Now, perhaps we might think this isn’t entirely a bad thing – heroic, bellicose virtues are a better counter to apolitical liberal pieties than insincere meekness and gloominess.  But obviously an elitist self-conception is ultimately incompatible with left-wing values. So how does it come about?

Consider the dominant conception of things that the Left (and Nietzsche) is rejecting: essentially, humans are individual selves with an absolute power of decision and judgement. With absolute power comes absolute responsibilty for our existence, actions and beliefs. This may seem a liberating conception, but in practice it serves simply to make us absolutely culpable for our position in life (“If you’re poor, it’s your fault for not working hard enough”). We are equally culpable  if we succumb to irrational or superstitious beliefs because we have failed to subject them to rational scrutiny.

One opposing conception reverses matters: people are not absolutely free and absolutely rational, but brainwashed victims of capitalist institutions and values. But what about the people who can see through the brainwashing? They are heroes fighting to free their fellow humans from the system that entraps them. These poor souls are subjects of pity, graciously forgiven by the liberating heroes for the retrograde concepts and values drilled into them by their capitalist overlords.

Or else: the conception in which reason and the individual rule supreme is replaced by one which praises nature or tradition. The quintessential capitalist is a cold, calculating rationalist who uproots all traditional and instinctive certainties. By contrast, the opposing conception celebrates a return to nature and organic community. The honest, common-sense values of the masses who have remained pure of capitalist corruption are favoured over the shrill political correctness of the ruling classes. (see e.g. Blue Labour, some primitivist strands of environmentalism)

What is common to both of these conceptions is that they perpetuate the viewpoint they are supposed to oppose. In the first case, the masses are still scorned for their stupidity and weakness, but now this scorn takes the form of pity. In the second case, the masses go from being condescendingly regarded as unreformed bigots to being patronisingly regarded as salt-of-the-earth stereotypes. In both cases, the viewpoint is still that of a privileged elite looking down upon the masses.

One of Nietzsche’s key insights was that apparent opposites could have the same source – opposing a conception by crudely inverting it will not result in wisdom but will simply repeat its flaws in a new form.  Famously, he was an “anti-moralist”, opposed to conventional morality, but that did not mean he simply proposed the opposite of what conventional morality told us to do and think in every case. Instead, he aimed to develop new values from which to judge such matters.

Appreciating that the dominant systems of values and concepts are flawed does not give us a shortcut to being right; it’s easy to be glib and self-righteous, but hard work to develop a sense of judgement and a system of values that isn’t simply an inversion of existing ones, and it’s not something that can be done by algorithm. This is the lesson I’m personally trying to learn at the moment: it’s a struggle to find the path between the Scylla of self-righteousness – the urge to be seen to be declaiming against the ideologically impure – and the Charybdis of hypocrisy – being inconsistent with my avowed values. The difference is that whereas you can only fall prey to one of Scylla and Charybdis, it’s quite possible to be both self-righteous and hypocritical at the same time.

Personally, I think it is only a small exaggeration to say it is so unspeakably, cringeworthily awful it has made me reconsider my support for same-sex marriage.

It seems almost futile to blog about this. If your reaction is anything like mine, no explanation of what’s so awful about it will be necessary. And if you think the video is beautiful and moving despite having actually watched it, I don’t know what I could say that could possibly be more convincing proof of the video’s awfulness than the video itself. But at the very least, I would like to register a howl of protest in the face of all the uncritical praise.

I’ll try and break it down as much as I can.

1. Union Jacks.

Literally the first frame is a Union Jack, which swirls away to reveal … a happy crowd waving Union Jacks! Hurrah! God Save the Queen!

2. Our boys!

Yes, the happy patriotic crowd are cheering the return of Her Majesty’s brave soldiers. If you love equality, you must love the army and British foreign policy, right?

3. Everyone is white!

The casting director of Midsomer Murders apparently helped out with this ad. It’s probably no more overwhelmingly white than most British media productions, but the effect is particularly unfortunate when coupled with the Union Jacks and 1940s ambience. It feels like some sort of UKIP fantasy version of Britain, except with added gays.

