MARK SIMPSON.com

The phenomenon of Manlove for the ladies, which I wrote about recently in The Times’ ‘Ideas of the Year’ in citing The Mighty Boosh snog, seems to be catching:

‘Former Buffy the Vampire star James Marsters helped fulfil one of his girlfriend’s fantasies on the set of sci-fi series Torchwood - when he locked lips with John Barrowman.

The actor plays flamboyant bisexual Captain John in the cult TV show and had to share a same sex kiss for the first time.

Marsters says, “I had never kissed a man on film before, but luckily my girlfriend was there, and she said it was always a fantasy of hers that I would kiss another man. She thought it was really hot.”‘

Torchwood was created by Russell T Davies, the writer behind the hit drama Queer As Folk set in Manchester’s gay village - a series whose success was largely down to its huge popularity with women.

Probably because it was basically: Take That Finally Get Down To It.

Speaking personally, John Barrowman is about as unsexy as you can get - even with James Marsters dressed as Adam Ant plastered all over his face.

But what do I know? It’s the ladies calling the queer shots now.

This example of revenge sporno from last year seems to have slipped through my fingers….

‘Top’ Dutch footballer and former Aston Villa goalie Stefan Postma was a tad embarrassed last year to find a home-made video of himself enthusiastically bottoming, that’s to say, taking it up the Arsenal, plastered all over the ‘net’.

The chap doing the ’scoring’? Well, it was actually an embittered ex lady friend wearing a strapadicktome.

Another reason why man-shagging should be a man’s job. At least if they’re cute and blond and have thick necks. (I can keep a secret lads, honest!)

In this spornographic age it’s going to get out there anyway. And at least if they put it out there themselves they’ll make money out of it rather than fritter it away fruitlessly trying to keep the dirty thing under wraps. Most importantly, they’ll be able to make sure its edited in a flattering fashion. And it does make you rather more famous: I for one had never heard of Stefan Postma before; now I’m one of his greatest fans.

Though probably if sportsmen want to maximise sales they should pretend it was released without their consent.

Much was made of the ‘bizarre’ nature of the ‘kinky sex’ depicted. But why is it so strange that a straight man should want to get shagged up the arse? After all, if God hadn’t wanted men to get bummed he wouldn’t have given them prostate glands. A very convincing and attractive tranny pal who went through a great deal of pain trouble and expense to have the ‘op’ tells me that the first thing that straight men ask her once she’s told them she used to be a man is: ‘Will you shag me up the arse with a dildo?’ The next question is, ‘What’s the biggest one you’ve got?’

Probably the most shocking thing to most football fans is how clearly and audibly Stefan is enjoying being ploughed (and watching himself being ploughed in the mirror and, no doubt, in the video afterwards). Some of them will be thinking: ‘He seems to be enjoying taking that a lot more than I do giving it.’ Traditional heterosexuality’s rigid, or sometimes semi-erect, sexual division of labour depends on men not thinking too much about whether they’re getting a bum deal.

Or women. Interesting that no one seems to have considered that the lady friend in the video might be enjoying it too. She certainly sounds like it. For all we know, it might have been her idea. There are a lot of naughty ladies out there who don’t just lie back and think of Sunderland, and not all of them are trannies.

Now, after all those words, here’s what you really wanted: a clip of the strap-on video.

Mark Simpson probes Men’s Health and finds it in painful denial (originally appeared on Guardian Unlimited)

Isn’t it about time Men’s Health, the world’s biggest-selling ‘men’s lifestyle’ magazine, came out to itself?

I couldn’t get to sleep the other night and so resorted to flicking through last month’s UK issue: I find the pictures of semi-naked men’s perfect, sweating muscles and the droning narcissistic hypochondria of the copy in this notorious metromag strangely soothing.

Then I happened across a five page cringemakingly earnest article about ‘heteropolitans’ (complete with a deathly serious ‘Am I heteropolitan?’ questionnaire), which MH wants us to believe have replaced metrosexuals. Apparently metrosexuals were too gay and too vain. HETEROpolitans on the other hand are just perfect: they’re really, really hetero, really attractive, really buffed, really rich, really stylish and really successful. What’s more they also find the time to be really great husbands and dads, and are not in the least bit gay, vain, or even single. Did I mention that they’re not gay already? And guess what? Men’s Health readers are all goody-two-shoes ‘heteropolitans’!

