Julie Burchill
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pon discovering that Sinéad
O’Connor has converted to Islam,
I was about as shocked as a Yuletide
shopper hearing the opening bars of
Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ while
picking up last-minute stocking-fillers.
It had to happen, didn’t it? Douglas
Murray attributes home-grown Islamic
conversion to the retreat of the secular
West from spiritual life — the Search For
Meaning — but I don’t give the clowns
that much credit. A vast amount of male
Islamic conversion takes place in prison
— suddenly thugs have the blessing of
a higher power to torture, rape and kill
— and with women I think it’s often
a combination of grieving for fading
physical attractiveness and attention-
seeking: ‘Look at me in my lovely special
modest costume, you sluts!’ What I find
particularly offensive are those perfectly
sane women who voluntarily hijab-up
— the Swedish politicians visiting Iran,
the American feminists on the Women’s
March — while all across the Muslim
world heartbreakingly brave women
are paying with their liberty and lives
in order to break free of the shroud
of submission. What sort of woman
identifies with a religion which supports
the oppression, torture and murder of
women who dare to want freedom? The
sort of woman who writes love letters
to serial killers on Death Row, I reckon.
Will Sinéad get around to that one next?
I
’m keen to see the new film about
Queen. Freddie Mercury wasn’t a
normal old girl-shy gayer but rather a
swashbuckling sexual omnivore. He once
remarked to a teenage Carrie Fisher as
they lay in bed together after sex and
she said she’d presumed he was 100 per
cent gay that ‘A bloke like me needs
extra.’ Bisexuality has got a bad rap in
recent years, chucked in with look-at-me
sexual preciousness such as polyamory
and pansexualism, but in its raw form
there is something attractively rough and
ready about it:‘ I fancy that — let’s be
’aving it!’ As Freddie said: ‘Men, women,
cats — you name it, I’ll go to bed with
it.’ Indeed, he went so far as to dedicate
his album Mr Bad Guy to one of his
cats (Jerry) followed by the tag ‘Screw
everybody else’. That Jerry must have
been really good in bed...
T
hough in theory we’re free to swear
more, it’s all strangely joyless,
removing our adolescent glee in smut by
insisting that anything is sayable, so long
as it’s on the approved list. You can say the
C-word (insulting to women though it is)
but not the T-word (insulting to pretend
women as it is) on TV. I miss the dirty
words of my pre-PC girlhood. Whenever
I mention this on Facebook, the thread
comes to gloriously lewd life as respectable,
respected grown-ups revel in rudeness asthey name their favourites. ‘Nympho!
Flasher! Randy! Sex maniac! Bum
bandit! Living in sin! Knockers, knackers,
leg-overs!’ Millennials think they
invented sex, but they’re right up there
with the Victorians when it comes to
coining boring words to describe mucky
delights.S
ometimes it seems that our free
western society — which without
doubt provides the best lives for the
greatest number of people — veers
between genuinely worthwhile moral
crusades (abolition of slavery, female
suffrage) and pointless nagging. Take the
current fuss about the alleged loneliness
epidemic. I’ve got no patience with
people who say they’re lonely, unless of
course they’re ill and/or house-bound —
just go out and get a volunteer job. Three
years ago, when my son committed
suicide, I started working at my local
Mind shop and I can honestly say that it
did more to return me to my naturally
effervescent state than sex, religion and
politics put together.I
t’s no secret that my career has
been up the creek for several years,
principally because I was on the warpath
against left-wing anti-Semitism and
bullying trans activists long before
people caught on to the evils of both
of them. I had to some extent been
written off as a loony. I was happy with
my semi-retired life, and I didn’t need
the money, but I’ve been a writer since
I was 17 and it’s been lovely to have
another unexpected bash at a different
branch of it as I did recently with the
play I co-wrote with Jane Robins, People
Like Us. It sold out before the first
performance, is likely to be revived early
next year and has netted us a nomination
as Most Promising Playwrights in the
Offies. This is not, as I first imagined,
for my heroic contribution to sales of
alcohol over the past year. The Offies
are the Off West End Theatre Awards.
Considering I’ll be 60 next year, I’m very
happy to be Promising at last.Julie Burchill is currently writing a
musical, Hard Times On Easy Street,
about a love triangle set against the
savage gentrification of Soho.