THE CLASSICS
damekellyholmes: Club Classics next week BRILLIANT!!!! What's your club classic?
Charliecondou: @damekellyholmes This is mine
Charliecondou: Actually, this is my club classic
semra: I seriously went to disco heaven last night.. THANKYOU and please can you make that night happen every week?! @DjGuyWilliams
thesisterbliss: @semra @djguywilliams can I come next time if I'm not working? Ready for some disco heaven a la shorditch pool parties!
DjGuyWilliams: @thesisterbliss @semra was such a top night, so many great comments looking at boxing day, you both around? X
Charliecondou: @DjGuyWilliams oi oi
DjGuyWilliams: @Charliecondou I'm you 32 495th follower, how will u remember me! ;-)
Charliecondou: @DjGuyWilliams I've already forgotten you
DjGuyWilliams: @Charliecondou sorry wrong number
Charliecondou: RT @Jessica_Derrick: One thing me and kelly rowland have in common - SHIT 'im really ill i cant make it' voices on the phone...
misterjorgensen: @Charliecondou Did you see the disgraceful article in the Irish Independent that refers to you?
Charliecondou: @misterjorgensen I did indeed. The article was claptrap but the comments were hilarious
misterjorgensen: @Charliecondou Absolutely. You'd better get on with your writing!
Above: Charlie Condou played Jonatton Yeah? in TV series “Nathan Barley.”
EARLIER REPORTS FROM IRELAND
londonirish74: @Charliecondou you are mentioned in the Irish Sunday independent this morning. Article by Eamon Delaney. You may have seen? X
Charliecondou: @londonirish74 No I haven't! Do you have the link?
londonirish74: @Charliecondou aha. Here’s a copy.
Loud and proud gays want to take over rest of society
http://www.independent.ie
Increasingly, it seems as if the homosexual community has forgotten that it is the minority, writes Eamon Delaney
Sunday October 30 2011
AS the cliche goes, some of my best friends are gay. I used to live in a very gay area, the West Village in New York. Indeed, enjoying their nightlife and cultural atmosphere, I was even accused of 'trading' off the fun, with my copycat denim jacket and tartan shirt, while not actually joining them.
However, like many, I've recently begun to get impatient with the endless trumpeting of gay 'identity', and the growing appetite for more and more rights and privileges.
I'm not being reactionary and I'm all for gay rights and an end to prejudice and discrimination, and always have, but at this stage it seems as if the tables have turned and a minority community -- the gays -- want to increasingly change mainstream culture to suit them.
For example, why is civil partnership not enough, and why do gays also want marriage, a surely traditional heterosexual facility, which gays used to see as patriarchal, and 'straight'?
Many gays also feel this way and resist the increasing politicisation and institutionalising of gay life. Last week, in the Guardian, a newspaper almost obsessed with things gay and 'progressive', columnist Suzanne Moore objected to gay marriage on the basis that it was a conservative 'selling-out'. Being gay should be edgy and experimental, she said.
But isn't this part of the problem? Many gays want to have it both ways. Thus gay magazines are full of ads endorsing late-night gyms, sex lines and a freewheeling sexual activity which would be dismissed as sleazy in heterosexual culture. But we also have articles that suggest a yearning for bourgeois respectability.
Likewise, travel books, such as the trendy Rough Guides, scold the mainstream 'meat-market' discos of foreign capitals but provide plenty of details for gay pick-up spots. Many red-blooded straight men might wish that society would endorse their own ambitions with such PC gusto.
Also, on the issue of gays adopting, it makes many of us uneasy and impatient with the idea that raising a child with homosexual parents is totally equivalent to a child being raised by its natural heterosexual parents. It patently is not, and it is a crazy concession to PC culture to say that it is.
I watched a Frontline programme recently on the topic and I thought I was seeing things when I heard Ivana Bacik refusing to be happy with a societal acceptance of gay adoption but insisting on full equality with heterosexual parenting. David Quinn gave the other perspective, but he was almost falling over himself to be reasonable about it, just looking for that concession that the natural, or heterosexual, parents were not just the same as gay parents.
Those expressing opposition or even concerns were shouted down in the television studio. However, from where I was watching, in a local bar, the viewers were all of the contrary opinion, and were amazed by this departure in opinions but also blankly accepting of it as part of the growing gulf which now exists between mainstream society and the liberal elites and quango-led experts who want to change and improve our lives.
