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The wonderful thing about American generals is that they come with their own free tickle stick included – they don’t need Peter Sellers to send them up.

Former Supreme Commander of NATO, General John Sheehan this week argued, with an impressively straight if possibly half-paralysed face, at hearings in Washington DC examing the Pengatgon’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, that the reason 8000 Bosnian Muslims were infamously massacred at Srebrenica in 1995 was because the Dutch allow gay soldiers to serve in their army.  Here’s the (conservative) Daily Telegraph’s account:

Gen Sheehan said that after the end of the Cold War, European militaries changed and concluded “there was no longer a need for an active combat capability.”

So, of course, those louche, ennervated Europeans it was his job as a manly Christian American warrior to order about threw their legs up in the air, snorted poppers and became completely passive.

He said this process included “open homosexuality” which resulted in “a focus on peacekeeping operations because they did not believe the Germans were going to attack again or the Soviets were coming back.”

Again, ‘open homosexuality’ – wide open, lubed-up homosexuality, no doubt.  You really have to hand it to General Sheehan’s unconscious.  After all, he has.  But then, it’s not at all shy.  It’s completely unhidden, undisguised and unabashed.  It’s all out there.  Way out there.

He went on to illustrate the fatal, irresistible consequences of allowing passive, open homosexuality in the military:

“The case in point that I’m referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs,” he said, referring to the UN peacekeeping force deployed to protect Bosnian Muslim civilians.

“The battalion was understrength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone polls, marched the Muslims off and executed them.”

No doubt those faggy, understrength, poorly led Dutch soldiers enjoyed being handcuffed….

We shouldn’t really be so surprised at Sheehan’s worldview. Not just because this is the usual US Christian right ‘Sodom & Gomorrah’ obsession with divine punishment for tasting the forbidden fruit of male homosexuality (see Haiti earthquake, hurricane Katrina, 9-11, Aids etc. etc.) – God like totally hates it when your prostate gland is massaged and will slay your people like flies for allowing it to happen.  But also because Sheehan was a senior American general at the time that the Pentagon seriously and persisently considered developing a ‘Gay Bomb‘ – a chemical device that was to be dropped on enemy troops and somehow render them irresistable to one another (though now perhaps we should call it the ‘Dutch Bomb’) and thus of course render them completely impotent as fighting men.  As I wrote in 2007:

The Pentagon’s love affair with the Gay Bomb also hints heavily that ticking away at the heart of its opposition to lifting the ban on gays serving, which involved much emphasis on the “close conditions” (cue endless TV footage of naked soldiers and sailors showering together) was an anxiety that if homosexuality wasn’t banned the U.S. Armed Forces would quickly turn into one huge, hot, military-themed gay orgy – that American fighting men would be too busy offering themselves to one another to defend their country. I sympathize. I too share the same fantasy – but at least I know it’s called gay porn.

Supreme NATO Commander General Sheehan on the other hand, along with much of the conservative US, thinks its called common sense.

All I can say is that their homo fantasies are much stronger than mine.  I’m almost jealous.

Tip: Steve K

… or at least, your cock as you might wish it to be.  If it was endowed with very good genes, worked out in the gym twice a day and had zero subcutaneous fat.  And was shot in high gain black and white.

But for all the professional production values, these models in the new ‘Mark the Spot’ campaign are nasty.  As in, just stepped off a multi-racial porn gang-bang shoot nasty.  Still covered in… cockiness.

And initially at least it seems as if they’re talking cock as well.

I’m not sure I ‘want to see more’, though.  I’m not especially fond of this ad with it’s in-yer-face arrogance (and it reminds me more than a little of this chap).  But I suspect it’s meant to be as annnoying as… an erection.  Or an internet virus.

Nevertheless, partly because he was the least convincing cock, I did watch pretty-boy Kellan Lutz talking about how much he loves to be in front of the camera in his Calvins (‘they hold everything together’), and tries to convince us that he got his vast juicy cantaloupe melon pecs from boxing and snowboarding.

Tip: Stephen B

The trouble with very smart dames who ‘get’ what’s happened to the male of the species is that they threaten to put this particular one out of work.

Over at the HuffPo Caroline Hagood has written an annoyingly good piece about Lynn Shelton’s bromance-dissecting movie Humpday, about two straight male buddies who decide to make a gay porno together as a kind of dude dare.  I’ve yet to see Humpday, but sort of feel that I don’t need to as I appeared in it — having notoriously allowed myself to be dared into joining in the action by some military dudes when when researching a piece about (mostly straight) US paratroopers making gay porn.

