Simon Edge Profile picture
May 7 21 tweets 7 min read
🧵For some years I was a senior contributing editor at Attitude magazine. That was a purely honorary title but I was delighted to have my name on the masthead and to be publicly associated with what was widely regarded as the world's best gay magazine.
I wrote for the first issue in 1994. It was launched by Richard Desmond, who later owned the Daily Express, and the founding editor was straight, but the first editorial was clear: 'We created Attitude because we believe the reading interests of gay men aren't being fully served'
Attitude didn't overtly brand itself 'gay' in the way Gay News, Capital Gay and Gay Times had done, but the word appeared a great deal throughout the mag. Fast-forward to 2013 and here are a couple of random pages from the July edition. I've ringed in red every instance of 'gay'.
I would ring every instance of 'LGB', 'LGBT' and 'trans' in different colours – but there aren't any. None of those terms appear on those two pages. I've skimmed the whole 162-page issue and I can only find three instances of 'LGBT', all in the same quote from an academic.
This interests me, not just as a rejoinder to those naive young people (and deceitful older ones) who insist the term 'LGBT' has been with us for as long as there has been a 'community'.
What intrigues me is the role of the press back then compared with 'LGBTQ+' journalists now. In 2013, the term 'LGBT' was already well established in the voluntary sector, but a magazine aimed mainly at gay men wasn't prepared to change its language. It knew its market.
Nowadays, by contrast, Attitude magazine is in the forefront of the aggressive forced teaming of the LGB community with the trans movement. Here's an emotional Russell T Davies spewing that message on an Attitude stage...
Here's the current owner of the magazine attacking Allison Bailey, a lesbian punished by Stonewall and her own chambers for helping set up an LGB organisation and for defending the right of lesbians not to sleep with people with penises...
And here's the magazine a couple of years ago, proudly putting the entire alphabet of pretend oppressions on its cover, including a self-described aromantic-asexual activist. Her inclusion was trumpeted as a massive first. The ideological shift is clear.
That's a 180-degree turaround on the part of a profession that once lagged deliberately behind the voluntary sector because it knew its gay readers wanted gay stuff, yet is now in the forefront of aggressive alphabet brainwashing of a new generation.
One thing's for certain: no journalist of my generation saw it coming. How do I know? Well, you remember that edition from July 2013, the one where I ringed all the instances of 'gay' in a couple of random pages? It was actually called 'The Future Issue'
Here's the introduction to that issue, by the multi-award-winning editor at that time. He flags up the main future issues the edition covers: developments in HIV treatments (I wrote that piece), worries about chemsex, the role of technology and the future direction of gay rights
There isn't a single word in that editorial or in the mag as whole about the need to link up with trans movement, to brand ourselves queer, to make alliances with intersex and asexual people – and of course nothing at all about giving puberty blockers to children.
And the words 'conversion therapy' don't appear anywhere either. This awful thing that apparently so desperately needs banning didn't occur to anyone as a problem less than nine years ago.
I wrote the main political item in that edition. It was headlined 'Lesbians Rule', a nod at a recent remark by veteran homophobe Lord Tebbit, who had warned we could up with a lesbian monarch if gay rights were allowed to go too far. As you can see, they had fun at the photoshoot
In my survey of the political landscape, I certainly didn't anticipate the direction things would go. You could say that was a sign of my own bias. But nor did my interviewees: the academic who used the term 'LGBT' and the then director of Stonewall.
And nobody at the magazine said to me: 'You've missed out the T, you bigot. This is an outrage! Don't you realise there's #NoLGBWithoutTheT? And why haven't you mentioned the poor suffering asexuals?'
What's the conclusion? In part, that the future never turns out how you expect and new movements can arrive out of nowhere. 'Woke' wasn't a generally known term back then either, and #MeToo was not yet a thing.
But it's also this: beware of forced teamers with forked tongues who tell you the LGB and the T have always been joined, that gay rights wouldn't have happened without transactivists, that we've always been united . It's a big fat lie, and the proof is in the archives.
Oh, and by the way: did you notice how Attitude magazine brands itself in its Future Issue? Scroll in close to the cover and you can see:
That was another snark at Lord Tebbit, who had used the term in the course of his moan, and the magazine wanted to show him two fingers. Who'd have thought that, less than a decade on, those of us who proudly call use the same term would be the pariahs of the community? 🧵.

