20 MAY 1995, Page 55

Low life

Mixing up the sexes

Jeffrey Bernard

Iam fairly appalled and certainly fed up with the amount of fuss and coverage that the media gives so-called gays. There are now, and have been for some time, an eli- tist group with as little tolerance towards heterosexuals as the non-smokers have about those of us who puff away. Anyway, I can't go on using that silly word 'gay' to describe homosexuals who, when I was a young man, were 'queer'.

The armed forces have at last discovered that there is s handful of homosexuals between the decks in the Royal Navy and one of them who appeared on television last night was a Lieutenant Commander. Now the MOD is at panic stations instead of action stations. A Dutch government official claimed that the Dutch forces are well-stocked with poofs which comes as no surprise in a country whose patron saint was a boy who had the nerve to stick his finger into a dyke and leave it there for hours. But why the government should balk at the idea of lesbians in the Wrens I don't know.

Had the men from the MOD seen the Colony Room Club in the 1950s, they would have realised just what good officer material such ladies are. There was a Sergeant Major in our part of the Armoured Corps who was queer and who prowled about the showers by the gymnasi- um but in no way could have been called gay. Some idiot poof announced publicly the other day that only homosexuals expe- rience true and wonderful sex and that we closet heterosexuals don't appreciate how good it is and how much we are missing.

My own flaccid organ, now an OAP, twitched at the insult and ignorance of that statement but then my whole body twitched with horror at two adjacent paragraphs in the Times which stated that the Bishop of Dover had blessed 12 lorry-loads of calves and sheep bound for France and the dinner table. I was reminded somehow of the preacher in the Western who told John Wayne that the meek shall inherit the earth. He said, 'Yeah, six feet of it.' The other item illustrated the path that science and not God is leading us along. A pity there seems to be no saner middle road for us ordinary people to take. But a plant has been discovered in Sarawak that lives on the exhaled carbon monoxide in the breath of ants and the nitrogen in their droppings. Presumably a group of scientists, probably made up of queers and lesbians, were given a grant of £500,000 to look into this phe- nomenon. In any event, you can be sure that the money spent was enough to have kept the homeless and unemployed in Lon- don is osso bucco and calves' liver for a week or two.

But even The Spectator can sometimes rise to reporting equally bizarre stories as there are in the Times or on the very enter- taining page three of the Daily Telegraph. The woman complaining rather hysterically about mixed wards slightly got up my nose. In my last half dozen stays in the Middlesex Hospital, I have been delighted that the wards have been mixed and yet I, too, can find reasons for wanting to get out of them. If I had been in that nuthouse packed with litigants from America, I would have sued the Middlesex for putting me under stress and psychological shock and damage. Until I broke my hip three years ago and was put in a mixed ward, I never realised that women went to the lavatory. But they do, and even the Royal Family must.

Women are famous for being braver than men, but sitting around the ashtrays on the landing it is noticeable that the women moan all day. Usually and very sadly about their wombs. But they do go on and on and the breath of the average female patient could keep a jungle of rub- ber plants from Sarawak alive for months and months.