Public opinion was poisoned by regular and vicious anti-gay features in the tabloid press. A column in the Daily Star that year, written by its deputy editor, Ray Mills, was typical: Little queers or big queens, Mills has had enough of them all – the lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals, the hermaphrodites and the catamites and the gender benders who brazenly flaunt their sexual failings to the disgust and grave offence of the silent majority. A blight on them all, says Mills.
