The Tech Horn: Mail hack blames Gately death on gay marriage

The chaps on the fantastic Daily Mail Watch really have all the bases covered when it comes to exposing the horrible tricks the paper uses to keep its readership in the dark. But they’ve not got around to this particular story by Jan Moir yet, so I thought I’d just share it while it’s still hot.

I’d strongly recommend you gird your loins and read it for yourselves. In a nutshell though, it’s saying that the untimely death of Stephen Gately is sad because he was young, but was really to be expected, what with him being a pervert and everything.

It kicks off fairly mildly (for the Mail) – putting Gately’s death into the context of celebrity substance abuse. This is okay-ish, as the current thinking is that he choked on his own vomit after a night of heavy drinking, even though this is hardly large living on the scale of Amy Winehouse, for example. So, this is going to be a story about the decadence and excess of celebrity then? Hypocritical for a paper which lives off celebrity gossip, but par for the course.

Then things start getting a little nasty:

"Although he was effectively smoked out of the closet, he has been hailed as a champion of gay rights, albeit a reluctant one."

The clear innuendo here is that, as he spoiled the media’s fun by choosing to beat the tabloids to the story, he should at least have been given a spot of public humiliation. I simply can’t imagine why he chose not to discuss his sexuality for so many years.

The story gets uglier still when Jan Moir starts playing around with the word “natural”, as in “natural causes”; the outcome of the Spanish post-mortem. She uses this word several times, in and out of context, then really hits it home, setting the tone for the rest of the piece, with this delightful little number:

"Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered.

And I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy."

So we slide effortlessly from “natural” as a term for describing the cause of death to “natural” as a moral measure of the circumstances surrounding it.

Having conflated “sleazy” and “gay”, Moir than descends into pure innuendo, implying that Gately’s grieving civil partner brought another man back to their apartment for sex, while Gately himself lay in the next room choking to death. Of course, rather than “they were having sex”, she writes “it is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards”. Stating it plainly would require some evidence. And she has none at all.

Having dealt with Gately’s husband, the spotlight of Moir’s baseless speculation turns on his parents.

"Gately's family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer's death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died.

Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family."

Right. Because cannabis is lethal. His mum probably sold it to him too.

But surely Jan, there’s some sort of wider lesson we can draw from this tragedy? You bet your boots there is. The “real sadness”, she bleats tearfully, “ is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”.

It turns out that this whole mess is down to “gay activists” going around convincing people that same sex relationships are the same as heterosexual relationships. “Not everyone” these activists apparently claim “is like George Michael”… Eh? The beard? A former member of Wham? What do you mean Jan?

And if that weren’t tasteless enough, she then brings up the recent death of Kevin McGee, Matt Lucas’ former partner, as some sort of evidence that something unspecified is fundamentally rotten about the very idea of gay marriage.

Ipso facto. QED.

This despicable article works by mauling Gately’s character – quite gently at first, then by assuming that homosexuality automatically brings polygamy and casting his family and supporters in the role of conspirators. On this basis, Moir is then free to imply any explanation she chooses, regardless of how little real information or evidence she has.

BOOTNOTE:

In fairness, the comments section (which, as a rule, tends to pick up on the journalist’s innuendo and repeat it in less regulator-friendly terms) was generally damning of the story, which restored my faith in humanity just a little.

But that’s not to say there weren’t a few corkers in there. Apart from the predictable “you’ve said what everyone is thinking – stand up to the PC brigade!” yawn, this one stood out for being simultaneously psychopathic, homophobic and slightly camp.