Word: gayness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That was music to the ears of many Tories, straight and gay, who have been trying for years to modernize their party. In 2000 Christina Dykes launched Absolutely Equal, a conference event that ran for a number of years and was supported by several minority-rights organizations, in an attempt to broaden her colleagues' focus. "After the bad defeats in 1997 and 2001, the party closed in on itself," she says. "We were just talking to ourselves." Matthew Parris, now a prominent writer and broadcaster, served as a Tory Parliament member during the Thatcher era and remembers when organizers...
...elections next spring. Never mind the bombastic speeches and the relentless stream of policy announcements: the strongest indication that the Nasty Party might have gotten, well, a bit nicer was to be found at Conference Pride, a pumping, churning, balloon-festooned disco, billed as the Tories' "first official conference gay night." (See a visual history of the gay-rights movement...
...church fete or a sedate evening of sherry and nibbles. It was May, in her former job as Conservative chairwoman, who coined the epithet "Nasty Party" in 2002 to warn her colleagues that their moralizing traditionalism was turning off the wider electorate. The rift between the Tories and gay-rights supporters was especially wide following the passage of legislation by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government in 1986 to bar the "promotion of homosexuality" in schools, an act that was repealed only after the Labour Party came into power in 1997. Adrian Rogers, a Conservative who ran unsuccessfully in that...
...Cameron's top team turned out for the Pride festivities on Tuesday, Oct. 6, they wanted to demonstrate that such homophobia has been banished from the Tory ranks. Earlier this year, Cameron apologized for the 1986 legislation, known as Section 28, and even predicted that Britain's first gay Prime Minister would be a Tory. "If we do win the next election, instead of being a white, middle-class, middle-aged party, we will be far more diverse," he said. (Read "Q & A with David Cameron: Why Britain Needs a 'Compassionate Conservative...
...Iain Dale became the first openly gay Tory candidate to be selected for a winnable seat. (He lost, however, to the incumbent, a Liberal Democrat.) Now a blogger and publisher and hoping for another crack at Parliament, Dale co-hosted the Pride event. In his view, sexual orientation has become "a nonissue in the Conservative Party." He adds, optimistically, that equality will soon be so firmly embedded in the party that "in another 10 to 15 years there will be no need for Pride to make a statement." (Read "British Spies: Licensed to Be Gay...