Posterous theme by Cory Watilo as adapted by Jamie Graham

Pride and prejudice

written on Sunday 3 July 2011 and filed under [london] [pride] [what i did on my holidays]

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Ah, the joys of modern technology. I'm actually blogging on an iPhone from the tiny Virgin-branded deep vein thrombosis generator that is a Pendolino while the story in question is still warm (if not actually hot).

I'm on my way back from Pride London, where me, the ball-and-chain and my mum had marched, shouted, chanted and sworn across three miles of busy streets cleared for us and a quarter of a million people of similar persuasions.

I've marched in Pride almost every year for ten years and have found that it had got less and less political and more and more partying over that time. That's not a bad thing per se, as it reflects the advances in liberation and acceptance we've had over that time. But I'm a very political animal and I like a good demo. Anything else is just a walk with strangers and I always feel I should've pressured coworkers and friends to sponsor me first. However, this year politics seems to have leapt back onto the gay agenda - yay! - and the march was more political than I've ever seen it. Thanks, 'Dave' and Nick, for putting the lead back into the gay pencil after years of queers marching in a kind of guilty silence with only Kylie booming out to cover it.

This year, the brothers and sisters and everything in-between were angry. Nobody outside of the Tory and Liberal right are happy about the cuts. Few in our newly cosmopolitan country are happy with the veiled threats to our gay liberty to be heard from the Tories. Fewer still - perhaps people with psychological problems - are happy to hear words of almost-prejudice, hints of curtails of freedom, coming from supposed Liberals. But the crowd had heard them and were annoyed. The painful cuts in services to the worst off, coupled with tax rises on the poorest only, had made them - us - angry. It was a good anger, with a good twisted gay humour behind it. As we marched down Oxford Street, surround by shops owned and run by men who don't pay tax and don't pay their staff a living wage, the chants and cat-calls were positively 1970s. I loved it. The march went past groups of spectators with their expensive beers and designer clothes - gay and straight - and broke out into a chant, led in our part by the officials from the National Union of Teachers, of "We're here, we're queer, we can't afford the beer!" which was fun and true but strange.

We weren't allowed to march past Downing Street this year, so the delicate little flowers who 'work' for 'us' there didn't have to hear our complaints. We were, however, required to walk past a group of narrow-minded wife-beating kiddy-fiddlers - I think they think they're Christians - who were shouting for us to be stoned and burned and other words of wise, kind forgiveness that their messiah asked them to say to their neighbours. Usually the marchers at Pride ignore them, or take the opportunity to snog their partners at that point, or to do the Stonewall Riot showgirl kicking thing that would cripple me. Not this time. From the top of Piccadilly Circus we could see the small band of weirdos. Someone asked "who's that?". A dull rumble of replies - Christians, evangelicals, extremists - one word cut through. Bigots. My mum was shocked, but not surprised, that anyone could care enough about what strangers did in bed to come out and shout abuse at them. It'd be like her making a special trip to stop people coming out of Homebase and insulting them for buying beige wallpaper.

The mood of the crowd changed as each party rounded the corner and saw the bigots. In front of us, they started the brilliantly satirical chant "Recruit! Recruit! One in ten is not enough!", which didn't scan but was very fun to shout. The crowd all did something as they drew level with the bigots, but when we did, my mum took things a step further. My mum is brilliant. I love her to bits and you would too. She's the life and soul of any party, but also a good shoulder to cry on. She'll make a cup of tea before you realise yourself you want one. She's undaunted by vomit, which was very useful in my teenage drinking years. And she's almost always smiling even as life hurls crap at her. With that word picture in mind, let us return to the march.

We drew level with the bigots and the march, as marches randomly do, briefly stopped for reasons we couldn't see (usually something to do with a float half a mile ahead). The crowd started to boo the bigots. Then my mum raised her hand in the air and, with grace and aplomb, stuck two fingers up at Chief Bigot (possibly Reverend Bigot, his nametag wasn't visible) and yelled "fuck you!".

There was a moment of silence, then all the boys and girls around us, me included, all raised our hands in the air, started giving them the finger, and all bellowed "fuck you!" at them too. It was like a spontaneous new gay chant for ill-bred homos everywhere. And the true joy was to come: Chief Bigot and his thieving child-murdering environment polluting assistant bigots looked shocked. Yes, shocked. It was the best thing that ever happened ever: my mum incited a crowd to shock a bigot. She should be given an award. Or at least consider sewing it into the pattern of her next piece of embroidery.

With that, the march petered out - there's never a good way to end a march, but the decision to end it 5 minutes walk away from the accompanying festival is quixotic - and we had to decide whether to go to Trafalgar Square with everyone else or walk over the bridge to the South Bank where the Terrace Bar sold Pimm's in pitchers.

Over our glass of Pimm's - well, what would you do? - we talked about how much fun we'd had and our plans for a theatre trip that night. We were exhausted but very happy and, yes, proud.

Sociopathy Today

written on Wednesday 29 June 2011 and filed under [sociopathy] [teh internets]

Ah, the internet. I really don't know what I did before the internet. I probably watched a lot of television (total broadcast television watched in the last 7 days: 0) or ran along the street pushing a hoop with a stick or something. I love the internet. Facts at my fingertips. Twitter. My t-shirt shop [ahem]. This blog. Unlimited porn. I love the internet.

