‘Dyke on a bike’ – rather a flat joke.

by Mint Cake

Queerbashing is hardly deemed the stuff of the intellectual elite. And yet the prestigious Sunday Times is the latest publication to be accused of publishing offensive and homophobic material in what has swiftly become a national scandal. For those who are yet to hear the sordid ins and outs of this particular jockey-versus-columnist squabble, it goes something like this:

1 – A.A. Gill, the infamously irreverent Times columnist, writes a review of TV presenter Clare Balding’s latest show ‘Britain by Bike’. He inexplicably includes an offensive and largely irrelevant parting shot along these lines:

‘Some time ago, I made a cheap and frankly unnecessary joke about Clare Balding looking like a big lesbian. And afterwards somebody tugged my sleeve to point out that she is a big lesbian, and I felt foolish and guilty. So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise. Sorry. Now back to the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation.”

2 – Balding, whose interests surprisingly don’t appear to include testosterone-fuelled homophobic banter, requests an apology from the Sunday Times Editor, John Witherow.

3 – Witherow, by way of “apology”, twists the knife in yet further:

“In my view, some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society. Jeremy Clarkson, perhaps the epitome of the heterosexual male, is constantly jeered at for his dress sense (lack of), adolescent mindset and hairstyle”

4 – Balding publishes aforementioned reply on Twitter and lodges an official complaint with the Press Complaint Commission.

5 – All Twitter-ish hell breaks loose.

Cue an explosion of cyber-rage from both sides, with the Balding fans accusing both Gill and Witherow of nothing short of hate crime, and the Gill crusaders bemoaning the oversensitive self-obsessed nature of the nation’s gays.

As ever, ‘free speech’ was among the first arguments wheeled out in Gill’s defence. “Mr Gill can take the mickey out of whoever he damn well pleases”, squeaked Times readers, “and Ms Balding needn’t get so uppity about it!” Certainly, biting wit is an essential part of any good columnist’s repertoire, to be deployed at will. Where Gill went wrong, however, is in his offensive choice of words. ‘Dyke’, no matter how much we use it within the gay community, remains a term of abuse. It certainly doesn’t sound funny when being yelled at your from the other end of the N88. Not that Gill would know anything about that. Terms like ‘dyke’, ‘queer’ and what we Brits squeamishly refer to as the ‘N-word’ are all former insults, taken and defused by the very minorities they were once hurled at. Their usage is acceptable, but only within that community. And A.A. Gill may be many things, but a lesbian, he certainly is not.

Others accused Balding of making a show of her sexuality, claiming that she was getting what she deserved for parading it in people’s faces. Hardly. Balding has done little more than be open the fact that she has a female partner. Not a ‘Dip me in chocolate’ T-shirt in sight. The only people trying to attach any sort of label to her, it would seem, are those attempting to undermine her, who can find little else to criticise her for. All rather infantile, non?

Finally, Balding’s critics dismissed the entire affair as an over-reaction on her part. Now given that the Sunday Times has a weekly circulation of well over 1 million, her objection to being humiliated in print hardly strikes me as unreasonable. We’re not talking about back-of-the-bus name-calling here. That the Press Complaints Commission are considering her claim only backs up her objection. The ST Editor claims that if Jeremy Clarkson can handle gags about his hair, then Clare Balding can put up with jokes about her lifestyle. Since when did one’s choice of hair product equate to one’s sexuality? I must have missed that memo.

Sadly, Balding isn’t the first to be let down by the British press, and she won’t be the last. The Sun choked on its own laughter with its “Elton takes David up the aisle” headline on the day of Elton John’s wedding. Stephen Gately had been dead for less a week before Jan Moir unleashed her bit of Daily Mail venom, in which she essentially claimed that gay = promiscuous = likely to die a young deserved death.

Why, then, in the big journalistic playground are gay men and lesbians still seen as an acceptable target for casual intellectually-void name calling and insult slinging? It seems that sexuality, unlike religion or race, is still viewed as a frivolous aspect of human identity, and thus fair game for mockery and insult. It’s only through challenging this assumption, as Balding has done, and refusing to accept casual bigotry, that incidents like this will stop cropping up with such alarming frequency.

A man who once referred to the Welsh as ‘pugnacious little trolls’, and wrote off the Isle of Man as a ‘hopelessly addicted, criminal cesspit’,  A.A Gill has never been afraid to cross the line. This time he may just have gone too far.