Unusually for a journalist, Hagood understands exactly where masculinity is today:

Hovering somewhere between the heterosexual and the homosexual is modern male sexuality — with its metrosexuality and bromances — in all its ambiguous splendor.

Just as unusually, she also understands metrosexuality.

…. the word describes the man whose sexuality is more linked to urbanism and consumerism than it is to either gender or sexual proclivity. A post-sexual, he is no longer homo or hetero, but just metro.

Most usefully of all though she articulates very well the essential anxiety of ‘bromance’, and how it is in effect set against the very thing it appears to be celebrating:

…there are two opposing forces that are powering films of late: an intense desire to pay tribute to the unique relationship that exists between men and an equally intense fear that this relationship may contain homosexual undertones. The result of these warring impulses are films like Humpday that blow open the dread and disgust surrounding homophilia that Hollywood strives to keeps under wraps in its average bromance flick. In the end, Shelton’s movie just may function as a mass therapy session for all the Judd Apatows of the world who live in terror of their bro-love.

I’d like to find something to disagree with, if only so as not to become completely irrelevant, but aside from perhaps some academic quibbling about the continuity between the dandy and the metrosexual, I can’t really think of anything.

Meanwhile, across the North Sea in Sweden…. 19 year old Eric Saade is telling us, in a leather jacket and gloves: ‘You can call me manboy’ before pleading, in the crie de coeur of metrosexuals everywhere: ‘Give me lurve!  Give me lurve!  — Don’t go!’.

The pleasingly annoying/annoyingly pleasing ditty ‘Manboy’ cranks to a creaky climax with Eric receiving an open-mouthed drenching while on his knees.

This probably shouldn’t be very surprising.  Sweden is the country, you may remember, that gave us Abba, Ikea and Freddie Ljunberg. Sweden is probably the most metrosexual country on Earth.

‘Manboy’ is in with a good chance of being chosen by Swedish TV viewers as their country’s entry in the family-friendly Eurovision Song Contest.

They should.  It would win.

Tip: DAK

…acccording to a headline in today’s Sun newspaper. Glad to see they’re finally reporting the news that people really want to hear.

Far be it for me to contradict Britain’s best-selling tabloid, but I wonder whether Danny Young isn’t more ‘vers’.

You can watch his topless Rocky on the tragically awful and apparently endless ITV reality show Dancing on Ice here.  Danny is favourite to win because he and his perky nipples (I’m sure it’s the ice) are the only reason anyone watches it.

I’d like to see him skating with Johnny Weir.  Then we’ll really find out who’s top.

A profile on the truck driving Republican Presidential hopeful from Boston Scott Brown in Vanity Fair caused a few chuckles last week with his wife’s cheeky revelation about the pink leather shorts he wore to his first date with her in the 1980s.  Here’s the money shot:

“The pinkish color drained from [Brown’s face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that the shorts weren’t something that he went out and purchased — it wasn’t like that at all. ‘I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in cash, they paid in clothes,’ he said. ‘And one of the things I had to wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink.’”

It’s certainly a relief to know Mr Brown didn’t buy them – that would be kinda faggy – that instead he was given the pink leather shorts for sashaying up and down the catwalk at a couture show.

How funny to think that the US was the only country that had anything approaching a serious backlash against metrosexuality, back in the mid-Noughties.  Oh, come on now, surely you remember?  That so-called ‘menaissance’?  Those prissy lists of ‘manly’ ‘do’s and don’ts’?  And those completely non-ironic ‘Reclaim your manhood – go shopping in a Hummer’ ads?  It got lots of coverage  in the press at the time.  Supposedly metro was out and retro ‘regular guys’ were back in.  Oh, and George W. Bush was re-elected in part on an anti-gay marriage anti-metro ticket (his Democrat opponent was portrayed by the Republican machine as a girly-man metrosexual passifist).

And yet,  just a few years on, faux Texan ‘bring it on!’ George Bush has been replaced by a svelte mixed-race President who starts every day with a workout, who ran a campaign based on slogans printed in the GQ font, and who is, for all Michelle’s prettiness, something of his own First Lady.

