JULIE BURCHILL: Beware the fauxmosexual.
Does it start with Panto Dames? At Christmas, in flighty old Blighty, little Brit girls are introduced to the idea of a matronly man in a dress who gets most of the laughs and isn’t remotely interested in any of that soppy love stuff that the plucky heroine and the principal boy (played by a girl, of course) get up to. The Pantomime Dame is a place of safety in the dark-scary-forest-world of “Behind you!” that little girls are already aware of at this early age.
And then, when we’re older, pop culture takes over. The Gay Best Friend is the natural go-to for the female casualties of the Love Wars; think of Sex and the City’s Stanford Blatch, always there for Carrie to cry on when Mr Big treats her like a side-piece.
But we’re on trickier territory when it comes to what might be called “fauxmosexuals”, straight men who act gay to get girls. Before Russell Brand was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, his trial featured a telling moment. After hearing that one of the complainants testified that she had presumed Brand to be gay when they met at a Labour Party conference and thus felt “safe” asking him back to her hotel room, the prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC whipped out the accused’s unfortunately-titled 2007 memoir My Booky Wook and confronted the leering Lothario with a photograph of himself at the age of seven, with the caption: “This is the exact moment when I decided to act gay to attract girls. It took 15 years to produce results.”
Though he claimed under cross-examination that this was a “joke” (wouldn’t be the first unfunny joke he’d told in his long career of alleged comedy — the only time he made me laugh was when he couldn’t find the verse from Isaiah he was looking for on Piers Morgan Uncensored, while thumbing through the Bible for close to two minutes) and denied he had ever pretended to be gay in order to put women at ease, it wasn’t as convincing as it might have been. There is a long tradition of such behavior in this country although, of course, not necessarily leading to any crime. Indeed, one of Brand’s comedic contemporaries — who most people believed to be gay because of the flagrant way he camped it up — is currently undergoing a right royal canceling due to his highly “bloke-ish” attitude towards women.
“Actor and comedian Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault,” CNN reports, adding, “Brand faces a lengthy prison sentence after he was found guilty in a London court on Thursday of raping a young fan and sexually assaulting three women.”
Wait, the Brits still actually investigate and arrest people for that sort of thing?
UPDATE: Russell Brand’s Right-Wash. “Whose idea was it to make Russell Brand a right-wing celebrity?…You can be pretty sure you won’t hear much from Messrs. Musk, Trump and Carlson about Mr. Brand now—except perhaps to argue the conspiracy against him is ongoing. But Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t make Mr. Brand a bad person. The Covid vaccine didn’t render the now ostentatiously performative Christian Mr. Brand, interviewed by Piers Morgan while wearing a cross necklace and holding a Bible, unable to recall the verse from scripture that he claimed was his comfort. Some on the right with large followings, however, did conspire to transform a washed-up, degenerate celebrity into a supposed victim of left-wing persecution. They let pure oppositionalism consume them to the point that they abandoned both common sense and morality. And all because siding with Mr. Brand made them feel they were siding against the ‘establishment.’”