4. Emotional depth of a DFS advert

Then … there is beautiful, searing romance! The returning soldier sees his partner, embraces him and bends knee to propose. This is the bit where everyone with no soul cries. It is the worst kind of dead-eyed, hollow kitsch. Even if you can forgive a bit of cheesiness in an advert, anyone who thinks it is “beautiful” has a dangerously impoverished aesthetic sense, to put it mildly.

5. Help for Heroes!

“All men can be heroes”. What. The. Fuck. I hate the whole “soldiers are heroes” rhetoric enough when it appears in British Legion ads. In an ad for marriage equality, it’s both inexplicable and appalling.

6. No women allowed!

There’s no space for women in the video’s Housman-esque vision of gayness. Marriage equality is all about men, apparently: “All men can be heroes”. “All men can be husbands”. Err you do know the army lets in women these days as well as gay and bisexual men, right? And that some women want to marry other women? Get over it!

A linkbaiting CiF piece (Google it, or better yet, don’t) opined that Stonewall were to blame because their “Get over it!” campaign was provoking homophobic reactions. This angered a lot of commentators (which, one cynically suspects, was the intention) who claimed this was a case of victim-blaming: laying responsibility for abuse on the abused rather than the abuser (The same piece also advocated using the problematic “It gets better” slogan instead, apparently ignorant that Stonewall also use that, and proposed Dan Savage as a role model Stonewall should emulate, which is rather like saying that the problem with David Cameron is that he’s not enough like Margaret Thatcher).

The CiF piece really does appear to be claiming that Stonewall were to blame for increasing homophobia through their campaign. But this claim blurs into another, which is that Stonewall was provoking a response through their campaign. Because the article doesn’t distinguish the two claims, being provocative is considered tantamount to fuelling homophobia, and the campaign is accordingly condemned. But to say that a campaign slogan provokes a response from your opponents is not necessarily to say that it somehow contributes to your opponent’s goals. Suppose I campaigned with a slogan: “Capitalism is evil. Get over it!” One possible outcome is that armed police arrest me and beat me; if you said it was my own fault that I was so treated, that would be a clear case of victim-blaming. But suppose the outcome is that a government official issues a terse statement: “Socialism is impossible. Get over it!” My campaign against capitalism isn’t unsuccessful just because it has provoked a response expressing pro-capitalist sentiment; the fact that it has provoked this defensive response might even be seen as a sign of success.

Let’s return to the Stonewall slogan. “Some people are gay. Get over it!” Consider how it is supposed to work (leaving aside just for the moment whether or not it does): rather than being apologetic or pleading, it is supposed to confidently dismiss homophobia as ridiculous. It directly addresses and confronts homophobes, and lays down the gauntlet for a reply from those who feel themselves to be addressed. But just because something provokes a response from those it addresses does not mean that it is counterproductive: the genius of a witheringly devastating put-down is that any reply you make to it will only make you seem more ridiculous.

Consider the slogan “Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get over it!” in this light. It is cringeworthy. It sounds like it was a written by a bunch of cranks. It plays directly into the taunt of the original slogan. Yet many people who admire the original slogan for its brash confidence reacted as if the response that it had provoked seriously threatened to destroy the fragile edifice of gay acceptance. The bunch of cranks were re-imagined as truly terrifying opponents: cunning tacticians with nigh-on unassailable power and influence who could only be brought down by a desperate, overwhelming show of force. It can serve certain interests to massively elevate the status of a particularly extreme opponent, both to make oneself seem better by comparison and to make one’s opposition seem more praiseworthy. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, because the opponent gets to seem more powerful and can claim to be persecuted. Consider the relation of the Guardian to the Daily Mail, or the New Atheists to religious conservatives.

Another feature typical of much of the reaction has been a strong streak of scientism. In Stonewall’s own response (courtesy of Ben Summerskill) they at least don’t exaggerate the threat posed by the unaptly-named Anglican Mainstream. But the focus of their response is to point out, on the authority of BACP, that gay cure therapy doesn’t work. This idea is extended in other reactions: not only does science show us that gayness can’t be cured, it shows us that some people are naturally and innately gay, and therefore that it is wrong to be homophobic. It’s the “born this way” argument, which is also suggested by the “Some people are gay. Get over it!” slogan.

