Children’s author Robert Muchamore apologises for anti-lesbian rant

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/17/robert-muchamore-apology-lesbian-comments-fifty-shades

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Children’s novelist Robert Muchamore has apologised for being “an ass” in the wake of a backlash prompted by his description of lesbians as “ugly women with short hair”. The bestselling author of the Cherub series has also announced he will be donating more than £10,000 to gay rights groups.

Muchamore made the remarks on his public Facebook page on Sunday. He had gone with friends to see the film Fifty Shades of Grey at the weekend, writing of the “small but noisy group of lesbians (well, ugly women with short hair who I assume were lesbians, and surely hadn’t had a penis anywhere near them in some considerable time) shouting: ‘You’re all rapists,’ to men entering the cinema”.

He took the comments down after they attracted heavy criticism.

“Just removed from my ‘books I need to buy my kids’ list,” wrote the comedian Dom Joly on Twitter in response. Muchamore’s fellow children’s novelist James Dawson, who recently published a non-fiction guide for LGBT young people, This Book is Gay, added : “I am disappointed to see @RobertMuchamore, a role model for so many young people, use homophobic language on his public Facebook.

Late yesterday, Muchamore apologised “to everyone I pissed off”, describing the comment as a “cheap shot” and saying that he “was venting because I was extremely pissed off about being shouted at and called a rapist by a group of protesters when I went to see Fifty Shades of Grey”.

Muchamore, whose novels about a group of teenage intelligence agents have sold more than 7m copies around the world, said that “rather than try to justify myself or drone on about what a nice guy I am, and how I have lots of gay friends and write books full of positive gay role models”, he “thought it would be better to make an actual difference to the lives of LGBT people”.

He is therefore donating £10,220 – £1 for each of his Twitter followers – to four groups, starting with the Kaleidoscope Trust, “because they campaign for gay people in countries like Nigeria and Gambia where just being gay means you can go to prison”, and the Rainbow Project in Northern Ireland, because he “never knew that people in Northern Ireland didn’t have the same rights as others in the UK”.

He wrote: “Lots of people will still call me a bigoted, selfish asshole, and say I’m trying to buy my way out of a hole and so forth. And they’re basically right, but whatever you think about me at least some real people will benefit and hopefully accept that my apology will be more than just words,” , adding: “Just to make it ABSOLUTELY clear. I do not support the women who stood in the street calling me a rapist and I am not apologising to them. Their behaviour was hateful and offensive to me.

“I DO wish to apologise for my idiotic comment that these women were ‘lesbians because they were ugly and had short hair’ and for any offence caused. In particular I offended some long-term gay/bi fans who I consider personal friends and basically feel like an ass for doing so.”

Last year, Muchamore caused a storm after he dismissed concerns about closing libraries as “trivial” and expressed a wish to go on a “slaughter-a-whining-lefty” spree.

The comments, also written on Facebook, were made after an event at the Southbank where Muchamore’s fellow authors Patrick Ness, Michael Rosen and Francesca Simon had spoken on issues including closing libraries and Michael Gove’s approach to education.

“These critical, earth-shattering, problems they were all rambling on about actually seemed trivial to the point of me not really giving a damn,” he wrote at the time. “We live in an age when 50% of kids go to university, books cost less to buy than the return bus fare for two people to go to the library and whenever I leave the UK, everyone raves about our amazing history of kids’ books and kids’ writers. By the end I was so angry I wished I’d brought a big samurai sword so that I could have gone on a ‘slaughter-a-whining-lefty’ spree.”