Taki: Stephen Fry and the gay lobby should cool it over the Winter Olympics

I’ve met Stephen Fry twice in my life, both times long ago. The first time at a dinner given by the then editor of The Spectator,

Dominic Lawson, in London, and the second time in a restaurant in New York with the writers Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis. The first time I was completely out of it, the second he was, hence we didn’t exactly connect. Fry has been in the news lately for demanding a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. His beef is Russian anti-gay legislation. Now there’s a hell of a lot of things that are wrong with Russia — first and foremost all the criminal-oligarchs are abroad instead of in jail — but anti-gay legislation is on the bottom of the pile. Let’s start with the hypocrisy of the bleating. When Qatar was awarded the 2022 Football World Cup, I didn’t hear Stephen Fry or the gay lobbies in Britain and America make a sound. Perhaps I was hard of hearing that particular day, but I remember thinking how money will keep them quiet every time. Homosexuality is legal in Russia but illegal in the sandy hellhole that is the property of the Thani family. Ditto in Dubai. How come gay activists don’t show up at, say, Ascot in June and throw yoghurt at the ruling family, which parades itself around the grounds in full view of the Queen, with upper-class Englishmen bowing and scraping in its wake? The reason they don’t is that the Dubai ruling family has lotsa scratch, and Qatar’s owners even more. Putin and Russia haven’t got that kind of moolah because nice guys like Abramovich have removed it abroad. Hypocrisy may not be as bad as murder, but it’s pretty lousy in my book. And selective hypocrisy is even worse.