Tony Blair’s Jesus Christ Sings Edith Piaf performance yesterday at The Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, giving testimony at the Chilcot enquiry into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War, disappointed a lot of people who hoped he would get nailed, or at least express a few regrets.

I’m not one of them.  Now, I enjoy a good scourging as much as the next man, especially in the wake of a war that has cost so many lives, but it seems to me that the expectations of the media and public played into Blair’s (stigmata) hands.  Tone the Catholic convert barrister excels at crucifixions and turned in a performance Mel Gibson would envy yesterday, hanging from the cross of his ‘belief’ that ‘removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do’.  For all the spears in his side, nothing was made to stick.  He won’t need to rise on the third day because unlike Our Lord Jesus Christ he didn’t die — instead he thrived.

Besides, the thing that many if not most people in the UK long to pin on him – personal and complete responsibility for our involvement in a disastrous US war – isn’t something that can be really pinned on any one British politician, however annoying his grin.  It has to be pinned on history.  The history of the UK’s ’special relationship’ with the United States.

Blair is more than happy to play the self-aggrandising role he’s been allotted by public opinion and the public is only further infuriated by the evidence of this.  Blair of course interprets his role not as The Man Who Invaded Iraq Illegally And Has Blood on His Hands, but as The International Statesman Burdened by Heavy Responsibilities, Special Knowledge and Big Decisions Reluctantly Made to Guarantee Our and An Ungrateful World’s Safety.  But it’s essentially the same role: A bigger one than he deserves.  Blair is a much more pitiful figure than most of his enemies are willing to admit.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be offering Blair a vinegar-soaked sponge, but scapegoating him as all sides of the political spectrum want to do – He lied to us!  He was sycophantic to Bush!  A poodle!  A narcissist! – obscures the larger, much more painful issue: that the UK invaded Iraq not because of weapons of mass destruction.  Nor Al Qaeda.  Nor Saddam’s tyranny.  Nor Zionism.  Nor even for oil.  And certainly not because Tony Blair is a weak man or a strong man.  No, in the final analysis there was only one reason why we invaded Iraq. Because the US wanted us to.

Jump is what military satellites of imperial powers do when their master tells them to, and it’s very difficult to imagine that any other British Prime Minister since 1940, with the possible exception of Harold Wilson (and look what happened to him – you can be sure that Blair did) could have said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to Uncle Sam’s kind invitation, especially after it had been attacked on 9-11 (the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack is irrelevant — or at least it was for America’s need for vengeance).  The Tories certainly wouldn’t have done, and their attempts now to wriggle out of their enthusiastic support for the war –without which Blair would not have won his Commons war vote – by bleating about being ‘misled’ by Blair is just shameless opportunism.

The former premier that Blair most calls to mind is Anthony Eden, who was forced out of office after the disaster of Suez in 1956.  Eden bigged up Nasser as a ‘monster’ threatening his own people and The World – and also famously lied to Parliament to justify  invasion, but this isn’t why he was shamed and shunned, even more so than Blair.  By fatally misjudging America’s wishes Eden had rubbed the UK’s nose in its post-war subject status.  Suez was actually a much more ‘justifiable’ war from the point of view of British interests than Iraq –  the canal was British and French owned and the route to (what was left of) the Empire.

But the Americans were not amused: they were competing with the USSR at the time for anti-colonial cred and told us to bog off home. And we did, pronto.  Eden was so reviled at home not for lying as many claimed, or even for losing, but because he succeeded in making it embarrassingly clear to everyone, most especially the French, that the UK no longer had a sovereign foreign policy.  He shamed us in the world’s eyes.  In our own eyes.

Likewise with Blair.  Those loud complaints about Blair’s ‘sycophancy’ to George Bush over Iraq – well, really it’s mostly about how we don’t like to be reminded of our national sycophancy towards US interests, unavoidable as it may very well be.  Sometimes its that very unavoidability that makes it so painful.

Blair, ever the actor, decided to make a virtue of what was essentially a political necessity.  Being something of a devotee of the Method School, he probably even succeeded in convincing himself of that necessity: and yes, doing so meant that, like Thatcher before him the US gave him a global stage to preen upon.  But this is what the US has done to the UK since the Second World War.  As a military satellite of the US – or giant American aircraft carrier, as the great American anti-imperialist Gore Vidal puts it – we’ve been bigged up by US power as a way of further projecting that power around the world.  Like, say, Austria-Hungary was by Germany in the early Twentieth Century, but with slightly less interesting headgear.  As a result we have remained far too big for our post-Imperial, post-industrial, post-everything breeches.  Though we of course prefer to term it: ‘punching above our weight’.  As if punching above your weight was something clever.  Even when you’re not teetering as we now are on the verge of bankruptcy.

In hindsight, to save our sensibilities Blair should have made it look like the UK wasn’t so easy.  He should have made Bush wine and dine us more – and put up more of a virtuous struggle before giving Bush everything he wanted and was going to get anyway.  Instead Tone seems to have gone the whole way on the first date.  We feel cheap instead of ’special’.

True, the way Blair and his minions set about terrorising us and his own party with fairy stories of WMDs was very naughty indeed, but as he now cheerfully admits, if it hadn’t been WMDs it would have been something else.  After all, we elect politicians to lie to us.  And did anyone, apart from David Aaronovitch, really believe any of it?  Something else that shouldn’t be forgotten: Blair would probably still be in power and only hated by a small ‘bitter’ minority of the British public if the US occupation of Iraq hadn’t gone so spectacularly awry – he was remember, like his master Bush, feted by the press and much of the public in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. They only fell out of favour when they seemed like losers rather than winners.

Nailing Blair to the cross of Iraq now won’t change what happened, or even stop something like it happening again.  In fact, by obscuring the real nature of our ‘special relationship’ with the US and instead blaming one man’s weakness and mendacity, it may make it easier for it to happen again.

