My wife brought this clip to my attention today:

Little Britain: The only gay in the village

It’s a clip from the BritCom Little Britain. The plot is that one man thinks he’s the only homosexual man in the village, but lo and behold, there’s a new person in town - a homosexual male hairdresser.

Wow. To me this seems to be on par with a German sitcom bit about the only Jew in town.

Why?

Homosexuality was illegal in the UK from 1533 until 1967. (Specifically congress between men - lesbians apparently were never targeted by these 434 years of legislation.)

Wow, 434 years of discrimination, and it’s a joke?!!

If you were convicted of these charges, for the first 300 years of the legislation, the punishment was hanging (1533 to 1885).

If you were convicted of these charges in 1950s, like the father of computing Alan Turing, you were given a choice: imprisonment or chemical castration (via oestrogen hormone injections.)

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Turing died about two years later - killed by a eating a poison apple (most likely suicide). No, the Snow White imagery is not a coincidence: it happened to be Turning’s favorite fairy tail.

The story, in general, has a happy ending: in 1967 homosexual acts were decriminalized and now homosexuals and lesbians have more freedom than we have in the US.

But man do I find this offensive: UK, way to trivialize (in a bad way) the half millennium your culture spent discriminating against homosexuals.

Seriously. WHAT. THE. FUCK.