Must not say that homosexuality is a risky lifestyle
We read:
"Britain's press watchdog says it has received a record 21,000 complaints about a newspaper column on the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately after critics used Twitter to brand the article homophobic and insensitive.
Gately died on October 10, aged 33, while vacationing on the Spanish island of Majorca. An autopsy found he had died of natural causes from pulmonary oedema, or fluid in the lungs.
Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote in a column on Friday that Gately's death was "not, by any yardstick, a natural one" and said he died in "sleazy" circumstances, She noted that Gately, who came out publicly as gay in 1999, he had been to a bar and invited a young Bulgarian man back to his apartment the night before he died.
Moir concluded that "under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see".
Anger at the column swept social networking site Twitter soon after Moir's piece appeared on the paper's website. Actor Stephen Fry urged his 860,000 Twitter followers to contact the Press Complaints Commission. Other prominent Tweeters followed suit, and provided links to the commission's website.
Moir defended her article, claiming suggestions of homophobia were "mischievous" and suggesting the backlash was a "heavily orchestrated internet campaign".
Source
The original article is here. "The Daily Mail" is conservative-leaning.
8 comments:
Moir's article was itself "mischievous"!
Gately's untimely death at such a young age fits right in with the findings of Canadian researchers published in the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE) in 1997:
"While the medical consensus is that smoking knocks from two to 10 years off an individual's life expectancy, the IJE study found that homosexual conduct shortens the lifespan of "gays" by an astounding "8 to 20 years" — more than twice that of smoking."
It looks like in Gately's case the lifestyle knocked about 40 or 50 years off his lifespan.
So by contrast straight men aren't so sleazy as to pick up women in bars and clubs and take them home for sex - yeah right!
That study would be confined to a sub-group of homosexuals who were open about having sex with other men, and whose deaths were related to that in some way. It could not reflect the generality of homosexuals and their conduct as many homosexuals are "invisible" - ie. do not admit to homosexual activity, and if their deaths are not obviously related.
Uh, yes it could. Scientists use samples of populations to predict population behavior all the time.
To generalize about all men who have sex with other men would be extrapolating on the lifestyle of a subset, whereas the other subsets or even the majority of "homosexuals" don't have that lifestyle which to have such a drastic effect on their lifespan is probably one of promiscuity, drug-taking, drinking, clubbing all hours, etc., so the results are skewed or very misleading. Some subsets of heterosexual people could have such an unhealthy lifestyle but would not usually be regarded as representative of the "heterosexual lifestyle".
Unless the fluid in his lungs was semen I'd say he didn't die because he was gay. Despite the claims of a drug free lifestyle I bet he was living some sort of rock star fantasy with the appropriate chemical help. So nothing ordinary in the circumstances.
Longevity isn't helped if you live in a hostile society - just the prolonged stress alone, not to mention actual attacks - but I guess it's the victim's fault for being different!
In some non-western countries, especially muslim ones, the hate extends to imprisonment, torture and killing (even legal executions) just for appearing to be homosexual or insufficiently masculine.
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