20 October - 6 December 2002
I can't turn my back for five minutes, can I? Iain Wilson and Billy Briggs were up to their old tricks in The Herald with "the vice business", mixing personal prejudices with a spot of journalism. The intellectual bankruptcy that supported Glasgow's crackpot efforts to close down lap-dancing clubs and straitjacket sexual expression in the city had now spawned the suggestion that women were being sold as slaves. Because females were advertised as working as 'bonded labour' at Park Grove House, it was suggested they were being coerced to work on demand as a means to repay loans. With such fanatical efforts of moral policing taking place in Glasgow, it wouldn't surprise me that there were far more dubious establishments setting themselves up in the city than this. Park Grove House is no stranger to tupenny-halfpenny journos busting them for a cheap story. The Scottish News of the World once had a couple dropping into this "HOUSE OF ILL REPUTE" to witness "the disgusting scene of sleazy men being offered seedy sexual favours". The poor loves refused "Dawn's grubby offers of sex extras" and those of another girl after discovering "she was not wearing knickers". The Herald's moral campaigners "asked for a sauna and massage" but appeared to grow faint only after "sexual acts were described, some involving chains and whips". If they had already acquainted themselves with the website, this really shouldn't have come as any surprise. Described as "explicit" by Glasgow's Evening Times, the website was tame by any standards. Park Grove House was labelled: "A brothel thinly-disguised as a sauna", and the reporters sneered how it "continues to flourish in Glasgow, despite being refused an entertainments licence nine months ago". These 'stories', rather predictably, are performed either under the guise of maintaining public morality, protecting women, or protecting children. Or in this case, all three. "...Next door to a children's nursery" the broadsheet remarked acidly. (The nursery was tucked away round the corner). On the assumption the women were all forced to work for money, The Herald suggested: "Some may be illegal immigrants, making them powerless to resist". Call me stupid, but if the women were here illegally, that would be a matter for immigration, would it not? Once "twelve women working as sex slaves" had been rounded up for "deportation", The Evening Times slammed on its brakes: "FOREIGN SEX SLAVES TO BE SENT HOME AFTER SAUNA BLITZ", they shrieked off the front page. 160 uniformed and plain-clothed police and immigration officials raided eight Glasgow saunas. Jim Coleman declared it "the nearest thing to slavery in the 21st century". The Herald's editorial went on singing from its own hymn sheet in a piece labelled: "Ending the vile human traffic, despite no evidence any of these women were forced to work as 'sex slaves' or were ever victims of human trafficking. Anyone supporting The Herald's dismissal of the rights of women working in the sex industry, thinly disguised as a protest against human trafficking, were quoted, including 'anti-porn' feminists from Scottish Women Against Pornography (SWAP). A spokesperson was reported to have said "men leaving lap dancing clubs may have specific behavioural problems" and that such "state of mind... could lead to intimidation and harassment of women in the area". Qué? How about protecting women who choose to have sex for money the dignity of basic rights in the workplace? Nobody was listening. Anyone supporting The Herald's line crawled out of the woodwork. They included Chief Glasgow City Council zealot, Jim Coleman and Nanette Pollock, who, as a former police officer, held a duplicitous role as 'liaison officer' for prostitutes and who now worked with Routes out of Prostitution, a name that begins with the premise that prostitution is always wrong and the way out, its only option. (Can you imagine naming an organisation tackling growing rates of HIV infection amongst gay men: Routes Out of Homosexuality)? With some gusto, The Herald reported: "Co-ordinated raids on brothels across Glasgow are being planned, with police, Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue among agencies gathering intelligence aimed at ensuring that criminals who employ off-street prostitutes will be driven out of business". With at least seven murders of female sex-workers on the streets of Glasgow in recent years, you would imagine Glasgow City Council might've learnt something. The opinion of Kevin Williamson graced another page in The Herald under the campaigning title: Pushing Prostitutes into Danger. It only repeated the tired mantra that it was only men who were sad, mad, bad and dangerous who were forcibly using prostitutes. With a Scotland on Sunday poll pointing to two-thirds of Scots in favour of 'toleration zones', I would say the Scots are not nearly as prudish as The Herald presumes. So, what's new?
