How can I, an out gay man, be homophobic? Surely, we leave all that stuff to Tory backbenchers, homosexuals from the 1950s, barking churchmen and loopy pressure groups like Family and Youth Concern. Well, not necessarily. Liberals have a kind of critical myopia around homosexuality. Many New Statesman readers probably believe that everything done in the name of gay equality – an equal age of consent, a plethora of positive images in popular culture – is good, and that campaigning homosexuals themselves are at the vanguard of liberationist politics, redefining notions of the family, identity and community.
Think again. Watch, as I did with mounting nausea, Channel 4’s Queer As Folk to get a handle on the real metropolitan homosexual lifestyle. The producers of this new drama are right to crow that it’s revolutionary: with its scene-centred, sexually compulsive, bar- and body-obsessed protagonists we finally get modern urban gays represented in all their shallow glory.
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