And it is already happening again. In a war that threatens to make Iraq look like a picnic.  Despite all the discussion and debate in the UK media about why we’re still in Afghanistan after eight years, what we hope to achieve, and what tactics should be employed, everyone in the media knows – but doesn’t say – there is only one reason why we’re in Afghanistan.  Because the Americans are. Everything else is hot air.  Or, in the case of Brown’s claims that the war in Afghanistan has to be fought to stop terrorist attacks in London: another 45 Minute WMD lie that no one believes.  After the UK distinguished itself in the 7/7 London bus and tube bombings as being the only country in the world that has succeeded in raising, housing and educating its own suicide bombers, everyone knows that the real problem the UK faces with radical Islamism is homegrown.

Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the Iraq Invasion and now Prime Minister in large part because of Blair’s unpopularity over Iraq, is very fortunate to have US imperial interests represented these days by someone much more appealing and persuasive than George W Bush.  Someone who gets handed plaudits and Nobel Peace Prizes just for being elected.  But however nice his smile is, the Emperor is the Emperor and our troops must still die for him.  Why are we sending even more troops to Afghanistan?  To liberate women, build power plants, and stop people being blown up on London buses?  No.  They’re going because Barack ‘I-didn’t-vote-for-that-war!’ Obama says so.

Blair should be held to account for his actions of course, but we shouldn’t fall for his self-aggrandising view of himself and history.  Even if it takes our mind off the rather vulgar details of the ’special relationship’ and how embarrassingly, vanishingly small our influence is over our transatlantic boss.

© Mark Simpson 2010

Interesting piece by Scott James in today’s New York Times:

New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.

That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”

The study also found open gay couples just as happy in their relationships as pairs in sexually exclusive unions, Dr. Hoff said. A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.

However the reporter discovered a wall of silence surrounding the subject:

None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.

Or perhaps they worry they might be shouted down and called ’sluts’ by the gay blogs.

Given the very real fear of being osctracised and shamed for talking in front of the goyim about how gay relationships actually are, instead of the Disney-esque way that gay marriage zealots would like to portray them, it seems a reasonable assumption that the 50% figure is an underreporting.  Probably most gay male relationships in the Bay Area are open.  As I’ve said before, in public, in front of the goyim, in my experience probably most gay male relationships are open.  (I’ll admit I was surprised by the article’s claims about lesbian relationships — but then, I have rather less experience of them…).

Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s half or most, or even a large minority, the point, as Scott James acknowledges, is that this is definitely not an attribute of the vast majority of hetero relationships.  Many may have their ‘infidelities’, but very, very few have open relationships.  For most the concept is a contradiction in terms.  Especially if married.  The author makes much of how the openess of gay relationships can help reform the failing institution of marriage, but personally I suspect he fails to understand what marriage actually is, and the proprietary, exclusive nature of it.  In reality, gay marriage may just  succeed in making gay relationships less open and more hypocritical.

Too often the movement for gay marriage is censorious and shame-based, about presenting homosexuality as a neutered heterosexuality, about claiming over and over again that gay relationships are ‘just like’ straight ones and anyone who says different is a bigot and ‘homophobe’ –  externalised or internalised.

There’s also another dimension to the reluctance of gay couples to talk about their open relationships… openly, one that has less to do with worrying about what the gays will say, and more to do with what the world will think: It may cost them their new-found respectability.  This after all is the point of ‘gay marriage’ for some, particularly those of the Sullivanite tendency: to prove to the world they’re not like those promiscuous, hedonistic, slut gays. Even and especially if they are still getting rogered by them regularly via Manhunt.

Then again, open relationships can be hard work.  And discussing them in public allows people like me to pass unhelpful comment.  Here’s ‘Chris’ and ‘James” rules for their open relationship:

complete disclosure, honesty about all encounters, advance approval of partners, and no sex with strangers — they must both know the other men first. “We check in with each other on this an awful lot,” said James, 37.

Obviously how they conduct their relationship is their business — and good luck to them — but I can’t help wondering if in this instance monogamy wouldn’t be much less trouble.

After all those ads in which Becks thrusted his giant Armani wrapped package in our faces if not down our throats, an Italian satirical TV show decided to do a little consumer product testing.  You know that in Italy they like to handle the sausage and tomatoes – and haggle over the price – before they part with their Euros.

Both parties are clearly unimpressed.

For those who don’t speak the most beautiful, most musical language in the world: the rubber-gloved lady shouts at a hooded, glowering Beckham driving off in his (ridiculously large) car full of minders: ‘HOW COULD YOU TAKE US FOR A RIDE!!??’

The incident has caused some anger in the UK, and some see it as outright sexual assault.  But if you are paid very large wedges of cash to put your lunchbox on the side of buses to sell overpriced underwear to the masses then perhaps the only shocking thing is that more punters don’t cop a feel of the goods.

C4 have been running this rather clever new cross-dressing Renault Twingo Sport ad heavily during Celebrity Big Brother ad breaks.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that Alex Reid, Jordan’s transexy cage-fighting beefy boyfriend, is one of the house-mates this year? And rapidly stealing the show, despite being the tabloids’ whipping boy and the way he was loudly booed when he entered the House.

The Twingo ad is quite a departure for a car commercial, especially one for a hot hatch aimed at young men.  Jeremy Clarkson must be pulling what’s left of his 1970s dad hair out.

Instead of displaying shame, shock, anger or embarrassment at being humiliated in front of his mates the hot-hatch metrosexual son sees his father’s cross dressing as an opportunity to be socially exploited: ‘Dad?  Can you get us in?’.  We live in modern times indeed.

So it’s been entertaining to watch dinosaurs in the Big Brother House like Vinnie Jones give Alex pseudo fatherly ‘advice’ — which boils down to: ‘Don’t ‘ave anyfin’ to do wiv any of that fackin’ queer stuff, my son.’  If you want to be a washed-up bit part actor-thug with sphincter cramp, that is.

I literally spilt my tea last week when Vinnie announced, after getting up sharpish and moving, backs-against-the-wall-stylee, right to the other side of the room when Alex volunteered he was ‘try-sexual’: ‘I wouldn’t be in a movie wiv you if they paid me five million quid!’

Well Vinnie sweetie, you are in a movie with Alex already — it’s called CBB and you did it, according to reports, for just 350,000.

Alex, bless him, looked crestfallen, but then almost all of them, including former Madam Heidi Fleiss, the one with prolapsed lips, were lining up to have a go at him for being ‘confused’. Translation: interesting.  Let’s hope they don’t succeed in straightening him out.