So it was that another piece by Iain Wilson and Billy Briggs in The Herald started with: "Tolerance zones for street prostitutes will not work in Glasgow" following the comments of Jim McLean, a Strathclyde assistant chief constable who said: "Most of the time the women wouldn't know what day of the week it is, whether they are in a tolerance zone or on the planet Zog". (Not so hopeless, of course, that police have ever been deterred from marching them down the complicated road of litigation). Nanette Pollock agreed, adding that sex workers wouldn't understand and stay in the centre because that was where the business was. Surely, men have a part to play in this too? Would they not also be encouraged to use a 'toleration zone', therefore creating a safe area of good business? Circumstances had already moved the women on. Despite the CCTV cameras in the wealthy city centre set up to 'protect' the women, arrests for soliciting had risen threefold in the more deprived east end. While the newspaper reports on sex workers overly concentrated on the morality of prostitution, barely touching on issues like poverty and drug dependency, Glasgow City Council was writing to MSPs, begging them to make importuning for sexual services illegal. This has implications for all of us, including gays who have, in the past, been particularly vulnerable to laws against importuning. As female sex workers are driven further underground they are the only ones who become more vulnerable in the face of ever more devious ways to circumvent policing and legislation governing sex.
The Herald reported: "Glasgow Muslims in brush with BBC over posters". Muslims had painted over six posters advertising BBC TV's drama Babyfather, which depicted the backsides of four naked black men together in a shower. The Herald reported "a flood of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the BBC". The ASA claimed just 46 complaints, from across the UK, (posters were also targeted in other Muslim areas), which sounds pretty much like the product of an organised campaign to me. When homophobic Keep the Clause posters covered the whole of Scotland, the ASA received 88 complaints and reached the eighth position in their list of the most reviled campaigns of 2000. (And this was purely a Scottish campaign). Dozens of posters were defaced with even a website set up to picture them. Did The Herald print that story?
Ron Ferguson, although another religionist writing for The Herald, was certainly kicking some arse over the Church of Scotland's inability to elect a female Moderator. "It was about Mrs Ferguson's involvement in a private blessing for a lesbian relationship nine years ago. It was whispered that a 'marriage' ceremony was held in her church, and one paper even said that it was televised. All this is far from the truth. The ceremony took place at a private house at the request of a Christian couple who wanted a blessing on their long-term relationship. This pastoral act is being portrayed as some sort of heinous crime... The longer this controversy runs, the more it damages the Church... When people in ecclesiastical authority say sniffily that to change the balance of the committee would be to give in to 'political correctness', the Church renders itself risible. No wonder Scotland couldn't give a haggis's left testicle as to whether Jack McLean, Jackie Bird, the Dalai Lama, or the hunchback of Notre Dame is the Kirk's Moderator. What will it take for a woman to break into the ranks of the top boys' club?" Personally, I welcome the Kirk's decision. It represents another nail in the coffin of a dying, conservative institution rooted in hypocrisy and firmly committed to sexual apartheid. A politicised Church like this has no place in the 21st century.
