Thank you, HelloFresh, for reminding us what gay liberation is about

I’m assuming that most upright spiked readers and writers share a similar distaste at the way HelloFresh has chosen to ‘celebrate’ Pride Month.

On its Instagram page, the food-delivery service, popular for its pre-prepared recipes, posted the following statement:

‘We know eating isn’t always a top priority this month. We respect that. But for those of you who are… prepping… we have an extensive lineup of high-fibre recipes available. Happy Pride.’

At first sight, the promotion is – to use a word I generally don’t, as I’m not 12 – gross. But then it got me thinking. Many gay men probably will be having more sex during Pride Month. They may be in two minds about the hi-jacking of their special time by the ‘queers’ – mostly bored straights in search of spice – but they will likely be going to more parties and stage shows than usual (here at Brighton & Hove Pride they’ll be treated to Diana Ross at the top of the bill, a weekend VIP Platinum Circle ticket costing a cool £349.20) and taking more drugs. This often leads to more sex. And when gay males are involved, some of this will be of the kind apparently popular back in Sodom. (What did they get up to in Gomorrah, which always sounds vaguely Irish to me?)

Though we could have done without the cringy-coy ‘prepping’ and the don’t-draw-me-a-diagram details about the cleansing effects of fibre, looked at from a devil’s advocate angle, we might applaud HelloFresh for reminding us why men generally become gay. Clue: it’s not because they have an overwhelming desire to become a girl’s best friend, or because they have an all-consuming passion for interior design.

Before Gok Wan wandered by, we used to know what a gay man was – whether he was a screaming mimi or an ultra-butch macho type. Either way, they were mainly in it for the sex. Sometimes the borderlines were blurred. Andy Warhol once said a brilliant thing, along the lines of ‘If you’re a gay man, and you see a man dressed as a cowboy walking down Times Square, think twice because he might not be dressed as your fantasy, but as his own’. These were the pre-AIDS days when straights and gays alike were at their most promiscuous. Studio 54 was founded in 1977 by the gay Steve Rubell, who was the public face of the uptown disco, and Ian Schrager, the straight man (in both senses of the word), who managed the boring old business. The club was famous, among other things, for encouraging straight women to behave like gay men and have sex with strangers, by tolerating and even encouraging public drug use. But they had a long way to go if they wanted to play catch-up. The late Martin Amis once memorably claimed that a moderately attractive gay man visiting a New York City bath-house in the early 1970s could have more sexual partners in a single year than Casanova had in his entire lifetime, for the simple reason that there was no female reluctance to rut with strangers to overcome.

When Studio 54 closed in 1980, the scary decade-long morning-after of all that fun was nigh for the hedonists. AIDS is thought to have arrived in the US around the start of the 1970s, brought back by gay male sex tourists and spread in New York bath-houses. As biologist Dr Michael Worobey explained in 2016, the virus encountered a population that was ‘like dry tinder, causing the epidemic to burn hotter and faster and infecting enough people that it [grabbed] the world’s attention for the first time’. The virus then spread from New York to ‘the West Coast and eventually to Western Europe, Australia, Japan, South America and all sorts of other places’. In 1981, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first recognised as a new disease.

But alongside the stereotype of the sexually voracious gay man, there had always been the other angle, the arty one. Gay men were more likely than straight men to have anonymous sex with a dozen strangers a night, but also more likely to enjoy opera than straight men. This was a puzzle for a lot of women, who patronisingly like to think that they can ‘see through’ men – to this day, they come out with dismissals of men, like ‘they’re just little boys’ or ‘they’re all after one thing’ in a way that women would be up in arms about if reversed.

AIDS running amok among the gay male population brought out the collective carer in many women. Since that time, the hyper-sexual image of men who have no need of women has been downplayed in favour of the gay man as a cuddly confidante. Men, that is, who crave the company of women. Now women and gay men could put their heads together and have a good old moan about men in general – what are they like, eh! A new kind of sex-free gay man appeared in the public eye. The Queer Eye for the Straight Guy boys. First Adele and Alan Carr as ‘bezzies’, now Amanda Holden has stepped up to take Miss Adkins place, with she and Carr making many successful television shows together. The adorable Rylan Clark, the erudite and elegant Robert Rinder – these are men always up for a laugh, but just as willing to cry when the fancy takes them. So of course lots of women like them.

But, somewhat comically, in a bid to embrace the new model FFG (Female-Friendly Gay), we appear to have forgotten what made these cuddlesome creatures gay in the first place. And HelloFresh is currently being reviled for reminding us. A relatively sophisticated friend of mine who specialises in Gay Best Friends was surprised to find herself shocked by ‘the loud, guttural noises’ that came through the walls she shared with the gay men she went on holiday with. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this. What do they think gay men do when they’re making new friends in foreign countries? Play dominoes?

This ceases to be amusing and becomes tragic when the phantom trans man hoves into view. There have been several sad cases of these females cosplaying as males putting themselves on gay-male dating sites, or visiting their watering holes in the hope of pulling, only to find themselves shunned or removed, because, as one habitué of Sailors sauna in Tower Hamlets exclaimed in horror, ‘there’s a woman in the building!’.

Gay people become gay because they like to have sex with their own kind. This simple truth has been lost under a flurry of cuddles in a way it would not have been when, say, the virulent misogyny of Joe Orton was the most public face of male homosexuality.

That there is an element of distaste for the genitalia of the opposite sex is surely a strong component of what creates a gay person, be they male or female. As Stephen Fry said: ‘My first words, as I was being born… I looked up at my mother and said, “That’s the last time I’m going up one of those”.’ What a wag!

Personally, I don’t want to know about the ins and outs of the importance of gay men consuming a high fibre diet in Pride month, but one useful thing the ghastly HelloFresh has done is remind us why men become gay. Begins with a ‘D’, to use the vulgar colloquial – and it’s not décor.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.