Well, that’s finally over and done with. After several years of periodic fuss, fanfare and a pandemic-caused delay, the Gay Games have been and gone.
A sudden influx of visitors, flush with “pink dollar” disposable income, should have been welcomed; every little bit helps, after all, in these times when international tourists are thin on the ground. Right along the line, everyone benefited.
And guess what! Contrary to the dire prognostications of Hong Kong’s more vocal Chicken Littles, the sky did not fall in, either during the Games or in the weeks that have followed their controversy-free conclusion.
Neither has any further and measurable decline in local moral standards occurred – at least as far as this writer has been able to observe. Life has gone on – just as it had done before. Who’d have thought it?
Such sentiments would, perhaps, have clawed back a little of Hong Kong’s once vaunted “Asia’s World City” mantle and put the naysayers and their “smears” and “distortions” to rout – at least temporarily.
But no, that happy series of outcomes was not to be. Never slow to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Hong Kong’s cabal of unrepentant bigots and other self-appointed guardians of “traditional family life” could not resist the urge to rant and declaim on the alleged perfidiousness of it all, and proclaim how “dirty money” was unwelcome.
This last-ditch, rather pathetic attempt to shut down any further discussion is not to be marvelled at. After all, these sorts of people instinctively know – as did others in earlier strange and febrile times, elsewhere in the world – that their safety resides in being “more royalist than the king, and more Catholic than the pope”.
That fearful medieval penalty, the brank’s bridle, was devised to deal with perpetually railing public nuisances; this contraption forced the offender’s mouth shut and suppressed their tongue, rendering speech agonising or impossible.
After more than a century’s disuse, being a common scold was finally struck down as an offence in England and Wales in 1972.