As for all the different types of people who enjoy gay sex, the list "could go on and on...", claims the Fife Men Project. Sensibly, and however briefly, they include support for men working in the sex industry. Enter, the sexual Grinch, The Scottish Daily Mail. Otherwise busy whipping up the prejudices of its gullible readers over lottery funded grants, they turned to one of their team of hired hands to do their bidding. Graham Grant's "exclusive" gasped: "Thousands of pounds of public money is to be given to a group which helps male prostitutes ply their trade". It was less than £5,000. A "cash handout", spat The Mail. One look at the Fife Men Project website will demonstrate some of the commendable work they carry out for local gay men. If only the same could be said of The Scottish Daily Mail, who, with the help of the evil Christian Institute and its cronies are hell-bent on destroying us! Police and legal experts were recorded expressing "their unease". (Unsurprisingly, police told The Mail they couldn't condone anything that helped people break the law)! "Critics" claimed the Fife Men Project effectively helped male prostitutes "break the law". (The success of work with either gay men or sex workers depends on a non-judgemental approach, not easily understood by dotty Mail reporters). Readers were conveniently reminded how lottery money had just been spent on a "shadowy" group which had "championed terrorists". One of the critics was a World War II veteran, an "old soldier" whose application for lottery funding to visit the Dutch killing fields had been turned down. He declared money for "an organisation like this... outrageous" and "absolutely sickening". The editorial sobbed: "How must these old soldiers feel, after seeing their comrades die and after risking their own lives to defeat Nazism, when they discover that they rank lower in esteem than male prostitutes? No wonder the National Lottery is faltering. These facts deserve earnest consideration by any decent citizen before he or she invests in a lottery ticket." Rich coming from a newspaper that once leant its support to Hitler! And with the co-ordinated persecution of homosexuals by British and US governments following the war, I have to ask just whose freedoms these brave men fought? Tory Brian Monteith, of course, found the whole thing "worse than disgusting". And he didn't mean the Mail's vile behaviour, either. Reporter Grant sneered at the Fife Men Project who "would or could not say exactly how many male prostitutes there are in Fife" before turning to a Fife Constabulary spokesman for help. After spending valuable police time leafing through files from as far back as January last year, they told the paper they had no reports of any offences regarding male prostitution. Perhaps they might like to leaf through some gay magazines in London where the back pages are full to the brim with photos and descriptions of men selling their bodies for cash from all over the UK; or dial up some chatlines; or visit the Internet chatrooms... The list is endless. The editorial wondered whether it was now possible to buy a lottery ticket "with a clear conscience". An interesting observation that could so easily be levelled at The Daily Mail which has had to print more apologies for inaccurate reporting than any other paper I've seen and has recently been derided by a top journalist as "the most evil mainstream organisation in Britain today". The editorial begged: "Giving lottery money to help train men to be male prostitutes is not only abetting the commission of a criminal offence, it is encouraging the exploitation of socially inadequate youths whose lifestyle is as dangerous as it is sordid. Why not fund a group offering these unfortunates an alternative career?"
It was no surprise to me how Britain's first public autopsy in 170 years, performed by Professor Gunther von Hagens in London should be set against a background of moral outrage and indignation from Scotland's press. The partly-censored televised event "provoked outrage from religious groups, some Tory MPs and the parents of children whose organs were removed" and ruffled the feathers of The Herald's editorial. Council officials in Glasgow had quite predictably moved the mobile Body Worlds exhibition on from parking itself in George Square. Professor Von Hagen successfully challenged the medical elite who had grown used to performing such operations in private. The Herald indicated "public autopsies were carried out for educational purposes in Europe in the sixteenth century, an age of mass illiteracy" and suggested anyone without "a basic idea how the body works can buy a book, a video, or a CD-rom". To suggest there was a 'proper' way to gain such knowledge smacks of arrogance and just the sort of elitism von Hagens set out to challenge. The Scotsman was satisfied "the ghoulish Mr Hagens is more a showman than a civil rights campaigner". The autopsy was undoubtedly voyeurism for the voyeur, and educational for those denied an insight into the organs of a deceased and consenting 72-year-old man. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking we are a more enlightened and a less ghoulish society than we were in the sixteenth century. We failed to better educate our populace then and we still do it today.
