PIERS MORGAN: Don’t boycott the Sultan of Bigotry – let’s turn him into the Sultan of Gayness and make him stone himself to death from the shame
Don’t boycott the Sultan of Bigotry – let’s turn him into the Sultan of Gayness and make him stone himself to death from the shame.
A few weeks ago, I co-presented my UK TV show Good Morning Britain live from the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles.
We were hosting an Oscars special, and one of our guest star panellists was celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.
Now, Perez is not exactly a shrinking violet.
In fact, he’s one of the most flamboyant people in America.
And true to form, he turned up in a spectacular Indian-themed blue and silver sequinned suit with matching turban, and a purple dyed beard adorned with sparkles.
Piers Morgan is joined by his television co-host Susanna Reid, soccer player turned actor Vinnie Jones, Spice Girl Mel B and celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who donned a purple sparkly beard and turban for the Oscar TV special filmed in the Sultan of Brunei's Beverly Hills Hotel
His contribution to the show was hilariously over-the-top and entertaining.
It was also very, very camp.
Perez, and I don’t think I’m breaching his legendary love of privacy here, is a gay man.
What made his appearance on my show relevant to this column is that the owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel is the Sultan of Brunei.
And the shocking, outrageous reality is that from today, if Perez turns up in Brunei and has sex with another gay man, he would risk being stoned to death. LEGALLY.
It’s staggering to even write those words in 2019.
How is it possible that any country on modern Planet Earth would bring in new laws making homosexuality an act punishable by being killed in such a barbaric way?
Yet that’s exactly what the Sultan of Bigotry has done today.
The Brunei despot, keen to strengthen his reputation as a strong-arm Islamic leader, has enforced a draconian, despicable new penal code on his predominantly Muslim people that makes offences including sodomy, adultery, rape, robbery and insulting the Prophet Mohammed now carry the maximum penalty of death.
The Sultan of Brunei, pictured with his Queen, has introduced a law which in effect leaglizes the stoning death of sexually active gay men
Lesbians won’t be stoned, but if caught having sex they will be whipped with 40 strokes of a cane and/or face up to 10 years in prison.
Thieves will have limbs amputated.
It’s the same kind of appalling medieval mind-set that we’ve seen embraced by ISIS as it sought to create its global caliphate of hell.
Only this time, the perpetrator is not a loathsome terrorist group, but the leader of a country who has been feted around the world by everyone from the Queen of England to the President of the United States.
Obviously, the Sultan of Bigotry has to now himself be punished for his disgusting actions.
But how best to do that?
I don’t agree with the well-intentioned campaign started by George Clooney, and now supported by other stars including Sir Elton John and Ellen DeGeneres, to boycott the brute’s nine five-star hotels in America, Britain, France and Italy.
Celebrities including Ellen Degeneres and Elton John, who are both openly gay, and George Clooney, who is considered a humanitarian are calling for a boycott of the Sultan of Brunei's hotels
First, the Sultan’s one of the richest people in the world.
Profits from these hotels barely register as a pinprick on his gargantuan oil-fuelled fortune.
So yes, boycotting them will grab a few headlines, and some people will stop going.
But a similar campaign five years ago, when the Sultan first introduced basic Sharia Law, soon fizzled out, and the principled stars that called then for a boycott quickly fell on their principled swords and returned to the hotels.
Second, the hotels are staffed with thousands of decent, hard-working employees who have done nothing wrong and, I’m sure, share our revulsion at their owner’s behaviour. Some of them will be gay themselves. I don’t want to see them unfairly punished, or lose their jobs, because of decisions made in a country thousands of miles away.
Third, any such boycott would face accusations of obvious hypocrisy. For example, the Saudi Arabia royal family owns numerous five-star hotels around the world. They too preside over terrible anti-gay laws. Do we boycott all their hotels now as well?
No, I’ve got a much better idea.
Clooney says ‘you can’t shame murderous regimes’.
But I have a cunning plan to do just that, only in a way that would work so much more pleasingly than any financial slap on the bejewelled wrist.
Rather than stay away, let’s go the other way and flood the Sultan of Bigotry’s hotels with as many gay people as can possibly fit inside them.
The Sultan of Brunei owns the Beverly Hills Hotel - among many others - which many celebrities are boycotting. But Piers Morgan is advocating a different approach - turning them into the epicenters of gay pride and culture
I urge wealthy gay men and women to buy up every room, book every table for breakfast, lunch and dinner; reserve every reception suite for private parties, work receptions, meetings and charity fundraisers; take every appointment at every spa; fill up the gyms, preferably in bright pink lycra; mill around the pools dressed like Perez Hilton; demand Diana Ross’s ‘I’m Coming Out’ is played on a 24-hour loop in every lobby.
Oh, and let’s have at least three gay weddings a day, every day, every month, in every hotel. Make the Sultan of Bigotry’s collection a magnificent monument to gay marriage.
In short, I urge the gay people of the world to rise up and hit him where it will REALLY hurt him: his reputation.
For the pathetic truth is he’s a pint-sized bigoted Neanderthal that wants his people to think he’s a giant, imperious, ‘sexually moral’ powerhouse by stoning gay men to death, and hideously whipping and caging lesbian women.
Imagine how humiliated and small he would feel if his hotels became the very epicentre of gay pride and culture; if every inch of every place he owns from London to Paris to LA reverberated with joyous celebration of living, breathing, fornicating homosexuality.
Then imagine if social media blew up on a daily basis with endless photos and videos from this non-stop global gay orgy of fun and frivolity – all with ecstatic messages personally thanking the Sultan of Bigotry for his hospitality?
He would go absolutely nuts, wouldn’t he?
I mean, losing a few million dollars from a boycott means nothing to a man reportedly worth $50 billion, who earns $100 a SECOND from oil revenues and investments, spends $21,000 on haircuts, has 600 Rolls Royces, and whose 1788-room palace is universally acclaimed as the single most vulgar royal monstrosity in the world.
But turning him into the Sultan of Gayness would be a punishment so unbearable for him that he might, ironically, end up stoning himself to death just to end the excruciating misery and shame such a label would bring.