But there are two problems here: firstly, you can’t win values arguments by appealing to science; something demonstrated by another linkbaiting article on the ex-gay ads (this time from the Daily Mail) which points out that there are plenty of naturally-occurring features that we consider undesirable. Secondly, gayness isn’t an immutable absolute given to us by nature, but a culturally-formed identity. Supposedly “basic” homosexual desires can be interpreted or conceptualised in many different ways, and reshaped through these interpretations and conceptualisations. There are people who have not had gay cure therapies who have ceased to identify as gay, there are people who have ceased to feel homosexual desire, and there are people whose self-reconceptualisations have changed their desires. What needs to be challenged isn’t the scientific veracity of gay-cure claims (since it clearly is possible to cease to be gay), but the motivation to be rid of homosexual desires in the first place.

So the two key points from the ex-gay bus ad story are I think as follows: firstly, don’t exaggerate the threat posed by weak or inept opponents. That isn’t to say we should downplay the profoundly harmful effects that gay cure therapy can have on individuals, or that we should ignore the threat altogether – just that everything should be kept in proportion (a good analogy is to how we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be panicked by the prospect of terrorist attacks).

Secondly, don’t try to circumvent arguments about gay identity or homosexual desire by appealing to science or nature or “experts”. It doesn’t work and it cedes ground needlessly. The values and motivations of people like Anglican Mainstream need to be confronted directly with counterarguments; the challenge is to offer a more compelling understanding of sexual desire and identity than the one which motivates people to eradicate their own desires (the liberal view of sexual desire as essentially benign and unperturbing has clearly not been wholly successful in this regard). Though the second point should be taken together with the first – this need may not turn out to be terribly urgent, given the actual influence of Anglican Mainstream.

This is the form of same form of argument that says that, no matter how inadequate AV is, it’s still better than FPTP, or no matter how awful Labour are, they’re still better than the Conservatives. One problem with this “all things being equal” form of argument (where two alternatives are compared) is that it says nothing about how much it matters which alternative you end up with; even if one alternative is indisputably better, it may not be very much better, or it may not be a sufficient improvement that it merits diverting energies from solving other problems. I agree that the importance of marriage equality mustn’t be overstated, not so much because it would redirect efforts away from more worthwhile ends (I think that assumes a zero-sum game model of politics; there is also the known issue of people who only ever affect concern about issues like poverty in order to dismiss “trivial” concerns with other issues) but because of the ideological cover it will give to the politicians who implement it.

But it wasn’t until the news last year that the British royal succession would now follow the principle of primogeniture (i.e. female heirs now take precedence over younger male heirs) that I was really struck by the problem with arguments that only allow two alternatives to be on the table. The media greeted primogeniture as a huge step forward for equality: bringing the monarchy into the 21st century. But it is so patently absurd that the institution of monarchy still exists that it is ridiculous to celebrate anything less than its wholesale abolition; anything short of that is irrelevant tinkering.

Supporting marriage equality means accepting that it is not absurd for marriage to be retained as a legal institution. In other words, accepting that it is not absurd that certain legal rights should be conferred upon only those who enter into a state-sanctioned partnership between two co-habiting individuals, and denied to others, or that religious ministers should be able to formalise such partnerships. Supporting marriage equality needn’t mean you support marriage per se, but it does mean that you doesn’t see it as analogous to the monarchy (unless for some weird reason you aren’t affronted by the very idea of the monarchy, in which case you need to seriously reconsider your worldview anyway!). It means at the least that you favour reformism over revolution with regard to marriage – whether because you think marriage could be improved into a worthwhile institution, or because reforms to marriage are a step along the way to more worthwhile legal and social arrangements, or because you think some improvements are better than nothing given that marriage isn’t going anywhere soon.

So I can’t have my cake and eat it: I can’t support marriage equality yet remain uncommitted in my views on marriage. I must at least think that marriage isn’t so wholly absurd and unjust that it makes no sense whatsoever to support reforms to it. I’m not saying that the case for this belief can’t be made: even the most ardent non-reformists must sometimes take account of actual social and political reality and support improvements to institutions that would not even exist in a postulated post-revolutionary world, and there is an unpleasant elitism to some anti-marriage rhetoric (sneering at people who get married rather than opposing the institution itself).

