Gay People Are Different

Last Sunday I made one of my very rare appearances in front of the camera as a guest on the programme “Shoot The Messenger”, a round up of the weeks current affairs big stories on the cable channel VoxAfrica, the easiest way to describe it to anyone who hasn’t seen it before is a black version of the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. I was on to do the paper review.

Whenever you do a paper review you end up knowing the papers far better than you would normally and noticing stories that any other lazy Sunday morning would pass you by. So it was that a story came to my attention that made me question my whole approach to diversity issues and how we should tackle stories in news and current affairs.

According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Stonewall, gay men and women in Britain are far more likely to end up living alone and have less contact with family in later life than heterosexual people. Unsurprisingly gay people over 50 have far fewer children than their heterosexual counterparts, (approximately a quarter for gay and bisexual men and half for lesbians compared to whopping 90% for their heterosexual counterparts). Older gay people are also far more likely to live alone (40% compared to about a quarter for heterosexuals). This has massive consequences for an aging population and how we look after our elderly in the coming years. Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, is quoted in the Observer saying; "We're facing a care time bomb of institutional ignorance about what a community that makes a £40bn a year contribution to public services will soon – quite properly – be demanding."

The reason why this story struck me is that working in current affairs I have covered the issue of Britain’s aging population several times. It’s what we call a current affairs “hardy perennial”, like the military, the unemployment rate and the NHS it’s an issue we keep on coming back to. However in all the years I have covered the story of an aging population I have never once thought; what does an aging population mean to gay people?  I had never thought of it as a “gay issue”. It might seems a bit naive to say on a blog dedicated to looking at issues about diversity but all people are not the same and that obviously applies to elderly people as well.

Nearly all large current affairs issues affect the whole population but how it impacts on individuals’ lives will nearly always differ depending on your class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, age etc. All too often in television we treat all people the same and don’t delve deeper into how diversity changes the issues. The YouGov survey of the gay elderly provided a new insight into an old problem. Covering diversity makes for better journalism and in my world better journalism means better television. And that is something we should all be trying to achieve. 


After all that however I ran out of time to discuss the gay elderly on the paper review on "Shoot The Messenger". Another guest had spotted a story about plans to prosecute absentee fathers for their children's crimes. Depressingly that seemed too relevant a story to pass up for an African and Carribean British focused programme.