Gay celebrities condemn 'vile' media coverage

Gay celebrities and campaigners have condemned as "vile" and "out of touch" a resurgence of homophobic media reporting in the wake of plans to equalise adoption laws as well as continuing fall-out from the Paul Burrell affair.

Businessman Ivan Massow, comic Graham Norton and actor-turned-MEP Michael Cashman are among the figures who have criticised editors for using gay stereotypes and offensive language to sell newspapers.

Their call comes as the Independent Television Commission prepares to suspend indefinitely an advert for Yahoo!, the internet company, following a flurry of complaints by gay viewers. The commercial, in which a naked man is left tied to a tree on his stag night only to be stalked by a predatory homosexual in a raincoat, will be pulled off air tomorrow.

News of the groundswell of unrest among the gay community follows weeks of sustained homophobic reporting in the right-wing press, led by the Daily Mail. Only last week, the paper's Ephraim Hardcastle diary branded Norton a "bottom-feeding nonentity" in an item about Roger Moore's appearance on his Channel 4 chat show.

A week earlier, the same column carried an item laced with innuendo about allegations stemming from the Burrell affair. It read: "Did a member of the Royal Family really couple with a servant? Former valet George Smith, who alleges homosexual rape by a Prince Charles intimate, says he saw it. So who played the passive role? The royal, according to Mr Smith. Talk about lèse-majesté!"

On Friday, the Mail launched another tirade, this time against Angela Mason, new director of the Government's Women and Equality Unit. She was unfit for the job, it suggested, because of her previous role as head of the gay pressure group Stonewall.

The Mail is far from the only paper to jump on the bandwagon. Last month, The Sunday Telegraph carried a front-page story criticising the Government for granting asylum to two Jamaican homosexuals who had fled "severe homophobia" in their home country. And The Sun ran a feature headlined "The Westminster Village People", which posed the question: "Why are so many of our MPs gay?"

Speaking for Graham Norton, who was in Ireland, his agent, Melanie Coupland, said of the Mail's attack: "It's vile, and Graham would treat it with the contempt it deserves."

The gay rights activist Peter Tatchell said the "stereotyping and scaremongering about gay people is scarily reminiscent of the way the Nazis demonised the Jews".

He added that disapproving stories about the activities of gays and lesbians often revealed a thinly disguised prurient interest in the subject.

Labour MEP Michael Cashman linked what he sees as an increase in homophobic reporting to the current legislative battle over gay adoption rights as well as David Blunkett's announcement last week that he was to abolish the offence of buggery. "The tabloids are caught in a timewarp but the homophobia in the media goes a lot further than that," he said. "The tabloids push a subject relentlessly and then the broadsheets pitch in and, before you know it, what was just tittle-tattle becomes an 'ongoing story' which requires rebuttal." But, he added: "On this and a lot of other subjects the papers are out of touch with their readership. The public has moved on on this issue.

"Lesbians and gay men are now much more out than ever before. You have openly gay politicians and gay builders."

Mr Massow said that the problem stemmed from the fact that homophobia was still perceived as "a legitimate form of prejudice". He said: "You couldn't say half the things the Daily Mail does routinely about gay people if you were talking about ethnic or religious groups."

But the columnist Matthew Parris, who became the Tory party's first openly gay MP in the 1980s, was more sanguine.

"It doesn't bother me much because there's no longer any reason to be afraid of these people," he said. "We are much more confident than we were. They can say what they like."