Those who know me probably know that I'm not a huge fan of human beings. I've met many of them and they appear to exist to annoy me. Still, I get though most days without killing any of the fuckers, so it's not like I can't cope with them. The problem is, the human race has joined me on the internet. Again, I can cope, but I really wish I knew why it drew out in particular the sociopaths, the stalkers and the generally maddest in such numbers and so vocally.

The other day I posted a confessional of sorts about a dead friend of mine. Within a short space of time - too short, I'd've thought, for Google to have found it, someone popped up with a comment that suggested I was being disingenuous - my "gay lover" had clearly left me boat loads of money, so what was I complaining about. Now, tell me: if you're in the pub and a friend, or a friend of a friend, or the person behind you at the bar or whoever was relating a story about the suicide of their partner, would you be inclined in any way to turn to them at the end and sneer "wah wah wah" and wonder aloud why they were complaining since, you had decided, they'd made money out of the entire business? And even if you were tempted, would you ever, for any reason, actually do it?

I signed up for something called Foursquare, mainly because I had a new iPhone and stuff that looked playable-with and was free seemed worth downloading. The idea of Foursquare is, every time you go somewhere, you "check in", which notifies your Twitter and Facebook followers where you are. Yeah, bit strange, but still. If you check in most often, you get made "Mayor" of the location. You also can win "badges" for going to unusual places and can get not-very-appealing discounts by becoming mayor of certain overpriced shops and drinking establishments. Nevertheless, it's an amusing enough diversion. After a few months of using it I was mayor of four places, none of them very exciting, as I pointed out in a screenshot of the application I posted on Twitter. Now here's the thing: shortly afterwards, one of my mayorships was lost to someone else. Ah well, that's how the game works. Then, another of them was lost to the same person a few days later. Looking them up online, I couldn't see how they were visiting my places quite so much - they were far away according to their Twitter feed - but it's how the game is played. Then I got displaced as mayor from the hotel I stay in London by the same person... while their Twitter feed had them at home. They were telling the app that they were in locations they were not, once a day, everyday, until they displaced me. And they were running down the list I'd posted earlier. So they weren't playing the game, or visting places, or anything else: a complete stranger had stumbled across my list and thought, "I know, I'll spend 5 to 10 minutes a day, everyday, from now until possibly six or seven weeks time, checking into these places and stripping this guy of his mayorships. Ha ha ha!" or the like. Why? Can you see any way at all that you would gain pleasure from doing that to a totally ordinary, total stranger? I decided that I wasn't going to play, so deleted my account. I assume he wanted that (again: why?) or, when he saw I had deleted it, thought "oooh, get her, touchy!" or the like.

When I first started out on the internet at the beginning of September, there was very little to see on the web and most of the action was in something now forgotten called Usenet. I remember saying something in reply to a thread suggesting I didn't agree with the poster. They replied to say I was wrong, but entitled to my opinion. All done. Except a day later they thought better of it and wrote to me by email to tell me I was a fuckwit. Fair enough. Oddly, over a month passed and I got a follow up email that just read "oh, get over it already you twat". Um, okay... except that I didn't realise I wasn't over it; in fact I didn't quite remember what the guy was banging on about because I was so much over it, whatever "it" was. Would you ever do that in real life? Publicly disagree politely, privately disagree loudly and then, over a month later, ring the stranger in question up, call them a twat and hang up sure in the righteousness of your actions because they clearly hadn't got over the even in the way you had?

Yesterday, my mate Louis was minding his own business on Twitter when a "mention" lit up on his screen. A total stranger, someone not following him or any of his friends, someone Louis was not following, tweeted at him the single word "clown" (one of the few words the guy has spelled correctly in his tweet stream). Again: why? Louis asked him, but got no reply. He had taken time out of his busy day replying semi-literately to celebrity tweets to call a random and not-very-famous (comparatively - sorry, Louis; here's a plug for one of your brilliant books as compensation) person he wasn't following a clown. I assume he felt better for that, had gained a moral revenge against whatever crime he believed Louis had committed, or otherwise had a reason of some sort for setting fingers to keyboard and lashing out. It's just not evident what that reason was.

Wikipedia is place where this type of thing goes on. Of course, with any open editing system you're going to get vandals - idiots as compared to the people cited above who would seem not to be idiots per se - and if you undo or have blocked a vandal, of course they'll turn up and attack you, which you'll also undo. But the place crawls with people who are very happy to attack other people who are just editing, whether you're a new user trying to add information with a source and being called a twat for not formatting it perfectly in their arcane markup, or an established editor reverting really nasty attacks but not doing a good enough job of it for a new user who then chooses to have a go at you for even trying.

At Transdiffusion, comment threads need to be kept under a watchful eye and pre-edited: the site offers a nice big "report an error" button, an email link on every page, even a postal address, but a spelling error (not a factual error, a spelling error) can earn the volunteer writer of the page a vicious tearing down complete with accusations of being deliberately ignored, and once even a disturbingly-specific death threat. For a spelling error!

I wonder if on the internet they forget that there is another human being at the end of the screed they're writing to them; that they think it's a bot at the other end with no feelings? Or has the internet liberated the inner-sociopath amongst a broad swathe of the population, giving them licence to be as creepy and vicious as they'd like to be with the bus driver and checkout assistant but don't have the cajones to do in real life knowing that it could get them arrested?

Above all, how do they react when it's done to them? Is the world now full of hurt little sociopaths, angrily crying into their laptops?