Garry Otton: Radical Historian

“Oh my god, he’s so easy to get drunk,” says Garry Otton, of himself. “Half a glass and he’s anybody’s.” We’re having dinner and a bottle of Chablis at the Slug and Lettuce in Edinburgh’s Omni centre. He’s just been to see the Fringe production of What’s Wrong With Angry?, which he’s very enthusiastic about, and I’m scrawling soundbites on bits of paper because I don’t have a dictaphone. And we agree that we’re both angry, about lots of things, and that anger can be both positive and necessary.

Garry’s the man behind 'Scottish Media Monitor', which ran as a regular feature in ScotsGay magazine for ten years. It took aim at homophobic and anti-sex attitudes prevalent in the press - like the blame-the-victim coverage of hate crimes. “It started after the first murder in Queen’s Park [in Glasgow]. A girl and two lads went to a party boasting about what they’d done – his face was unrecognisable, they’d jumped up and down on his head.

“[At the time] the Herald was absolutely chocka with religionists. Media Monitor just rolled on – I began to be more sensitive to the media. There were soft but powerful religionists, like Eddie Barnes, the former editor of the Scottish Catholic Observer, who went on to Scotland On Sunday.” I mention the tendency of Scotland’s papers to wheel out a religious spokesperson for a ‘balanced viewpoint’ – almost always a condemnatory one, despite the diversity among churches - when gay themes are covered. “Any story on the Catholic Church, would they wheel out a gay representative?” he asks rhetorically. “I took Scottish Media Monitor very seriously. All these terrible stories, these cries for help – people were sending me envelopes stashed with cuttings.”

Out of all this grew his first book, Sexual Fascism, published by Ganymede with a foreword by Peter Tatchell. His second book, Badge of Shame, is currently being serialised in ScotsGay before publication. “It’s about [...] the repeal of Section 28. It’s an important chapter in Scottish history. It’s useful to write from my perspective as a gay man, rather than the press perspective which is largely from the Catholic Church and Brian Souter’s perspective.” A quick recap for those who were elsewhere at the time: Section 28 was a piece of legislation from the Thatcher government which banned local authorities from “promoting homosexuality”. It was basically unworkable in law, and very much open to interpretation, but in order to avoid conflict many authorities opted to just not mention homosexuality at all. Its effect was most felt in schools where lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils – as well as those with LGB parents – could expect to be written out of the curriculum, and a blind eye was often turned to homophobic bullying. When repeal was finally on the cards, Stagecoach boss Brian Souter poured a million pounds into his Keep The Clause campaign, and the media delivered plenty of moral panic around the prospect of ‘gay sex lessons in schools’.

“Scotland in 2000 for gay people must have been like being Jewish in the thirties,” Garry recalls. “There were stories in the press of an international conspiracy. There were smashed windows, diagrams in the press of how to spot a homosexual, beatings, murders, stories withheld from other editions, huge amounts of money coming from abroad against repeal. There are ten chapters out so far, and believe me I’m only warming up, it gets worse.”

He continues to express concerns about the SNP – “not just because Salmond took half a million of Souter’s money, but because of behind-the-scenes talks with the Catholic Church. There’ve been talks with Souter’s foundation – whose main aim is to promote religion – to administer electro-shock treatment to drug addicts. Salmond has also written in the Scottish Catholic Observer that he’ll do what he can to find a way round for Catholics to discriminate against gay people.”

While debates rage on about issues like gay marriage, Garry has a different take on it: “Marriage is under threat. Marriage is in crisis and it’s like ‘quick, get the gays on board, they’re good at reviving something that’s dead’. Marriage as an institution is very fragile. It’s expensive, shallow, an excuse to party. I see too many [heterosexual] women who put their whole life and soul into the ceremony and come out the other side depressed, because - what now? They’re not sure where to take their lives after marriage.”

In the past, Garry illustrated love stories for Jackie magazine. “My pictures were distributed to nine countries. There was a montage of them on TV, set to I Wanna Know What Love Is. It was very romantic but then I quit because I felt, ‘It’s a lie’. It was always hetero. I was feeding this lie to people.” Having illustrated heterosexuality for a living, it’s no wonder he’s sensitive to the invisibility that’s frequently imposed on queer people – and the internalised homophobia that results. “Gay people are incredibly homophobic,” he laments, “like the gay outdoors club I went to where they were basically like ‘don’t draw attention to yourself’. It was full of people who are desperate to assimilate, guys desperately trying to be butch and masculine. There aren’t many working class people there either: they’re mostly very middle class and trying to emulate straight people.

I want to celebrate the feminine side of gay men - too many clubs give negative messages to feminine men and boys. Gay is getting more conservative, and youth today is getting more conservative, far more conservative than youth in the 70s or 80s.” This assimilationist trend meshes well with an anti-sex climate. “I’ve always seen sex as an art, a creative force,” Garry says. “I love the writers Avedon Carol and Susie Bright because they’re positive about sex, upbeat about sex. I’m tired of negative things about sex in the papers, like dogging, cruising. We have the biggest heart attack rate in Europe and these people are going out walking and exercising - we should promote it!”