by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
Russell T Davies is so wrong to blame populists for the crisis of gay liberation.
Russell T Davies, TV writer, famed homosexual and the smuggest of luvvies, has hit out at Donald Trump. Apparently the evil oaf in the White House is trashing gay rights. He ‘is literally out to get us’, Davies says, conjuring up an image of The Donald lurking around gay bars with a baseball bat. Apparently, Trump wants gay folk ‘gone, defunded, completely invisible’ and ideally ‘biologically altered to become as straight as him’. The funniest thing about this rant is not its fact-lite delirium but its gall. For everything Davies accuses Trump of doing to gays is actually being done by a movement Davies himself supports – the trans lobby.
Russell T Davies, TV writer, famed homosexual and the smuggest of luvvies, has hit out at Donald Trump. Apparently the evil oaf in the White House is trashing gay rights. He ‘is literally out to get us’, Davies says, conjuring up an image of The Donald lurking around gay bars with a baseball bat. Apparently, Trump wants gay folk ‘gone, defunded, completely invisible’ and ideally ‘biologically altered to become as straight as him’. The funniest thing about this rant is not its fact-lite delirium but its gall. For everything Davies accuses Trump of doing to gays is actually being done by a movement Davies himself supports – the trans lobby.
It was in an interview with the Big Issue that Davies, best known for reviving / ruining Doctor Who, let rip against Trump. And against Reform UK too, Nigel Farage’s party. ‘We, the gay community, [the] queer community, should be revolting in terror and anger and action’, he says. Because ‘what happens in America always happens here’. And right now we are looking down ‘the barrel of a Reform government’ that looks set to ape Trump’s hell-bent mission to make gays ‘invisible’. Gay rights are ‘rapidly and urgently getting worse’, he says.
It’s the hollowness of his dystopic wailing that is most striking. He gives not one example of how Trump or Farage has taken a cudgel to gay rights. How could he? These men are not 1980s-style conservatives who love to bark a Leviticus verse at canoodling men. They’re pretty socially liberal. Indeed, Trump hosted a ‘Trump Pride’ rally during his 2020 campaign. He held aloft a Pride flag emblazoned with the words ‘LGBT for Trump’. He once opposed same-sex marriage but then changed his mind – like Hillary Clinton. Anita Bryant he ain’t.