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E-mailLate Boyzone star Stephen Gately attacked by British journalist
Daily Mail reporter pens insensitive, homophobic rant
- Story / Twitterati claims victory in row over Stephen Gately article / Click here
- Video / Gately sings Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone" / Click here
As the much-loved Irish boyband star Stephen Gately, 33, was laid to rest by his friends and family on Saturday, a major controversy erupted in England over an article about the late Irish singer that some are calling homophobic.
Gately’s passing offered British journalist Jan Moir of The Daily Mail a platform to suggest that his death was the result of his being gay. Critics are contending that Moir’s article titled “A Strange, Lonely and Troubling Death,” plumbed new depths of insinuation and homophobia, especially since the singer had not yet been buried as it ran to press.
In her article Moir compared the deaths of Gately, Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson, contending that their early demise was the result of what she calls “dark appetites” and “private vice.” She leaves out exactly what these appetites and vices are, since she’s in the business of demagoguery, not reporting.
Not content to accept the coroner’s findings, Moir writes “something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend…”
Despite the fact that the world’s been told that Gately died of an acute pulmonary oedema, Moir prefers to offer her own more sinister explanation. “Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pajamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again,” Moir argues.
But in fact they do, at any age, with depressing regularity. The coroner didn’t get it wrong. However Moir wants to bash gays so her article discards the actual truth in favor of innuendo and insinuation. “I think if we are going to be honest,” she writes, “we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.”
It wasn’t his undiagnosed heart condition that killed him, Moir argues, it was his lifestyle. Moir contends that Gately died because he was gay and said his “sleazy” death struck “another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.”
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