APPENDIX 2
In the course of BBC2 TV programme Taboo,
transmitted 12 December 2001, while the text and the cartoon
drawing, published in Gay News, were shown on screen, Miss
Bakewell said:
"The other institution you criticised at
your peril (was) the Christian church. Blasphemy was an offence
and still is. In the 1970s a poem, an explicit homosexual fantasy
of the centurion taking Christ's body down from the cross, was
bound to offend . . .
"I laid my lips around the tip of that
great cock, the instrument of our salvation, our eternal joy.
The shaft still throbbed anointed with death's final ejaculation.
I knew he'd had it off with other men, with Herod's guards, with
Pontius Pilate, with John the Baptist, with Paul of Tarsus, with
foxy Judas—a great kisser, with the rest of the twelve together
and apart."
James Kirkup's poem The Love That Dares to
Speak Its Name, pushed what had been a tacit tolerance of
blasphemy too far. It was published in Gay News in 1976.
Mary Whitehouse took out a private prosecution, the first blasphemy
case since 1921".
26 June 2002
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