Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Diary – 1 November 2018

Upon discovering that Sinéad O’Connor has converted to Islam, I was about as shocked as a Yuletide shopper hearing the opening bars of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ while picking up last-minute stocking-fillers. It had to happen, didn’t it? Douglas Murray attributes home-grown Islamic conversion to the retreat of the secular West from spiritual life — the Search For Meaning — but I don’t give the clowns that much credit. A vast amount of male Islamic conversion takes place in prison — suddenly thugs have the blessing of a higher power to torture, rape and kill — and with women I think it’s often a combination of grieving for fading physical attractiveness and attention-seeking: ‘Look at me in my lovely special modest costume, you sluts!’ What I find particularly offensive are those perfectly sane women who voluntarily hijab-up — the Swedish politicians visiting Iran, the American feminists on the Women’s March — while all across the Muslim world heartbreakingly brave women are paying with their liberty and lives in order to break free of the shroud of submission. What sort of woman identifies with a religion which supports the oppression, torture and murder of women who dare to want freedom? The sort of woman who writes love letters to serial killers on Death Row, I reckon. Will Sinéad get around to that one next?

I’m keen to see the new film about Queen. Freddie Mercury wasn’t a normal old girl-shy gayer but rather a swashbuckling sexual omnivore. He once remarked to a teenage Carrie Fisher as they lay in bed together after sex and she said she’d presumed he was 100 per cent gay that ‘A bloke like me needs extra.’ Bisexuality has got a bad rap in recent years, chucked in with look-at-me sexual preciousness such as polyamory and pansexualism, but in its raw form there is something attractively rough and ready about it:‘ I fancy that — let’s be ’aving it!’ As Freddie said: ‘Men, women, cats — you name it, I’ll go to bed with it.’

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