Paul 🏳️‍🌈

TIP TOE ON CHANNEL 4 IS RUSSELL T DAVIES' REALITY WAR — NOT OURS!!   As a self-respecting gay man on the frontline in the 1990s fighting for equal rights, I viewed all 5 episodes of Tip Toe with mounting horror, only not in the way Davies intended…   Tip Toe as a commentary on our times is neither accurate nor clever. As an effort to stoke fear and plant ideas into minds who do wish us harm — 60 year old straight white men being way down that list — it’s downright irresponsible…   Tip Toe is more Russell T. Davies propaganda that delivers all his familiar tropes (anyone for rimming?), shock value, and contrived sucker punches at every ad break to keep the viewer engrossed, if not grossed out.   Tip Toe can only have been written by subversive "hacktivist" Davies drawing from his personal, lived experience gleaned trawling the cobbles of Canal Street since the 1990s. An abstract perspective of life through the paranoid lens of someone who has witnessed change, yet which bears no similarity or relevance to most of us watching.   In 1998 I attended Manchester Pride with several thousand gay men and a smattering of lesbians. I still recall the electricity, laughter and sheer joy in the air; a time when real change and genuine progress was afoot, and equal rights within our grasp. When leather was the edgiest of fetishes, transsexuals coexisted peacefully in society and were a world apart from transvestism, and drag was performed as a career — not a lifestyle choice or means to access kids’ classrooms for ‘story hour’…   Fast forward to 2026. LGBTQI+ Pride is LGB in name only; co-opted by an umbrella of identities and contentious progressive ideologies which most of us now cross the road to avoid due to the inherent misogyny and…homophobia — and it now resembling a circus bordering on freak show.   Tip Toe may be Davies' unique perspective of where his world view now is; those of us familiar with his work already know that it’s one where all men are emasculated, straight white men demonised, and traditional families portrayed as even more dysfunctional than his neurotic LGBTQ+ creations.    But how to explain Davies' failure to grasp the sanctity of childhood, which he appears throughout his ouvre to infer should — for the sake of his world — be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, like victims of rape gangs, to maintain a false sense of societal cohesion? The wellbeing and safety of children — away from adults planting seeds of confusion in their developing minds, and predators who adjoin to the + — will always trump any rights the LGBTQ+ demand or aspire to.   A cult Davies abandoned the LGB years ago to become an extremist activist for at a pivotal juncture when everything was, finally, just fine. It was Davies and others like him who would stymie, stamp on and destabilise that snapshot in time when LGB were able, if momentarily, to breathe easy…   In nailing his balls to the mast of the nonsense and insanity that has prevailed ever since —  in taking a sledgehammer to the moral boundaries that bind the fabric of society; in advocating for endangering women in their sports and safe spaces; and putting kids on the firing line and throwing them on a conveyor belt of sterilising drugs and grotesque medical experimentation —  he still can’t, won’t, comprehend why their safety is non-negotiable and the hill we would fight on to protect.   In conclusion, I Googled when the last UK gay lynching occurred. James Pratt and John Smith, hanged by the state at Newgate Prison in London in November 1835, for the “crime of homosexuality”.    Meanwhile, references to gays being beheaded and thrown off tall buildings in the same third world countries whence those arriving daily by small boat originate are plentiful.   Those with eyes to see reality in the world beyond Canal St have our own battles to fight and families to keep safe in a world made mad by those who’ll lap up Tip Toe for the subversive propaganda it is.