Two veteran voices of the British and Northern Irish centre-right – Matthew Parris and Jeff Dudgeon – have spoken almost in concert this September, their arguments converging around the same theme: the gay rights movement has travelled far, but it must now tread carefully.
Parris, writing in The Spectator (26 September), recalls the grim days of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality – furtive meetings in basement rooms, warm white wine, and whispered solidarity. He remembers the sniggers at the very word “homosexual” and the political tightrope between not lying and not declaring. Yet his story is also one of rapid transformation: a John Major government lowering the age of consent, an electorate largely indifferent by the 1990s, and today’s Parliament with over 9% of its members openly gay. What was once unthinkable is now embedded in public life.
But Parris insists this victory brings responsibility. He rejects the notion that “anything goes”, warning that the respect so painstakingly won could be fragile. Pride’s inflatable phalluses and a culture of loveless gratification, he argues, risk alienating a wider public that has granted tolerance based on privacy and moderation. He is wary of conflating gay and trans causes, not out of hostility but because, as he puts it, “women have rights too” and because pushing too far risks awakening dormant opposition. History, he reminds us, does not travel in straight lines: “We gays ask for respect. We need to show it, too.”
Jeff Dudgeon, writing separately, strikes a similar but sharper note. A veteran Ulster Unionist and himself a pioneer in the decriminalisation struggle in Northern Ireland, he points out that gay issues no longer command political attention. The sheer representation of LGBT MPs in Westminster – three times their proportion in the population – is itself proof that discrimination has collapsed. But the silence around this fact, he suggests, is telling. If gay men and women are already secure in law and in politics, why the continual expansion of the LGBT+ agenda? For Dudgeon, the trans debate has filled the vacuum, releasing a simmering section of the public “who don’t want homosexuality advanced as their best, as the BBC would like.”
Both men, therefore, issue the same warning in different registers. Gains are real and deep, but they are neither permanent nor beyond challenge. Hubris – whether in sexual libertinism, overreach on identity politics, or the insistence that “history is on our side” – risks provoking a backlash.
Parris couches this as conservatism in its truest sense: respectability, restraint, continuity with the wider moral codes of society. Dudgeon voices it as political realism: if gay people are already integrated, then overstating their marginalisation may exhaust public patience.
Together, they represent a generational shift in tone. The age of pleading for equality is over. The question now is how to live with it – and how not to lose it.
Links:
The Portsmouth Defence – every solicitor and barrister knows the traditional defence to utilize when defending a client accused of murdering a gay man when there is no other legitimate defence available. Its name indicates that it originated in medieval times in seaports when mariners were caught on rolling/robbing their homosexual clients or victims.
We need to interview the players in out history before they leave us, we also need to develop photographic evidence of artifacts before we arrange for them to be deposited in the Ulster Museum with whom we have now agreed a facility for depositing items like placards, photographs, home videos of historical moments, paintings etc. Documentation can be deposited with the PRONI (Public Records Office Northern Ireland), and we have already done this for items from Jeff’s case and also from PA’s archives
The following interviews were undertaken by Swiss TV Station SRF on the run up to the Marriage Equality vote and the interviews start about 2 minutes into the report and is in German