On Wednesday morning, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly spoke to LBC’s Nick Ferrari about the forthcoming World Cup in Qatar. Gay fans, he said, ought to be “respectful of the host nation,” where homosexuality is illegal, as he assured us the Qatar authorities would in return. He mentioned “a bit of flex and compromise on both sides.” Which, I’m guessing, means should gay football fans attend, we won’t end up in prison for being who we are, so long as we don’t do anything too gay, like talking effusively about Jack Grealish’s thighs.
I was livid (too gay?) with Mr Cleverly for five minutes after reading his pronouncements. So I listened to the broadcast, hearing his words in context and oddly stopped being angry (very un-gay). His message to gay football fans was, essentially, look after yourselves out there. My tip, should he want one for future reference, is to be less headmaster-ish moving forward, to try to address this corner of his electorate as friends, rather than a separate species.
Cleverly’s big mistake was to fall into the classic ministerial trap of straightsplaining. As gay folk we know this stuff already, well. Gay people think about potential impediments to our behaviour each time we book a holiday or get sent somewhere exciting for work. Mykonos and Sitges didn’t happen by accident. We sometimes think about it at family parties, job interviews, on Tube carriages. From childhood we become attuned to judging the temperature of rooms, developing a sixth sense for potential animosity, the joke that stops being funny, the look which creases into opprobrium or censure, the potential legal infraction.
Code-switching gets factored in. Fight-or-flight mechanisms develop. Eventually, most of us get so bored of it that we stop caring. Adapting behaviour to circumstance is a recognisable enough gay trait that in the Noughties it was christened “The Velvet Rage” by a Californian therapist who made a small fortune medicalising some of our collective misery (über-gay).
Mr Cleverly has not been the only man straightsplaining the Qatar World Cup. Former England captain Gary Lineker suggested that it would be the perfect backdrop for two closeted Premiership gay footballers to come out against, as if the human development of sexuality is nothing more than a publicity opportunity to help others. Why? Again, you wince and hope it comes from a good place. But honestly? Try doing the thing before advocating it.
Gay football is not just hot news again because of Cleverly, Lineker or FIFA’s dodgy Ponzi scheme to flog its championships to the highest bidder, regardless of potential harm or threat to players and fans. It’s because we have watched exactly how gay football triumphs at peak efficacy, in the form of the England women’s team, where lesbians rule. With this fresh context to judge a World Cup against, I suspect most gay fans will show off their most intuitive, hard-bitten flex and compromise. By not going.
Why Keith McNally is my arrogant and classy hero
Until last week, Keith McNally, above, was just the most useful culinary graph by which to make my way around lower Manhattan. The first fancy restaurant I was taken to in New York was The Odeon, McNally’s cinematic bistro which turned Tribeca into a thing long before Jay-Z and DeNiro shipped in. By the time Pastis became an early series SATC local of Carrie Bradshaw & co, I’d learned McNally’s name as well as his menu. He’d become less restaurateur, more rock star/zip-code bellwether.
As his very public spat with James Corden, now resolved, has sprung from the Balthazar staff log-book via Instagram to the news pages, he has again confirmed everything I love about his professional life. This Englishman in New York gifted the metropolis a new dining room culture to mirror its gobby pomp. Arrogant, classy, attention-seeking, sleek, opinionated, with a side order of prizing the well-being of staff over fame. Cheers to that.
