Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

In praise of bisexuality

I’ve never seen a National Treasure whose head I didn’t have a strong urge to shove down the nearest toilet. So when I read that Christopher Biggins had entered the latest Celebrity Big Brother house for a rumoured £150,000 – far, far less than what I was offered, to put it mildly – I fair hugged myself with glee at how cheap they’d got him. I had every reason to dislike him already; many years ago, when I was showing off about what I’d be like if I was a gay man – ‘Rupert Everett, probably, or Oscar Wilde, or Arthur Rimbaud’ – my husband fixed me with a cold glare (for he dislikes bragging, which often makes me wonder why he married me) and said ‘No – you’d be like Christopher Biggins.’ I never really forgave the rotter for that.

Pretty soon Biggins had told a ‘joke’ about the Jews which was so vile that it left a Jewish housemate in tears. So imagine my delight when the foul fool was sent packing – not just for this, but for claiming that bisexual people were responsible for the spread of Aids. His exact words were ‘Gays had been really badly treated for so long. Then came a period where they were respected. But suddenly, a killer disease then came along which was attributed to homosexuals – but it was actually a bisexual disease. What the government didn’t realise is that there were bisexuals out there who were having sex with those people.’ (Dirty foreigners, one presumes.) ‘They then brought it back to their families over here and in America. That’s how it became a worldwide disease.’ Earlier, he’d treated us to a choice slice of slime-speak by decreeing (in a house which contains three beautiful bisexual women – Marnie Simpson, Aubrey O’Day and Samantha Fox – the chivalrous old charmer) ‘The worst type though is the bisexuals.

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