained the song in terms of gay men. And yet for some reason, in the interview with Bragg he said “Of course, back then [the ’70s] ‘gay’ meant something different than it does today. It was an umbrella term covering the whole LGBTQIA+ community.”
I’m a straight male and even to me, hearing this gay man (possibly even a gay icon to a generation of British gay men) who had been so outspoken about gay rights suddenly come out with such an obviously dishonest, revisionist statement was absolutely shocking. I can barely begin to imagine how those gay men who looked to him throughout the dark days of the ’70s and ’80’s must feel. ‘Utterly betrayed’ probably doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Apologies for the length of that rant, but it was six hours ago that I heard it and I still can’t quite get my head around it.
The thing that you’ve got to remember about Tom Robinson is that although he wrote Glad to be Gay in 1976, he’s been married to the same woman since 1988. (That’s an impressively long-lived marriage in current-era, especially for a touring musician, so good for them.) He’s always said he’s not bisexual, just a gay man who fell in love with a woman, and I think that he projected the fluidity of his own sexuality onto gay people as a whole.
And of course, the overall issue of gay rights maps just fine to lesbians and bisexuals and even sexually fluid individuals. There may be some pockets that are specific to each group, but the BS objections raised to any of those, and the rights being sought, are pretty much identical all through the groups. It does NOT map to trans, intersex, or asexuality, and of course it only maps to ‘queer’ in the original slur definition of the word (ie, gay man), not the current utterly meaningless, open-ended mushmouth use that seems to cover straight couples with a once-used pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs in the bottom drawer of the nightstand.
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm the party slogan famously changes from “Four legs good! Two legs bad!” to “Four legs good! Two legs better!”. This is close to the situation we’re actually in except that, rather than changing the words themselves, the content of the words has been fully inverted. It’s as if Orwell’s pigs had decided that the word “four” has always meant* “1+1” and “two” has always meant “1+1+1+1”.
*Or used to “back then”, before counter-revolutionaries working for Snowball came along and tricked everybody into using these words the wrong way.