But it’s a case I’m not confident I can make. Since I do support marriage equality, that means I will have to bite the bullet and accept that this commits me to views on marriage I’m not confident I can defend, and opens me to reproach from critics who I can’t just dismiss as readily as I might have liked. Provided, that is, they oppose civil partnership as much as they oppose marriage; I will readily dismiss criticism from anyone who doesn’t have some minimum standards of consistency!

The first thing is to say that not all approaches advocating lower overall consumption need be puritanical. Imagine two different responses to excessive consumption of alcohol in a society. One response is to deliberately restrict one’s alcohol consumption and advocate that others should do so too. The other response is to cultivate a new, lower consensus about what counts as a normal amount to drink on a fun night out. The first response is parasitic upon existing norms governing alcohol consumption; people are to deliberately drink less than would be normal for a fun night out. The second response changes those norms: people don’t deliberately drink less than would be normal or have fewer fun nights out, but the amount that it is normal to drink has become less.

A change in consensus is likely to arise from broader changes elsewhere (it can’t be imposed by diktat from above, or if it is then it is likely to be puritanical after all), such as changes in working conditions or the distribution of status in society. But the first response presupposes that the consensus does not change; it is the reaction of a small group who identify themselves in contrast to the norm. In Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, he imagines that the weak and powerless might make themselves feel better by evaluating all the characteristic attributes of the powerful as evil. But those who react against consumption are often not the powerless but the powerful, who derive a sense of superiority (and a sense of being the ‘good guys’ rather than systematically part of the problem) from being part of an elite who abstain from things that others do not. This, too, is part of Nietzsche’s story; the ultimate expression of power is to be so confident of one’s power (in this case, one’s ability to consume) that one can casually refrain from exercising that power.

As well as being a paradoxical means of expressing power, puritanism can be a continuation of the very tendency it supposedly opposes but in fact merely inverts. Imposing absolute efficiency on consumption, or requiring exacting justification for consumption, is simply another manifestation of the insatiable rationalising impulse at the heart of capitalism.

For an example of what I mean by this, let’s turn to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer thought that it was impossible to be truly happy; we think we will be happy if only we can satisfy all our desires, but Schopenhauer points out that even if we did manage to satisfy all our desires we would only be bored, not happy, and before long some new nagging desire would make itself felt. Schopenhauer proposed that we should give up on the futile chase for happiness and refrain from satisfying our desires: we should live a life of saintly self-denial.

Nietzsche attacks Schopenhauer’s account on many fronts; but what particularly interests me here is Nietzsche’s rejection of the craving for a transcendent state of perfection. Nietzsche thinks Schopenhauer is right to deny that we can achieve a permanent state of satisfaction that redeems our existence; this is the beguiling myth that happiness is just round the corner as long as we just keep plugging on. Philip Larkin puts it nicely:

Something is always approaching, every day

Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,

Sparkling armada of promises draw near [...]

We think each one will heave to and unload

All good into our lives, all we are owed

For waiting so devoutly and so long.

But we are wrong.

Another version of this myth is peddled in capitalist society: if you just buy this one product, you will be happy and your life will be perfect (except, of course, it turns out that there’s always another product you need to buy to achieve this happiness). Just as some anti-consumerists think we can “opt out” of this myth by refusing to consume,  Schopenhauer thinks we can achieve victory over our desires by refusing to satisfy them. But Nietzsche thinks this is just a new form of the craving for a state of transcendent perfection: the absolute clarity of nothingness.

Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche does not think this craving is an unchangeable metaphysical reality but a contingent symptom of spiritual sickness. To yearn for a state in which everything is perfectly resolved, once and for all, is to be sick of life: life is dynamic and ever-shifting, and we should rejoice in the beguiling temptations of desires rather than wishing for their cessation. Any apparent endpoint will turn out to be a stepping stone to a new destination, and Nietzsche thinks we should welcome this continual process of self-overcoming.