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More from @simonjedge

Apr 26
🧵 Yesterday Linda Riley, who owns what was once the UK's premier lesbian mag (now a platform for people who think men can be lesbians) and claims to have invented #LesbianVisibilityWeek, launched an attack on @jk_rowling for daring to praise black lesbian activist Allison Bailey
Linda's tweet has so far received 28k likes – 28k people (many of them men with beards or people with anime avatars who weren't born when that pic of Allison was taken) who think it's 'hateful' to celebrate a veteran campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in #lesbianvisibilityweek
Also yesterday, Owen Jones tweeted that 'transphobes' – by which he means people who think sex is real, gender ideology is harmful and lesbians and gays have the right to organise separately from the trans movement – should be banned from 'every lgbtq bar'
Read 15 tweets
Apr 25
The media ought to report on the civil war in the lesbian and gay community. The woman who started #lesbianvisibilityweek says it's hateful to mention a particular lesbian activist who dared challenge Stonewall. @BluskyeAllison is the wrong kind of lesbian and must stay invisible
Whichever side you support in a conflict that has pitted lifelong friends against each other, it's newsworthy. Unfortunately it isn't being reported by embedded 'LGBTQ+' correspondents because they're tied to one side and have a vested interest in pretending the war doesn't exist
It would upset the business model (aka grift) of the bloated LGBTQ+ charity sector if they were forced to acknowledge that they don't, in fact, speak for a whole community, therefore they pretend this conflict doesn't exist and savagely suppress any dissent
Read 4 tweets
Apr 4
Our bloated LGBTQ+ organisations are weirdly relaxed about the established church refusing to marry same-sex couples and sacking gay & lesbian clergy. The Church of England is institutionally homophobic. The zeal with which these clerics now embrace transing is positively Iranian
Lesbians & gay men are now totally equal before the law – apart from the laws relating to the Church of England. The established church is there for everyone. Yet I couldn't marry my (ex-priest) husband in one. Instead of challenging this, Stonewall bleats about 'asexual' rights.
It has long been clear that the Church of England is more comfortable with trans people than homosexuals. And the LGBTQ+ establishment is more than happy to embrace institutional homophobia if it's a way of advancing the sacred trans agenda.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 12
A little story about Stonewall in the pre-lunacy years, told to me at the time by a friend who worked there. I've been thinking about it in the past few days and I think it's illuminating.
It must have been around 2014, when the Cameron/Clegg government had surprised everyone by legalising same-sex marriage. This, remember, was something Tony Blair insisted would never happen: he repeatedly said civil partnerships were a good thing but marriage was a step too far.
Stonewall themselves had got into a tangle on the issue. Since there was almost no practical difference between civil partnership and marriage, they badly underestimated the appetite for marriage proper. An aggressive campaign by Pink News made them look remote and out of touch.
Read 22 tweets
Jan 29
For those of us who were in London in July 2005, the events of that month are unforgettable. But that was 17 years ago, and younger people may be completely unaware of them. In light of this week's political events, that awful time is worth revisiting.
It started on a high, on 6 July, when London was awarded the right to stage the 2012 Olympics. It was a surprise victory – Paris had been the clear favourite – and caused massive excitement. Hundreds celebrated in Trafalgar Square that night. But the joy didn't last.
The next morning, terrorists set off rush-hour bombs on three tube trains and a bus. 52 people died, all UK residents, of 18 nationalities. More than 700 were injured. It was the UK's worst terrorist attack since Lockerbie in 1988 and the country's first Islamist suicide attack.
Read 24 tweets
Dec 27, 2021
I've read some exaggerations re law on homosexuality in the Gulf state of Qatar so I thought I'd check for myself. I consulted an expert authority, which classifies Qatar as a Zone 3 country (out of 3), where sexual acts between people of the same sex are illegal. More details 👇
Sexual acts between people of the same sex are illegal
according to the Articles 296 (3) and 285 of Qatar's Penal Code. Punishments include imprisonment for between one and five years.
Qatar also runs Sharia courts, where technically it is possible that Muslim men could face the death penalty for same-sex sexual activity, although there is no record of this actually happening. That means Qatar isn't Saudi Arabia or Iran. But it's not exactly gay-friendly.
Read 13 tweets

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