Last week, SX published an interview with the openly-gay former Baywatch star Jaason Simmons. In one part of a wide-ranging interview, Simmons expressed disappointment in Australia’s same-sex marriage ban and the lack of civil unions, and said he didn’t want to live in a place where his relationship and family weren’t recognised.

Fair enough, one would think.

But when Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper published a report on the interview under the headline ‘Gay star rails at Australia’, it opened a portal to a maelstrom of anti-gay abuse. As with most of the Courier-Mail’s stories, readers were able to comment online – and those comments exposed the ugly face of homophobia in what media commentators call ‘the new media’: the digital, computerised or networked communication technologies such as online newspapers, blogs and internet forums.

“Do we really want his type here?” screeched one Courier-Mail reader, Bru Hughes from Burpengary (and yes, that is a real place name). “I don’t think so! He has not rejected Australia, Australia has rejected him because it doesn’t want people like him here. That’s why gay marriage is BANNED. It’s not natural. Goodbye and good riddance!”

Dale Munns of Helidon said: “Gay people will never get accepted if they keep being drama queens about marriage”, before expressing concern for the welfare of the young boy adopted by Simmons and partner John O’Callaghan.

‘Pensioner of Rochedale’ chimed in with similar ‘concerns’, claiming the couple’s son was a victim of paedophilia.

While it may be tempting to see these comments as an isolated example of rednecks in action, in a state with supposedly more than its fair share of such people, the fact is that they’re far from isolated.

The news.com.au website – which pools the resources of Australia’s Murdoch dailies including Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Melbourne’s Herald-Sun, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail and the national daily The Australian – carried thousands of comments, most of them anti-gay, when it reported on the decision by Brisbane’s Anglican Church Grammar School (‘Churchie’) to ban same-sex partners at the school’s end of year formal.

The opinions expressed, many drawing on passages of the Bible, and the sheer volume of comments, suggested that an orchestrated campaign by a religious group was in action.

And searching for evidence of such a campaign, SX has found the following: a direct link to the Churchie article on the website of Christian fundamentalist group Salt Shakers (www.saltshakers.org.au ) bemoaning “yet more proposals to advance the homosexual cause”, and proclaiming in big red letters: “We need to have our say!”

In fact, orchestrated mass-responses to newspaper articles, with participants purporting to be individual respondents, is a speciality of Salt Shakers.

The group’s website maintains a regularly updated list of news articles to respond to online, and provides tips for writing effective missives.

From the site’s ‘Take Action’ section: “Newspapers give a snapshot of what is happening in the world. They also provide an excellent opportunity for us to communicate our values ... We need to read the daily papers to see the perspective the world puts on issues and then consider what the Biblical response is to that issue.”

A PDF download file called ‘Using the media’ states, “Our experience proves that if you write enough letters, or phone talkback radio often enough, eventually you break through and can be read or heard by hundreds of thousands of people … The media is a powerful tool and we need to use it.”

So what does this mean for queer communities in Australia? If there are groups actively working against our rights in ‘the new media’, shouldn’t we be doing something to counter that, lest homophobes control the debate in the influential medium?

“Absolutely, yes,” says Rachel Evans, from Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH). “We see evidence time and time again that right-wing religious groups are seeking to hijack the debate over queer rights in online forums and polls. The Sydney Morning Herald recently held an online poll on same-sex marriage and the ‘no’ votes were astronomical, which suggests an orchestrated response.

“We need to realise that the Christian right are very organised and very good at getting their points across. These groups meet en mass every Sunday, and if they decide to go off on an anti-gay bent, it’s very easy for them to organise their parishioners to take up the cause.”

As a result, queer communities need to more media savvy, says Evans.: “We need to challenge bigotry in the media on newspaper websites and forums. The Christian right are very media savvy, very internet savvy. We need to be too.”

To this end, CAAH maintains an email list (visit www.caah.org to join), which regularly informs subscribers of queer news articles, and polls they can take part in.

Gay advocate Rodney Croome also maintains a website with such updates at www.rodneycroome.id.au and his own email list.

But fighting homophobia online through digital means only is not enough, says Evans.

“Queer people need take up the ’70s rallying cry ‘out of the bars and into the streets’ – or maybe ‘out of Ikea and into the streets’,” she says. "We need to attend protest actions outside newspaper offices, political institutions and religious headquarters to ensure we get our point across – because the consequences of letting the religious right run the queer rights debate is dire.”

Just how dire is highlighted by the fact that the religious right successfully lobbied both major political parties to ban same-sex marriage, she says.

It begs the question: if they managed to get bipartisan support for a same-sex marriage ban, what might their next victory be?

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