As some of you know, I can't stop myself getting into (largely pointless) arguments with US Jesus People on You Tube, some of whom are more convinced than ever that the end-times are upon us. Christians in the US, they assert, are an oppressed minority (despite being the majority) and soon the queers will have outlawed Christianity, and they'll be forcing everybody to collect porcelain, serve pureed salsify, worship Barbra Streisand and introduce water sports at church weddings. Be ready now for much fizzing of Evangelical mouth-froth, for the fags have won. Here's part of an exchange I had with one Scott Payne, servant of Jesus and gob-smackingly presumptuous twerp. Scott opens the conversation.

Well, I take it you are a little gay?


Not a little, totally. Do you know what that means? I have no interest in women sexually. That doesn’t license any other inferences on your part about my life or beliefs.


Ok, I Iived in San Francisco from 1982-2008, and one of the jobs I had took me though The Castro on my way home. You know what The Castro is?


Vaguely. I don’t live in the same hemisphere as you, so why should I?


My opinion's (sic) are based on first hand experiences. No I did not meet every gay person in SF


I’m sure you didn’t.


but having lived in a "gay city" I've had enough of an experience to decide on an impartial basis
.

Impartial basis? (Quote: 'Sir after I die, I will be with Jesus.') First-hand experience of some denizens of the Castro does not equal first-hand experience of ‘gay life’, whatever that is. It’s like claiming you know all Christians from having lived near the Amish. Do you know anything of how a homosexual man or woman might live in Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Uganda or working-class Glasgow? Or anywhere else far removed from the Castro?


My decision is not my own, and I will be happy to tell you how I arrived at it,


OK, go on then. So long as you realise how ridiculously parochial you sound already.


but, first if you are gay, I want you to explain in explicit detail what does really happen in a gay relationship in the bed room,if you will?


If I asked you to tell me in explicit detail what you do in bed, you would quite rightly think me an utter creep and tell me it was none of my business, so why do you imagine it's OK to ask me that question? If I asked you what happens in heterosexuals’ bedrooms, I hope you’d have the intelligence to tell me that that is a stupid question, because there is far too much variety, and anyway, what consenting grown-ups do in the sack is of no interest to anyone else.

*****

That last line was a mistake. People like Scott are obsessed with what other people do in the sack, as obsessed with sex as anorexics are with food. I hope that after a brief period of hysteria, gay-hating evangelicals will in due course back off and quietly die out.