Heterophobia

ASTRANGE rash spread over some of London's gay clubs a few years ago.

A handful issued an injunction: No Straight People Allowed. A few gay punters declared they were sick of straight rubber-neckers hijacking their dancefloors. Malibusoaked hen nights were crashing into gay clubs to escape from straight men, and the straight men were following the hens' microminis and flashing rabbit ears in a hypnotic trance.

It's easy to see why people were bewildered. A friend of mine once spent three hours gazing into the eyelashes of a refugee from a kamikaze hen night.

He thought she was a transvestite; she thought he was straight. The epiphany was cruel. Very cruel.

But the ban prompted more surrealism - and in Charing Cross too. I once saw a lesbian bouncer order two suspiciously heterosexual- looking boys lingering in a queue to kiss. They shrugged, tried awkwardly to exchange tongues, declared meekly, "This isn't going to work," and wandered off into the testosterone-scented night.

Yet most gays were, at heart, too decent to tolerate genital apartheid.

Sure, gay people might refer to their straight brethren as "breeders" and curse Sienna Miller and that damned nanny. (I knew I should have applied for employment in the Law household.) But heterophobia is just a mirror-image of homophobia, an attempt to resurrect an iron wall - covered with tinsel and pictures of Rupert Everett, of course - between the sexualities, and most gay people know it. Gay people realised that if we parade our own bigotries, we can hardly complain when others do the same. So the bans wilted and died. But two weeks ago, in one of my rare forages out of Columnist Land into Real Life (they don't read the New Statesman! Or Prospect!), I was greeted with an even uglier de facto ban. Wandering into a south London gay club in dire need of a spellcheck - it's called Rude Boyz - I watched a man being denied admission.

The reason? He was yellow-skinned. The bouncer explained to the startled customer, "No East Asians allowed."

Apparently, a group of East Asian men had started a fight the week before - so the bouncers responded with a blanket ban: gays yes, East Asian gays no.

There is one word for this: racism.

It was only when the saintly Peter Tatchell, veteran gay rights campaigner and Mugabe-snatcher, began to protest that the club insisted there was no ban.

Bouncer error! they screamed.

East Asians welcome! Drinks are on the white folk!

Now, my hatred for bouncers knows no limit - since I resemble an over-nourished 12-year-old, I have long had dealings with the species Bouncer Sapiens. And politics plus vodka plus people trying to get laid plus London at 3am always equals a pool of confusion; the morning after, it's always tough to unpick the logic. So I'll give Rude Boyz a pass this time (though there will be no forgiveness for the spelling. Not ever).

But a (Rude) warning did emerge through the smoke that night. We gays inhabit a space recently swept clean of bigotry. If we let it back in - through the casual misogyny of many gay men, through vicious anti-lesbian jibes, through the lips of that bouncer that night - Heaven at 3am will be a very bitter place indeed.

Internet killed the video store

LONDON'S video shops are dying. There are long, lingering closing- down sales at the two rental shops nearest to my flat, and the local Blockbuster is emptier every time I go there. There might even be a corpse in Comedy clutching a copy of Jurassic Park III.

The decline began about five years ago, when they decided to stock mountains of copies of the latest hit or putrid sequel and flog off the back catalogue to make space for Spider-Man II.

When I recently tried to hire The English Patient - I had resisted a crispy Ralph Fiennes for too long - nobody had it.

Everyone is shifting to online video libraries because they have those old, obscure movies you've always wanted, but I will miss the shiny plastic video palaces at the bottom of the road.

Where Babs and I differ

BARBARA Windsor wiggled her way back to Albert Square this week, and people are fawning over "everybody's favourite Eastender".

But sweet old Babs wishes people like me - who love and live in the East End - were still living under the "protection" of The Krays, a gang of torturing murderers.

That's not the East End I want to live in - where the newsagent is slashed from ear to ear for not having Reggie's copy of Heat on time.

This week I visited the Blind Beggar pub, the sweetly dingy hole where those "charming, polite" Krays shot a man in the head. Locals don't glamorise the Krays. I chatted with Jessie Glass, 62, who said, "They were just gangsters, nothing more."

I want real working-class heroes in my part of town. Here's one: the former barmaid from the Blind Beggar, still living in hiding as Mrs X, who risked her life to testify against the Bruvvers.

(c)2005. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.