House rule-book memorising Vinnie is playing CBB dad, but a very bad one — with badly dyed hair.  He’s so jealous of Alex you can taste it.  He’s jealous of his youth, his hair, his looks, his tits, and jealous of his cross-dressing, or at least his lack of hang-ups about it. He’s also threatened by Alex’s real as opposed to ‘Guy Ritchie’ fighting ability.

‘Hard Man’ Vin is also shaping up to be a major gossiping bitch — cross-dressing Alex by contrast mostly keeps his tongue in his head and hangs onto his sense of fun.  Vinnie knows Alex is his main threat, in every sense: that’s why he keeps needling him and nominating him. He’d make a great Blakey in any remake of On The Buses.

But the bad CBB dads don’t end there.  Mega-swish Stephen Baldwin, who puts me in mind of the crazy camp ‘Begone foul demons!!’ preacher on the make in There Will Be Blood, is completely obsessed with Alex, spending scads of time and energy trying to seduce him — into the ways of Je-sus!– with flattery, love-bombing, back massages, mentalist preaching, and lots and lots of inappropriate eye-contact during endless shaggy dog sermons.  Stephen, who clearly doesn’t know his parable from his allegory, thinks he’s ‘helping’ Alex and showing him and us the viewers at home the revealed truth of the Holy Book he likes to thump so much and his own superior, saved status, but is in fact just making a very convincing case for American evangelism being sublimated – or rather congealed – homoerotics.

Alex is too nice a bloke to tell him to piss off.  Besides, he likes attention — and I suspect he knows that The Conversion of Alex just gets him more camera time.

I haven’t really watched CBB, or BB, since Pete Burns’ legendary appearance on it a few years back as a mischievous, sometimes downright malevolent, Eastern pagan goddess with a scouse accent.  Nor have many other people, which is why C4 isn’t renewing the franchise with Endemol.  But this final CBB is shaping up to be almost as good.

And I haven’t even mentioned Stephanie Beacham and Ivana Trump….

The Naked Civil Servant is the best and funniest TV drama ever made. And I’m sorry, but it’s a scientific fact.

And like its subject it could only have been made in the UK.  Even if Crisp said he hated England –and he did, over and over again –only England could have made Crisp and The Naked Civil Servant.

So many lines in Philip Mackie’s superb screenplay for the Thames TV adaptation glitter like, well, the icy aphorisms that Crisp filled his eponymous autobiography with.  But it was Hurt’s breakthrough performance as Crisp which is most historic: rendering Crisp, as Quentin himself acknowledged — and welcomed — something of an understudy to Hurt’s Crisp for the rest of his life.

The actual, quasi-existing Crisp, born Dennis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey in 1908, sometimes sounded by this stage (he was nearly 70 when the drama aired) like a vintage car tyre losing air ve-ry slow-ly.  And was almost as immobile.  Hetero dandy Hurt injected a kind of rakishness – a hint of phallicism, even – to Crisp’s defiantly passsssive persssssona that came across rather more invigorating and sexy than he actually was.  Hurt rendered Crisp rock ‘n’ roll when he probably wasn’t even up for a waltz.  When Hurt repeatedly intoned Crisp’s Zen-like answer to the world and Other People and Desire in general – ‘If you like’ – it sounded slightly more aggressive than passive.

(And for me, Hurtian Crisp was further improved and made edgier by what I shall call Hoyleian-Hurtian Crisp: when I met the performance artist David Hoyle in the early 80s when we were both teenage runaways to London’s bedsit-land he would perform key moments from TNCS mid conversation about the weather or who was on Top of the Pops last night, adding a dash of David Bowie and Bette Davis to the mix.  David always succeeded in making these impromptu excerpts sound as if they were flashbacks to his earlier life.  Which, since he grew up a sensitive boy in working class Blackpool in the 1970s watching a lot of telly, they were.)

TNCS, book and the dramatisation, is criminally funny precisely because so much of what Hurt/Crisp says/declaims is so shockingly true.

The line whispered delicately in the ear of the leader of a 1930s queerbashing gang is now almost a cliche, but still has hilarious force: ‘“If I were you I’d bugger off back to Hoxton before they work out you’re queer.”  Some toughs are really queer, and some queers are really tough. Crisp’s truths, particularly about human relationships, are the truths told by someone who has nothing to lose – largely because they’ve already lost everything to the bailiffs of despair.  This is the ‘nakedness’ of the Civil Servant.

Because it was one of the first TV dramas to depict a self-confessed and unapologetic — flaunting, even — homosexual TNCS has been frequently misrepresented as a ‘gay drama’.  But Crisp’s sexuality is not really what TNCS is about – or in fact what Crisp was about.

To a degree it is about being ‘out and proud’, or at least determined to inflict oneself on the world, but not so much as a homosexual, and certainly not as ‘a gay’, in the modern, respectable, American sense of the word. It’s not even, thankfully, a plea for tolerance.  Rather it’s a portrayal of the heroic self-sufficiency of someone who decided to stand apart from society and its values, henna their hair and work as a male street prostitute – and then, lying bruised in the gutter, turn a haughty, unsentimental but piercingly funny eye back on a world which regards him as the lowest form of life.  It’s the blackest and cheekiest kind of comedy — which is to say: the only kind.

‘I am an effeminate homo-sex-u-alll’, declared Crisp to the Universe, over and over again.  And the Universe had no choice but to agree. By being utterly abject Crisp forced the Universe to do precisely as he instructed.  A blueprint for celebrity that was to be repeated many, many times by others before his death in 1999 and even more times after — though usually rather less wittily.

Crisp added that as an effeminate homosexual he was imprisoned inside an exquisite paradox, like some kind of ancient insect trapped in amber: attracted to masculine males – the famous Great Dark Man – he cannot himself be attracted to a man who finds him, another male, attractive because then they cannot be The Great Dark Man any more.  Hence the famous, Death-of-God declaration in TNCS, after many, many mishaps and misrecognitions: ’”There. Is. No. Great. Dark. Man!”’

