Date: Thu, 30 Mar 1995 14:57:09 -0500
From: Gabo3@aol.com

New York Newsday - Thursday, March 30, 1995

Anglo Outing: The Closet in the Cathedral
by Gabriel Rotello

	New York - He's being called "the most hated man in Britain," yet Peter
Tachell seems to love every minute of it. As perhaps he should. After all,
he's winning.
	Tachell is the head of OutRage, a gay liberation group roughly akin to Queer
Nation in this country. OutRage stages kiss-ins and phone zaps and employs a
wide assortment of shock tactics designed to challenge British prejudice
against lesbians, gay men and people with AIDS. But while many progressive
Britons might be inclined to support OutRage for, say, displaying sexy
posters of lesbian and gay couples in front of Conservative Party
headquarters, or possibly even for releasing helium filled condoms in
Westminster Cathedral, most take a decidedly dim view of Tachell's latest
claim to fame: Outing, Anglo style. 
	American activists may have invented outing, but like rock and roll the
whole thing somehow grew louder and bigger and more frenzied when it crossed
the Atlantic. Outing is rocking England these days, and the coverage is gettin
g more hysterical by the minute. Why? Mainly because Tachell has chosen as
his target a central pillar of proper British society: the top leadership of
the Church of England. 
	Britain's pushy journalists actually prompted the current controversy when
they published reports last fall that bishop-elect Michael Turnbull of Durham
had once been convicted of "gross indecency" with a man. Bishop-elect
Turnbull responded by maintaining that he was not now and had never been a
homosexual, a response that did not sit well with Tachell and his merry band.
They accused Turnbull of gross hypocrisy, disrupted his enthronement
ceremony, and then, at a demonstration outside a synod in December, named ten
Church of England bishops as closeted homosexuals.
	This kind of thing has been tried over here, but with little success.
Activist Michael Petrelis, for example, once stood on the steps of the U.S.
capitol and claimed a dozen or more senators and congressmen were gay, but
the press didn't bite and the story went nowhere. Not so in England. Tachell
not only got significant coverage, he got responses from some of his targets.
And hardly what you'd expect.
	A Scottish bishop went on the telly and acknowledged that he was indeed gay,
the first Anglican bishop ever to come out of the closet. Then an English
bishop announced he was getting himself to a monastery. A week later
Tachell's loftiest target, the Bishop of London, the third ranking leader of
the Church of England, announced that he was celibate but that his sexuality
was "ambiguous." Which was widely interpreted to mean that he, too, is
homosexual.
	In the face of all this, the 36 bishops and archbishops of the Anglican
Church agreed to rethink their official don't ask-don't tell approach to
homosexuality. The Archbishop of Canterbury even called a press conference in
which he unexpectedly condemned gay baiting and told the faithful that
homosexuals were made "in the image of God." And in perhaps the most shocking
development, the head of England's Roman Catholics, Cardinal Basil Hume,
issued a truely extrordinary and unorthodox statement saying "Love between
two persons, whether of the same sex or of a different sex, is to be
treasured and respected."
	It's easy to condemn Tachell. He's not a very sympathetic character. His
campaign smacks of what the Independent calls "sanctimonious fanaticism." He
has divided Britain's lesbian and gay community and absolutely outraged almost
 everybody else. The Queen, one can safely assume, is not amused. But it's
also true that Tachell's nastiness has done more to shake up the complacent
British closet and rattle the Anglican church's institutional homophobia than
anything anybody's done in years of organizing and demonstrating. 
	"Our tactics are moderate compared with the extremism of those who deny us
human rights," Tachell recently said. Well, maybe. To me his tactics seem
nasty as hell. But if he's the most hated gay leader in England, he's also
arguably the most effective. 


(Gabriel Rotello's column appears in New York Newsday every Thursday. His
email address is Gabo3@aol.com)