This may seem a rather unsettled and unsettling ideal (Nietzsche would agree, but would not think it a problem). Metaphorically, he likens it to endless sailing without any solid land. Within this metaphorical landscape, the picture he is arguing against is of an otherworldly firmanent that provides absolutely solid grounding beneath our feet. But we need not suppose there is no solid land, even if we reject this myth of an unchanging firmanent. We can find grounding in things that, while firm enough to be getting on with, do not satisfy the craving for absoluteness and perfection; indeed we must, because  nothing can satisfy such a craving.

Nietzsche identifies this craving with Christianity, but that might not be quite right for all forms of Christianity. It is only where a radical separation opens up between our immanent lives and some transcendent Beyond that things go awry, and this radical separation is not characteristic of a Christian doctrine according to which which God’s goodness is disclosed through his creation. It is more characteristic of a “disenchanted” outlook which relegates value to a realm of absolute rationalistic, geometric perfection and consistency that cannot be realised in the course of our actual lives. This is the outlook of modern capitalist societies, more appropriate for machines or financial accounts than for human beings.

The way out of the impasse is not necessarily to change what we value, but our way of valuing. There is nothing wrong with wanting luxuries that go beyond our essential needs – life only flourishes amidst superfluity. But if we anxiously crave a perfected accumulation of such luxuries (in vain, since this accumulation can never be perfected), the solution is not to anxiously crave the non-accumulation of such luxuries, but to desire those luxuries less anxiously and more moderately.

Of course, this isn’t a solution that can be aimed at directly, since our consensual norms and modes of valuing are grounded in social and material factors that need to be changed before it would even make sense for most people to value otherwise than they do: But the point here is to rule out puritanism as a solution, not to propose a new solution of the same kind; the starting point for a solution lies in tackling structures of power and wealth distribution, not in finding means to accommodate ourselves to those structures.

You don’t have to wear a poppy to remember those who have died, but nor does the poppy signify just one form of remembrance. A WW2 veteran might wear it for different reasons than a politician who has just sent troops off to a new foreign war, the parent of a soldier who has died might wear it for different reasons than someone anxious to make a good impression at work. Every November, we are enjoined to wear it “with pride” – but as well as remembering with pride and gratitude, people may remember with anger, sadness or horror.

But just look at the way the Poppy Appeal has been marketed this year:

[Advert for the British Legion's Poppy Appeal showing Helen Mirren wearing a poppy. Text: "Our troops are the real stars."]

[Advert for the British Legion's Poppy Appeal showing Andy Murray wearing a poppy. Text: "Please remember those who don't return."]

[Image of a T-shirt sold by Poppyscotland. Text on T-shirt: "I (IMAGE OF A POPPY) OUR HEROES"]

Let’s suppose you do regard soldiers as heroes worthy of respect. How disrespectful, patronising and fake must this seem? Is that actually a tennis pun (I really, really hope not)?

And even if you think soldiers are heroes worthy of celebration, the purpose of Armistice Day is not celebration but remembrance. Even if you think soldiers deserve respect and admiration, you might balk at the sentimentalising rhetoric of “stars” and “heroes” (the British Legion have a “To our Heroes” messageboard). And what about the people who died unheroically or needlessly – do they not deserve to be remembered? What about people who wear a poppy not to take sides or glorify ongoing conflicts or celebrate heroic sacrifices, but simply to remember?

This kind of marketing may be effective in monetary terms (and it is appalling that care for veterans is dependent on the willingness of people to donate) but it is deeply crass and undignified. This sort of thing imposes on the poppy precisely the meaning that many people believe makes the poppy a problematic and imperfect symbol of remembrance in the first place – and in doing so it excludes the many other meanings and forms of remembrance that others are able to associate with the act of wearing a poppy despite these problems and imperfections.

For me, my attitude towards and understanding of my sexuality has always been intimately connected with my political attitudes. My family background is Conservative (with a big capital C), and being in the closet went hand in hand with accepting conservative politics. Conversely, when I later rejected expectations by coming out as gay this went hand in hand with rejecting those politics.