Strictly 19^th Century sexologically speaking, Mr Crisp was probably more of a male invert than a homosexual and often said that he thought that he should have been a woman, and even wondered whether he was born intersexed (this despite famously dismissing women as ‘speaking a language I do not understand’ — perhaps because he didn’t like too much competition in the speaking stakes).  Either way, he doesn’t appear to have been terribly happy with his penis or even its existence – something homosexual males, like heterosexual ones, are usually delirious about. But then again, perhaps rather than expressing some kind of  proto-transsexuality Quentin’s Great Dark Man complex was merely setting up a situation in which he could remain ever faithful to his one true love.  Himself.

In Thames TV’s TNCS, which begins (at Crisp’s request) with a pretty, pre-pubescent boy as Quentin/Dennis dancing in a dress in front of a full-length mirror, Hurtian Crisp is an out-and-proud narcissist, who simply refuses to take on board the shame that such an outrageous perversion should entail. When he attempts to join the Army at the start of the war he causes apoplexy in the recruiters for being completely honest about his reasons for doing so: he doesn’t mouth platitudes about ‘doing his duty’, ‘his bit’ or ‘fighting Nazis’.  He just wants to eat properly and the squaddies he knows seem to have quite a nice time of it, loading and unloading petrol cans in Basingstoke.  His openness about his homosexuality is palpably less shocking to the Army officials than his honesty about his self-interestedness.  About his interest in himself.

Or as Hurt/Crisp replies as a preening adolescent youth when asked by his exasperated, buttoned-up Edwardian petite-bourgeois father: ‘Do you intend to admire yourself in the mirror forever?’

‘If I possibly can.’

And boy, did he.  TNCS, which aired slap in the middle of the 70s, was probably more of an inspiration to the glam, punk, new-wave and new romantic generation than to gays in general.  Hurtian Crisp and his hennaed hair and make-up sashaying the streets of 1930s London symbolised in the 1970s the idea of an aestheticized revolt against Victorian ideas of proper deportment and dullness that had dominated Britain for much of the Twentieth Century.  The best British pop music had always been a form of aesthetic revolt, and Crisp seemed very much his own special creation, which is what so many teens now aspired to be.  Crisp was taken for a real original and individual in an age when everyone wanted to be original and individual.  Or as Crisp put it himself later: ‘The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.’

TNCS changed Crisp’s life and made him very famous indeed.  A reality TV winner before such a thing existed, his prize was the chance to move to America.  Since he had loved Hollywood movies from childhood and was later treated like a Hollywood starlet (albeit in air raid shelters) by American GI’s in London during the Second World War, no wonder he grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

But if there’s anything to be learned from An Englishman in New York, the sequel to TNCS broadcast on ITV recently, it’s that it may all have been a terrible mistake.  Even if Mr Crisp never thought so.

Although Hurt turns in a technically fine performance, he seems to have become more Crispian and less Hurtian.  Perhaps that’s inevitable with the passage of time (Hurt is nearly 70, the age Crisp was when he first played him).  Or perhaps it’s simply that his acting skills have increased.  Whatever the reason, it’s not a welcome development here.  And I’m sure Crisp would have agreed.

But much, much worse is the redemptive reek of this sequel.  Everything is made to turn on Crisp’s ‘AIDS {upper case back then, remember} is a fad’ quip made in the early 80s and the trouble this got him into in the US – and why he was a good sort, really.  Despite the things he actually said.  So we see him adopt a gay artist dying of the ‘fad’, fussing over him and arranging for his art to be exhibited.  We discover him sending secret cheques to Liz Taylor’s Aids foundation.  We even hear him explain what he meant by ‘fad’ (supposedly it was a political tactic: minimize the gay plague to avoid a hetero backlash).

Now, this obsession with redemption may be very American and has of course, like many American obsessions, become more of an English one of late – especially when trying to sell something to the Yanks, as I’m sure the producers of this sequel are hoping.  But if there was any point to Crisp at all it was that he was utterly unsentimental – except where royalty were concerned – and relatively free of the hypocrisies of everyday life.  This sequel supposedly about him is full of them.  So forgive me if I’m unconvinced.

Crisp was invincible in his determination to regard the US as the dreamland of the movies of his youth made real: America was as he put it ‘Heaven’ where England was ‘Hell’.  And why not?  If you’ve spent most of your best years deprived of almost every single illusion that comforts most other people, why shouldn’t you have one big one in your retirement?

And to be fair much of what he had to say about the friendliness and flattering, encouraging, open-hearted nature of Americans compared to the mean-minded, resentful, vindictive English is quite true, even today.  But Crisp’s whole approach to life was even more at odds with American culture, even in its atypical NYC form, with its emphasis on self-improvement, aspiration, uplift and success. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style,’ said Crisp, who regarded himself as a total failure.  Could there be a more un-American worldview?  Apart that is from, ‘Don’t try to keep up with the Jones’.  Try to drag them down to your level.  It’s cheaper.’

In an early documentary from the 1960s Crisp, sitting in his London bed-sitting room sipping an unappetizing powdered drink he takes instead of preparing food, which he can’t be bothered with, that ‘has all the vitamins and protein I need but tastes awful’ he describes himself as a Puritan.  Actually Crisp was a Puritan with an added frosting of asceticism.  Crisp was deeply suspicious of all pleasure (save the pleasure of being listened to and looked at) and most especially sex, which he described as ‘the last refuge of the miserable’. And four years of house dust is a very good way of showing how above the material world you are.

It’s a very middle class, middle England, middle century Puritanism – just like Crisp’s background.  But Crisp was also his own kind of revenge on himself, or on the world that had made him — of which he was a living parody.  Ultimately none of us are really our own special creations. The most we can hope for is a special edition.

Crisp’s Puritanism was part of the reason why he could never embrace Gay Lib (‘what do you want to be liberated from?’).  He was recently subjected to a stern posthumous ticking off by Peter Tatchell, an original Gay Libber, in The Independent newspaper prompted by what he sees as the ’sanitising of Crisp’s ignorant pompous homophobia’ in An Englishman in New York. Post-60s Crisp was apparently jealous of a new generation of out queers who were stealing his limelite: he wasn’t the only homo in town any more.

