It was en eventuful weekend. First, there was the Jan Moir thing. It made me so cross. Yes, her piece was unnecessary, nasty and homophobic, but it didn’t stop there. People were so (rightly) angered by her insulting of the private life of Stephen Gately that they missed the even bigger slur: that on sex itself. She wasn’t just slamming gay sex, she was basically saying that any consensual sex that she hasn’t imagined herself doing in her own narrow fat head is all sleazy. All wrong. It upset me because many of the things she lists used to constitute my weekends. The good ones. Oh, I may be engaged now, but prior to that, I don’t know what I’d have done without spliffs and strangers.
And so, I wrote a Tweet: The nuns always told us that sex was bad. I’m still a little surprised that it’s punishable by death. #janmoir and by the end of the day, it had ended up here.
I wasn’t writing for Stephen; I’ve never met him and couldn’t presume to. I did forward links to the Facebook group, urging the Daily Mail to retract the slimy piece, and their advertisers to desert them, but I’ve never been a campaigner. I’m way too paranoid for that. There’s too much to be fixed in my own flat and face to be trying to fix other stuff. I’d get all confused.
But Jan Moir didn’t just tread on lovely Stephen Gately’s red-Nike-clad toes: she tread on mine. She’s the kind of woman who sniggers at single people; who doesn’t remember loneliness and heartbreak. I do. I remember them vividly. I remember doing ill-judged things simply so as not to be alone. I also remember doing things for fun. Just for fun. Call me sleazy (Jan will), but it seems to me that Stephen Gately had a top last night on this planet. Surely that’s a good thing?
(The following paragraph is Jan-esque in its conjecture and spuriousness. It’s the gauntlet Jan’s laid down, and I’m picking it up. I’ve not researched any of the following statements and have no intention of reading anything else Jan has written in order to do so. Too dull.) How could Jan remember human emotions? She doesn’t have a heart to begin with and she probably doesn’t remember because she’s half-cut on white wine half the time. Inebriation is inebriation, Jan, I hate to break it to you. Just because it’s in a form which you find acceptable doesn’t make it less muddling of the senses. If you’re into drinking with the girls, fair enough. I won’t use that statement against you to ask whether this obsession (my scurrilous assumption) with the girls means that you don’t have a husband? Or let it lead me to ask why you don’t? Or if you do, where he might be? I do hope he’s not off having an affair while you terrorise pastoral villages. I can’t be the first to call into question the “happy ever after” myth of heterosexual partnerships, now can I? You silly, smug prick.
Smugness is a terrible, terrible affliction. Smugness is a million times worse than the odd, legal holiday threesome; at least in a threesome, there’s an acknowledgement that other people exist, and get their fair go. The minute you see yourself as safe, and right, and levitating high up enough off your own pedestal to be handing down rules for living, look out. Not only are you cruising for a fall, but if you’re that high up, then birds don’t have far to shit on you.
Jan, I wish you a cloud of a thousand pigeons.
Anyway, that was Friday. Saturday, the pain in my lung-area, which has been making it hard to breathe properly and plaguing me on and off for weeks, got worse. I had to go to the Whittington Hospital to make sure I didn’t have a pulmonary embolism on the way. I probably don’t, is the answer; I’m too low-risk. Phew. Turns out it’s likely a tear in the muscles in my ribcage due to over-training for the marathon. So I have to take a few days off and eat ibuprofen. Fine by me.
I’m glad I got it checked, but if we’ve learned nothing else from Stephen Gately’s fate, it’s that you just never know when you’re gonna go. So be damned sure you live your life exactly how you want to live it.
Now get out there and have sex. Together.
