Tatu still managing to upset gay people in 2014
For a very long time, one of the most-read pieces on No Rock And Roll Fun has been the one where Tatu broke off from filming videos of themselves snogging in the pouring rain to ask why everyone thought they were gay.
I think, nine years down the line, it's still puzzling Yulia, as she's now going to extraordinary lengths to distance herself a bit further from That Sort Of Thing, mainly by coming out as a flaming bigot:
Volkova has now revealed that her support for gay rights have since waned and says she would not accept her son if her were gay.The idea of not accepting a gay son, in the way one might refuse to sign for a delivery of chipboard.
"Yes, I would condemn him, because I believe that a real man must be a real man," she said. "God created man for procreation, it is the nature. The man for me is the support, the strength of... I won't accept a gay son."
Obviously, we don't need to waste much time engaging with the substance of Yulia's homophobia, or her theology. Or her, much.
But you might be wondering 'hey, didn't Tatu at least try and salvage their image the last time round by making some token support for LGBT issues? Isn't this making her look not only like a terrible, terrible person, but one who is perhaps suggesting that was all less than genuine?'
And you'd be right.
But Yulia has a workaround. Let's hear it, Yulia:
She was quick to add that her views aren’t at odds with her previous work; lesbians are a more acceptable form of sexuality than gay men, she claims, because women are "aesthetically nicer".Okay, when I said we don't need to spend much time engaging with Yulia's substance, I might have been wrong.
Because she seems to be implying that lesbianism is absolutely fine, because women are nice to look at, the logic appears to suggest that she's looked at some cocks and decided they're pretty poorly designed.
From this, she's rationalised that since nobody would want to engage with something so ridgy, and thrusting, and dribbly-when-enraged, and coloured with a purple that Dulux has never tried to recreate, the only possible reason you'd want to go near one would be, reluctantly, to make a baby. And if there's not going to be a baby coming out of the encounter, why would you bother?
Winningly, Yulia has managed to invert one of the stock pieces of lazy gay stereotyping - that they're all aesthetes - and turned it on its head to suggest that for two men to enjoy their company when they're naked, those men would have to have no sense of style or taste at all.
So is Yulia right that acts of same-sex activity can pervert society? Actually, yes, in one very specific way.
Because, although All The Things She Said was a cracking pop song, without the video it would probably have been overlooked, and by now Tatu would, as a band, be too obscure a reference for Pointless and probably only deployed during the latter stages of Only Connect, if at all. Ironically, we could all probably be moving on without having to worry about what a spiteful Russian woman thought about men who have sex with men if that woman hadn't spent time snogging another woman in the rain, in front of a camera, a decade ago.
That might be, uniquely, the one piece of same-sex activity we'd all have been better off without.