How gay is Britain, and is it just the chattering classes who 'accept' 'us'?

A Labour MP is exposed for subscribing to a gay internet dating service, but middle England condemns his choice of underwear, not his sexual orientation. A gay pop star is at No1 - and no one bats an eyelid. So has Britain finally accepted homosexuality, asks Libby Brooks

It was a deviation for which the decent soul of middle England could muster minimal forgiveness. In a poll for the Mail on Sunday last weekend, the public were not gentle in their censure of Chris Bryant, the Labour MP lately exposed as an active subscriber to the internet dating site Gaydar. His underwear, revealed in the near-naked self-portrait that Bryant posted on the site alongside a profile in which he described himself as "very versatile", was deemed wholly unacceptable. Only 3% of women, it transpires, prefer a man to wear Y-fronts.
The rest of the results were rather milder in tone. That the honourable member for Rhondda had a right to privacy, it was agreed, was beyond question. That his decision to share with the online community his love of "a good long f***" was not a resigning issue was similarly supported by the majority of respondents. Instead, the behaviour that most exercised those questioned was not related to Bryant's sexuality, nor his chosen means of its expression, at all.

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From a recent interview with one of the UK's most popular television presenters:
Q Are you really in the gayers or is it just
your TV persona?

A It was my agent's idea...She said, 'How do you
feel about going homo? It's the new black.'

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