In which I clamber on my high horse again...

[filthgoblin]

Recently, pop star Stephen Gately died on holiday with his partner in Mallorca. The post-mortem found the cause of death was pulmonary oedema, and the coroner ruled he died of natural causes. He was 33 years of age.

If you don't know who Stephen Gately was and are still reading he was a member of Boyzone, a 1990's Irish boyband who were popular around the same time as The Spice Girls and Take That. In 1999, after hearing that someone was due to sell a story to the tabloid press about his sexuality, Gately decided to pre-empt the press and come out, albeit reluctantly. He didn't think it was anyone else's business who he chose to sleep with, and I am inclined to agree. Boyzone went their separate ways and though some members went on to have solo success, Gately mainly stayed out of the spotlight. He entered into a civil partnership with his long-term boyfriend in 2006 and kept himself to himself.

Although the news of his death at such a young age was pretty shocking, the press reaction has for the most part pretty measured. The ghoulish glee at exposing a celebrity's tawdry private life as is often the case in celebrity deaths such as those of Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger was predominantly absent from the coverage, not least because it seemed there was nothing over which to gloat.

That was, until today.

The British newspaper The Daily Mail is a dispicable rag of hate-filled half-truths at the best of times, but today they surpassed themselves. Somehow one of their journalists, one Jan Moir, has managed to take the sad death of this young man in relatively rare but not unheard-of circumstances and turn it into something sordid. If you wish to read the unexpurgated version of her strange musings and illogical conclusions, you can see the full article here. However, here are a few gems from the content of her article.

She starts by casting completely unfounded aspersions on Gately's cause of death.

All the official reports point to a natural death, with no suspicious circumstances. The Gately family are - perhaps understandably - keen to register their boy's demise on the national consciousness as nothing more than a tragic accident.

How strange that the family should want to accept the ruling of the coroner. Not least because there WERE no suspicious circumstances and it was a very sad and untimely death. Although it was no accident. He died in his sleep. But wait, Ms Moir has something to say about that too

The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again.

Um, maybe not frequently, but yes they do. Later on in her article, she goes on to say that "his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family". That sounds very reasonable. The usual causes of acute pulmonary oedema are of cardiac origin. There is a whole set of undiagnosed cardiac conditions that cause sudden and unexpected death in otherwise healthy adults called, perhaps somewhat unimaginatively, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. 90% of cases of SADS are young men under the age of 35, for whom the first sign that they have an undetected electrophysiological problem with their heart is death. Extreme tachycardia [an abnormally fast heart rhythm of up to 300 beats per minute] would only take a couple of minutes to kill someone and the only sign it leaves once the person is dead is an excess of fluid on the lungs. It doesn't take a medical expert to know that. Whilst I may be slightly better informed than some, that information on SADS and pulmonary oedema was gathered in five minutes using just two Google search terms. However, this does not stop Ms Moir from speculating further.

Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered.

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. The coroner said, categorically, that there were "no signs of suspicious circumstances" and Gately did not "cause his own death" [source]. And pulmonary oedema absolutely is a natural cause of death. He was not suffocated. He did not choke on his own vomit. He died in his sleep. But wait, maybe there was another cause that we're not taking into account. Hark, what's that I hear? There's a moral reason why he might have died? Please, enlighten me.

I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.

After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.

Oh, but I beg to differ. That is an entirely disrespectful thing to suggest in the absence of any evidence whatsoever that there was anything sleazy afoot. In 2004, Mr G and I went with after8mink and another friend to Amsterdam and on the way home from a club in the wee small hours we bumped into a couple of young, lost British boys who couldn't find their hostel. We tried to help them locate it but they couldn't remember what it was called or where it was and were beyond help. So we invited them back to our appartment where we chatted and drank and smoked with them until the sun came up and they left to find their friends. And I can categorically say that we had no intention of having sex with them, nor did we.

