In my latest book, ‘The Madness of Crowds’ (copies of which can be found in all remaining [not remainder] bookstores, etc) I mentioned in passing that I sometimes wondered how it feels to be a heterosexual reading the news these days.
That feeling wafted past me again over the weekend as I went to the front page of the BBC News website and came across a video titled ‘General Election 2019: What to look out for on LGBT issues’.
The video is presented with positively boastful impartiality by a BBC journalist called Tobias Chapple who wears a charming form of blue nail polish. The camera often lingers on this, as though to prove to us that what we are watching is a truly queer production.
Anyhow – the aim of the video is meant to be to educate us on what to look out for in this central issue of the 2019 general election. So what are we meant to be looking out for?
Readers will be unsurprised to learn that one of them is the question of the parties’ approach to ‘hate crimes.’ You mean that some of the parties are for them and others against them? Are the Conservative party against hate crimes but the Liberal Democrats keen to encourage them? We are presented with the photo of a lesbian couple attacked on a London bus earlier this year as though this is an actual election issue.
Not to say that Tobias doesn’t try his best to make it so. Of course we are told that hate crimes have gone up, though to give Tobias credit we are also told (in the interests of impartiality) that some people see this as being caused by an increase in reporting.
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