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PARIS, Oct 14 — French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand is fighting for his political life after admitting that he paid boys for sex in Thailand.

The minister may ultimately keep his job. But if he is driven out of office, this will only be because he failed to distinguish between sexual preferences and sexual abuse.

For Mitterrand’s homosexuality is not an issue in itself. His predicament will also likely have little impact on a whole generation of European gay politicians now rising to prominence.

Mayor Bertrand Delanoe of Paris and Mayor Klaus Wowereit of Berlin are openly gay. So is Peter Mandelson, effectively Britain’s deputy prime minister.

Germany will soon acquire a foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, who is gay. Following in the steps of women and ethnic minority leaders, it is now the turn of Europe’s gay community to make large inroads into the public arena.

In permissive nations such as the Netherlands or Scandinavia, gay MPs have been out of the closet for decades.

But elsewhere on the continent, revelations about someone’s sexual preferences have traditionally resulted in instant disgrace.

This did not mean, of course, that gays failed to serve with distinction in all walks of life. However, they lived in constant fear of exposure or blackmail.

And the media enjoyed baiting them. When Britain’s newspapers — by far the most vicious on the continent — referred to someone as a “confirmed bachelor”, this usually meant that they suspected him of being gay, even if no concrete evidence existed.

This was the case with Edward Heath, Britain’s prime minister in the early 1970s, whose explanations that he was too busy to find a wife were dismissed as just a smokescreen.

Heath ignored the rumours. But others were less fortunate. Countless European politicians ended their professional lives when lovers or partners sold their stories to newspapers.

Others, such as General Guenter Kiessling, the commander of Europe’s allied ground troops, have had their careers smeared unfairly. Kiessling resigned in 1983 amid false accusations of his homosexuality.

Attitudes changed only as a new generation of Europeans — raised in an age when homosexual acts and same-sex marriages are legal — began to see matters differently.

Initially, the continent’s media did not notice the shift. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair promoted homosexuals to his Cabinet a decade ago, The Sun — the country’s most salacious newspaper — promptly demanded to know whether Britain was being run by a “gay Mafia”.

But journalists soon discovered readers had grown bored with the subject. This may not have been the “liberation” that gay non-governmental organisations sought, but it provided opportunities for a new batch of European politicians.

Still, many difficulties remain. Most openly gay politicians belong to Europe’s left-wing or centrist parties, while many right-wing gay politicians hide in the closet.

Joerg Haider, who led an extreme right-wing party in Austria, kept his sexuality hidden until his death last year, when his supporters discovered to their amazement that he had appointed his 26-year-old male lover as his political successor.

But such a permissive environment is still anathema to many other nations. Several years ago, a proposal by Brazil to include among international human rights the “protection of sexual orientation and gender identity” attracted 66 votes, but almost all of them came from Western countries.

Europe itself is far from united on this score: A recently planned gay rights march in Serbia had to be cancelled because of the threat of violence.

The fear in some countries is that Europe will now seek to promote a gay agenda by imposing its standards on the world. This is one reason the current president of the United Nations General Assembly, Libya’s Dr Ali Abdussalam Treki, proclaimed last month that being gay “is not acceptable”.

But Europe’s gay politicians are not single-issue activists: They are ordinary statesmen, who happen to be gay. On the face of things, there is no reason, therefore, why a new German foreign minister could not establish a good working relationship with, say, ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia.

True, Europe’s openly gay politicians will have to exercise discretion when visiting other nations. However, people who started their lives in the closet need no training in discretion — this is already second nature to them.

The Europeans may believe that where they lead, all should follow. But whether this turns out to be the case is still a choice for other governments, and them alone. — The Straits Times

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