Christopher Biggins' betrayal of gay people

By rolling this progress back, by allowing the likes of Biggins and Graham Norton to be the main face of British gaydom, we actually make it harder for gay kids to understand their sexuality. The vast majority of gay boys grows up without any more ‘effeminacy’ than their straight brothers, and yet the only gay people they see represented are mincing queens, and they think: well, I’m not like that, and I don’t want to be like that, so I can’t be gay.

But the problem with Biggins goes deeper and becomes more fetid. For the sake of a few thousand quid, he has actually sold out his fellow gay people to the most repellent gay-bashers in the British media. The Daily Mail has a clever tactic when it wants to attack a minority and beat back social progress: it pays a small fortune to a member of that group to do it for them. Want to savage feminism? Find a self-hating woman. Want to rubbish race relations laws? Find a token black person. Biggins is their token self-hating gay, the one they wheel out to make it seem as if gay people are seriously divided on unequivocal pieces of progress.

Poor old Biggins. If only he was more butch. A mustache and a leather peaked cap maybe. Johann Hari talks utter crap and blames poor old Biggins for conspiring with The Daily Mail to 'beat back social progress'. What nonsense!  It is gays like Biggins, Norton, Larry Grayson, Frankie Howard, John Inman, Russell Harty and Kenneth Williams, amongst many others, who gained complete acceptance and even love from a wide, mostly working class, British public who took them to their hearts. Of course, if Hari had been born a few years before 1979 he wouldn't need to be reminded of that.

To blame Biggins for not being 'straight' enough is preposterous and insulting. Hari should take himself down to Madame JoJo's a bit more often.