So far, so cliched. But rest assured, this isn’t the prelude to a mawkish tearjerking coming-out saga. What I’m interested in here is something I’ve gradually come to realise: namely, that although I rejected right-wing politics through identifying as left-wing, I had not rejected but merely inverted the terms in which this right-left divide was understood. ‘The left’ was a monolithic bloc of everything from the liberal centre-left onwards, and they simply went in my mind from being the baddies to being the goodies.

Uprooting this way of looking at things is an ongoing process (measure of progress: I’ve gone from reading Liberal Conspiracy, to being intensely annoyed by Liberal Conspiracy, to not reading Liberal Conspiracy at all). I’ve reached a point where I will usually be on the socialist side in arguments between liberals and socialists, but where it would still seem absurd to describe myself as a socialist: my instincts and default priorities remain liberal, and my personal position of relative comfort within society makes my relation to many political issues necessarily rather abstract. Perhaps the best formulation would be to say I’m ‘pro-socialist’ – or, as a friend put it recently, I’m a ‘radical social democrat’ (with all the contradiction that that implies!).

What connection does any of this have to my identity as gay? Well, the development of this identity and my understanding of it mirror these developments in my politics.

For instance: “coming out” could seen as simply another inversion – just as reading the Guardian went from being “bad” to “good”, so too did being gay. The straight-gay binary itself remained unquestioned, yet conceptualising things in this way is itself problematic: officially, it allows bisexuality to be inserted as a middle term and allows that people’s sexualities may change, but in practice these concessions are only tacked onto a tidy, rigid classificatory system that prescribes sexuality as much as describes it (I have known gay friends who worry about whether they’re “supposed” to have sexual fantasies about women). Alternative pictures portray sexuality as complicated and queer, without a neat normalised category of straightness by contrast with which gayness can be defined. But for all that I can intellectually recognise the problems of a heteronormative model of sexuality, I don’t identify as “queer” because it would be dishonest about the extent to which my own sexuality is fitted to that very model.

Of course, this is very different from my reluctance to describe myself as “socialist”: indeed, it’s as different as having a political opinion is from having a sexual orientation (there’s no question of being “right” when it comes to sexuality, for a start). The parallels are clearer where my gay identity and politics come into contact. From the moment I came out and my politics started to become more liberal, I focused on LGBT (well, mostly gay) political issues. Why? I can’t really remember. Firstly, I suppose, I felt that it was appropriate to do so since I was gay myself. Secondly, it was reassuringly straightforward by comparison with other areas of politics: whatever your views on other matters, you’d have to be crazy and evil to disagree that homophobia and inequality are unquestionably wrong and should be opposed.

But here we have the same problematic picture : the “goodies” are a monolithic bloc opposed to the baddies. Everyone who isn’t a Daily Mail columnist is seen as being part of the same good fight against homophobia, as if there weren’t a specifically liberal take on gay politics within the mix, or what I like to call the “Ikea gays” outlook.

What are the problems with this outlook? Firstly, it has a highly abstract conception of gayness – like a letter x that gets plugged into a general formula used to test that outcomes are identical no matter what the input – which serves an assimilationist agenda: making gays as much like straights as possible. Consequently and perversely, camp, promiscuous or other non-heteronormative behaviour  gets regarded as an unwelcome stereotype that prevents acceptance of the idea that gay people are just like the rest of us. (This abstract conception is also at the heart of  formulations such as “You wouldn’t say that about a black person”, leading to shallow conceptions of prejudice and Oppression Olympics).

Secondly, the distorted and distorting focus on homophobia. The simplified “goodies” vs “baddies” picture enables a seamless segue from disapproving of the overt homophobic conservative agenda of e.g. the Daily Mail, to acclaiming as a goodie anyone who takes the fairly minimal step of denouncing or opposing that agenda. This enables the “pinkwashing” of dubious companies or objectionable politics, presenting a lucrative opportunity for liberal LGB organisations and a cover-all excuse respectively. It serves these interests to inflate the attention given to the odious and lurid homophobia of the Daily Mail, or to import stories from the Republican heartlands of the USA as if they represented the extent and nature of homophobia elsewhere.

