Paul Thomas: Playing it straight in a world of empty closets

Martin Amis' short story Straight Fiction postulates a gay-dominated world with a despised, marginalised but increasingly assertive straight minority.

"You saw it all the time these days (downtown anyway), straights kissing in public, on the lips and everything. Cleve was only 38 but in his lifetime people used to go to [expletive] jail for doing that."

Amis' satire has a host of targets, including homophobia, the militancy of some gay activists, and the obsession with nailing down the sexual orientation of public figures, be they politicians, movie stars or long-dead writers.

At times it seems homosexuality has gone from being beyond the pale to ho-hum in the blink of an eye. This week a lesbian couple who pioneered same-sex marriage in Massachusetts announced they were splitting up. Far from being defensive, they argued that their example showed gay marriage is following convention right down to being a 50-50 proposition.

But there are occasional reminders that homosexuality hasn't entirely emerged from the shadows, and the straight community hasn't entirely set aside its suspicions.

Last week that incorrigible rag the News of the World devoted most of its front page to a photo of the pop singer George Michael emerging flushed and wild-eyed from Hampstead Heath after a late-night dalliance with a 58-year-old male van driver, who was described as "pot-bellied" and "seedy" just in case we hadn't got the message that this was a rough trade encounter.

The ostensible justification for this humiliation was that Michael, who came out of the closet after a not dissimilar incident in Los Angeles some years ago, is in a long-term relationship with someone other than the pot-bellied van driver.

In fact the aim of the exercise was to illuminate - literally and figuratively - an underground culture of furtive sex in public places with complete strangers that one might have presumed was obsolete now that homosexuality has entered the mainstream.

"This is my culture," shouted Michael, thereby inviting further ambushes.

Here at home the distinguished journalist and social commentator Rosemary McLeod has made gayness a talking point again by drawing attention to what she called the elephant in the living room: a shadowy gay network within the Labour Party.

Having warned that this subject can't be openly discussed because to do so is to risk being accused of homophobia, McLeod ventured where less robust souls fear to tread.

The crux of her complaint is that Labour is abandoning its working-class, family oriented roots to push a gay agenda, and is doing so covertly to the extent that some of those involved have not been open about their sexuality.

It might come as a surprise to many Labourites to learn that their party still has working-class roots. They probably assumed Labour ditched its class affiliation when it converted to free market economics in the 1980s.

Like social democrat parties the world over (hardly any of which still bother pretending that they are, in any meaningful sense of the word, socialist) the Labour Party has always been a coalition of the working class - in the form of the trade union movement - and urban middle-class liberals as preoccupied with social reform and equal rights as bread-and-butter standard of living issues.

During my adult lifetime policy settings have seemed to favour, at various times, farmers, the business community, entrepreneurs, the trade unions, women, families, solo mothers, Maori, Pakeha, immigrants, the forces of law and order, the criminally inclined ... you name it.

There have also been periods when each of the above felt out in the cold. That's the swings and roundabouts of multi-party electoral politics.

And it could be argued that after almost a century of exclusionary heterosexual predominance - homosexuality didn't become legal until 1986 - it's both inevitable and overdue that gays should have a seat or two at the top table.

McLeod quoted emails from readers to demonstrate that she's not the only one exercised by the gay bee in Labour's bonnet. Being slightly cynical about public feedback, I tend to think that if you adopt a contentious position on virtually any subject under the sun, supporters of that point of view will come out of the woodwork.

For instance, if I were to advocate shooting penguins on sight, I'd probably get a pat on the back from someone in Eastbourne who missed the start of Desperate Housewives because commuter traffic was brought to a halt while a column of penguins crossed the road at a leisurely waddle.

One of her readers complained that "gays hit on me all the time at my workplace". Unless his workplace is Parliament House, I'm not sure what this has to do with the issue at hand, but it does draw attention to what is likely to become an increasingly common occurrence.

A friend of mine in Sydney, a fairly obvious heterosexual one would have thought, reports that twice recently he has been suddenly and ardently kissed on the lips by guys who have presumably interpreted his willingness to engage in conversation as a green light.

His take on it? Now he knows what women have had to put up with for all these years.