Change, Repress Or Eliminate?

Following where Boris Johnson led when he banned certain advertisements from London buses, Labour has today called for something like the Maltese ban on any attempt to, "change, repress or eliminate a person's sexual orientation, gender identity and/or gender expression."

But practically all homosexuals had heterosexual experiences in early life, before deciding that such things were not for them. Yet an absolute taboo increasingly surrounds reporting the reverse experience, and that taboo will soon be written into law, no doubt well before the next General Election.

Someone's expression is indeed being changed, repressed and eliminated here. There are those who will gloat, but they need to be careful what they wish for. I have been around politics, religion and academia quite long enough to know about gay men.

Regardless of education, generation or anything else, strikingly many of them just do not much like women, and are profoundly unconvinced that any man experiences genuine sexual attraction to women. This goes quite beyond the corresponding hostility to homosexuality among heterosexual men. No one who displays that denies that homosexual attraction exists, and few believe that sex with a woman could cure it.

Whereas it is normal – not universal, and probably not the majority view, but nevertheless very common indeed – for gay men to believe that at least expertly executed sex with a man would turn any man gay, and that that was what all men really wanted. Will the expression of that view, by word or by deed, now be subject to the strictures of the criminal law?