Now this single, childless, beer-bellied bum-bandit REALLY couldn’t get to sleep.

Who do they think they’re kidding with this guff? Their mother? Men’s Health, with it’s front page pin-ups of studly six-packed shirtless men and pages and pages obsessive-compulsive advice on how to get the perfect pecs/skin/low-fat soufflé has long been one of the most nakedly metro of the men’s metromags. You might be forgiven for thinking that the only questionnaire MH needs to run is: ‘Am I Gay? Or Just Bisexual?’

It looks like we’ll have to wait a while for that one. Of course most of its readers are not card-carrying homos like me (though most of them probably have a Boots Storecard). Or closeted. Or even particularly bisexual. Though I’d take a wild guess that a fair percentage of them are. But even the majority hetero readers of MH and other men’s shopping and gyming ‘men’s lifestyle’ mags are not that hetero – they’re clearly metro. Even if MH is in massive denial about this.

The prissy pretence that that any suggestion of gayness is utterly inconceivable between their pristine pages can lead to hilarious results: such as the recent MH sex guide which encouraged readers to get in touch with the hidden pleasures of their prostate gland by ‘getting your girlfriend to massage it for you with her finger’. Or maybe your boyfriend could do it with his penis? (In fact, it’s MH and consumerism in general that is really ‘massaging your prostate’, no vaseline.)

I haven’t been exactly what you’d call a devoted reader over the years (the UK edition of MH was launched in 1995), I tend to dip in when I’m feeling in need of masochistic motivation at the gym or just some eye-candy, but I don’t recall MH always being so comically keen to insist on its Totally Het credentials. Yes, like almost all men’s glossies, the copy didn’t openly acknowledge any of its readers might be homosexual, bisexual, bi-curious, or even just straight but-not-narrow. But then, with those covers it didn’t need to.

Obviously there’s been a rethink at MH Towers. MH is published by Rodale, an American-owned company and I suspect they’ve been influenced by all that mendacious ‘menassance’ marketing twaddle in the US last year in which manly manliness and old-time real-guyness supposedly made a comeback knocking that faggy metro back into the closet ‘Reclaim your manhood – go shopping for moisturiser in a Hummer’, that kind of thing. Maybe this faux-macho Hummersexual over-compensation works in God-fearing, Bush-voting, fag-baiting America – after all, as Gore Vidal once observed, Ernest Hemingway was a joke that only America couldn’t get – but it just looks as camp as a row of camouflage print tents over here. When it doesn’t come across just plain creepy.

Every month gets more surreal in the flawlessly worked-out world of MH. In addition to the usual advice on how to achieve the most desirable body on the dancefloor, the May issue of MH includes an oh-so butch ‘Spartan warrior workout’ based on the Chippendale epic ‘300’, random expressions of disgust at male homosexuality in the Dining Out section, and a ‘welcome aboard’ piece on the Contributors Page in which the editor chastises a new boy from Total Film for spending too much time reviewing films ‘in darkened basements with other men’.

Not to worry though lads, nothing queer about him: he’s a fan of Rocky movies (I kid you not) ‘We’re now ensuring he spends as much time in daylight and in the company of women as possible,’ smugly assures the – rather gay and grey looking – editor. Which means, I guess, that he won’t be spending much time in the gym. Or reading Men’s Health.

After taking rather a lot of paid advice from MH over the years, I have some advice for them I’ll offer gratis. The editorial staff at MH should really give some thought to all those nasty stress hormones released into the bloodstream by having to live a lie, and the terrible things they do to complexions, hair and muscle tone.

Not to mention looking absolutely bloody ridiculous by being so nancy about mansex and so coy about something as natural and irrepressible as good old male vanity.

Especially when your business is built on it.

© Mark Simpson 2007

I don’t blame Keane for being furious. I’m positively seething myself that no one invited me either.

‘Stars in sick orgy’ (strapline to the print version - doesn’t appear online)

Another example of how sporno is fast becoming porno - or is porno becoming sporno?

Tabloid newspapers in the UK can’t get enough of these faux-outraged ‘roasting’ stories about the ’scandal’, ‘disgrace’ and ’sickness’ of several fit young professonal footballers sharing one consenting ‘busty female fan’, simultaneously. Illustrated, if possible - as in this case - with tantalisingly blurry shots from the (no doubt dodgily acquired) home-made porno movie.

Why? It sells. The tabloid readers, male and female - but particularly male - love it. It delivers to them the realisation of the fantasy at the heart of so much sport today: the sports star as porn star. Porn that is, like team sport itself, every so slightly homoerotic. This is after all, porn involving rather more sporting pricks than groupie pussy - in this case, three or four footballing studs on one accomodating lady, and some male spectators, cheering them on and checking out the (decidedly male-rich) action.

It’s not exactly ‘gay’ - but it’s not terribly ’straight’ either.

But I wouldn’t want to suggest that these footballers were any different to most lads today. They seem quite normal to me. The footballing lads are probably recreating the ’straight’ gang-bang many-penised porn increasingly popular with young men - and which more and more features, like most hetero porn, attractive and athletic young men instead of merely a fat hairy penis attached to a fat hairy faceless fuck as in the past.

Footballers are certainly not short of enough groupies to go around - but the deluge of these tabloid ‘roasting’ stories would indicate that they often prefer to share.

And why not? If you spend all that time training and playing and showering and partying with fit mates then why shouldn’t you want to seem them in action? And film them on the job as well? Especially when they’re so keen to show off.

All things considered, it’s just as well that male bisexuality and bi-curiousness ‘doesn’t exist’.

This month’s Details magazine carries a letter, which Details strangely neglected to show to me, by veteran gay writer John Rechy, author of the cult 60s hustler novels ‘City of Night’ and ‘Numbers’, and the 70s plea for homo tolerance ‘The Sexual Outlaw’ (books I enjoyed as teenager in the 80s) which takes issue with my recent story on the gay porn scandal involving the 82nd Airborne.

After agreeing that it was wrong for the young enlisted paratroopers to be punished so severely by the mighty US Army for what they did in their own time and with their own bodies – literally out of uniform – he gets to the main business of his letter:

‘…he [Simpson is entirely naive when he upholds the absurdity that “straight men who perform – for pay or otherwise – consensual gay sex are still straight, despite being aroused to the point of orgasm.  This is strictly a lure by the cunning operators of these sites to their gullible clients who want to believe the fantasy.  Those seven paratroopers should not have been prosecuted, but they should not claim to be “straight either.  By doing so, they compound the dishonesty of the whole situation.’

In other words, they shouldn’t be punished for appearing in a gay video – but they deserve to be horsewhipped in the letters pages for their ‘dishonesty’.

I’m grateful to Rechy for clarifying matters.  For years I’ve laboured under the naive and absurd delusion that I was homo because I preferred males.  Now I realise my dishonesty: how can I be homo?  I’ve had sex with women! ‘To the point of orgasm’.  And I wasn’t filmed.  Or even paid.

It is perhaps too easy to make fun of his argument.  Many people have difficulty today accepting the idea that when two males have sex with another this does not necessarily mean that, before the spilled semen has even had time to cool, they have to book their own float at Pride.  Once upon a Kinseyian time, probably most male-on-male sex involved men who were otherwise heterosexual.  In the 1940s Dr Sex famously found that 37% of his interviewees admitted to sex ‘to orgasm’ with other males. (Though he was of course attacked for this finding by those who claimed he was entirely naive and hadn’t interviewed enough ‘normal’ men.)  As recently as the 1960s, a paniced British Navy called off an investigation into homosexuality on Her Majesty’s ships because it was found that at least ‘50% of the fleet have sinned homosexually.’  The authorities decided they would rather have a fleet than kick out every man who had ever engaged in spot of sodomy, with or without the lash.

Obviously a proportion of Dink’s ActiveDuty models must be gay or bisexual.  After all, I appeared in an ActiveDuty video.  (And in fact not all of them are presented as straight.)  A certain amount of scepticism is understandable, advisable even.  But most of them are probably otherwise heterosexual.  I can’t of course prove this, and perhaps it really is my gullible fantasy – but then neither can Rechy prove they’re not.  And the onus of proof is with the prosecution. 

Homosex is not some magical, irresistible juju that robs hetero men of their preference for pussy should they ever experience it.  Even when it’s me they have sex with (I like to think my dick is magical, but nonetheless…).  For quite a few straight men, especially those who aren’t schooled in bourgeois niceties, like the country boys who become paratroopers, homosex is much less of a deal than it is for many gays.  It’s just a naughty giggle.  Or a quick way of earning some cash.  Something Rechy should know from his hustler novels - though as I recall they were usually about hustlers who thought they were straight but eventually realised that they were actually John Rechy. 

I suspect that part of the reason so many homos want to see straight guys having sex with one another - and will pay good money for it - is the paradoxical appeal of seeing innocence ‘corrupted’, and corruption rendered ‘innocent’.  Straight gay porn, when it’s done right (and Dink of activeduty.com seems to know exactly how), looks like a fulfilment of the fantasy of most if not all gay porn: a carefree, smiling, laughing, rascalish discovery of masculine erotic pleasure - free of shame and pride, free in fact of ’sexuality’.  Tom of Finland drawings, pre 1970s, brought to life.  Ironically, straight guys are sometimes better able to embody the gay ideal than gays.

Speculation aside, the ‘bottom’, slightly counterintutive line here is that the fact that someone appeared in a gay porn video, even with an outsized membrum virile in one or both of his orifices, doesn’t tell you what his sexual preference is.  All it tells you is that he appeared in a gay porn video.  And perhaps that he can take it like a trooper. 

As one of the paratrooper models replied when confronted by a shell-shocked Fayetteville woman who’d recognised him on the ActiveDuty site demanding to know how he could have done such a thing: 

‘It was no big deal,’ he replied laconically.  ‘And besides, I got paid.’

A perfect response to the military, to offended/confused straights and gays alike.  And to explanations in general.  Foucault would have approved - even if it does somewhat undermine the need for three volumes of ’A History of Sexuality’.
———

Salon vs Details - James Collard of The London Times speaks to the (gay) Salon.com editor about his decision to spike the original story - two years before it became a huge international scandal, and a major feature in Details magazine. 

September’s Out magazine features an essay ’Assume the position’ by yours truly defending hazing.  An ancient masculine ritual that almost all respectable people now oppose.  Including of course respectable gays.

One out-raged reader has already described the essay as being the ‘lowest, most immoral homo-commentary I’ve ever read’.  Oh, you’re just saying that.  I’d love to believe it was true.

Here’s the opener:

‘When I joined my local rugby team, I was made to do terrible, awful things. Even now, all these years later, I feel distressed and choked up recounting what happened. I had to stand on a chair as a full pint of beer was shoved in my groin, soaking it. I then had to drink a yard of ale (three pints in a yard-long horn-shaped glass) with a bucket in front of me. Later, several of us had to run around the rugby pitch stark naked. In January.
     I was traumatized. I may never recover. This wasn’t what I had signed up for! I want to complain. I’m gonna sue! Someone’s gotta pay! You see, it was a terrible,  awful, wounding… disappointment. It was just all so restrained.’

Read the essay here.

 

You might think that it was Italy’s greater ball-skills or stamina or team-spirit that won them the World Cup in the final against France last night.

But you’d be wrong.

Cleary, indubitably - as the pictures ’explicitly’ show - what won it for the Italians was not so much their sporting spirt as their sporno spirit. 

Earlier this year some players from the Italian team recruited Dolce & Gabbana (or was it the other way around?) to produce a spornographic fashion shoot of them all oiled up and ready for action in the locker-room.  In hindsight we can see that the world was theirs for the asking/at their feet (etc. etc.) from that moment on.

Sporno, the post-metrosexual porno aesthetic that sports and advertising are using to sell us the male body is, well, irresistible.  Even for the French - who were, let’s face it, a much uglier bunch.  First Portugal defeat England because Ronaldo is tartier than Becks and swoonier than Rooney, then Italy defeat France because the punters would much rather celebrate with them in the locker-room than the French. 

It’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us as desirable, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of metrosexuality.  This doesn’t proffer an intense enough image.  It’s not shocking or arousing enough any more.  In fact, it’s just too… normal.  Now the male body has to promise us an (immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped) gang-bang in the showers.

Though of course, because this is sporno and not actual pornography, it remains just that: a promise.  Advertising offers us not just a fetish of the spo/urting male body but also of his… underwear.  Commodity fetishism is usually the name of the sporno game, just as it was for metrosexuality.  However, the homoprovocative nature of sporno is much less easy to disavow than it was in metrosexuality. 

I mean, just look at the pictures.

One of the especially peculiar - and frustrating - effects of a spornographic world however is that more and more men at the gym tend to wear their underwear or trunks in the showers .

Which seems to me to be really dirty. 

 

 

Just in time for the World Cup the July issue of the re-launched OUT (now edited by Aaron Hicklin) features an essay by yours truly on the post-metrosexual pornolization of sport - or what I dub ’sporno’.  Here’s a (breathless) taster:

‘Sportsmen on this side of the Atlantic are increasingly openly acknowledging and flirting with their gay fans, a la David Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg (the man who actually looks the way Beckham thinks he looks). Both these thoroughbreds have posed for spreads in gay magazines and both have welcomed the attention of gay fans because they “have great taste.â€?  More than this, they and a whole new generation of young bucks, from twinky soccer players like Manchester United’s Alan Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo, to rougher prospects like Chelsea’s Joe Cole and AC Milan’s Kaka, keen to emulate their success, are actively pursuing sex-object status in a post-metrosexual, increasingly pornolized world. 

In other words: they’re not just sports stars, but sporno stars’

And if you think sporno is just a faggy Euro phenomenon, then think again:

‘Why are Euro soccer stars Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg household names in the US, a country which has generally less interest in soccer than socialism? Because these sporno stars— athletic young hustlers who are happy to be ogled barely dressed on Times Square billboards and in Vanity Fair—advertise a willingness to put out, or at least get it out, to get ahead that is about as all-American as you can get. 

‘Ljunberg’s Calvin Klein clad basket of giant Swedish meatballs is the dish everyone wants to dine on and he seems more than happy to feed us (god bless ‘im).  Or try a nice cool, creamy Beckham, recently hired as the new face off the long-running Got Milk? campaign. Want to grow up to be a sporno star? Make sure you drink your milk!’

The July issue of OUT - like the male sporting body - is on sale now.

You can read the full article here.

 

Is Superman gay? 

This ‘pressing’ question about what the Man of Steel does with his flying package (’is it a bird? is it a plane?’) when it’s not held in by industrial strength spandex seems to be enormously exercising the media in the run up to Bryan Singer’s ‘Superman Returns.’ 

All this shocking speculation about Superman’s Supersexuality has been prompted by a not very shocking article in an American gay magazine about gay interest in superheroes.  It didn’t actually claim Superman was gay but was cannily given the front-page headline ‘How gay is Superman?’, and the wagging tongues got wagging.  Things have reached such a pitch that Singer, (openly gay) director of the upcoming blockbuster, felt it necessary to deny Superman is gay and stated ‘he’s probably the most heterosexual character in any movie I’ve ever made.’ 

Now, leaving aside the fact that Singer is perhaps best know for directing ‘The X-Men’, starring characters with names such as ‘Wolverine’ and ‘Magneto’ and ‘Storm’ who sound like gay pornstars, he and his studio are no doubt worried that talk of Superman being gay might keep the teen boys away from the box-office, and no blockbuster can afford to offend the delicate sensibilities of teen boys.

I’ve never met Superman (though I keep looking), and I haven’t seen the new movie yet (I don’t use Bittorrent), so I can’t really comment.  But of course, I won’t let that stop me: 

Let me just say this: in my expert opinion Superman is not gay.  OK?

But he’s probably not terribly straight either.  If he was, would he use the word ’super’?  Would he work out?  Would he wear stretchy-tight clothes and a rubber cape?  Would he oscillate between being ‘mild-mannered’ and brazenly exhibitionistic?  Would he use so much product in his hair?  Would he stay single?  And smooth?  And perpetually 25?

Whichever way his manhood swings, whether his preference is hetero, homo, or bi (the third possibility that straights and gays, as usual, seem equally keen to overlook), Superman is clearly, alarmingly, metrosexual.

This seems to be the fate of all superheroes when made into contemporary Hollywood Blockbusters.  As I pointed out in a 2002 piece for Salon.com(‘Meet the metrosexual’) about the just-released ‘Spider-Man’, the movie:

…offers us the kinky, fetishistic spectacle of a geeky ordinary young man whom no one notices transformed into a raving metrosexual before our very eyes. Apparently injected with steroids and ecstasy by a gay spider, he admires his new buffed body with widening eyes in the mirror, dresses up in a tight lycra gimp suit and runs around a lot on all fours with his arse in the air, after having setting up (Web?) cameras to record his (s)exploits. Peter Parker/Tobey Maguire employs designer drugs, clothes, perverse sexuality and multimedia technology to get people to look at him as he swings between the billboards and skyscrapers from what appears to be his own hardening jism.

In one memorable bondage/mummification-resonant scene he hangs upside down in his gimp suit while Kirsten Dunst peels off the lower part of his mask to kiss him, before replacing it: a perfect example of the new power dynamic between metrosexual men and women and how metrosexual men have to be the center of attention. We’re supposed to believe that Tobey is motivated by old-fashioned virtues of social concern and love for Kirsten but we don’t believe it for a moment. Nor does, in the end, the movie: Kirsten finally offers herself but Tobey declines, realizing that she would come between him and his real love: his metrosexual alter ego in the Day-Glo gimp suit.

 

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

 

The current (May) issue of the proudly metrosexual Details magazine includes an ‘undercover’ exclusive by yours truly on the globally-reported gay porn scandal involving paratroopers from the elite 82nd Airborne, ‘America’s Honor Guard’.

A couple of years ago my buddy and The Queen is Dead co-author Steve Zeeland tipped me off to the existence of activeduty.com, the then little-known military porn website now at the centre of the scandal. Ever the over-keen observer of masculine trends, metrodaddy travelled to North Carolina to meet Dink Flamingo, the man behind activeduty and find out more about straight men ‘acting gay’ - this time in the form of mansex rather than manicures.

For contractual reasons I can’t reveal more about what happened here: if you feel the need to know you’ll have to buy, beg or borrow a copy of the highly fragranced men’s fashion magazine to find out all the (slightly less fragranced) ‘details’. Or, if you’re feeling brave, try a Google search. Let me just say that Dink is a real character and his military models real friendly.

The piece also looks at why mostly straight, in some cases married, elite military men would get involved in gay porn, despite the US military’s explicit ban on appearing in skin-flicks – not to mention your actual homosex. And why they might actually have less of a problem with it than straight civilian men.

Why, in other words, fighting men might not be pussy about dick.

Most significantly, it also reveals that there have been numerous gay porn scandals involving the US military since the 1970s, and uncovers evidence that the seven paratroopers charged by the US Army over the scandal have been unfairly scapegoated - that this has been going on for many years, probably with the Army’s knowledge, and involves many more than the seven paratroopers, ‘isolated to one unit’, claimed categorically by the Army as the ‘only ones’ involved.

Homos and soldiers, it seems, can’t stay away from one another. Certainly homos can’t get get enough of soldiers. It was Marcel Proust who observered a hundred years ago that: “A homosexual is not someone who likes other homosexuals, but someone who on seeing a soldier immediately wants him for a friend”.

Perhaps in this less literary, less innocent, more mediated age this should now be modified to: “…immediately wants him for a porn star.”