What’s the point of the LGBT Awards?

At last year’s British LGBT Awards, actor David Tennant picked up his gong for ‘Best Celebrity Ally’ and fantasised about a future when ‘we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore’. In response to Tennant wishing non-existence upon a black female politician, the achingly right-on, rainbow-brained audience members cheered and whooped their approval.

This year’s LGBT Awards offered a similarly unedifying spectacle. Once again, a parade of charmless celebrities and shameless self-publicists were seen vying for relevance. The LGBT Awards has proven once again that in the realm of corporate campaigning, the more ludicrously PC the cause, the louder the applause.

At the Tesco-sponsored bash on Friday evening, those who have truly shown bravery in the battle for gay rights were studiously ignored. There were no gongs for the lesbians who, just two months ago, intervened in the landmark Supreme Court case on the meaning of the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 – their submission helped secure the right of lesbians to meet and organise without men turning up. In fact, there was no reference to the real-world, grassroots issues confronting gay and lesbian people in the UK at all – although there was plenty of champagne, generously donated by Moët & Chandon.

Instead, those deemed worthy of recognition included Ian ‘H’ Watkins from 1990s pop band Steps, who won a ‘Special Recognition Award’ for arranging a Pride march in rural Wales; former Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall, now perhaps better known for hawking butt plugs and leading crowds in anti-JK Rowling chants, who was named this year’s ‘Celebrity Ally’; and former TV presenter India Willoughby, who clutched a trophy ‘on behalf of the trans community’.

Over the weekend, Willoughby expressed a yearning to relocate to Iran – the Islamic theocracy where gay men are hanged and women vanish for defying dress codes. He tweeted that Iran offers better ‘trans rights than the UK and US’. It’s true that Iran does fund so-called sex-reassignment surgeries, but it does so because homosexuality is a capital crime. For many Iranian gays and lesbians, the options are surgery or the noose. In response to Willoughby’s offensive ignorance, JK Rowling wryly offered to cover his airfare and others offered to crowdfund for his burqa.

Perhaps the most baffling entry in this procession of has-been and never-were award winners was Yasmin Benoit. She’s a model / activist whose claim to fame is wearing fetish gear while loudly declaring that she doesn’t want to have sex. This apparently makes her a member of the LGBTQA community, under A for asexual.

To be fair, Benoit is an impressive woman. Despite lacking a credible cause or any obvious trace of intellect, she has apparently convinced other grown adults that ‘asexual discrimination’ is the new frontier in human rights. Indeed, last year, 30-year-old Benoit was appointed as a visiting research fellow at King’s College London’s Public Policy Institute to advise on asexuality.

Collecting her gong for her ‘outstanding contribution to communities’, Benoit gushed that ‘people forget that asexuality is even a thing’. She went on to lament that the law fails to recognise or protect those who – to put it bluntly – aren’t particularly horny. She spoke gravely of rising ‘acephobia’ and, more chillingly, warned of the threat posed by ‘asexual conversion therapy’.

Of course, the woke wankosphere has long championed the noncauses of nonentities like Benoit. But after a year in which campaigners struck vital blows for gay and lesbian rights, the lack of recognition hit that bit harder. Because, while the ‘LGBTQ+’ industry has been busy clinking flutes over its invented identities, brave gay men and lesbians have been doing the unfashionable work of defending their sex-based rights against the ‘queer’ establishment – that is, against dangerous fools like Willoughby and Benoit.

If the organisers of the British LGBT Awards and their sponsors wanted to do something genuinely progressive, they’d support gay pride in places where homosexuality is illegal. Perhaps in 2026 they could even skip the self-congratulation in London and take the ceremony somewhere truly edgy. Let’s see the rainbow carpet rolled out in Tehran – and the (alcohol-free) champagne chilled for those brave enough to say ‘love is love’ where it might cost them their lives.

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.