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On his return a few minutes later, Sanderson takes two bites and begins to talk. Today Keith pokes his head into the living room to offer tea and hot-cross buns. Terry Sanderson lives with his husband, Keith, in the comfy, velvety home they have shared for 35 years. As many British papers shift, now encircling transgender people with repurposed taunts, Sanderson’s decades-old polemics about the media’s treatment of “dykes” and “buggers”, and how they pose a threat to children/decency/society, foreshadowed it all. It’s all there, much of it in newspapers that are not the most obvious culprits.īut the timing bites. The resulting website,, now provides a unique insight into the period and comprehensive evidence of what the media, politicians, and public figures did during the most pivotal fights in LGBT history: the AIDS crisis, Section 28, the age of consent, civil partnerships, fostering, and adoption. He also secured a first: a historic win, holding a newspaper to account for its smears against gay people.Įarlier this year, while on a break from cancer treatment, Sanderson decided to unearth all of his old columns and publish the lot online. But he didn’t stop for 25 years, outlasting all the columnists who were frothing when he first started. The column was only supposed to be a one-off. On one occasion, Kenneth Williams, the famously self-hating gay actor, told an interviewer, “Anybody who pretends that two men can live together happily like man and wife is talking a load of rubbish.” Sanderson responded in “Media Watch”: “At the beginning of the interview, Mr Williams proclaims, ‘I am a cult’, although I’m not sure he’s spelt it right.” And he lambasted his own community, too - if deemed to betray the cause. He accused tabloids of turning its coverage of gay people into a “blood sport” - the difference being that “with gay-baiting nobody seems concerned about the barbaric cruelty of it all.” He mocked the most what-the-fuck ludicrous coverage - the Daily Star’s assertion that “the Rottweiler is the gay community’s favourite pet” or the Sun’s headline: “Gays Axe Christmas”. He dissected the worst - the myths, the stereotyping, the outing of members of the public - and responded to the onslaught with wit and fury, all while providing LGBT people with something invaluable: a voice. Later, when the Conservative government gagged teachers from discussing homosexuality, many newspapers roared in approval.īut there was one gay man who decided to fight back, with words of his own.įrom 1983, Terry Sanderson began to document newspapers’ slurs against the community in a column for Gay Times magazine (then the most important gay publication) called “Media Watch”.
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After the burgeoning liberation movement and the shirts-off, arms-up disco era, gay men started dying in the hundreds, then thousands.Īs AIDS hit in the early 1980s, Fleet Street, then the home of Britain’s newspaper industry, responded by blaming gay people for their own deaths lying about the causes of the disease calling for a return to the closet, to abstinence, and even to prison. The stories beneath would expand on the pejoratives, justifying them with news of “sick”, “evil”, “predatory” gays - all arising from a presumption: that readers would agree. This was how British tabloid headlines referred to gay men and lesbians in the 1980s - an echo of the taunts heard on the street before a beating.
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The Burden of Being a Prodigy by Alan Dwight.The Brilliant Boy Billionare by Altimexis.