For example, the Guardian now has a feature called The Three of Us in its family section, a weekly diary by one of two gay men raising a child with their female friend, the natural mother. Two dads, one mum -- one family is the sub headline.
I don't know about you but this strikes me as strange.
And the counter-argument that divorced kids often have three parents knocking around is fatuous and nonsense. A child has two parents, whether separated or not. However, it is one thing to have such a diary, but it also seems almost designed to offend and irritate those who do not agree with this new radical departure in parenting. Thus, last week, the writer Charlie Condou questioned the whole convention of women being seen as naturally connected to their children. (Not for nothing is the Irish Independent's weekly supplement called Mothers and Babies.)
But no, Charlie went to the Alternative Families show in the UK and saw all the gay dads with their children. It's just the same for him, it seems, and, he "stood around and chatted about the absurdity and irrelevance of the 'biological question'". Oh, please. What about breastfeeding?
And there are other things about the growing gay rights movement which make outsiders impatient and uneasy. Like, when did the gays and lesbian community become the 'LGBT', an acronym that also includes Bisexual and Transgender?
Sorry, but this is broadening the boundaries in a way that makes many of us understandably sceptical.
Bisexual? Isn't that reminiscent of the loose Seventies sexual experimentation? How many bisexuals are there? And will the plain people of Ireland be happy with legalising rights for, and spending money on, all of this?
The new Human Rights Commissioner for Northern Ireland, Michael O'Flaherty, is a gay rights advocate and says that he sees all of this as part of his rights agenda. Again, I raise all these things, not out of reactionary resistance but just to question the direction and motivation of the whole sexual rights agenda.
There is also the danger surely that this insatiable demand for more and more recognition and identity (gay quotas?), will eventually alienate mainstream opinion and undo some of the valuable gains made in this country by, for example, David Norris and others, in eliminating prejudice and discrimination.
Originally published in IRISH SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
Charliecondou: @londonirish74 Thanks! At lunch, I'll read it later x
londonirish74: @Charliecondou Bon apetit. X
LATER THAT SUNDAY NIGHT…
JakeCanuso: Can someone tell me what I came dresses as? Aimed for Catman burglar. Not sure I succeeded. pic.twitter.com/z3aljZUp
Charliecondou: @JakeCanuso Thats what Tulisa wore last night!
Charliecondou: RT @SarahKSilverman: A lady wrote 2 me "FUCK YOU!"
I clicked on her profile- it says "I'm inspired by beauty, exist 4 love & live to be free"
joemuggs: @charliecondou WOTCHER!
Charliecondou: @joemuggs Ello. I followed your other profile, then realised you dont use it anymore so unfollowed. In case you were wondering
joemuggs: @Charliecondou oh I just assumed you'd developed a sudden interest in dubstep and profanity.
Charliecondou: @joemuggs That too obv
davidchild: I am developing a rather large crush on @charliecondou's husband. He is rather dishy.
JOJEHARVEY: Happy Belated 21st Birthday to Trade. Baby Bro is DJing there this morning. I am in my pyjamas. Know where I'd rather be. (here)
Charliecondou: @JOJEHARVEY I was just thinking that. Everytime the clocks go back I remember there's a Trade party. I SO cant be arsed to go though
JOJEHARVEY: @Charliecondou I delicately avoided Steven's texts to join - extra hour in bed far preferable to an extra hour gurning in Muscle Mary Alley
Charliecondou: @JOJEHARVEY I knew my Trade days were over when I popped in one morn with a coffee,croissant and the Observer & tried to find a quiet corner
JOJEHARVEY: @terryronald @Charliecondou it was its 21st birthday party last night. Think they do stuff like that, not much more x
Charliecondou: @terryronald @JOJEHARVEY I think so, though I havent stepped foot into discotheque since 1993
JOJEHARVEY: @terryronald @Charliecondou In a 70s Jilly Cooper adaptation once I wrote the lines: We're going to a wine bar. - What's that? - It's like a pub, where you drink wine. *takes a bow*
Charliecondou: @JOJEHARVEY You're wasted on Emmerdale
JOJEHARVEY: @Charliecondou thank you for spotting that.
