The only time I was invited to appear on TV was in 1998. ‘Newsnight’ and other like programmes wanted to interview me about my edited collection ‘Rethinking Prostitution’, which was making an impact at the time. Unfortunately I was at the time teaching a semester as Visiting Professor at Emory University in Atlanta and couldn’t go to their studios. The compensation for missing out, I thought at the time, is that my mother would have been as embarrassed as she would have been proud to tune in to me espousing the decriminalisation of sex work.
But I’ve done a bit on the radio, a few sessions on both Laurie Taylor’s ‘Thinking Aloud’, on café society and stigma, and ‘Woman’s Hour’, on GPs’ attitudes to HIV/AIDS (in the early days of its spread) and sex work. These were invariably interesting experiences, and not just because I set off the fire alarm at BBC HQ in Portland Place by accident.
Laurie Taylor had a quite a lengthy and eloquent introductory script prepared. In fact I had virtually no time to contribute on café society, on which I’d just edited a book with Aksel Tjora. I had more time on stigma though, managing to insist – Laurie grinned – that the gov of the time was deliberately ‘weaponising stigma’ – that is, appending blame, and hence culpability, to shame – with reference to people with disabilities in order to justify welfare cuts.
The ‘Women’s Hour’ programmes were more revealing. The first was to report on a study of GPs’ attitudes towards AIDS conducted by a medical student doing a B.Sc in sociology under my supervision. The student didn’t want to do it herself and asked me to deputise. I arrived early and was duly closeted close by the studio in readiness. The presenter/interviewer was Jenni Murray and she was warming up on the head of the Ulster Constabulary prior to talking to me. What I heard was BBC people behind the scenes saying things like ‘go on Jenni, get him’, in other words wanting her to wind him up and provoke him into saying something controversial or ‘newsworthy’. I was forewarned. And Indeed she was clearly trying to get me to attack GPs as ignorant and prejudiced against gay men. I declined to be intimidated or trapped by this pleasant and well-mannered presenter. How would my student have fared?
The other episode was of a different nature. I was invited to discuss sex work and understood that I would be accompanied by a sex worker from the English Collective of Prostitutes. I was again seated in a waiting area. And in due course another interviewer duly arrived and sat down next to me. I assumed she was the practising sex worker. She was very pleasant and we chatted for several minutes. Then she was called into the recording studio before me. It transpired that she wasn’t a sex worker after all: she was Joan Armatrading. Fortunately I hadn’t said anything disastrous. But it was a lesson learned. She was genuinely lovely to talk to.
I must briefly mention another invitation. I was ‘vetted’ beforehand by phone. I was clearly expected/meant to say that the fact that women were increasingly going sex workers – and they were – was a progressive or positive development. When I said that women doing what men had traditionally done wasn’t necessarily ‘progressive or positive’ they lost interest. There you go. That’s the media.