So they've done it then, the Lords have seen off the buggers! Their virtue is intact, for, in the paranoid words of the Daily Mail: "Despite Labour's bid to emasculate them, the Lords have shown they are truly representative of the people." In other words, they have not been buggered or castrated or turned into poofs by Tony Blair, the chattering classes and the legion of queer activists shoving gay propaganda down teenage boys' throats.
Male sexuality may be a wonder to behold, but Daily Mail sexuality is as perverse as hell. You would have to revisit a bathhouse in San Francisco in the seventies to find people more obsessed with what gay men do to each other than this lot.
Indeed, it struck me, listening to peers lapping up tales of cruising and cottaging, that this sadly is a very English thing.
Lately, people like Andrew Marr and Darcus Howe have been trying to define Britishness and/or Englishness. Could there ever be anything more English than a gobble of deranged lords discussing their favourite subject - sodomy? This is the most aroused that they have been for some time.
Let's not be coy here: the whole debate about the repeal of Clause 28 has been preoccupied to an unhealthy extent with sodomy. No one cares much about lesbianism. No one minds what lesbians do in bed, because it is the stuff of much heterosexual male fantasy. No one much cares if young girls get a bit of lesbianism "promoted" to them by a wickedly gorgeous physics teacher.
No, the whole focus is on impressionable young boys and seductive gay men who will corrupt them into their evil ways.
Perversely, it all makes a bit of buggery very exciting, indeed. It also makes it more appealing. One experience of anal sex will apparently turn a former heterosexual into a mad and dangerous cottager complete with gay lifestyle overnight. It's that good. But before you get too carried away, remember, as Lord Waddington informed us: "Who cannot see, from their knowledge of anatomy, that sodomy is an unnatural act?"
And who cannot see from their knowledge of history that this unnatural act has always gone on? And who does not know what men in prison and public schools and armies do? Sodomy is deemed wrong even between consenting homosexuals and heterosexuals because it separates pleasure from procreation. It is sex for its own sake and God knows (doesn't She?) that we can't have that.
The backlash against the repeal of Clause 28 reminds us once again that Britain is not one country, but many. There is the land of the Mail and the Sun with what I call its pretended tolerant relationship with gays: you can be gay if you are in show business or an astrologer, but you cannot really be gay if you are a non-celebrity or a politician. In this land, homosexuality is a direct threat to family life. Its very existence undermines marriage. This position is not logical, but it is deeply felt. Sensing that Blair no longer walks on water, the right-wing press will go in hard on these issues. At times like this, a lot of Christianity is invoked, even though the only people who go to church these days are those who are pretend-Christians trying to get their kids into church schools. In a nod towards multi- culturalism, other religious leaders have also been rounded up to denounce the promotion of homosexuality. The Chief Rabbi acknowledged that Hitler also had a problem with gays but that didn't stop him from yet more bigotry of his own.
Yet all these people live in a country where Gilbert and George can be interviewed by Graham Norton and talk about their own bodily fluids in depth; George Michael can have cosy chats with Michael Parkinson about cottaging; and Julian Clary can make a career out of talking about big ends and passages on the basis that buggery is essentially funny. Queer as Folk is the favourite of teenage girls (they always do have the best taste) who have rightly identified this as the most passionate portrayal of sex and unrequited love they will see on TV for ages.
The war between these different countries is a culture war. It is our equivalent of American culture wars over abortion. Buggery is our touchstone in a way that abortion is not. The majority of people in Britain accept a woman's right to choose - and although we can never afford to be complacent, I cannot imagine that we will ever go back to the bad old days on this issue.
Why, then, is homosexuality still so problematic for us? Why can hatred be so easily whipped up by a few out-of-touch middle-aged men? I won't use the word "homophobia" here because I, too, think it has become meaningless. For what we are in the midst of is a real fascination with homosexuality and its "unnaturalness". It was noticeable in the Lords that those most concerned with Clause 28 are those who want to go into vicarious detail about what exactly it is these "perverts" get up to.
We should be concerned about many aspects of the so-called gay lifestyle. Mindless consumerism is mindless consumerism whether you are gay or straight. No one can go clubbing for ever. Ecstasy, even when backed up by Viagra, has its limits. As does cappuccino. But obviously the debate isn't about these things; it is about one thing and one thing only - the frightened and frightening world of British uptight, upstanding masculinity. Do not confuse this with morality because it reveals itself time and time again as queerer than anything you could find on Hampstead Heath.
It is positively gagging to be emasculated.
The writer is a "Mail on Sunday" columnist