Thanks to the instructive examples of Stonewall and Johann Hari, my eyes have been increasingly opened to both these problems. But where does this leave my personal LGB politics? Consider two issues I’ve campaigned on extensively: marriage equality and lifting the ban on MSM blood donation. I’d like to think my motivation for pursuing them has at least not been crass liberal disdain for “the wrong kind of gay” (i.e. ones who aren’t safe to give blood and don’t want to marry because they want to sleep with lots of partners). But can I trust my own post facto justifications for continuing to pursue political goals that have been set within a liberal framework? It was put to me recently, for example, that it is at the very least hypocritical to campaign against an MSM blood donation ban while tacitly accepting lifetime bans on donations by former sex workers and people from Africa. And I’m no longer convinced that an argument for marriage equality can be made without at least some tacit support for marriage – if you think the insitution of marriage absolutely should not exist at all and should be abolished, it is senseless to support equal access to it (though if you fall short of actively and strongly opposing marriage, you should still be in favour of equal access).

But it’s wider than particular issues: what justification do I have for a specific, compartmentalised concern with “LGB issues” at all? Even if we overlook the problems of defining a particular set of LGB issues in the first place (reinforcing a straight-gay binary, defining LGB people as a special class of victims), why should I care particularly about them or have much to say about them? My personal experience of homophobia is limited to hearing anti-gay sentiments expressed at home and at school when I was younger; and although this was hurtful and made it hard to come to terms with my sexuality (though even this way of putting it presupposes that I had a fixed and predestined sexual identity), I do not believe I have ever been personally disadvantaged, hurt or even insulted as a result of my sexuality in my adult life. The perspective I can bring to bear on homophobia is in most respects little less detached than that of someone who has identified as straight all their life.

In other words: my feeling of certainty with regard to gay political issues is not based on a clear sense of what is homophobic based on personal experience: indeed, far from having any such clear sense, my instinctive reaction is to assume everything is fine and not make a fuss, and so I have to override my instincts anyway to object to something’s being homophobic. Rather, this feeling of certainty derives from a simplistic liberal picture I am now inclined to reject.

So, just as I don’t know exactly where I stand with my politics generally, I’m not entirely sure where I stand with regard to LGB issues and homophobia. I’m not sure I trust myself to engage with those issues from a perspective other than that of a crusading Ikea gay liberal; and doubtless, if try to second-guess myself, I’ll simply end up speaking from the other extreme of liberalism (represented by Matthew Parris)  which underplays the impact and prevalence of homophobia in the name of the myth of inexorable progress.

Obviously, all rather problematic for someone who blogs on LGBTIQ issues! I’m half-inclined to stop posting altogether while I mull things over; but equally, it’s only through writing out my views that I’ve forced myself to confront them. Ultimately, I suppose it is best not to be addressing issues, political or otherwise, from a position of presumed certainty. And I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what direction my politics (and this blog!) take in future.

Thanks to everyone who has read and contributed for bearing with me while I’ve been finding my feet. Things may be quieter here for a time while I get on with some things in the real world and try to get a better handle on what I want to write about here and why, but there should hopefully be plenty more to come in my second year!

Why? Well, here is the shortlist of award nominees.

Deservedly, most attention has been given to Julie Bindel, who has been nominated for outstanding contributions “in the field of equality, diversity and inclusion” despite her well-publicised transphobia and ridiculing of queers. Other recent journalism includes this piece on how the police are too soft on Muslims and this piece defending John Snow’s decision to eject a gay couple for kissing.

In the past year, both Bindel and fellow nominee Paul Burston have engaged in a crusade against “Muslim homophobia” in East London, without the support of Muslim LGBTIQ groups and without mentioning the recent attempts by the EDL to stir up racist hatred in the name of gay pride in the East End. Here, both of them appear in comments to applaud an article that  complains about how “other minorities” aren’t sufficiently “decisive” in supporting LGB rights and advocates withdrawing cooperation. Paul Burston was even quoted in the Daily Mail article “Tower Hamlets Taliban” – comments which were condemned by a wide range of activists. Peter Tatchell has also faced some criticism recently with regard to his comments about Islamists, though his comments and interventions have generally been less egregious than Bindel’s and Burston’s.