And now the great white hope of the Republicans, who whipped Obama’s skinny ass in a Democrat stronghold, is a former Cosmo centreforld and male couture model who liked to wear pink leather shorts because they showed off his tanned legs.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Scott Brown’s very successful 1980s male modelling career, looking at the pictures, is this: he wouldn’t get the work today.  He’d have to do hardcore gay porn.  And certainly not Falcon or any respectable studio – no, Scott would have to do fetish/extreme stuff.  Fisting in black (not pink) leather, that kind of thing.  Or cash-in on his surname.  And he still wouldn’t get paid very much.  Though they probably would let him keep one of the XXL toys.

I’m not being bitchy.  No, really.  I’m just being realistic.  And anyway, it’s not about him; it’s about us.

He was nice enough looking in a wooden sort of way, but since the 1980s an entire generation of young men have been raised to be male models – and they work at it a lot harder than Scott evidently did.  They also look at themselves a lot harder.  Scott had it relatively easy because there was much less awareness of what was ‘desirable’ in the male body back then – amongst women and men.  Young men as a sex hadn’t learned to desire to be desired.  That was still officially women’s role.  And because there was probably also rather more in the way of stigma attached to his profession there was even less competition.

Yes, it looks like Scott had a pert bum and what they used to call back then a ‘hunky’ physique – but today it would be a case of ‘Don’t call us dear, we’ll call you.’  Such is the choice available of absurdly desirable, obscenely fit young men, I doubt anyone would even bother to tell him what he so obviously needed to do: get down the gym and take steroids and crystal meth.  (And if you work really hard and you’re really lucky you’ll end up on Jersey Shore.)

His body looks far too natural to be credible today as a idealised male image: the lack of porno pecs, a six-pack and ‘cum-gutters’ is heinous.  The untrimmed, un-waxed body hair is grievous.  The unbleached teeth unforgiveable.  He wouldn’t make the audition for today’s male Cosmo – Men’s Health – let alone the cover.

In fact, the most buffed and pumped thing about the young Scott Brown to our critical 21st Century eyes is his hairdo.

From The London Times

David Cameron has propelled marriage to the centre of the election campaign after surprising the Tory party faithful with a promise to spell out his flagship policy before polling day.

Rallying the troops after a narrowing of the poll lead, the Conservative leader said that he would announce details of tax breaks for married couples in the manifesto.

Whatever happened to the days when the Tories were the party that refused to use taxpayer’s money to prop up failing, outdated industries making things that people didn’t want?  That told us sternly that ‘the market must decide’.  Well, it turns out the Tories aren’t happy with what the market has decided in this instance, and instead want to effectiviely nationalise marriage – to take it into public ownership.  British Layland.

Obviously this isn’t going to do marriage much good.  Aside from celeb photo opps and immigration fiddles it was already hideously out of fashion.  But the Tories want to turn it into an Austin Allegro.

It’s nice that Dave has figured out a way to buy off the Ian Duncan Smith/Terry & June tendency of his party – with your tax money – but I wonder if he’s thought it through.  Will he be handing out tax breaks to civil partnerships as well?  If he does the IDS tendency won’t be very happy about subsidised sodomy.  If he doesn’t then, well, his enthusiastic support for Section 28 will come back to haunt him.

Of course, he could save everyone a lot of time and trouble if he just gave the tax bonus money directly to the divorce lawyers.

Until last year I thought pop was a completely spent force.  Oh, there were some nice bands around with nice tunes and some nice haircuts, but pop as a total art form was pooped.  Along with pop culture.  It was just another Facebook app.

And then along came the New York songwriter-turned-singer that the press loves to dub ‘bizarre’.  2009 was indubitably The Year of Gaga, and not just because she had a string of blockbuster international hits, but because they were the instantly unmistakable product of a ‘kooky’ young woman who is actually completely in control of her work and vision.  And her own aesthetic.  Hence perhaps the wishful-thinking sightings of a penis.  This chick doesn’t need a dick – she has a real one.

Last night at the Brits (where she performed acoustic versions of ‘Telephone’ and ‘Dance in the Dark’, styled by Miss Haversham saluting Marie Antoinette ) she won a rare three gongs.  She deserved much more.  And a much longer set.  (It was rumoured to have been cut down by anxious Brits producers because she kept changing her plans.)

Gaga has, almost single-handedly, resurrected mainstream, High Street pop music – or at least made it seem like it’s alive again.  She’s even made postmodernism seem almost… modern again.  That she does it with a look and startling pop promos that play so entertainingly with the deathly, garish iconography of fashion and contemporary celebrity culture is all the more remarkable.  Yes it’s a kind of galvanic motion – those promos often look like Helmut Newton zombie  flicks – but boy, this is shocking fun.  Besides, that’s the nature of the twitching/tweeting human subject in a mediated, hyper-consumerist age.

Sorry to go on, but Gaga manages to be truly pop, and yet is a true artist.  She churns out crowd-pleasing dance-floor tracks that stomp on the competition, but there’s also a winsome melancholy and vulnerability behind the… Poker Face.

Some hasten to mention the ‘M’ word to put Gaga in her place.  But aside from moments of hilarious brilliance such as ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Vogue’ I was never much of a Madonna fan, even before she found the Kabala and I’m-not-Gay Ritchie.  Maybe it’s early-onset dementia, but I feel differently about Gaga.  Rather than see her as a Madonna knock-off, I see her as a more fully-realised Madonna.  She’s the Madonna Madonna wanted us to take her for (and legions of gays did).

And it’s not as if Gaga doesn’t pay homage.  ‘Dance in the Dark’, which Gaga performed at the Brits, is probably my favourite track from The Fame.  It’s very 1980s HiNRG – with a talky bridge that is a touching tribute to Madge’s Vogue.  It’s actually gayer than Vogue, which is quite something.  You can almost smell the poppers.  And I don’t even like poppers.

Gaga, a dedicated follower of fashion, dedicated her Brits performance to her friend Alexander McQueen, who died last week.  I don’t like eulogies, but I did rate his work.  He was a genuinely free spirit, a gay bohemian of the kind that almost died out in the 1980s (and which Gaga is clearly inspired by).  That he seems to have taken his own life suggests that it wasn’t easy fighting history, or fashion houses.

I never met Lee, but we did have a flirty fax correspondence in the late 1990s when I was still in my thirties.  His opening gambit was ‘we met once in DTPM a couple of years ago’.  DTPM was a London gay techno club where all the muscle boys went and took off their shirts and downed masses of drugs, dancing the night away, so of course I should have met him at DTPM – and forgotten about it.  But I never did because I never went there.  Or anywhere, really.

In the course of our thermal-paper correspondence (which I think I still have somewhere, now fading away into blankness)  he asked me, in a handwritten scrawl on Givenchy headed notepaper, to marry him. I don’t know how serious he was, but I declined, pointing out I wasn’t really the marrying kind.  This was true, but it was even truer that he wasn’t really my type.  Which is a sad reflection on me, and perhaps on male homosexuality.  I suspect Lee was often told by gay men he wasn’t ‘their type’.

Either way, I could have done much, much worse.  And of course, I did.

Some amusing – and possibly disturbing – MM4W Craiglist personal ads spotted on the rather fascinating NattySoltesz.com (not entirely office safe).

My personal favourite is the one headlined: ‘Probably the 2 Best Looking Men You’ll Find On Here’, which insists: ‘No trannies, no dudes, none of that creepy stuff – we’re straight!’  The pictures attached of the two buffed, preening male tarts are indeed a testament to where straight men are at these days.  The state of straight.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with some buddies wanting to re-enacct the gang-bang, several-outsized-penises-pester-one-pussy porn that is so popular with straight men these days.  And if they’re buffed – even better.  It doesn’t mean they’re gay.  It doesn’t even mean that they’re particularly bisexual.  It just means that, like most men, they’re rather keen on cocks.

But the hysterical lengths men still feel they have to go to to refute any of ‘that creepy stuff’ – even as they spit-roast or DP an obliging lady together, admiring each other’s sweating, flexing muscles and perhaps enjoying the sensation of their buddy’s erect penis hammering away on the other side of the pelvic area – or perhaps in the same orifice – is a bit sad.  If understandable.  Because of course, if you’re male and ‘touch one another’, even just once, then you are GAY!!!!!  Forever.  Whereas if you’re female and touch one another you’re… HOT!!!!!

The slightly, how shall I put it, impenetrable French Freudian feminist Luce Irigary (impenetrable even by the standards of French feminism) wrote back in the 1980s about the ‘masculine homosexual economy’ (of heterosexuals) in which women are merely objects and tokens to be exchanged between men – men in patriarchical systems being supposedly far more interested in other men than in women.

In the 21st Century we have moved on from that, of course.  Now men appear to be using women as double-ended Fleshlites.

Mark Simpson detects how public information films about policing and justice throw an arresting light on our recent past

The London Times