Stephen Gately

What would possess any journalist for a major daily newspaper to write a column suggesting that a nationally mourned celebrity died because of his, ahem, alternative lifestyle? That’s the question thousands of people have been asking in the wake of the scandal from now on to be known as ‘Moir-gate’.

For those of you who live abroad (or in Britain, but under a rock), let me just explain. Last week saw the shocking news emerge that one-fifth of the Irish boyband Boyzone had died, in uncertain circumstances.

The story broke last weekend that Stephen Gately, 33, had been found dead whilst on holiday in Majorca, discovered in admittedly peculiar circumstances, crouched over a sofa, by a Bulgarian man named Georgi Dochev.  Suicide and foul play were rapidly ruled out; this was an awful tragedy, but an accident.

Anyone who was a teen or preteen girl in the boyband heydey of the late nineties knew exactly who Stephen Gately was.  For everyone else, media pundits helpfully described him as ‘the gay one’.

For most of the plethora of reporters and critics covering the story, this fact became a relatively big feature, mainly because in 1999 Gately made boyband history and broke the hearts of a million lovestruck fans by coming out to a tabloid about his sexuality. Yet while almost all of the coverage took account of the perhaps salacious details of his death, only one has attracted (at the time of writing) over 1,300 comments and a record 22,000 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission.

That would be the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir, who last Friday wrote this delightful missive:

“ I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy”…

…“Gately’s death […] strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”….

… “For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see”…

Jan Moir

Apart from those who have officially lodged complaints, the Twitterati and blogosphere have been fuming about her comments.  The inevitable Facebook groups have been set up in response, while ever other newspaper has gleefully contributed to Moir’s undoing.

Rather than list the people who have weighed in, it would probably be quicker to count those who haven’t.  To hint at the sheer intensity of the storm; a Google search for Jan Moir, Stephen Gately pulls up 476,000 results. Marks & Spencer’s have requested that the paper remove their advertising from the offending webpage.  The Daily Mail has probably never enjoyed so many hits to their website.

Columnists from Charlie Brooker to Janet Street-Porter have replied, and Stephen Fry, Derren Brown and any number of celebrities have put in their two cents worth.

Meanwhile Moir has responded to the vitriol, saying that it “was never [her] intention” to upset the gay community.  She was simply stating “that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.”

Gately has been laid to rest, but the war over his legacy remains brutal.

No doubt, Moir’s was an atrocious piece; rabid, insensitive, bigoted in essence if not in intention. But in the subsequent furor several voices have defended Moir ,Voltaire-like, in an ‘I detest what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it’ vein.  It is a free speech issue, they argue, one that we should be fighting with educated argument and discourse, not censorship. The very same defense is being used by those who support the BBC’s decision to invite the far right BNP party leader Nick Griffin on to Question Time on Thursday.

It is a fair point, as is the argument that we should not really be too scandalised. This was a piece in the Daily Mail, after all, a publication known for being a tad polemical and offensive. And she’s a columnist who recently called a charity ‘ham-fisted food fascists’. If you wanted rationality and fairness, you should have bought a different paper.

Maybe true, But when all is said and done, does free speech really give a journalist the right to insult someone beyond all comprehension, and to claim their tragedy is a result of their sexual predilections? Just because a paper caters to a specific audience, and seeks to stir debate, that does not make it acceptable for them to feature words that are so patently untrue.

Stephen Gately's funeral

A man has died. He might not have been a great statesman or philosopher and his contribution to music is perhaps negligible. Even his status as a gay icon can be disabused, given that he allegedly outed himself to preempt someone planning to do the very same to him. We may never know the true circumstances of Gately’s death, nor satisfy the morbid curiosity about the detail of his bedroom habits.

But we do know that somewhere, family and friends are mourning the loss of a loved young man cut down in his prime.

Jan Moir was wrong to write what she did.  It is right that we hold her to account for it.