Hedonistic? No, today’s gay men are civic-minded – and conservative

A gay friend phones over the New Year break. A lovely chap (let us call him Richard) and long retired, he has done well and made money over the years. Richard has called to tell me how he is spending it. I know that in the past he had helped the gay lobbying organisation Stonewall; and that in memory of his late civil partner he had helped endow a local state school in need of funds. Now, he tells me, he has bought a house for a young friend and his partner: someone who helped Richard during the low time after his bereavement. ‘There was no way they could find the savings to get their feet on the ladder,’ he tells me, ‘and I just thought “What’s all my money for if not to do some good? I’ve enough for my own needs, and I’ve looked after my family; so why not spread the rest around?”’ The pleasure in his voice is palpable.

His phone call puts me in mind of another old friend, also homosexual, now long dead, who spent his seventies and early eighties designing and planting the most beautiful garden — trees and shrubs were his greatest love — above the river banks by his bungalow in Derbyshire: a garden whose maturity he knew he would never see. What spare time and money this left him he spent with, and on, his friends at home and abroad, helping more than one establish their careers. Then my mind moved to Michael Bishop, now Baron Glendonbrook, who founded British Midland Airways, amassed a small fortune, and in retirement is giving it away through a charitable foundation that innumerable good causes have reason to thank. Bishop is also gay.

It was a writer I admire tremendously (I think The Spectator’s Paul Johnson has often been touched by genius) who stung me into the rudest piece I’ve ever written: aimed at him, as it happens, and the first of a series for this magazine which has this week continued for exactly 18 years.