Johann Hari

The portly, shrieking pantomime dame Christopher Biggins won ‘I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!’ last night, and to no doubt become the nation’s favourite eunuch for a few months. He’s part of a long tradition of gay men welcomed into the British mainstream who I’ve written about before: the safe, sexless, self-hating homosexual who doesn’t make you think about anything frightfully distasteful like men actually having sex with each other other. No – Biggins reassures you that homosexuality is about nice things, like wearing dresses and being friends with Joan Collins, dah-ling!

As it happens, on a personal level, I think he seems like a nice man. There are some gay men (a small proportion, as it happens) who simply are naturally camp, and they shouldn’t be condemned or lectured for simply expressing their true nature. But I thought we were moving beyond a time when this was The Face of the Gays on national television. I thought we were beginning to see that gay men are just as likely to be soldiers or war correspondents or brickies as they are to be pantomime dames or howling drag queens.

By rolling this progress back, by allowing the likes of Biggins and Graham Norton to be the main face of British gaydom, we actually make it harder for gay kids to understand their sexuality. The vast majority of gay boys grows up without any more ‘effeminacy’ than their straight brothers, and yet the only gay people they see represented are mincing queens, and they think: well, I’m not like that, and I don’t want to be like that, so I can’t be gay.

But the problem with Biggins goes deeper and becomes more fetid. For the sake of a few thousand quid, he has actually sold out his fellow gay people to the most repellent gay-bashers in the British media. The Daily Mail has a clever tactic when it wants to attack a minority and beat back social progress: it pays a small fortune to a member of that group to do it for them. Want to savage feminism? Find a self-hating woman. Want to rubbish race relations laws? Find a token black person. Biggins is their token self-hating gay, the one they wheel out to make it seem as if gay people are seriously divided on unequivocal pieces of progress.

For example, Biggins was almost alone in attacking the tender, touching introduction of civil partnerships for gay couples, with Melanie Phillips presenting it as a portent of the end of civilisation. Biggins announced in the Mail that he would not be entering into a civil partnership, saying: “Marriage, in my view, should always be reserved for the union between a man and a woman - primarily for the purpose of bringing up a family.” So is he in favour of banning infertile couples from getting married? What about couples in their sixties, seventies and beyond? They can’t have kids either; but he makes no comment on them.

He then says: “To go one step further and elevate partnerships into the status of marriage would make a mockery of an institution which, for all its faults, has served society well for many centuries.” A mockery? I’d say it was a tribute, a beautiful tribute. If you’re looking for a mockery of marriage, how about Jodie Marsh setting up a reality show to find her a husband? She is – somebody tell Biggins – heterosexual. But Biggins doesn’t, I suspect, believe this right-wing drivvel; he can’t feel good when he sees the notorious homophobe Richard Littlejohn – who was actually condemned by the Radio Authority for his bigotry – praising him for being “sensible”. No: he took the money and ran.
Biggins deserves to win a reality show. It should be called ‘I’m an Uncle Tom… Get Me Out of Here!’

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