On 16th February 1997 an article appeared in the Sunday Mail (the Scottish Equivalent of the Sunday Mirror) headlined: Just when you thought it was safe to go out in Edinburgh, sex addicts decide it's time to party. Now I know that such articles are usually (if not always) rubbish, but I had never quite realised how much rubbish. With this article, though I couldn't help realising, because it was about me.
What happened was that I was going to run a convention called Polycon, which was intended for all sorts of non-monogamous people to get together, have a chat about the way they live, and maybe organise some kind of network. Unfortunately we had just had to cancel the event due to a lack of bookings, so I was particularly annoyed when two representatives of the Sunday Mail turned up on my doorstep one Friday morning to ask me about it.
Now I admit I was very rude to them. I had just been woken up (from being in bed with one of my non-monogamous lovers, as it happens) and wasn't dressed properly and I was also under the impression that the Sunday Mail was The Mail on Sunday, an even worse tabloid to have on your doorstep. Had I been in a better mood I probably wouldn't have told them to fuck off and explained that the reason I wasn't talking to them was because they were scum. I would, however, still have told them that the convention had been cancelled. And I suspect that they would still have refused to believe me and continued to stand there like gormless melons until I slammed the door in their face.
I went back to bed hoping that the message had got through, but no. Four hours later, by which time I was up and dressed, they came back. With a photographer. I opened the door, saw who it was, and slammed the door just as the flash went off in my face.
I didn't know what to do. I invited another friend around to keep me company and check if there were any shifty looking geezers hanging around outside, but he couldn't see anything. In the end I had to carry on as usual. I phoned the convention venue, who confirmed that the event was off and told me that they had given some journalists my phone number. I told quite a few friends, but nobody had any ideas what to do, apart from hope they didn't print anything. Well they wouldn't, would they? They had nothing to print.
The next day they came back. They gained entry to our stairwell by saying they were a "special delivery" and when my flatmate opened the door they handed her a letter and tried to take her photo. The letter said that it would "be in our best interests" to contact their newsdesk before their deadline, which was 4.00 that afternoon.
Note that this was the first time they had actually given us their contact details, in spite of the fact that they had had my phone number all along and it could hardly be called an urgent story. We decided to phone and explain once more that the conference was off and complain about the behaviour of their journalists.
The first woman I spoke to was nice enough. She believed me that the event was off but said she'd been asked to get some details of what it would have been about. Reluctantly I told her something about our principles, sticking to things that had already been said in our publicity material. I stressed that non-monogamy is about being honest with your partners and said that the convention wasn't meant to be a pick up joint. I tried to complain about the journalists on the doorstep and ask why they hadn't phoned us, but she referred me to the news editor Alan Crow - the man who had signed the letter.
When I spoke to Alan Crow he turned out to be a very unpleasant person indeed and seemed to believe that anybody that refused to speak to them for any reason obviously had something to hide and was asking for it. He refused point blank to believe that the event had been cancelled because it was still being advertised on the Internet and some magazines that he had (it had only been cancelled the previous week). He said that "three people were telling him it was on and one person was telling him it was off". I pointed out that the one person was the actual organiser, but that didn't seem to cut any ice with him. I also tried to ask why his reporters had just turned up and not phoned first and he decided that this was very snobby of me (he had already accused me of being a snob for referring to them as a 'tabloid'). "Do your friends need an appointment to speak to you?" he asked, which invites the obvious responses, "No, but you're not my friends." and "My friends don't knock me up at ungodly early hours of the morning." In the end it seemed futile to go on. Alan Crow's attitude was that anything his reporters did was justified. When I complained about the photographer, for instance, he said that there had been no photographer first time round, as if it was perfectly all right to use a photographer to get revenge on me for refusing to speak to them in the first place. I gave up, having reiterated once more that the convention was not happening.
The next we knew was when this article appeared. The comments on the right are my response. The only changes I have made to their text are to remove references to my street address and my flatmate's names.
