I have a somewhat different take on them. I don’t see this as some sort of monumental hypocrisy where they vote against ending prejudice against gay people while having a secret gay life of their own. I will take their word for it that they are not gay– no gay person I know leads a life like that, though perhaps some do. Hypocrisy requires a degree of consciousness that they clearly do not have. As Rochefoucauld said, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. You cannot pay that homage without knowing what it is that you do. Curtis’s life is definitely about vice. Being gay is neither virtuous nor vicious. Paraphrasing Tevye: “It’s no shame to be gay, but it is no great honor, either.”

Nor do I see this as merely some sort of freudian reaction formation, where they battle the private part of themselves that they don’t like in the public arena. That is probably true, but way too pat of an answer.

This is what I see here, and I hope that I am making a subtle, but real, distinction. Curtis votes against ending the prejudice against gay people because he is a moral man. He knows exactly how dirty and disgusting gay people are, because he has his very own life as evidence, and who would want to inflict that bit of disgusting, unclean perversity on society. Who would want that for his children? Certanly not a moral man.

Note: I said moral, not conscious, not intelligent, not compassionate, and not responsible– a bit like that moralizing Old Testament God who thinks nothing about sending a flood amd wiping out little children who couldn’t sin even if they wanted to, all to prove his point that he is moral and they are not. (Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth is a great exposition of this mind-boggling intellectual and ethical vacuity and vanity on the part of Our Lord and Father).

Like this OT God, you have people who think and act like Richard Curtis: moral, not conscious, not intelligent, not compassionate, and not responsible. They certainly will not accept any responsibility for the gay world that their attitudes, beliefs, and actions have created– a world a sleazy, anonymous and furtive sexual encounters, punctuated or adorned (depending on your POV) by lying, cheating, adultery, disease, and dirt, where relationships are transitory at best, destructive at worst. All the old stereotypes, all products of the closet.

Nor will they easily allow us to have the gay world that we wish to have and have created for ourselves where those stereotypes have no place, because that would again require inteligence, compassion, consciousness, and responsibility, which are the moral opposites of moralizing.

My belief: 90% of the problems in the world are cause by 90% of the people who are 90% unconscious 90% of the time. richard curtis is just another example of that.