My, oh my! In the late 1800s homosexuality, indeed anything outside normative Victorian standards of sexuality, was a media outrage, spurred on by such news as the fact that Oscar Wilde preferred intimate relations with his ‘Bosie’ rather than his wife or other women. Around this time, when homosexuality was a crime punished by a term in prison, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, neé Beatrice Tanner, uttered the perhaps famous phrase:

My dear, I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.

This quote, probably semi-apocryphal, was intended to point out the consequences to a fellow younger actress of an older male actor’s infatuation with another younger male actor on a production Tanner was working on. In time it would seem this probable quote has undertaken the rubric of ‘anything new’ having the ability to scare horses.

Well Beatrice, there are lots of new things today. And the slight concept of an older man having the hots for a younger man are so passé. We’ve moved on Bea-Tan. In fact there is almost literally nothing that can scare today’s horses. And so, as we move into the twilight of Western civilization, where we have perfunctory bureaucrats with nothing left to lose, British police will now help monitor situations [see here] where four year-old boys who want to be girls (and vice-versa of course) in case a crime is committed.

And there the case must rest, m’lud. Opinion is in the eye of the opined indeed. But be that as it may, horses still appear to be horses and do get riled. Perhaps they need to be in the street more often.