| Rag: Sunday Mail Date: Sunday 16 February 1997 Page: 17 | |
| Headline Just when you thought it was safe to go out in Edinburgh, sex addicts decide it's time to party | |
| Picture of Princes St |
(Presumably the only thing they could find in the picture library) |
| Caption: EXPOSED... Scotland's sex capital | (if only) |
| Picture: sign on our door, which reads Gomorrah Paul Crowley Alison Rowan [Flatmate's name] Mail for [Ex-Flatmate's name] No Christians No Tories | (note the way they print our flatmate's and ex-flatmate's names even though they don't appear in the story, not to mention the way they breach our copyright in the design of the sign) |
| Caption: SIN SIGN... on the door | |
| Article Body | |
| BED-HOPPING sex cheats are set to turn Edinburgh into Scotland's capital of sin. | (chance would be a fine thing) |
| And last night a titillating talk-in for wife-swappers and one-night-stand sex addicts was the centre of a sleaze storm. | (trans. We decided to print an article about it) |
| Hundreds are due in Edinburgh for a "non-monogamy" convention for people of "all sexes and sexualities." | (the only time they quote our publicity, I wish I knew who the 'hundreds' were, though) |
| They'll be holding teach-ins on promiscuity in the hope that they can gain converts to their "liberated" lifestyles. | (a nice idea, but since the conference was to be for non-monogamous people only, probably a waste of time) |
| Organisers are advertising in magazines and on the internet, and charging £22 for tickets. | (up to £22, it was a sliding scale) |
| But last night fury erupted over the sinners' convention at Edinburgh University's Pleasance Societies Centre. | (trans. We decided to print an article about it) |
| A spokeswoman for health group AIDS Care Education and Training stormed: "We are concerned at the swapping of partners." | (does that sound like 'storming' to you? ACET is a Christian charity, whose guidelines recommend monogamy as the best way to combat AIDS. Most AIDS/HIV agencies would have said something about condoms, which we also use and promote) |
| And Edinburgh councillor Moira Knox said: "This is scandalous. It shouldn't be allowed." | (Right wing rent-a-quote, so well known in Edinburgh that the Evening News aren't allowed to use her any more because she always says the same thing.) |
| TOWEL | (Huh? Is this Viz?) |
| The convention - due to take place on April 5 and 6 - was booked by Alison Rowan and Paul Crowley, both believed to be students. | (By our reporters, who didn't speak to them.) |
| Yesterday, the door of their Edinburgh flat in [Street name] had a sign saying: 'Gomorrah. No Christians. No Tories.' | (A very clumsy way of printing our address) |
| Rowan answered the door naked except for a towel | (Oh, that towel. Actually it was a long skirt pulled up over my breasts - easily as decent as a sun dress) |
| but refused to discuss the convention. She just said: "It is different from the usual." | (I didn't. They said that. I said 'Yes'. Through gritted teeth) |
| Last night there was confusion over the convention. Edinburgh University said it would be stopped. | (Did they? Or is the just the Sunday Mail trying to claim the credit for it being cancelled?) |
| But adverts were still appearing and a spokeswoman at the Societies Centre confirmed the event was on. | (Of course they don't mention that the organisers went on at some length about how it had been cancelled...) |
In spite of my name and address being printed I didn't get any hassle from the general public, just a few phonecalls from folk wanting to come to the convention. I did get quite a few journalists phoning up, though, including Mark Campanile from the Evening News who offered to "set the story straight". After some debate we decided to take him up on this, and both gave phone interviews on the Sunday afternoon. His article appears below.
The organisers of a sex convention cancelled because of lack of interest today declared: "We're no perverts".
Polycon - described as a "non-monogamy" convention for "all sexes and sexualities" - was due to take place in Edinburgh in April.
But local organisers Paul Crowley and Alison Rowan say the cancelled the event when just a few people signed up to attend.
Unemployed Rowan, 30, said the aim of the convention was not to promote cheating on your partner.
"The whole point of non-monogamy is that you tell your partner what you do. Quite a lot of people live like this."
Computer programmer Crowley, 25, said he hoped the event could be held at a smaller venue in the city.
This is better, and is mostly accurate, but in the end it wasn't worth doing. The event is still called a "sex meeting", and because there's no mention of the Sunday Mail article the whole thing makes little sense - it makes the reader think "why are they bothering to tell us this?"
This is not a cautionary tale, because there is no advice I can offer to help other people avoid this sort of situation. Perhaps if I'd been more polite at first they would have believed me and not run an article, but I certainly wouldn't want to put money on it. I am lucky that I've had nothing but positive feedback from the articles, and that none of my friends believe this sort of tabloid junk, but had I been in a job which might have disapproved, or been closeted in any way it could have been a lot harder.
Any media journalist will tell you that all you need for a good TV outrage story is a quote from an MP and a quote from a member of a pressure group. It happens all the time. The MP legitimises it and the spokesperson lends it the credibility and support of an organisation. It takes just two calls. You don't need to have seen the offensive material, nor do they.
This was originally about the media reaction to the Brass Eye series but, while we're not on TV, if you replace 'MP' with 'Councillor' I think you have the Sunday Mail's policy in one.
Last updated 2nd March 2000