Water Cooler Chatter Al Porter’s Apology

When Kevin Sacey tried to pivot the revelation of his alleged assault on a 14 year-old boy into a good news coming out story, it went down like a lead balloon with the queer community, who rightfully saw the conflation of homosexuality with predatory sexual behaviour towards a minor as wrong and harmful. Now we have Al Porter, who has always been out of the closet, saying that his alleged groping of other men was “in keeping” with his “flamboyant and outrageous public persona”.

What a bizarre, and misguided apology. Not to put too fine a point on it, being flamboyant and outrageous is one thing, groping someone non-consensually is something entirely other.

Porter’s brand of comedy gay, much like that of the 1970s influences on his act such as Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson, is the innoffensive queer-for-all-the-family, a sexless send-up of homosexuality for the masses. The light-entertainment gay has always passed under the radar, always at the ready with a double entendre while at the same time never frightening straight audiences off with so much as a whiff of what men actually do in bed together.

Whether playing the homosexual eunuch in itself is offensive to gays, in that it seeks to make our sexuality palatable by making people laugh at it, is one thing. What’s really offensive to us here is the employment of words like ‘flamboyant’, ‘outrageous’, which have since time immemorial stood as derisory shorthand for gay, which by turn suggests another story all straight men have internalised about the gays, the one where we’d forcibly try it on with anything in a pair of trousers.

If the allegations are true, it’s more likely that Porter came to see his flamboyant and outrageous public persona as a kind of passport for touching up other men. He could do it under the radar, as such, and it could be palmed off as something inoffensive, possibly by the people he groped and definitely in his own mind (as his apology suggests).

One way or the other, Porter’s apology is not good for the LGBT+ community. Just like Kevin Spacey’s apology, it reinforces a dangerous stereotype about gay men, that sex is the only thing on our minds and that nobody is safe, just because of who we are. It’s a stereotype that leads to hatred and violence; it’s a stereotype that leads to exclusion, and it’s a stereotype that distorts our humanity.

If Al Porter did what his accusers say he did, it’s not because of his “flamboyant” persona, it’s because he thought he could get away with it.