Introduction

In October 2009, Stephen Gately, a member of the boy band Boyzone, died at his home in Spain, aged 33 years old. Gately was openly gay and in a civil partnership. Jan Moir, a columnist for the Daily Mail, a national newspaper in the UK, dedicated part of her column to speculating on Gately's death, initially connecting Gately to the ‘dozens of household names [she named Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, among others] … idols [who] live a life that is shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice’ (Moir, 2009a). However, she outlined her shock, which she imagined others would share, that Gately was one of these names given that he seemed to be ‘charming, cute, polite and funny’. Moir then undermined Gately's career, saying that ‘he could barely carry a tune … [h]e was the Posh Spice of Boyzone, a popular but largely decorous addition’. Finally, Moir reaches her main point that Gately, being gay, was therefore implicated in his own death. He had come out – or, as Moir puts it, had been ‘smoked out’ – because of the threat from a newspaper to out him. The fact of his sexuality, for Moir, is enough to cast serious doubts over his death:

The response to this column clearly took Moir and the Daily Mail unawares. The following week, Moir issued an almost but not quite unreserved apology. Moir explained how her original column was neither homophobic, nor anti-civil partnerships, nor anti-gay lifestyles: ‘I have never thought, or suggested, that what happened that night represented a so-called gay lifestyle; this is not how most gay people live’ (Moir, 2009b).