This broadside was a tad harsh and Tatchell sometimes sounds as if he’s on the Army board that rejected Crisp (while accusing him of ‘homophobia’ threatens to make an absurdity of the word) but I agree that the sequel does ’sanitise’ Crisp, though I think this a bad thing for different reasons to Mr Tatchell.  I also suspect there’s some truth to the accusation of ‘jealousy’, but I’d be inclined to put them in another form. Maybe Crisp didn’t want homosexuality to be normalised because if it were it would undo his life’s work.  Likewise, I think Crisp would have loathed metrosexuality.

And as the sequel suggests, in one of its few insightful moments, one reason for Crisp’s failure to answer the gay clarion call was simply that he didn’t believe in causes, or the subjugation of truth and dress-sense to expediency that inevitably goes with causes. Unless that cause is yourself.

Besides, like many ‘inverts’, Crisp was a great and romantic believer in Heterosexuality — the ideal kind, of course, rather than the kind that heterosexuals actually have to live, and which they execute very, very badly.  He used to call heterosexuals ‘real people’ (as opposed to ‘unreal’ homosexuals), but I suspect he thought he was the only real heterosexual in town.  And in a sense, he was.

I can’t leave you without pointing out that while Quentin Crisp may have dismissed Aids as a ‘fad’, Hurtian Crisp became more associated with ‘the gay plague’ than almost anyone save Rock Hudson: literally becoming the sound of the seriousness of the subject.  In 1975 hetero Hurt plays the most famous stately homo in England. The success of this gets him to Hollywood, where four years later in 1979 he is cast in an even more globally famous role – as ‘Patient Zero’ in Ridley Scott’s Alien: the first host for the terrifying unknown organism that enters his body by face-raping him and which proceeds to kill-off in horrifying, phallic-jackhammer fashion his shipmates — two years before the first identified Aids cases in NY.

Eight years later, Hurt was the unforgettable fey-gravelly voice for those terrifying tombstone ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ ads (complete with jackhammers) that ran in rotation on UK TV, urging people to read the Government leaflet pushed through their letterbox and practise safe sex.

In other words, The Naked Civil Servant had become a rubber-sheathed civil servant.

Old Spice: interview Crisp gave Andrew Barrow of the Independent a year before his death.

Crispisms

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing.

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, “I wish you hadn’t made every line funny.  It’s so depressing.”

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

Someone asked me why I thought sex was a sin. I said, “She’s joking, isn’t she?” But they said, “No.” Doesn’t everyone know that sex is a sin? All pleasure is a sin.

Amidst the swathe of drearily predictable ‘decade  in review’ pieces that appeared at the end of December this one by Amanda Hess at The Sexist stood out as one which actually managed to offer some observational cultural insight, rather than just recycled cuttings and cliches:

Think boys are simply born into their masculine gender role? Consider, for a moment, how quickly the cultural norms of acceptable maleness can change. The past decade of masculine fads saw cultural expressions of manliness range from finely-groomed boy bands to shlumpy stoners to blowed-out “guidos.” The versions of masculinity that gained popularity in the aughts saw an infusion of traditionally feminine traits—along with a heavy dose of hyper-masculine compensation.

Sharply observed and well-informed (after all, she quotes me) Hess is one of the few decade-end commentators to notice that the Noughties signalled a major, if not epochal shift in masculinity — but perhaps this isn’t so surprising since as I know very well myself the media in general is highly resistant to any serious analysis of the subject, despite or perhaps because of the space it gives to women’s issues.

Hess’ section on ‘bros’ is worth quoting at length:

Like the metrosexuals who rose alongside them, bros incorporated some traditionally feminine aspects into their own version of masculinity—think pink polos, pastel ribbon belts, and store-bought scents. But bros differentiated themselves from the metro set with a healthy dose of crippling homophobia that encouraged both aggressive heterosexual behavior and subversive homoerotic displays among the bros. And so—we got aggressive heterosexual sexual conquests (banging some chick in the frat house), alongside decidedly homoerotic sexual conquests (banging some chick in the frat house with three of your best bros). We got extreme masculine contests (CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!) alongside absurd homosocial displays (fraternity initiation paddling). At least women got a reliable warning sign of likely brodom—the double-popped collar.

I would submit however that most of Hess’ listed masculine trends, particularly ‘boy bands’, ‘bros’ and ‘Guidos’ are more like fads or subspecies within the wider trend of metrosexuality itself and the breakdown of traditional male gender and sexual norms that it represents.  Bros and Guidos for instance seem to be examples of how metrosexuality is being assimilated (and resisted — often in the same gesture) in different areas of American life, according to class, ethnicity, age etc.

The homophobia of bros for example, looks very familiar and very ‘gay’ to me: it’s the homophobia of ’straight acting’ gay men towards ‘queens’.  While Jersey Shore looks to me very much like metrosexuality for boys who love their Momma’s cooking too much to go to college (they also look a lot like metrosexual young men from matriarchal working class backgrounds in the UK, such as Geordies — who tend to be just as orange and plucked and just as prone to fights and making fun of men who cook).

Hess lists the ‘peak year’ of metrosexuality as being ‘2003′ — in reality, this was the peak year not of metrosexuality but of metrosexmania, the global media’s insatiable craving for literally skin-deep stories about male spas and sack-and-crack waxes — and trying to wear out the ‘m’ word with empty repetition.

Metrosexuality, men’s passionate, epoch-making desire to be desired, is a long, long way from peaking.  And the Twenty First Century is going to have to get used to it.

I’ve often thought that Bear Grylls’ ’survival’ programs with his frequent nakedness and subby eagerness to put all sorts of eeeurgh! things in his mouth in extreme close-up while generally putting his body on display and in harm’s way are really a form of fetish porn.  Bear Grylls: Nature Gimp.

Yes, it’s true that I see porn everywhere – especially if it involves fit young chaps – but in this instance I think it’s quite deliberate.

The clincher is Gryll’s terrible acting.  It’s passionately unconvincing.  Acting so bad that almost by itself it renders what you’re watching pornography, even on the rare occasions he keeps his clothes on.  And as in porn, his bad acting is a major part of the sadistic pleasure of voyeurism.

