Think pink: soon you will have to

Mark Simpson on why dumbing down is really gaying up

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 November 2000 01.35 GMT

It is true: there really is a "gay conspiracy". It stretches its pink tentacles into every aspect of our contemporary culture, from TV to music, publishing to politics. It is a conspiracy aimed at exploiting and extending the hegemony of mass culture. In fact, so successful is it that everybody talks about "dumbing down", instead of what is obviously "gaying up". Habits previously associated with gays, such as nightclubs, promiscuity and diva worship, are all the rage with straight people. Pop music is dominated by silly boy bands and bossy girl groups - usually with gay puppetmasters pulling the strings. Even politics is under the gay sway: New Labour's populist "image-led" makeover was masterminded by a gay Svengali prince of pinkness, while New Toryism's William Hague sports a buzz-cut makeover that makes him looks like a gay man's interpretation of Grant Mitchell.

It wasn't always this way. Not so long ago homos were involved in a very different kind of conspiracy - a conspiracy of high culture against the hoi polloi. Homos were aesthetes par excellence - colonising and often monopolising the arts and disdaining the mob. Oscar Wilde was the very symbol of the homo as aesthete: in fact it was his arrest and very public trial which made aestheticism "homosexual".

When high culture was "hot", this is where gays - who, being largely rootless, tend to align themselves like iron filings with the poles of magnetic influence - ended up. In the postwar period, the rise of consumerism and "pop culture" reorientated British society's attention away from the "highbrow" to the "lowbrow", from elitism to populism.

The comic tragedy of Kenneth Williams' life was bound up with the way that he was caught between these two poles, forever oscillating backwards and forwards between "high" and "low" - rather like his voice; which went from "dead common" to "dead posh", often in the same sentence. Of course, even the grandest of the homo aesthetes had an interest in low culture, or at least the lower orders. What Wilde described as "feasting with panthers" was what Williams would have called simply "rough trade". Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst are examples of contemporary literary gay writers who straddle "high" and "low" in their work - a night at the opera might in their books be followed by a visit to the leather club and an exciting encounter with a despatch rider.

And there were some homosexuals who rejected both high and low culture and instead were drawn to a "bohemian" or "alternative" culture. The last gasp of any kind of alternative culture in Britain was punk, which was incubated in gay pubs and clubs because punks, bless 'em, thought that gays were outsiders like themselves.

Queer proved to be more shortlived than Madonna's "lesbian" period, and failed to reverse the main post-Stonewall gay political strategy - "we're just the same as you". Or, for that matter, the consequent homogenisation of gay culture. This is why gays are perfectly situated by the beginning of the New Millennium to exploit and extend the reign of mass culture. Having gone spectacularly mainstream themselves, gays set about mainstreaming everything else and advancing themselves by gaying up. A cultural elite - with their history of camp, irony, mastery of surfaces and haircuts - they disguised themselves and their influence by pretending to be naffer than the naffs.

• Mark Simpson's The Queen is Dead (Arcadia, £11.99) has just been published