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Jan Moir? The Daily Mail’s got plenty more where she came from

What is is with the Daily Mail and the death of gay men? First it was the outrageous bigotry of Jan Moir on the death of Stephen Gately; today Mail journalist Geoffrey Levy turns the paper’s moral fire onto Ray Gosling.

With the headline ‘Brilliant, eccentric BBC film-maker Ray Gosling says he killed his dying gay lover. But is his story all it seems?’, Levy accuses Gosling of a huge publicity stunt, asserting ‘moral superiority and of not caring very much about the suffering of his long-term partner, whilst getting in a few side-swipes about Gosling’s sex life.

Levy’s direction is clear from the start:

“Where this new fame will lead only time will tell, but Mr Gosling, who is 70 and lives in sheltered accommodation, clearly believes he has everything to gain and nothing to lose by telling the world that he killed a gay lover terminally ill with Aids. More than that, there was even a discernible note of moral superiority in his confident, almost chirpy voice, as he described the circumstances to listeners of Radio 4′s Today programme yesterday morning.”

So Gosling has said what he has for all the wrong reasons? Moral superiority – maybe it was the ‘confident’ voice of a man who had nothing to hide?

“To add insult to killing, Mr Gosling, who made his name in the Seventies and Eighties chronicling the difficult lives and foibles of the working classes, explained that the other man ‘wasn’t my partner, he was my bit on the side’. How very odd, you may think, that a man should kill a mere ‘bit on the side’ as an act of mercy, especially when he did no such thing for the enduring love of his life, his longtime partner.”

Anyone who heard Gosling’s interview will know that this man wasn’t ‘a mere bit on the side’. He was obviously someone who was much-loved, being spoken about in an affectionate manner. The pair had their own private relationship and it’s nobody’s business but their own. But of course the Mail has to get in its usual dig at the alleged promiscuity of gay men.

“Indeed he carefully nursed his partner, a man called Bryn Allsop who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, until the moment of his death in 1999. No question of snuffing out his suffering, as he did the other man.”

So Gosling is a man who cares and is compassionate. Who knows why he didn’t help his partner to die. Maybe Bryn didn’t suffer as much; maybe he didn’t want his life to end that way and Gosling respected that decision, just as he had for his lover? Again, whose business is it of the Daily Mail and its prying bigots?

“But then, an act of genuine mercy with his long-term partner was never going to resurrect the name of Ray Gosling, who was so short of work in the decade up to 2002 that he went bankrupt and lost his house. And yet his story of tender killing, disclosed just as talk of legalised euthanasia and mercy killing is becoming worryingly fashionable, has resurrected his name in an instant.”

Ah, he’s obviously in it for the money …

” … he talks of making a pact with the other man, each to kill the other if they were suffering. Subsequently, the other man was infected with Aids in another country, though when he came back to Britain they carried on having ‘some sort of sex  -  we worked it out. It was full of laughter and love’.”

So there was an agreement and the lover had asked Ray to help him die. QED, you would think. But it’s time for another dig at the sort of sex gay men have.

But Levy turns particularly hasty as he tries to pick holes in the veracity of Gosling’s comments:

Version 1: ‘I said to the doctor, “Leave me . . . just for a bit” and he went away. The doctor came back and I said, “He’s gone”. Nothing more was ever said.’

Version 2: ‘There was this moment and the doctor said to me something like, “I’ll pop out for a fag or I’ll go to the local canteen or I’ll go round another ward. Will you still be here in half an hour, Ray?”. I said, “Ay, I’ll still be here”. It was an invitation.’

Maybe there was a truth that went: ‘I said to the doctor, “Leave me . . . just for a bit”. The doctor said to me something like, “I’ll pop out for a fag or I’ll go to the local canteen or I’ll go round another ward. Will you still be here in half an hour, Ray?”.  I said, “Ay, I’ll still be here”. And the doctor went away . He came back and I said, “He’s gone”. Nothing more was ever said.’ There, seems highly likely.

But Levy hasn’t finished with the character assassination.

“… the sometime Northampton Teddy boy and Leicester University dropout identified totally with his subjects, or so he said, and even agreed to be chairman of a council housing tenants’ association in Nottingham.But then it emerged that this outspoken champion of the working classes, who was at that time said to be earning a prodigious £50,000 a year, was a closet Tory who voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. ”

So was Gosling a middle-class man who took up with the feckless poor, or a working-class man who had ideas above his station? Either way, he shouldn’t have been allowed to earn a lot of money or vote Tory (did you see how we sneaked the word ‘closet’ in there?).

I don’t intend to continue further. The whole piece is sneering, nasty, bigoted and mean-spirited – in other words a typical Daily Mail article. Read it if you want – but you won’t learn anything new about Ray Gosling or the Daily Mail.

Watch out Alexander McQueen – I expect you’ll be next.

Related posts:

1. Maybe the Daily Mail should keep its mouth shut?
2. Daily Mail promotes thieves and vandals charter
3. The Daily Mail – where misogyny sells