I would describe Bear as taking the role of the bottom in gay porn but this probably isn’t accurate enough.  Bottoms in gay porn generally don’t make nearly as much noise as Bear: it would be a bit of a turn off.  No, Bear makes as much noise as women in straight porn.  Bear’s job, like female porn stars, is to act out (very, very badly) the pain, pleasure and degradation – and glamour – of being on the receiving end.  Of being ‘the bitch’.  For the male viewer.

Every time Bear the rufty-tufty ex-SAS explorer jumps naked into an ice hole or eats dung the ridiculous noise he makes lets us know that we’re watching something much kinkier than a survival programme.

But this clip in which he gives himself an enema ‘Only as a last resort’ takes everything to a whole new level.  The noise he makes as he ‘lies back and thinks of England’ should get him an Adult Video Award.  I’m sure that giving yourself an enema with seagul poo-flavoured water in a chunky plastic hose is a trifle uncomfortable, but Bear manages to make it sound like he’s being fisted by a Rhino.

Bear Grylls: Use only as a last resort – if you can’t find any proper porn.

Watching former mooning hell-raiser turned right-wing Republican fundamentalist and morality campaigner Stephen Baldwin as the self-styled ‘light of truth’ on the new infernal-themed series of C4’s Celebrity Big Brother I was reminded of an hilariously candid interview (posted below) Alexis Arquette, his co-star in 90s (very) tentatively-bi-flick Threesome, gave me a decade or so ago. ‘Saved’ Baldwin, who now worries about his kids learning in school that homosexuality is normal, probably wants to forget swinging Threesome, and given his inebriated state at the time has probably already forgotten what he got up to with Alexis.

But thanks to the internets, he need never forget again!

Alexis revealed, amongst other things, how Baldwin and Usual Suspects director Bryan Singer had a more embarrassing threesome in Stephen’s pick-up truck. After being subjected to heavy flirting from Baldwin all evening an out-of-it Singer broked down and blubbed on Baldwin’s shoulder ‘Oh GOD! I want you SOOO MUCH!’.

Alexis also told when they were filming Threesome Stephen frequently got his ‘very, very thick’ cock out and waved it at him, saying he wanted to get blown by a chick while Alexis watched. Stephen’s penis wasn’t the only thing on display, however.  He once proffered Alexis his butt in a hotel lobby, bending over and rubbing it shouting ‘Oh, dude, this ass is SOMETHING ELSE!  You’ll FUCKING LOVE it man!’

This was back when Baldwin still had a Satanic bubble-butt, instead of a born-again barn door.  And when Alexis still had a penis.  Alexis you see is now a rather transtastic woman.

What a difference a decade makes!  I think though I’d much rather have had Alexis’ decade than Stephen’s.

As you’ll see in the interview, Alexis didn’t take Stephen up on his offer, prompting me to suggest that it would be nothing short of blasphemy for Stephen’s prime rump to reach saggy old age without being put to the purpose which God clearly intended — and selflessly offer my services in averting this outcome.  Alexis thought they might not be entirely unwelcome as back then Stephen was very broad-minded.

But twelve years on Stephen looks like a Donald Trump that’s been left too close to the radiator overnight and I’m no longer so sure I can rise to the occassion.  Besides, his saggy ass now belongs to Jesus.

Maybe Bryan Singer can help?

———

Sex Rap

Alexis Arquette interviewed by Mark Simpson

(Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, 1998)

Fierce drag queen in Last Exit To Brooklyn, hysterical rejected fag in Threesome, trembly sniper in Pulp Fiction, dipsy dithering boyfriend in I Think I do (and brother to family thesps Patricia, Rosanna and David) Alexis Arquette, arthouse Hollywood’s favourite sissy is actually something of a dude in the flesh.  Within minutes of meeting I just want to go out and down a crate of Bud with him and talk baseball scores.

But, you’ll be glad to hear, all he’s interested in talking about is sex.

ALEXIS: I’m a lot like John Malkovich’s character in Dangerous Liaisons.  I just talk about sex all the time.  Actually John’s a lot like that character too.  He wants to know all the details about your sex life and what you got up to last night.  You’ll be on the set and he’ll go in that weird wavery voice of his, ‘Alexiss, last night I was having sssex with a wo-man and she put her fing-er up my asssshole.’  ‘Did you like it?’ I asked.  ‘Yeah.  It was really great!’ he said.  It was a revelation for him!  I said, ‘Well, of course you did!  It’s like the male fucking G Spot, dude!’

I like talking about sex, but don’t really like talking about sex beforehand, if you know what I mean.  But then, I do like talking during sex….

MARK: You like abuse?

Well, I’ve not really had that yet, but maybe it’s something I want.  Part of me thinks it’s the slave gene that’s in us all.  At some point all of our ancestors were enslaved, or something.  I don’t think it’s a bad thing.  But on the other hand if I was in love with a boyfriend and saw him get tied up and fucked and slapped around by six guys it might hurt my feelings…

So you’re old-fashioned?

I guess I am.  On the other hand, if he really, really wanted it, it might turn me on!

Who’s your ideal lay?

Henry Rollins is pretty fucking hot man!

So you’re at a party with Henry.  You’re introduced.  How do you chat him up?

I don’t know.  I’d have to find out what he was into.  You see that’s the only thing I don’t like about myself.  I think I would have more success if I just went for what I wanted instead of trying to please people.

Isn’t that the paradox of being an actor?  You exist for others….

Yeah, it’s a problem.  You begin to wonder if you really feel anything.  ‘Am I acting, or is this really me?’  Something I can’t handle is rejection.  That makes me insane.  Someone rejects me that makes me want to kill.  I suppose that’s real.

So if Henry wanted you to be a sadist and whip his ass would you?

Yeah, I would.  And I’d probably enjoy it.

How about Stephen Baldwin.  Didn’t you make a movie with him which is basically all about his ass?

Oh, yeah, Threesome.  Oh man, I love Stephen.  He like totally loved showing off his butt in that movie.  When we were making that movie he was drinking a lot.  He’s sobered up now and become more respectable, but back then he was always getting trashed.  He was always getting his dick out and waving it at me.  He wanted to get blown by some chick while I watched.  Crazy shit man.

So what does Stephen’s dick look like?

