What a boring December it was. Firstly the world didn't end on the 21st as predicted which would have got me out of at least four deadlines for early January. Secondly, that whole Mangaung thing was incredibly dull. Apparently 850 accredited journos flocked to the place all looking for an exclusive that didn't exist. I have to doff my hat to real journos. There they all were, queuing for hours in the sweltering heat for their press cards and spending the best part of the week in great discomfort when they could have been out Christmas shopping or lying by the pool (do journos have houses with pools I wonder?) with a cool one. And all for what? Nothing apart from the re-emergence of the great whitey wet dream candidate Cyril Ramaphosa as a sort of steadying hand on the ANC tiller. Other than that there was nothing of the remotest interest to report.
Which is why it was a great relief when Stephen Mulholland came to the rescue with his first Sunday Times column of the year on the duty same sex parents have to tell their children not to emulate Dad and Dad or Mum and Mum if they want to have kids of their own. I don't know much about the state of sex education in our schools (although I believe there is lots of practical extra-curricular tuition after hours in the rural areas and elsewhere) but I suspect that most kids have already worked out that it takes a male and a female to make a baby by the time they're ten.
After a brief introduction outlining the topic Mulholland got into the swing of things with a short history of great homosexuals and the contributions they have made "from business to the arts, theatre, sport, literature, science, medicine, politics, the media, theatre, music and films". I'm not too sure why theatre got two mentions in the same sentence; maybe Mulholland meant to write hairdressing. So it's quite obvious that Steve is pretty impressed that some of these gays have turned out all right after all. I mean despite this handicap they bear.
He then goes on to mention that he "knowingly encountered" his first gay adult about 60 years ago. Aha, I thought, it's going to be a Catholic priest but no such luck. It was a film critic on a newspaper but the good news (or maybe not) is that he didn't find the youthful Steve a sufficient turn on and left him alone. This is just as well because 60 years ago homosexuality was a criminal offence and one shudders to think of the devastating effect it might have had on an embryonic journalistic career.
Mulholland waffles on with one eye on the word count on the bottom left corner of his computer screen and finally reaches his awkwardly phrased denouement which is that being gay isn't great if you want to preserve the human race. You can't argue with the logic of that now can you?
Within hours of the same column being carried on the BDLive website certain members of the Twitterati were frothing with fury. Mulholland was obviously homophobic they shrieked and shouldn't have been allowed to write such things. What was BDLive doing carrying such rubbish and why had the editor of the Sunday Times even published something which was bound to offend so many gays and gay sympathisers?