Reflections of a stormy petrel

Actually, I do think that Joss Whedon has something of a prejudice against male homosexuals. I do not mean a violent, burn'em-at-the-stake, pathological hatred, but simply the kind of negative blokeish feeling that was, not so long ago, virtually universal. In all seven years of the series, I have not seen a single gay male character treated with respect; on the other hand, I have seen a considerable amount of negative humour or unpleasant portrayals. The underlying homosexual attraction between the three nerds, for instance, is both fairly evident and fairly negative - it leads Jonathan and Andrew to let their better sense be overruled by their dominant partner, and is at any rate associated personalities so ludicrous and ineffective as to count as a classical negative description of effeminacy. At the same time, there are jokes of which homosexuality or buggery are the implicit catchphrase; for instance, when Jonathan and Andrew are fleeing to Mexico and find themselves with a truck driver who seems to have designs on their virtue. When they realize what he wants, we are meant to laugh. A good few villains and vampires, beginning with Mister Trick, have high-camp attitudes and hints of effeminacy. And I think that this is not actually changed by the supposedly positive portrayal of lesbianism, which seems to me to reduce itself partly to the well-known male fantasy, and partly to a portrayal of two damaged women - Tara with her oppressive family background, and Willow with her dangerously addictive personality. On the whole, I find the interest of "queer theorists" and such in BtVS sadly misplaced.

Most of us know that ever since the bloke with the beard took over Cuba, homosexuality - associated with the island's supposed pre-revolutionary past as a haven of Yanqui degeneracy - has been suppressed, persecuted and punished by (what passes in Cuba for) law. Well, no more. Raul Castro seems to have noticed that his putative allies in the extreme left have changed their view on that little matter - and so, from one minute to the next, Cuba has turned from hell for homosexuals to San Francisco without the Diet Coke. In a few days, with the speed and efficiency of tyranny, the Cuban government has passed rules that allow the changing of one's identity, sex-change operations and the eventual legalization of homosexual unions.

Now understand me: I have absolutely no intention of making any direct comparison between the promotion of "gay marriage" and the like, and the horrors of the nineteen-thirties. However little I may like some features of this (and on sex-change operations I am agnostic), it is simply not on the same moral level as the promotion of mass murder. So I positively beg the looking-for-offence brigade not to distort what I am about to say. But this sudden and extreme change of tack by a hardened tyranny looking for support where they had previously had enemies reminds me of nothing so much as Mussolini's appalling race laws of 1938. Apart from their own native loathsomeness, which itself cries vengeance to Heaven, these vicious perversions of the concept of law were execrable because they represented a complete about-face on a matter on which Mussolini had been consistent since 1919, namely toleration and protection of Italy's Jewish population. He sold the Jews down the river, and broke his word given to them over and over again, in order to align himself to a man whom he had previously treated as an enemy and actually nearly gone to war with only four years earlier. Now countries change allies, and Italy's reasons to do so in 1938 were only too easy to see; but to change ally is one thing, and to change your whole ideology to suit your ally is another. Mussolini made himself, not the ally, but the slave of Hitler; in that one dreadful act there were the inevitable seeds of all the seven years that followed.

Of course the Cuban Communist about-face is not on the same level. It does not, for one thing, represent the State suddenly turning a hate-ridden and murderous face to a class of citizens it had always protected before. Where murderousness and inhumanity are concerned, el partido is pretty much where it has always been, not better, but not worse. What is clearly reminiscent of Mussolini is the way that a tyranny throws away decades of practice and implicit principle, however bad, not out of principle but out of transparent and undignified grovelling before an ally.