Not very long, but very, very thick.

That figures.

Yeah, and I think he likes to be brutal with it.

I loved the climactic scene in Threesome where the cool liberal straight guy played by Stephen selflessly allows the sad fag to touch his bubble-butt whilst he balls the bitch….

Yeah!  It’s even funnier when you know Stephen.  During the filming of ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ we were drinking in the bar, like, really fucked up.  Then we went out into the lobby, and for some reason, he went to me, ‘I know what you want!’ ‘Oh yeah,’ I asked, ‘what’s that?’  He turns around and shows me his ass – in this brightly lit hotel lobby with people behind the desk and everything – ‘You want to fuck my ass don’t you?’   I laugh, but he’s serious.  ‘You DO, don’t you?’ he says, bending over rubbing his behind.  ‘YOU WANT TO FUCK MY ASS!’  I was like, ‘What??’  But he was like, ‘Oh, dude, this ass is SOMETHING ELSE!  You’ll FUCKING LOVE it man!’

He’s right of course.  He does have the best ass in Hollywood.

Yeah, it’s a fucking bubble-butt man, I’m telling you.  But he’s a fucking monster. He just really loves to be desired.  If he even thinks you’re into him he’ll want you to be around all the time.  I think that Steve is a sexy guy.  But he’s not the kind of person I’d try to get into bed – I know him too well.  He’s like a brother to me…

Yeah right. You’re sharing a motel room and Stephen Baldwin sneaks across to your bed in the middle of the night and starts slapping your face with his very fat cock and grunting – you’re absolutely going to call the management to demand your own room….

{Sighs.} Okay.  Well, if he made all the moves, then yeah, I probably wouldn’t stop him….

But that’s not going to happen because he wants all the attention.

And he gets it.  Bryan Singer, the guy who directed him in ‘The Usual Suspects’ was in love with Stephen.  One night the three of us were together in some punky club in LA and I made the mistake of introducing him to Traci Lordes.  Afterwards… Byan, Stephen and me were on the bench seat of Stephen’s pick up truck.  Brian was sandwiched between us, really off his face and out of nowhere he turned to Steve and said, ‘Oh GOD! I want you SOOO MUCH!’ and starts fucking crying on his fucking shoulder!!  And Stephen’s like ‘Er, it’s OK man…’ all the time with this ‘OH JEEZ!’ look on his face.  I told him, ‘You started it dude!  This is what you get for leading boys on!’

Stephen needs to be taught a lesson.

Yeah, and I think he’s fair game.  I think you’d probably have a good shot with Stephen.  I don’t think he’s one of those straight guys who’s into drag queens.  I think that if he opened himself up he could be genuinely bisexual, y’know what I mean?  I think that if he slept with a guy he’d wanna get fucked.

I’d love to help Stephen ‘open up’.  It would be nothing short of blasphemy for his prime rump to reach saggy old age without being put to the purpose which God clearly intended.…

And you know what?, even if you never get fucked in the ass ever, that’s the male G spot right there.  It’s the prostrate, y’know what I’m saying?  My best friend in LA, a straight guy, very open minded, he says he’s never wanted to get fucked, but every time his girlfriend sticks her finger up his butt he shoots, like everywhere.  He’s totally cool about his male vagina.  But most guys would be, ‘OMIGOD! I must be A FAG!’

So are you a bottom Alexis?

I think it goes beyond that.  I remember one of my first sexual energy things as a kid.  There was this cartoon I saw, where Colonel Custer was forcing some Indian to kiss his feet.  I remember getting a fierce little woody instantly.  POINGG!!.  Then I got together with a friend of mine when I was six and we’d play this game where he was the King and I was the slave, and all I really wanted to do was kiss his feet.  It just made me feel completely… opiated.  I didn’t know what sex was, but I knew I reallly, REALLY liked that.  And y’know what, since then, no matter how wild the sex, I’ve never experienced like that.  Nothing that’s come even close.

So are you a good little bottom?

There’s no-one that likes giving pleasure more than I do, but y’know what?  When I’m done, when I’ve busted, you’d better take you’re dick out, and you’d better get those shackles off me master, because this little pussy boys’ gonna kick your ass, daddy, coz I’m DONE!

{Alexis pauses and looks thoughtful.}  On the other hand, maybe I want to be taken to the point where I’m having sex with someone and not wanting it any more.  I don’t know….

Jeez, where does all this stuff come from?

© Copyright Mark Simpson 2010

The wheels appear to have come off the gay marriage bus in the US and no one seems to know how to put them back on.  Not even the lesbians.

And that’s not according to meddlin’ Limey Uncle Tom ‘slut’ me (as I was dubbed by the Voice of Gay America) but according to the gay-marriage-supporting  New York Times in a piece last week titled ‘Amidst Small Wins, Advocates Lose Marquee Battles’:

…the bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York failed by a surprisingly wide margin on Wednesday. In New Jersey, Democrats have declined to schedule the bill for a vote, believing that the support is no longer there. Voters in Maine last month repealed a state law allowing same-sex marriage despite advocates’ advantage in money and volunteers.

And on the other reliably liberal coast, California advocates of gay marriage announced this week that they would not try in the next elections to reverse the ban on gay marriage that voters approved in 2008; they did not believe they could succeed.

Gay marriage doesn’t appear to be something that even liberal ‘bi-coastal’ America has much of a stomach for, let alone the God-fearing ’flyover’ States that of course make up most of the US.  So how earth did the US gay rights movement turn down this gay marriage cul-de-sac, apparently without a reverse gear? 

Even supporters of gay marriage say that all the optimism got ahead of the reality.

“I think there was some overreading of the political marketplace for gay marriage,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. “It’s not so much that something changed. There was a misreading of where the public was at.”

You don’t say.  Perhaps though it was not so much an ‘overreading’ or ‘misreading’ but rather more a case of complete illiteracy.  I mean, who would have guessed that screaming ‘BIGOT!!’ at beauty queens for believing, like most Americans, including President Obama, that marriage is between a man and a woman wasn’t going to be a terribly persuasive strategy? Whoever would have imagined that trying to blame black voters for California’s re-banning of gay marriage last year at the same time as trying to hijack their history of civil rights struggle and proclaim gays as ‘the new blacks’ wouldn’t play so well?  