But of course in the case of Stephen Gately and his partner we're talking about gay men. That means they all wanted to fuck each other senseless. Because that's what gay men do. How foolish of me. Now you put it like that, it's clear he died of teh ghey rather than any one of the couple of dozen perfectly explicable medical reasons for a young man to die suddenly with fluid on the lungs.

But there is worse to come. Not only does having the gay make you a). necessarily promiscuous, b). likely to die unexpectedly from whatever it is that gay men do to each other behind closed doors *shudder* [or in Moir's own words "What happened before they parted is known only to the two men still alive. What happened afterwards is anyone's guess"], any same-sex civil partnership is GUARANTEED TO END IN DOOM. As you can see from the evidence eloquently presented here:

Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

Okay. Where to begin? Just to set the record straight, I don't think that anyone was suggesting that civil partnerships would be any more likely to offer a "happy ever after" than opposite sex marriage. But leaving that aside, let's take apart the rest of that statement. Not everyone is like George Michael, she says. And what is George Michael like, exactly? He's single. He has admitted to a liking for sex in public places. He's taken a few drugs in his time. Oh, and he's gay. I could reel off any number of male, heterosexual celebrities who have a known predeliction for drugs and risky sex, but they aren't cited as the big black cloud cast over the beautiful moral archway that is the institution of marriage. Why should individuals be used to tar civil partnership with accusations of misery and sleaze?

So far the assertion that civil partnerships by their very nature will end in misery is based on the death of Gately - by unfortunate natural causes no matter what salacious alternative Ms Moir is trying to imply - and Kevin McGee, who sadly committed suicide following a long battle with addiction and a good year and a half after his relationship with Matt Lucas had broken down. Their gayness did not bring about the dissolution of their civil partnership or cause their upset. I refuse to call their deaths tragic, because to do so implies in the Shakespearean sense that they were in some way fatally flawed in character and if you take Jan Moir's interpretation, that tragic flaw was their sexuality.

She finishes her miserable excuse for badly concealed bigotry she calls 'journalism' by saying that "once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see". Given what I said at the start about what's known of Stephen Gately's apparently quiet and private life, I don't even have words to come back to that.

Comments

[perdiccas.livejournal.com]

This makes me so sad and angry. Usually celeb deaths don't affect me much but Boyzone was the first band I was ever into as a young lass and his untimely death hit me hard.

This article is so shameful. I'm sorry, I don't have anything more intelligent to add to your commentary than a hearty 'hear, hear'.

[filthgoblin.livejournal.com]

I can understand that. I wasn't a particularly big Boyzone fan, but his death did kinda hit me like a punch in the gut. Partly because it was so unexpected, and I think partly because he was only a year older than me.

Moir's article was just the height of unpleasantness, and as a result I've just finished my point-by-point complaint to the Press Complaints Commission referring to their code of practice. Her rebuttal of criticism of her article (http://bit.ly/1YZb6b) made me seethe a little bit more. She just. Doesn't. Get it. Which, for a so-called professional journalist, is a little disquieting.

[sweetsyren.livejournal.com]

Fucking rag. God damn I hate that paper.

[filthgoblin.livejournal.com]

I've had my teeth gritted for most of the afternoon over this. I know it's disproportionate to get my knickers in so much of a knot over an article, but it's made me seethe.

[licklepickle.livejournal.com]

Confused and appauled. I just dont understand how the Daily Hail didn't see this outrage coming....i've read some nasty shit on their website in my time but this really takes the biscuit.
Probably according to Jan M it is a soggy biscuit.

[filthgoblin.livejournal.com]

Me neither. I tweeted earlier with a link to her rebuttal of criticism of her article in the Guardian and she just keeps making it worse. Apparently the internet is ganging up on her. ORLY? Boo fucking hoo, Jan. That's what tends to happen when you get paid for writing festering nobseepage innuendously suggesting that a celebrity died of teh ghey.

Check out Charlie Brooker's article published on the Guardian website (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-jan-moir) with his views.