The prudish reporting of sexual issues in The Sunday Mail is at best fairly nauseating, but the entrapment exercise by Mail reporters was in quite a different league. The 'investigators', behind this debasing exercise were Brendan Mcginty, Lorna Hughes, Charles Lavery and Russell Findlay. Allegedly, "Graeme Paterson tried to seduce a girl he believed was just 12 in a series of increasingly obscene conversations in a chatroom". Thing was, this '12-year-old' turned out to be a reporter who hadn't plugged in her Net Nanny. Presuming games of 'come and sit on daddy's lap' has not been censored out of existence, on or off the Internet, for anyone interested in this kind of sexual foreplay, what was The Sunday Mail doing sniffing round Internet chatrooms? An "AOL chatroom", they added vaguely. Like so many Internet chatrooms, there are ones on AOL that are frequently used by people to act out fantasies, change sex, have extra-marital affairs, role-play, and find sexual partners. For the gratification of their readers, they were more than generous with the circumstances of Mr Paterson's sexual non-starter. The Sunday Mail had just "NETTED" another sexual victim. Paterson was said to have responded with "disappointment" when he met the ageing 12-year-old, saying: "You look older than I expected". But it was not so much 'disappointment' on Paterson's face, pictured in The Sunday Mail; more like a smirk. Even after the woman, dressed like a schoolgirl, confronted him, The Sunday Mail sneered how he still "made it clear that he wanted to meet for sex". A woman pretending to be 12-years-old was not such a disappointment to Paterson, then. Was this really a paedophile or a confirmed role-player? This story was a small ad from the back pages of a sex magazine, masquerading as a tabloid exclusive. Were The Sunday Mail's 'investigators' mistaken? Despite so much "not suitable for publication", we were, as usual, clearly expected to arrive at the same conclusion. All The Mail could say was that "his lust for child sex was clear in every conversation and he frequently spoke of his heightened state of sexual excitement". He had also asked her "to wear ankle socks and, at one stage, a school uniform". The Mail was satisfied that he was "a pervert". I'm afraid I would take a little more convincing.
Several newspapers reported the ridiculous circumstances whereby police have written to the Scottish Executive to ask when knickers are sexy and when they are just items of clothing. Amongst them was The Sunday Mail whose journalists otherwise spend their time 'exposing' shops selling erotic items, such as videos. Apparently, the Association of Chief Police Officers' assistant secretary Colin McKerrechar, who is Deputy Chief Constable of Strathclyde, sought guidance on what were the sexiest colours in underwear, when could riding crops be considered 'sex aids' and what could be done to licence shops selling sexy items to help him make more arrests. "When does underwear cease to be a functional piece of clothing and become something 'intended for use in connection with, or for the purpose of, stimulating or encouraging sexual activity'?" begged McKerrechar. Apparently, police are disturbed that shops refused sex shop licences were selling sexy items alongside "controversial items". Ooh, matron! I'm surprised The Sunday Mail weren't straight on the blower for a quote from the Kirk's Board of Social Responsibility or the Catholic Church! Craig Watson's report finished: "Two weeks ago, we revealed Ann Summers is to double its number of shops in Scotland".
"No one from the Highlands and Islands Fire Brigade was available for comment", finished the report in The Daily Record of 21-year-old firefighter Karla Stevenson's winning of Diva's Miss Lesbian UK competition. It was an otherwise perfectly good article, why should anyone have to comment? Firefighter uniforms are an integral part of sexual play; no one asked the Fire Brigade's opinion when firemen posed for calendars in their kit.
CUT IT OUT!
Former Tory justice spokesman Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the minister once responsible for prisons, when told by a former prison chief inspector that ministers were more concerned about a lesbian cult problem than overcrowding in a Stirling prison in Scotland on Sunday: "I don't recall any official report containing this sort of information". Whilst busying themselves with a 'lesbian cult', six women killed themselves in the chronically overcrowded and uncaring regime at Cornton Vale.
Gerald Warner's views on youth in Scotland on Sunday: "The Great Charlatan (Tony Blair) has even proposed a youth council, in which the most brain-dead generation since Palæolithic times would be asked for its infantile views on public policy. If the potential members could read, write or identify Britain on a map of the world, their opinions might be valuable. Politicians' courting of the 'youth vote' is an absurdity. Few young people trouble to vote. For that we should be grateful, since the young are profoundly ignorant".
Former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway in The Sunday Herald: "Apparently, the Church can bless human warfare and call it just, but it cannot bless human love, if it happens to be gay or lesbian".
Mrs Katie Grant in The Scotsman, once again rising in defence of her religion over child abuse scandals: "The Catholic Church is having a horrible time... That the priests were few and many of the allegations unsubstantiated is providing no defence against the merciless onslaught of the press. But, while I deplore in the strongest possible terms the abuse of children, should we be quite so blindly vindictive?" Yes.