And that’s just the nominated individuals I’ve actually heard of. But aside from them, the list is a paean to megacorporations and banks: including RBS (investors in cluster bombs until very recently) and Vodafone (with £6bn in unpaid taxes). It’s diversity as practised by Stonewall, who (surprise, surprise) are also nominated, despite the fact that it’s been less than a year since their Chief Executive claimed LGB equality was too expensive.

This kind of “diversity” has become as meaningless as buzzwords like “progressive”, “aspiration”, “fairness”. These awards are just another example of a shallow, tick-box notion of “diversity” being used to celebrate and legitimise the rich and powerful, who can never have enough self-congratulation. It’s about shallow indifference to what people are like provided they are good workers and consumers. Real diversity is about active affirmation of the difference and variety among human beings, and it’s absurd to pretend that this is what blandly homogeneous corporate outfits are committed to – particularly when you’ve got the likes of L’Oreal or Abercrombie & Fitch promulgating oppressively narrow ideals of body and beauty, or the UK’s armed forces waging imperialist wars across the globe.

The full details of the picket are on the Facebook group here, taking place from 6.00 p.m. on Thursday 22nd September outside the Savoy Hotel in London.

Frankly, the whole thing is risible.

The consultation has already been announced twice. Civil partnerships are still not able to take place on religious premises, even though this now merely requires a ruling from ministers. There is no evidence of any political will to make any changes in the face of opposition from conservative lobby groups, only evidence of politicians cynically using the issue as an opportunity to demonstrate their pro-LGB credentials without actually firmly committing themselves to doing anything.

Furthermore, the consultation excludes in advance the possibility of opening up civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples and the possibility of religious same-sex marriages. This is the consultation we’re talking about here, never mind any actual legislation. What is there to consult about if you’re not actually going to ask about what form people think marriage equality should take or whether religious same-sex marriages should be permitted? These are precisely the two things that make the most difference. Nobody wants religious groups forced to host same-sex marriages against their will, but some religious groups do want to be able to host same-sex marriages (and those groups aren’t happy with the compromise of hosting civil partnerships on religious premises either – not that they have even that option yet). And if civil partnerships can only be between same-sex partners, a trans person in a civil partnership would still have to dissolve the partnership if they wanted to have a change in gender legally recognised.

Some people might regard civil partnerships as a specifically queer institution that should neither be abolished nor opened up to same-sex couples. Even if you can take this idea seriously, it ignores the existence of opposite-sex bisexual couples or genderqueer individuals who are legally recognised as being the binary-opposite sex to their partner. And in any case, what would really be queer is not a special kind of same-sex-only marriage-lite but legal and societal recognition of more diverse and flexible forms of partnership. We should be pushing for the latter alongside equal access to existing legal institutions – and although the anomalous institution of civil partnership should continue to exist in the interim, there’s no good reason it should be same-sex-only.

Of course, according to Stonewall (who now support same-sex marriage but not opposite-sex civil partnerships) opening up civil partnerships would cost £5 billion in pensions costs, which perhaps suggests what the government’s real priorities are. Meanwhile, the delays and restrictions to the same-sex marriage consultation (as well as to the implementation of civil partnerships on religious premises) are due to lobbying by Catholic and CoE traditionalists. This lobbying not only makes a mockery of having a consultation process, it fails to represent the views of most Catholics and Anglicans, who do not want other faiths to be blocked from hosting same-sex marriages if they so choose. Because the Church of England is established, some may be concerned that Anglican churches would be legally obliged to host same-sex marriages (though individual ministers would be able to opt not to act as registrars at such marriages) – but claiming exemptions appropriate to non-established religious groups while functioning as an arm of the state is most definitely a case of having one’s cake and eating it.

Marriage equality is a trivial legal change. The government could easily implement it if they chose, even if just as a cynical ploy to pinkwash the impact their other policies are having on LGBTIQ people and on society more widely, or their lack of action on more important matters (such as the treatment of LGBTIQ asylum seekers). But they’re not even demonstrating that much commitment. Instead there’s just more posturing, delaying and vague promises of inadequate, piecemeal legislation.