COMMENT: WHAT THE MURDER OF IAN BAYNHAM TELLS US ABOUT GAY LONDON

The death last month of a man from a homophobic attack has sent shock-waves through London’s gay community today.

Ian Baynham, 62, was set upon by feral two teenage girls after a night out on 28 September. He spent the subsequent weeks in the Royal London Hospital until his life support machine was turned off.

The heinous nature of this crime will revolt any right thinking citizen. It was the top story on the Evening Standard website and was sprawled across all the papers. The online editorials were full of outraged comments and the so called ‘gay community’ are rightly reacting with incensed horror.

The question, however, is why did it take so long to provoke this reaction? Why, when the attack occurred back in September, did it not receive the coverage it deserved? I am not referring just to the mainstream press, but to our gay press.

I am talking, of course, about the gay press that is available to the largest audience – the scene magazines anyone can pick up in the bars and clubs. The magazines that are more concerned with peddling the intimidating body fascism, untapped hedonism and commercialism that reduces the gay experience to the relentless, topless posing of lost, drug addled nights.

I am referring to the pages dominated by the club promoters who hold themselves up as champions of the ‘gay community’, the same people who wheel GHB casualties out of the back door to avoid undesired publicity, their one concern being the fall of their own egotistical slice of Babylon.

The fact is that when attacks like this happen these kind of magazines are loath to surrender more than a few centimetres of their sex fuelled advertising space to one of the most pertinent and serious threats to gay Londoners’ safety and liberty in decades.

It was the responsibility of gay London to react to the assault on Ian Baynham when it happened back in September. Moreover, it was the responsibility of the free gay press to ensure it had the coverage that it so warranted. Their duty was to bring this lethal trend of homophobia to the forefront of our minds and to direct and galvanise our reactions to it.

That, however, is the function of a community press and there is little left of the gay community in London. It has been reduced to a twisted march of lust and greed. The marchers, of course, look beautiful in the latest D&G and Gucci, but have now spent so long oiling their perfectly buffed bodies and squeezing into their Aussie Bums that they have forgotten to carry their placards.

Nor are they walking together anymore. After all it’s pretty tough to co-ordinate body movements when you’re off your head on Ketamine. Instead they bump into each other once in a while, rarely speaking and often barely looking at each other. Why squander time doing that when you can just grope at what’s bulging through the trunks?

Today’s gay scene is quick, easy and devoid of consequences. There’s no need to think about feelings or care. It’s considered a waste of energy and, more to the point, it doesn’t sell. It is not fashionable to make feelings visible.
Why then has the care gone? In an age where gays enjoy unprecedented visibility and rights and where HIV can be treated with pills, the political fire is dying out. Complacency is becoming the watchword of our age. Why face up to the unpalatable realities which still exist when it is so much easier, and more fun to bask with reckless abandon in the triumphs that an earlier generation won for us?

Ian Baynham’s death reminds us that if we do not reignite this fire and fight to regain the courageous kinship of the past we risk extinction once more.

There are people in gay London who recognise this and are stirring us into action once more. A few weeks ago Half Way To Heaven, the pub in the street near where Ian Baynham was attacked, held a benefit for the Albert Kennedy Trust. It was in honour of the birthday of David Morley who was brutally murdered in a similar homophobic attack in 2004.

The camaraderie in the air was awe inspiring and the convergence of defiant spirit truly heartrending. For just a few hours in that crammed pub a sense of thoughtfulness, humanity and belonging had returned to gay London. As the proud punters sauntered up to the bar, their eyes rested on a notice about another recent homophobic attack in the same area. It emboldened them more still. The sad thing was that for many it was the first time they had been alerted to the senseless events that would leave the unnamed victim dead just weeks later.

Alex Hopkins is a writer and journalist. His blog can be found at http://alexhopkins.wordpress.com/