Professor David Flint, monarchist extraordinaire among many other accomplishments, is a good mate of Rev. Fred Nile (Christian Democratic Party, Festival of Light). Flint’s noble visage has often graced the pages of Nile’s Family World News (FWN), so it must have come as a bit of a shock for Fred to learn that there was ‘absolutely nothing wrong’ with his old pal, as Jerry Seinfeld might say:

For 30 years or more, Flint has lived in an apartment overlooking Bondi Beach with a partner he never mentions to colleagues or casual acquaintances … Forthcoming about everything else, he is silent about the person at the centre of his life. As a young man, he was open about his homosexuality. ‘I have never denied it. I’ve never hidden it’, he says evenly. It’s just that these days, ‘I don’t talk about it’. (Jane Cadzow ‘Stranger on the shore’, Age Good Weekend, 3 Jul. 2004, 29)

Fred doesn’t have a very high opinion of gays - I believe he’s called them ‘these sodomites’ and certain other unsavoury epithets - and I lost a lot of sleep worrying about the future of the Flint/Nile relationship. But I needn’t have worried. There’s David on the front page of the current FWN, sharing the limelight at a Queen’s Birthday bash with Fred and Elaine Nile, all giggling away together. And on page 5 there’s an even better photo of David, standing behind a lectern decorated with not one, but two portraits of the … well, of Her Majesty, ‘added to [the] lectern by Fred‘.

Nile admits to being a practical joker. I guess old habits die hard.

Filed in: People, Sexuality