And who could have possibly conceived that self-righteously denouncing civil unions, a much more politically achievable – and in my Limey Uncle Tom slut opinion also much more appropriate and modern – institution for giving same-sex couples legal protection as ‘riding at the back of the bus!’, and instead going pell-mell after gay marriage and respectability would have turned out to be such a tactical and strategic blunder? 

Empowered by judicial decisions affirming a constitutional right to gay marriage, beginning in Massachusetts in 2003, advocates argued to move away from a strategy that had focused on more incremental change.

“The gamble has not paid off,” Mr. Garin said.  “We leapfrogged from civil unions to marriage, primarily as a result of judicial decisions that were followed in some cases by legislative action. But the reality is that the judicial decisions were substantially ahead of public opinion, and still are.”

And, it might be added going pell-mell after gay marriage also helped George Bush get re-elected in 2004. Which as we know was such a wonderful outcome for everyone, gay or straight.

Mr Garin may be more clear-headed on this issue than many gay marriage advocates, but the expression ‘ahead of public opinion’ sounds to me like more ‘overreading’.  Maybe most Americans don’t accept that a relationship between two men – and after all, it is this double-penised aspect, not two wombs together, that the straight public think about — is ‘just the same’ as a relationship between a man and a woman, not because they’re backwards, or ignorant, or prejudiced, but because, if you’re not blinded by liberal platitudes, it clearly isn’t. 

And please, can someone over there point out, if only just to be really annoying, that the assimilation of the radically new phenomenon on modern gay relationships to the moribund institution of marriage with its reproductive role-playing, religious flavouring, and history of treating women as chattel does not exactly represent ‘progress’?

Fortunately, there’s one American homo left who isn’t Gore Vidal doing exactly this — though not of course in the NYT.  The novelist Bruce Benderson, interviewed by Christopher Stoddard in the latest issue of East Village Boys about his new book Pacific Agony makes some salient points about male sexuality which the Andrea Sullivanized American gays don’t want to hear:

Bruce Benderson: I have a kind of old-fashioned idea about what a homosexual is, and I think it’s somebody who is made to live outside the social norm. And the reason he was made to live outside the social norm is because one of the main functions of the structure of a social norm is to perpetuate the species, but I don’t think that’s a natural thing for male homosexuals. Not just homosexuals, but men in general are naturally too promiscuous. It’s their relationship with women that makes them more stable so that they can channel it into building a family. These gay couples are going around saying, “Oh, we’re just like you straight couples, really! We just happen to be two men.” I don’t believe that. I think they’re different.

Christopher Stoddard: Okay, so you think that gay men are essentially subject to “vice”?

BB: If you want to make that moral judgment… Suppose a bomb dropped and there were only 100 women and 1 man left. Well, theoretically, that man could repopulate the species by impregnating 100 women a year. Now, take 100 men and 1 woman after the bomb drops; we could only make 1 baby a year, okay? To perpetuate the species, men have been programmed by evolution to be promiscuous. Marriage is the social taming of a man’s sexual energies by a woman, which is necessary to build a social structure. Because a man is made to screw more than one person, there’s nobody to stop him if he’s with just another man.

CS: You sound like the proverbial Repulican who believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

BB: I think that marriage should be illegal! Just like pledging to God should be illegal. Marriage is a sacrament that has absolutely nothing to do with the State, and it should have no legal status whatsoever. A domestic partnership should be recognized by the State, and it should hinge on things like wills, joint tax filing, inheritance, things like that. And any two people should be able to do it. A marriage is just this left-over sacrament that somehow wiggled its way into legal status.

CS: You don’t believe that two men can be devoted to each other in a monogamous way and not cheat because of these carnal needs?

BB: Correct. I believe two men can be totally devoted to each other, but it probably won’t be in the same way that a man and a woman can be totally devoted to each other. I know several gay male couples who’ve been together a long time and go to the baths together, or they both go to one of those, you know, orgy places.

CS: I think I know who you mean. {chuckles}

BB: Yet they’re totally close, and they totally trust each other, and it’s a wonderful pairing.

Be careful, Bruce!  You can’t just go around talking the truth about gay men in public!  Not if you want to be taken seriously, that is.

Male pole dancing is on the rise, according to Diane Passage on the Huffington Post.  Male pole dancing teachers such as the leg-warmer wearing one above have emerged. There’s even a male pole dancing contest in the UK called ‘Mr Pole Fitness’.  However Ms Passage is careful to make this slightly uptight, not to mention self-defeating disclaimer at at the end of her piece:

As I was discussing this topic with friends, the majority of both men and women were not turned on by the idea of watching a man work the pole. I personally am not a fan of a man who tries to imitate the sensual moves of a woman, but I do appreciate a man who demonstrates a masculine gymnastic style suggestive of what I might see in Cirque du Soleil – which does appeal to the masses.

In other words, so long as the male pole performer accepts that sensuality is the woman’s preserve and doesn’t ’try to imitate it’ but rather pretends he’s taking part in an Olympic pommel-horse event or some circus act — instead of pole dancing in a thong — it’s still ‘masculine’ and therefore OK.

It seems to me that male pole-dancing is becoming more popular with men  precisely because in this metrosexual century men are more and more disregarding what is supposed to be a woman’s preserve — particularly sensuality and inviting the gaze.  Men today see women doing things — such as using cosmetics, pole dancing, and sucking cock — and think: Hey! That looks like fun!  I’d like to give that a go!

And why not?

After all, women have been doing the exact same thing with the ‘male preserve’ for some time.  It’s why so many journalists these days are female.

Here are some other clips of male pole dancers that probably won’t meet with Ms Passage’s approval.  I’m not entirely sure whether they all meet with mine.  However the last clip seems to gloriously short-circuit quaint (North American/Anglo) ideas of what’s acceptably ‘masculine’.  The young pole-dancer may be gymnastic, but he’s definitely not pretending he’s on a pommel-horse.  Instead he seems to represent the emergence of a beautiful new species of butterfly. Spectacularly demonstrating that males can be both (eye-poppingly) masculine and sensationally sensual. 

Tip: DAKrolak