“Next we’ll have people asking us to marry them to their dogs and toasters”

No, nobody really said this, but the spoof report on Newsthump of the successful vote in Parliament to introduce gay marriage (as yet only a Bill, not a Law) was horribly believable.

Of course, who might say something like that? Why, my own local - Hendon - MP, Tory Matthew Offord. He spoke in the debate in the Commons, expounding his weird theory that - well, I'll let you read it for yourself (as reported in the Pink Paper):

”The evidence from around the world is that once marriage is redefined, with a flexible definition, pressure always grows for redefinition.

“There are several advocates of same-sex marriage who openly support changing the law to permit polygamy.”

One friend quipped that Offord supports the human right of his dog Max to enter Parliament, but not equality for gay people. I quipped back who would you rather wake up next to, Max or Matthew? (That kind of day.)

Offord has fallen out over this issue with former Barnet Council Cabinet colleague and now MP for Finchley and Golders Green, Mike Freer. It was interesting to see how fewer than half of Tory MPs voted for gay marriage, although it's their own party that has brought in the bill to allow it. And how more than half of London Tory MPs voted for it. Yes, London is different.

I have decided to mark this momentous historical development by coming out as bisexual. I imagine this is as uninteresting to you as it is to me. I think most bisexuals will tell you that it is much easier to act on one side - the heterosexual side - of this self-definition than the homosexual one. Certainly, in my case, I am hardly free of one man before another one hoves into view. When will I - or they? - ever learn?

In 1978 when I was 13 (!?) the Tom Robinson Band's "Glad to Be Gay" song was in the charts. My friend rang me up in a state of great agitation the first time she heard it, via an archaic institution known as "Dial-a-disc". You rang a telephone number and the one existing (and publicly owned) telephone service played you their record of the week down the line. This week it was "Glad to Be Gay".

We thought there must have been a revolution (sexual revolution?) in London (it for sure hadn't reached West Malling yet).

I feel there are still many revolutions to go before we are anywhere near humans enjoying liberated sexuality (for which we only need to free ourselves!). But we must be creeping there.