In a recent piece in The Spectator, one Rachel Johnson described my forthcoming teenage novel, Sugar Rush, as “unquestionably grim and narrowly grotty”. It did make me wonder why this one specifically is attracting this kind of criticism. Even before I’d put pen to paper two years ago, there were pieces in various newspapers explaining Why This Book Must Not Be Written. Well, tough, it has been. And it’s out next week.
Miss Johnson sarkily fingers my opus as “a joyful exploration of the sunlit teenage world of drugs and lezzies”. I’m sorry to pull rank here, but if Rach really thinks that the world I described of drugs and lesbians is in any way grim and grotty, she’s been trying the wrong drugs and the wrong dolls. Or maybe she hasn’t, and that’s her problem. Rachel, babe, I know that you’re blade-straight to the nth degree and don’t have a problem with lesbians, but I’ve got to let you know that when a female over the age of 13 uses the word “lezzies” she sounds exactly like the sort of frustrated scaredy-cat who fantasises ceaselessly about a bit of girl-on-girl bodysurfing but is too timid and self-loathing to go for it — just as “dyke” is usually said by the type of man who’s rubbish in bed and knows that a woman could “do” his wife better. So I’d drop it, if I were you.
This sort of juvenile name-calling becomes not just self-revelatory but also rather repellent in the light of the recent nomination for Music of Black Origin (Mobo) Awards of two singers who advocate burning, shooting, hanging and drowning of homosexuals and, to use Rachel’s charming word, lezzies. Racists must be rubbing their hands in smug glee at the utter stupidity of glorifying yet more violence when black-on-black killing is at an all-time high, and at the total inappropriateness of a community that has suffered more than its share of oppression and violence rewarding people who advocate yet more of the same.
The justification of British Buppies (black yuppies) desperate not to look out of touch with their “roots” is inevitably that homophobic sentiments are part of Caribbean culture and, as such, sacrosanct. No doubt this will come as a comfort to the grieving Caribbean parents mourning the beatings and deaths of dozens of Caribbean sons and daughters, such as the young man in Kingston, Jamaica, who was cornered in a Baptist church and shot dead one Saturday afternoon a few years ago after begging for his life. Still, so long as he wasn’t a victim of racism!
From having your world described as “grim and grotty” maybe because you’re a “lezzie” to getting killed for being a “batty boy” is a long and lonely furrow, but the impulse which informs such distaste is the same one, and that it can still be found in people who are quite passionately anti-racist is a source of ceaseless puzzlement to me. I’m not going to come out with the simplistic old myth about how anyone who doesn’t like homosexuals is really one themselves, but I do think an element of envy may be at work here.
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It is an open secret these days that heterosexuality is far from being a state of perfect bliss, and that what men and women want from relationships is generally somewhat different. So of course many straight men must envy gay men their easy access to huge and varied amounts of sex without benefit of commitment or credit card; it’s only natural that many straight women envy lesbians their aptitude for closeness and domesticity. And it works across the genders, too. When I recently went to see my friend Tim Fountain’s play Sex Addict, my rude and silly reaction to it — jeering, tutting, cat-calling — stemmed from the fact, I realise now, that I always felt, in my twenties, that I would have made a brilliant promiscuous gay man.
Yet what do so many gay men increasingly think about having seven sorts of sex on tap? That it’s sad and shallow. What do numerous lesbians feel about their status as alternative domestic goddesses? That it’s time to roll back the carpet and roll out the barrel. And this is what straights can’t forgive: not gayness itself, not the “unnatural” sex stuff they do, but the fact that gay couples of both sexes accessed so easily the harmony that men and women still struggle so desperately to find with each other — and having done so, looked around, clear-eyed, and wondered whether the other side didn’t have a point, after all! So rich gorgeous gay men, who could have all the anonymous sex in the world, spend their pink pounds on creating babies and making families for themselves; loved-up lesbians, who could easily close the commitment deal on the third date, pull on their dancing shoes and decide that they will go round the block just one more time. How dare they!
The problem is this: that straight society took gay people from being pariahs to being icons, and never saw the necessity of letting them be human — all too human! — on the way. Homosexuality has ostensibly gone from being the love that dare not speak its name to being the love that feels duty-bound to disport and contort itself all over the media, selling everything from sportswear to mortgages. We “accept” gayness — so long as it is in the stylish shape of fairy godfathers showing us how to achieve our dream homes or sexy pseudo-sapphics pepping up our sad old sex lives. But when we think about gay sexuality as what it truly is — the pride, passion and courage as opposed to the swatch samples and the soft porn — we come over all weird. We talk about lezzies, and those at the other end of the aggression spectrum corner boys in churches and kill them.
The question is not why we are now so nice to gay people, but why they are so nice to us. The interesting insults are not the ones we bite back, but the ones they do. Why don’t lesbians laugh at straight women’s general inability to have orgasms during sex? Why don’t gay men point and jeer when they see a straight man lying, buying and just plain trying to get sex off a woman? Why is it that, statistically speaking, a female child would be less likely to be sexually assaulted spending the night under the roof of two strange lesbians (though hopefully not too strange) than in her own home with her own father? When did the allegedly irresponsible, flighty queer community become the grown-ups here, for ever shielding us from our own moral incontinence and hysterical hypocrisy?
So, Rachel — I don’t know if you have a daughter, but if you do, maybe you should keep her away from my book. Keep her pure for the benediction of heterosexuality — for the joyful, sunlit bliss of underage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease and sniggering slander the morning after. There’ll be tears before bedtime, perhaps. But so long as she’s not grim, grotty or a lezzie, who cares!
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Sugar Rush is published on Friday by Young Picador (£9.99, offer £8.49 plus 99p p&p)
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julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk