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Tom Cruise is report­edly work­ing on a script for a sequel to Top Gun. In case he’s mis­laid his well-thumbed orig­i­nal copy of Male Imper­son­ators: Men Per­form­ing Mas­culin­ity, the book that outed the flam­ing queer­ness of the orig­i­nal movie, he needn’t worry.

Tom can now down­load it in an instant as a Kin­dle eBook, in a ‘2011 Director’s Cut Edition’.

In fact, Top Gun and Tom Cruise’s swish­ingly sex­u­ally ambigu­ous career only make up one of the chap­ters (and one of the weaker ones at that, it seems to me now). Pub­lished in 1994 Male Imper­son­ators exam­ined the way men were rep­re­sented in pop­u­lar cul­ture as a whole – movies, ads, mags, music and com­edy – fil­tered through, of course, my trade­mark ‘bent’. Show­ing how ‘unmanly’ pas­sions such as homo­erotics, male nar­cis­sism and masochism were not excluded but rather exploited, albeit semi-secretly, in voyeuris­tic virility.

Essen­tially, Male Imper­son­ators is an X-ray of what late-Twentieth Cen­tury medi­ated cul­ture was doing to mas­culin­ity. Elbow deep.

Unlike most ‘Director’s Cuts’ I have actu­ally cut instead of adding stuff. Chiefly, I’ve axed the long intro­duc­tion I didn’t want to write in the first place and that prob­a­bly no one read anyway.

WARNING: Com­mis­sioned by an aca­d­e­mic pub­lisher, Male Imper­son­ators, my first book, is often heav­ily ref­er­enced and freighted with the­ory. This was the last time I wrote that kind of book.

It was also the high sum­mer of my love-affair with Freud. So there’s rather a lot of what Gore Vidal sniff­in­gly dubbed ‘the Jew­ish den­tist’ in this work. My heart still belongs to Siggy and his the­ory of uni­ver­sal bi-responsiveness, of course. But I’m no longer, as they say, ‘in love’.

Writ­ten in 1993, a lot of M.I. is nat­u­rally very dated now. It really was a dif­fer­ent cen­tury. ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ had just been enacted in the US, while even prop­erly clos­eted homo­sex­u­al­ity was still a dis­missal offense in the UK Armed Forces. The age of con­sent for two civil­ian males was 21 (low­ered halt­ingly, reluc­tantly, to 18 in the same year as M.I. was pub­lished). Sec­tion 28, the 1980s law intro­duced by Mar­garet Thatcher that out­lawed the ‘pro­mo­tion of homo­sex­u­al­ity’ by local author­i­ties was still in force, along with all the grim panoply of ‘gross-indecency’ and ‘impor­tun­ing’ anti-homo leg­is­la­tion of the Nine­teenth Century.

The HAART ther­apy cav­alry was yet to arrive and Aids was still per­ceived as a (gay) death sen­tence in the West, and had ‘exe­cuted’ a num­ber of friends of mine: includ­ing one of the ded­i­ca­tees, Imanol Iriondo (who died just after M.I. was published).

So it’s only under­stand­able that I should have been a lit­tle more pre­oc­cu­pied with ‘homo­pho­bia’ back then than I am these days. Par­tic­u­larly the hyp­o­crit­i­cal way it was often used to keep homo­erotics pure. I was a lot gayer then.

That said, some of M.I. stands up sur­pris­ingly well, I think. Often, my feel­ing as I went through it was: WHY did I write that? Quickly col­lid­ing with HOW did I write that? M.I. was writ­ten in the space of three months, when I was still in my 20s. Ah, the energy of youth.…

For all its dat­ed­ness, there is some­thing time­less about M.I. The ‘male objec­ti­fi­ca­tion’ it analysed has become so dom­i­nant and every­day that even New York Mag­a­zine (and then Details) notices it.

And MI did after all give birth to that attention-seeking, damnably pretty crea­ture that was to own the 21st Cen­tury: the met­ro­sex­ual. Though I never uses that word in MI. Instead I talk about male nar­cis­sism (and masochism). A lot. It wasn’t until I wrote an arti­cle for UK news­pa­per The Inde­pen­dent in late 1994 to pub­li­cise MI that I used the ‘m’ word – which turned out to be its first appear­ance in print.

I deployed ‘met­ro­sex­ual’ as jour­nal­is­tic short­hand for the freighted the­ory of MI. Read­ing MI you may decide that the short­hand said rather more than the long­hand. If Male Imper­son­ators was the the­ory of met­ro­sex­u­al­ity, Met­ro­sexy, my recent col­lec­tion of metro jour­nal­ism, doc­u­ments the way met­ro­sex­u­al­ity went on to con­quer the cul­ture over the next decade or so – and also the half-hearted, men-dacious back­lash against it in the Noughties.

Some­times I have to pinch myself today. Watch­ing the pretty boys hug­ging and cry­ing on X-Factor and Amer­i­can Idol, or the straight mus­cle Marys flaunt­ing their depilated pecs and abs on Jersey/Geordie Shore, or the orange rugby play­ers spin­ning around top­less in glit­tery tight pants on Strictly Come Danc­ing — or Tom Hardy doing much the same thing in War­rior – it’s as if I’ve died and gone to a hell­ish kind of heaven.

MALE IMPERSONATORS

Men Per­form­ing Masculinity

The book that changed the way the world looks at men.

