EU referendum: Beyond liberal economics
The official campaigns from both sides of the EU referendum debate are both so exasperating I frequently find myself wishing I could vote against both of them. Neither campaign deserves my vote, and...
View Article‘Taking control’ means taking responsibility, too
Okay, first of all, no more petitions to re-run the referendum. Please. It confirms everything that the Brexit campaign has said about people who wanted to stay in the EU. People voted. It’s done. The...
View ArticleWhat George Michael meant to me in 1998
Self-abasement in exchange for basic tolerance is the standard get out of jail card for LGBT people. George Michael was having none of it. I was about 13 years old when it happened. I felt like I was...
View ArticleWhat if ‘identity politics’ really did provoke the rise of the far right?...
There are two buzzwords right now that spike my blood pressure every time they’re uttered: “ordinary people,” and “identity politics.” These two buzzwords (or buzz phrases, I suppose, to be accurate)...
View ArticleThe mess over Clive Lewis is how we know you see misogyny as a game
If you were a Tory and you wanted to give the impression that you, and your political colleagues, take misogyny very seriously, you might think that taking a stand over an MP’s supposedly misogynistic...
View ArticleWhy does the far right get away with weaponising LGBT people?
First published on The Queerness, May 2017 UKIP’s General Election manifesto was published this week, and, unlike their previous manifestos it actually includes a mention of queer people. But don’t get...
View ArticleBeing queer isn’t a moral question; how you vote is
First published on The Queerness, June 2017 18-year-old Megan McGowan was recently quoted, in a clickbait style headline from the BBC, as saying that she found it “harder to come out as Tory than as...
View ArticleWhy do we find it so hard to ‘play the dating game’?
First published on The Queerness, July 2017 Oh, the unique horrors of being a man who fancies women and finds it hard to approach them without seeming like a creep. Women don’t understand what it’s...
View ArticleWhen free speech just means bullies yelling over bigots
First published on The Queerness, September 2017 So this is what the free speech utopia we keep hearing about looks like. Piers Morgan, of all people, yelling hysterically over the words of a man who...
View ArticleNational Coming Out Day: who is it really for?
First published on The Queerness, October 2017 Before I was ‘out’, I was in the closet. So goes conventional wisdom. Only I wasn’t, not really. I wasn’t telling the whole truth but I was telling the...
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