Owen Jones: Yes, it’s true that the manner in which he was outed became a standard playground homophobic trope, a means for bigots to express their revulsion at how sordid and morally corrupt they deemed gay men to be. But haters gonna hate, as the expression goes – homophobes will latch on to anything to confirm their bigoted narrative. For LGBT people consumed with terror at the realisation of who they were, to see the man who sang Last Christmas telling his tormentors where to stick it was liberating.
[…] Here was a man who proudly campaigned for LGBT rights, becoming a high-profile supporter of HIV charity the Terrence Higgins Trust. He was profoundly political in many other ways, too, backing Labour through the trauma of Thatcherism and backing Britain’s striking miners. He put on a free concert for NHS nurses to say thank you for looking after his dying mum. In 2003, he reworked Faith alongside Ms Dynamite into an anti-Iraq war track, and even released a single – Shoot the Dog – that castigated Tony Blair’s alliance with George W Bush and the neocons. More here.