ExGay.org.uk

‘Ex-gays’ side with prejudice
Like many ‘ex-gays’, Patrick Muirhead sidelines reasoned discussion in favour of an ugly attack on the gay community

David L Rattigan

Writing in the Times earlier this week, Patrick Muirhead describes “the day I decided to stop being gay“. Even allowing for its firmly tongue-in-cheek tone, the problem with his article is that he really seems to believe the half-truths he presents about homosexuality.

He talks of his increasing attraction to women, or more pertinently his attraction to the idea of a wife and children – though in fact, when his decision was made, no woman was even in the picture. It was the sight of a father playing with his child that persuaded this one-time “fully fledged homo” to pursue a traditional, heterosexual family life. This is a spectre that cannot be avoided throughout the article: has the author really changed, or is he just enamoured of the idea of “normality”?

In common with many others who have given up the supposedly hedonistic lifestyle of the modern gay man, Muirhead cannot resist taking a parting shot at homosexuals. It’s a familiar pattern, especially in the US, where the religious, rightwing “ex-gay” movement thrives on myth-making about the dangers of same-sex love. The American Michael Glatze, for example, a former gay youth activist, converted in 2007, but not without launching a vile tirade against gays, announcing that “homosexuality is death,” and merely “lust and pornography wrapped into one”.

Of course, Patrick Muirhead has not – at least so far – made any religious claims, and nor does he hail reparative therapy, prayer or any fix as the reason for his decision. Yet his words, veiled perhaps by their easy-going, ironic tone, have much in common with the less subtle rhetoric of the “ex-gays”.

Like Glatze, Muirhead defines homosexuality only in terms of his own limited experience. He has spent the last 20 years in a particular subculture, perhaps the dominant gay subculture. I don’t doubt he has spent two decades leaping from bed to bed and toilet stall to toilet stall engaging in taboo acts that “you would not want to know”. I don’t doubt that his sexuality was developed mostly behind bike sheds, in dormitories and in episodes of “pubescent fumbling” – but aren’t there as many heterosexuals of whom the same is true? Muirhead recalls his time at the BBC among “flamboyant” gay media people, where homosexuality was “very nearly compulsory”. But straight folk too can recount their experiences of schools, workplaces and peer groups among whom it was just as compulsory to be ragingly and promiscuously heterosexual.

What is it that makes Muirhead think his experiences were so uniquely tied to being gay? For his unfulfilling experience of life as a gay man leads him to all kinds of judgments on other gay people. Muirhead insists on using the word “abnormal” to describe homosexuality. As an intelligent adult with enough knowledge of the English language to be a writer and journalist, he is surely aware that the associations and connotations of that horrid word “abnormal” go far beyond “not in the majority”. If not, shall we apply “abnormal” to adopted children, spectacle-wearers, redheads, the autistic and Hindus? On account of this abnormality, he complains that his gay friends don’t realise the difference between “who we are and our stake in society”. Indeed, he comes dangerously close to suggesting that minorities don’t deserve the same freedoms as the majority. But it is Muirhead who misses the difference. Who or what we are is human, and on that basis our stake in society is the same as everyone else’s, regardless of our sexuality.

The ugliest part of Muirhead’s piece comes with his attack on civil partnerships, which he describes as “theatrical shams”. I felt the sting of this, not because of my own situation, but because of that of a cherished ex-boyfriend, who recently registered his civil union with his new partner. By all accounts the ceremony was an understated occasion, with very little show and only a handful of guests. Of one thing I am sure: it was no theatrical sham. They did it because they loved each other, were committed to each other, and wanted to spend the rest of their lives together with the same basic legal rights that straight couples enjoy.

To justify his personal discomfort, Muirhead turns to an embarrassingly antiquated-but-convenient definition of marriage as “a solemn institution created to provide stability for child-rearing”. Gay partnerships akin to marriage subvert this, he says. Alas, he is mistaken, and the reason is hardly breaking news: heterosexuals subverted this institution long ago, when they decided that personal choice and romantic love were the bedrock of marriage, when divorce became acceptable and serial monogamy became normalised, and when a childless marriage became as valid an option as a childbearing one. Subverting traditional marriage was something straights managed all on their own.

It is telling that one of the few times that Muirhead appears to write without a hint of irony is when he refers to the novel Maurice, by the gay Edwardian EM Forster. It was a message of tolerance, he says almost wistfully, “never a charter for parity”. One can hear the pining for simpler times, when minorities were content just to be left alone.

The really unfortunate thing here is that if Muirhead hadn’t felt compelled to attack gay people and their relationships with such blanket half-truths, his story might have raised some valid questions. There is certainly room for a more fluid view of sexuality than the prevailing narrow perceptions. Muirhead’s amusing recollection of a wedding at which his former boyfriend is being married to a woman in the presence of his ex-boyfriends – one of whom is the vicar – shoots holes through the commonplace assumptions. There’s a debate in there, but Muirhead does nothing to advance it.

There are discussions to be had and critiques to be made of gay culture, but such critiques are rarely made, or at least rarely well received. As long as gay people are constantly put on the defensive, there is little hope that they ever will be received. Sadly, by siding with prejudice, Muirhead does little to make such a discussion possible, and much to hinder it.