Britons Reject Ballyhoo Over Gay Officials

“TELL US THE TRUTH TONY, Are we being run by a gay mafia?” cried a front-page headline in the Sun tabloid after a second member of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet announced that he is gay and two others were “outed” in the media.

The response Tuesday came not from Blair but from the British public: Who cares?

Despite the efforts of some British media to make political hay of gays in government, an opinion poll published in the Guardian newspaper showed that a majority of Britons think that homosexuality is morally acceptable and not an impediment to holding high public office.

“Following the lesson of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, we may be seeing that the public is more tolerant than the press thinks it is,” said Ralph Legrine of the Center for Mass Communication Research in Leicester. “They are less concerned about private details than the media are. . . . There is a feeling that if people don’t want to announce their sexuality in public, no one should point a finger.”

Columnist David Aaronovitch concurred in the Independent newspaper. Noting that Republican efforts to ax President Clinton with the sex scandal involving former intern Monica S. Lewinsky had claimed House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s scalp and not the president’s, he wrote that British newspapers “have not quite caught up with last week’s news from America.”

Over the weekend, Agriculture Minister Nick Brown was forced to announce that he is gay when a former lover tried to sell his story to the Sun’s sister paper, News of the World. Brown made the disclosure with the bitter aside “I had rather hoped I could have a private life like other people.”

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott rushed to Brown’s side, saying that the British newspapers had become “judge, jury and executioner in this matter. It’s totally unacceptable.”

Brown’s announcement came on the heels of the resignation of Welsh Secretary Ron Davies after he was robbed in a park known for gay cruising. Davies, who is married, initially denied newspaper allegations that he is gay and refused to explain why he had resigned over being the victim of a crime.

The Guardian later reported that Davies had agreed to meet a man in the park who was threatening to blackmail him over alleged sexual advances. Davies then gave an emotional news conference in which he said, “We are what we are. We are all different,” but said that his sexual orientation was his own business.

Subsequently, Matthew Parris, a gay journalist for the Times of London and former Conservative member of Parliament, declared on the BBC that there are two homosexual members of Blair’s Cabinet--Culture Secretary Chris Smith, who is openly gay, and Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson, who Parris said “is certainly gay.”

Mandelson did not respond, but BBC honchos did, issuing an edict that any reference to Mandelson’s sexuality was off limits. This prompted a revolt among BBC editors and reporters, who charged that the edict was censorship.

Gay rights activists condemned the involuntary “outing” of politicians. Stonewall, a British gay and lesbian lobby, attacked News of the World for forcing Brown to declare his sexual orientation. “Coming out is a personal decision and should happen at the time of their own choosing,” the group said.

But some Times readers disagreed in Tuesday’s letters to the editor, stating that the public has a right to know which representatives are gay, particularly when Parliament is considering such issues as whether to lower the age of consent for gay sex.