Why would Stephen Fry slavishly copy the traditions of either weddings or marriage? He has already found someone 30 years younger, an act to raise some eyebrows in certain areas of society. (The Daily Mail website immediately gasped with a “toyboy lover” headline.)
This is, lest QI fans forget, a man who has taken cocaine in “gorgeous palaces, noble properties and elegant, honest establishments” including Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons and the House of Lords; who has done a runner from a West End stage; who’s smashed the hushed stigma of mental illness by filming his own; whose sketch shows frequently found him dragged up to mock Mrs Middle England before suddenly pronouncing: “I’ve left the iron on”; who’s crossed the globe confronting the Pied Pipers of homophobia; who portrayed to devastating effect Oscar Wilde – once the shackled enemy of the state.
Yet this is a man whom Middle England can claim as its captain unaware that he subverts its prudish veneer. I can’t help thinking that they do not recognise the Trojan Horse who delights and amuses while encouraging them to “taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once”. They love him and laugh because they know the truth: that behind their doilies and antimacassars lie spankings and stockings, naughty seaside postcards and mutual schoolgirl crushes. Middle England are a right bunch of perverts. It’s just hidden behind the scones.
Fry’s model of encroaching behind enemy lines has always worked wonders for gay liberation, alongside the mass protests and abseiling lesbians. The “kiss-ins” in the early 1990s, where activists publicly snogged to protest against police brutality, worked, as did many other actions by the explosive OutRage! group. But anyone who has accompanied Peter Tatchell (its unofficial leader) to meetings with the powerful will know that clever radicals recognise the potency of besuited whisperings in gilded rooms.
The partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967? Its removal from the list of recognised psychiatric disorders in 1974? And, last year, Britain’s first same-sex weddings? These were largely the result of backroom fumblings of an altogether different kind: tricky, reasoned debate; arguments won.
And thus, in Stephen Fry – “Lord of dance, Prince of Swimwear & Blogger”, as his Twitter profile describes – we have a real and present danger to the idiocies of homophobia: the revolutionary dressed as the conformist. Fittingly, we have also, in the wedding of Fry and Spencer, something old (sorry, Stephen, but 57 is 87 in gay years), something borrowed (marriage), something new (two men!) and something deliciously blue.
As I type, tabloid journalists are camped on Fry’s doorstep. There they unintentionally elevate another kind of camp, one whose proud position in English history changed more than we will ever quantify.
So, all hail the WEDDING OF THE DECADE (as Hello! magazine will undoubtedly call it) and our beloved Stephen Fry. I, for one, will happily kneel before Middle England’s saucy, subversive Queen, and, as the bells peal, cry with a single raised fist: “We won.”
This is, lest QI fans forget, a man who has taken cocaine in “gorgeous palaces, noble properties and elegant, honest establishments” including Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons and the House of Lords; who has done a runner from a West End stage; who’s smashed the hushed stigma of mental illness by filming his own; whose sketch shows frequently found him dragged up to mock Mrs Middle England before suddenly pronouncing: “I’ve left the iron on”; who’s crossed the globe confronting the Pied Pipers of homophobia; who portrayed to devastating effect Oscar Wilde – once the shackled enemy of the state.
Yet this is a man whom Middle England can claim as its captain unaware that he subverts its prudish veneer. I can’t help thinking that they do not recognise the Trojan Horse who delights and amuses while encouraging them to “taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once”. They love him and laugh because they know the truth: that behind their doilies and antimacassars lie spankings and stockings, naughty seaside postcards and mutual schoolgirl crushes. Middle England are a right bunch of perverts. It’s just hidden behind the scones.
Fry’s model of encroaching behind enemy lines has always worked wonders for gay liberation, alongside the mass protests and abseiling lesbians. The “kiss-ins” in the early 1990s, where activists publicly snogged to protest against police brutality, worked, as did many other actions by the explosive OutRage! group. But anyone who has accompanied Peter Tatchell (its unofficial leader) to meetings with the powerful will know that clever radicals recognise the potency of besuited whisperings in gilded rooms.
The partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967? Its removal from the list of recognised psychiatric disorders in 1974? And, last year, Britain’s first same-sex weddings? These were largely the result of backroom fumblings of an altogether different kind: tricky, reasoned debate; arguments won.
And thus, in Stephen Fry – “Lord of dance, Prince of Swimwear & Blogger”, as his Twitter profile describes – we have a real and present danger to the idiocies of homophobia: the revolutionary dressed as the conformist. Fittingly, we have also, in the wedding of Fry and Spencer, something old (sorry, Stephen, but 57 is 87 in gay years), something borrowed (marriage), something new (two men!) and something deliciously blue.
As I type, tabloid journalists are camped on Fry’s doorstep. There they unintentionally elevate another kind of camp, one whose proud position in English history changed more than we will ever quantify.
So, all hail the WEDDING OF THE DECADE (as Hello! magazine will undoubtedly call it) and our beloved Stephen Fry. I, for one, will happily kneel before Middle England’s saucy, subversive Queen, and, as the bells peal, cry with a single raised fist: “We won.”
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