illuminating 2014 Guardian interview by Decca Aitkenhead:
'Stonewall's Ruth Hunt: ‘I’m not interested in being the thought police’
Since she took over at the gay rights charity, Ruth Hunt has received fierce criticism for being too timid. She talks about life in the the era of gesture politics, the footballers who ask for her help and the battles she still wants to win'
(extract)
"Whatever the public narrative that’s now in place suggests, she says, such experiences remain commonplace. There is more to be done, she goes on, because anti-gay legislation was only ever part of the problem. For many gay people who live far from Soho, or any other gay scene, it’s others’ homophobic attitudes that blight their daily lives. “Those people would never say they were equal, or that everything’s great, no.” But attitudes and emotions cannot be legally defined and legislated against – so this week Stonewall launched a new “No Bystanders” campaign, urging not just schoolchildren but all of us to challenge or report any homophobic abuse or insulting language.
On the face of it, the campaign is blamelessly admirable. “It’s about taking personal responsibility to create a kinder environment in which we can all exist.” But it comes dangerously close, I suggest, to policing people’s private thoughts and feelings.
“I’ve got no problem with how people feel, they can feel how they want,” Hunt insists. “It’s how people act that I’m desperately concerned about. I am not interested in being the thought police.” (continues)
Social norms will always be more powerful than laws, and gay people in remote communities are never going to enjoy the same freedoms taken for granted in places such as central London until attitudes shift as radically as the law has. So actually, Stonewall is to some extent acting as the thought police, isn’t it? “Stonewall’s position isn’t about insisting that people think differently in a forced way. It’s about helping people to change how they think about things.”
It’s an important but subtle distinction. Unfortunately, Hunt has discovered from bitter experience that nuance does not translate well in an age of social media." (continues)
The instant liberal consensus was that Stonewall must sign up at once to a boycott of the hotel chain. Hunt’s refusal provoked the Twittersphere into such a fury that “it very nearly cost me my job. I got annihilated. The level of personal abuse was off the scale, and I wasn’t ready for it, or mentally equipped. ‘Ruth Hunt with her designer glasses, who does she think she is?’ It was really, really awful.”
Stonewall will not use the Dorchester in future, she says firmly, “because our supporters have made it very clear that they don’t want us to”. But despite her glum certainty that any new attempt now to explain her position will be futile, and only invite fresh vitriol, she still wants to try. Because, she explains, she is fed up with campaigners’ blind enthusiasm for “gesture politics which just make people feel better, but achieve nothing” (continues)
At Stonewall, Hunt has faced “social media comments saying a lesbian cannot represent gay people”. When I ask if misogyny among gay men concerns her, her careful answer suggests both that it does, and that she is anxious not to give her gay male critics a new excuse to attack her.
“I think misogyny is far more rampant in society than we give it credit for,” she says. “Across all sorts of walks of life, both gay men and straight men. It’s naive to think that because a man is gay he is less or more likely to be sexist.”
It’s a typically calibrated answer. Rather frustratingly, one legacy of that Dorchester row is a wary reluctance to say anything very controversial. For example, when I suggest that we might be better off without faith schools, given the doctrinal homophobia, her face tightens into a plastic smile. “It’s not for Stonewall to say. We work with whatever exists.” Whenever she says anything remotely bold, she panics about what the Stonewall board will say. Which is probably prudent, but makes me rather wish we’d met before she got the job." (continues)
www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/nov/21/ruth-hunt-stonewall-interview-not-interested-in-being-thought-police