Why is body­build­ing a form of trans­sex­u­al­ism? What do foot­ball and anal sex have in com­mon? Why is Top Gun such a flam­ingly ‘gay’ movie? Why is male van­ity such a hot com­mod­ity? And why oh why do Marky Mark’s pants keep falling down?

In his influ­en­tial first book Male Imper­son­ators, first pub­lished in 1994, Mark Simp­son argues for the vital cen­tral­ity of homo­eroti­cism and nar­cis­sism in any under­stand­ing of the fraught phe­nom­e­non of mod­ern masculinity. A highly pen­e­trat­ing, tick­lish but always seri­ous exam­i­na­tion of what hap­pens to men when they become ‘objec­ti­fied’.

From porn to shav­ing adverts, rock and roll to war movies, drag to lads’ nights out, Male Imper­son­ators offers wit and reader-friendly the­ory in equal mea­sure in a review of the great­est show on Earth – the per­for­mance of masculinity.

On male strippers…‘

‘The myth of male strip­ping mes­merises pre­cisely because it con­tra­dicts itself with every dis­carded item… No mat­ter how freak­ish his gen­i­tal attrib­utes, no mat­ter how craftily engorged and arranged with rings and elas­tic bands, no mat­ter how fran­ti­cally it is waved and wag­gled, the stripper’s penis, once naked, never lives up to the promise of the phal­lus: the cli­mac­tic finale of the strip is… an anti-climax.’

On Elvis…

‘The world does not need a ‘gay Elvis’, for the orig­i­nal, with his black leather suit, pomaded pom­padour, come-fuck-me eyes and radi­ant nar­cis­sism, was quite queer enough.’

On porn stars…

‘Visu­ally, Jeff Stryker resem­bles noth­ing so much as an illus­tra­tion of the human ner­vous sys­tem in a med­ical text­book where the size of each region and appendage rep­re­sented is related to the num­ber of nerve end­ings. Thus Jeff on-screen is remem­bered as a huge face, a vast pair of hands (all the bet­ter to grab and slap ass with) and grotesquely out­sized genitalia.’

Praise For Male Imper­son­ators

‘Simp­son pulls the pants off pop­u­lar cul­ture and wit­tily winks at the Freudian sym­bols lurk­ing beneath.’ (FOUR STARS OUT OF FOUR) – The Mod­ern Review

‘This set of high-spirited essays dis­plays more insight into the mas­cu­line mys­tique than has the decade of earnest men’s stud­ies that pre­ceded it. Simp­son has an unerr­ing eye for the inner logic and pre­tences of a wide range of mas­cu­line enter­prises and sym­bols. THIS IS QUEER THEORY WITHOUT THE JARGON AND IS A MUST FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN THINGS MALE. GENERAL AND ACADEMIC READERS AT ALL LEVELS ‘– Choices

‘What is hap­pen­ing when men and their sex­u­al­i­ties become the focus of the camera’s gaze? Mark Simpson’s bril­liant, witty, up-to-the-minute analy­sis shat­ters com­pla­cen­cies, old and new.’ – Alan Sin­field, Uni­ver­sity of Sussex

‘Mark Simp­son detects and dis­sects the myths of machismo and its atten­dant media cir­cus with refresh­ing gusto and wit.’  – John Ashbery

‘It’s not only women who don’t have the phal­lus – men don’t have it either – just the inad­e­quate penis! This book cheered me up with the reminder that when it gets down to it, both sexes are just great pre­tenders.’ – Lor­raine Gamman

‘Like me this book plays with men. Provoca­tive, irrev­er­ent, acer­bic and witty, it offers one gigan­tic intel­lec­tual orgasm after another.’  – Margi Clarke

‘A brilliantly-positioned array of fire­crack­ers, ele­phant traps and banana skins designed to trick con­ven­tional male­ness into show­ing it’s true hand, or some extrem­ity.… SIMPSON CAPERS LIKE ROBIN GOODFELLOW, STRIPPING OFF THE FIG LEAVES WITH EXUBERANCE.’  – The Observer

‘CLEVER, ENGAGING, INCISIVE.’ – The Guardian

‘EMINENTLY READABLE.’ – My Prime

‘Mark Simpson’s Male Imper­son­ators could do for male sex­u­al­ity what Camilla Paglia did for women, find­ing latent homo sub­texts to Marky Mark, Clint East­wood and Tom Cruise’s base­ball bat.’ - Melody Maker

‘Male Imper­son­ators quickly reveals itself to be dif­fer­ent and, arguably more insight­ful than many pre­vi­ous ‘Mas­culin­ity books’. Male Imper­son­ators makes a timely and exem­plary addi­tion to cult stud’s ‘Return to Freud’. It has an excel­lent read­abil­ity fac­tor com­pared to many oth­ers freighted with dull writ­ing.’  – Per­ver­sions

‘A DEFT AND PERSUASIVE DISCUSSION ON THE SUBJECT.’

– Stage and Tele­vi­sion Today

‘These smash­ingly provoca­tive essays by the spunky Brit writer Mark Simp­son det­o­nate myths, stereo­types and icons, gay as well as straight. The psycho-social line sep­a­rat­ing homo and het­ero male­ness, he ful­somely shows, is much fuzzier than Robert Bly and Pat Buchanan find it to be.’

- Lambda Book Report