April 9th, this year, I had a Prince Albert piercing done by Patrick Bartholomew at the London Piercing Clinic. I can't praise Patrick highly enough - he was great. All I had to do then was concentrate on the business of healing....It was a month to go before the elections for town councillors where I lived. I was standing for re-election after four years, and the campaign proper was just about to kick off. I had to cry off for a couple of days from pounding the streets as I was a tiny bit tender, and explained to my colleagues the reason why. As in all thing to do with politics, you can't have secrets - so word got to a number of political rivals. There was an element of good-natured acceptance (Councillor Alexander having a piercing was not exactly news...) and the campaign went on without any mention of it by anyone.
May 7th, I was re-elected. The balance of power on the town council changed, going from no majority for any party to a slim majority for one party. A member of an opposing political party threatened to tell the local press about my piercing. Perhaps inadvisedly, I chose not to be 'blackmailed', and told them myself. Nothing happened.
Then, some three weeks later, one of the local papers ran a small article calling me 'an apologist of the psychologically dubious practice of body piercing' and mentioning that I had posted a picture of my piercing on my home site. Tin hat on, I waited for the flak. There was none.
A week later, another article in the same paper said that '[t]he decision to put his own penis on display was probably misjudged and certainly politically naive' but then went on to say that '...we are left with a choice - do we take the easy moralistic path and demand his resignation? Or should we welcome the fact that one of our elected representatives has the insight to understand both underground cultures and mainstream politics?'.
I can't think I was 'welcomed', but no one demanded my resignation, and (despite a rumour that some fellow councillors had to have what a PA was explained to them) my site and my piercings weren't officially mentioned at all within the Council. There was the usual good-natured banter, but nothing critical. The hit rate on my site soared, of course, but there was no additional E-mail from visitors. It seemed that no-one was really that interested.
Uh-oh. Not so fast. Some four weeks later, the phone rang at work. A journalist from another local paper rang to get my comments as a former colleague was denouncing me for allegedly showing pictures of my penis to small children on the internet. Oh, my. Trying to choose my words with care, I defended myself as best I could, and waited for the paper to be printed. Predictably enough, it had a few half-truths and inaccuracies, plus the inevitable 'moral outrage' from my colleague. It was a cheap and easy story to write, and I wait for the storm of protest that never happened last time.
It is often lamented in these pages that the 'mainstream' world has its own perception of body-piercers, and that perception is flawed. Sadly we are far from unique in the UK - witness the outrageous treatment of the Spanner victims, or yet the arrest of the 'Bolton Seven' - a group of men imprisoned for making a home video of themselves performing homosexual acts with each other. If little England can't understand something, it is immediately 'bad'. My story manages to combine almost everything a tabloid journalist could wish for - pierced genitals (and therefore 'kinky' sex), politics, and the internet. Add a hint of the corruption of children, and stand well back. The fact that it simply isn't true is never something that has bothered the press.
There are some who would say that I should have kept my mouth shut and not told a soul about the PA, or any of my body piercings. It is, they say, a private matter between myself and my partner, and so mentioning it outside that relationship is intolerable. Yet many of them espouse political parties that claim to exclude no-one, including my own. By hiding myself, I pander to that climate of repression, and nothing will change. There are others who wonder at me ever wanting to become part of 'the establishment' when I had piercings, because piercings mean that you don't want to conform. Sometimes you can do both, I feel. Even ten years ago, Members of Parliament would stand down rather than come out as a homosexual. Things are changing, because they must change. Perhaps with our new government, a new reign of tolerance and open-mindedness will spread across the land. Or maybe not. We shall see.
My name is Alastair Alexander. I'm a councillor, and I have body piercings.
(For copyright reasons, I have not re-printed the relevant newspaper articles in this article. However, I have obtained permission from the newspapers concerned to reproduce the articles on my site - http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~alibear/ - where they can be viewed.)