MARK SIMPSON.com

This month’s Out magazine includes a feature by yours truly on my visit to Montreal in April to see the biggest, baddest, ballsiest Ultimate Fighting Championship event ever. UFC, for those who aren’t in the know, or unaccountably uninterested in seeing fit, near-naked men grappling and grunting, is the cage-fighting craze that is rapidly becoming the most popular sport with young men in North America.

Out tell me my take has provoked some threats against my pretty face from outraged MMA fans. It seems my crime was enjoying it too much. Other less shall we say clenched followers of this man-mounting sport have however welcomed my interest - even if I breathe too heavily.

Here’s how the piece begins:

Imagine the space shuttle taking off with a really fat customized exhaust pipe or the Visigoths sacking Ancient Rome with kicking bass tubes fitted to their 4-by-4s. Or 20,000 supercharged male orgasms. Simultaneously. And you have some idea what it sounds and feels like in Montreal’s famous Bell Centre tonight for Ultimate Fighting Championship 83, as a spunky young carrot redhead in shorts pins an auburn lad on his back with his heels somewhere around his ears. I think the technical term for this is a “full mount.” Or maybe it’s “ground and pound.”

As the chiseled and blond bad guy with the low-slung shorts (Cam Gigandet) in the recent mixed martial arts (MMA) exploitation flick Never Back Down says leeringly to the doe-eyed brunet boxer good guy (Sean Faris) new to MMA, the good news is that in this sport you can choke, kick, punch, pin, and throttle; “the bad news is that it’s gotta end with you looking like a bitch in front of everybody.” Perhaps it was bad news for him — and for the auburn lad in the ring tonight — but certainly not for the 22,000-strong overwhelmingly young-male audience for the biggest-ever UFC event.

Over 2,500 miles away in Las Vegas, “slapper” Brit boxer Joe Calzaghe is tonight defeating light heavyweight Bernard Hopkins on points. In the long-established world of boxing, there is rumored to be an ancient and secret tradition called the “perk,” or “perquisite” — by which the losing man may be required later to literally give up what he has lost symbolically. In other words, the fucked gets…really fucked.

I don’t know how much truth there is to the “perk,” though the breathless trash talk of modern-day boxers in the run-up to a fight — “I’m gonna make you my bitch/girlfriend/punk” — certainly doesn’t discredit it. But I’m fairly certain that the “perk” doesn’t exist in the “full-contact” brave new world of mixed martial arts, an omnivorous blend of boxing, freestyle wrestling, judo, tae kwon do, kickboxing, karate, jujitsu, and Thai boxing that is rapidly replacing boring old traditional boxing, especially among young men, as the fighting sport. The perk isn’t needed. Because in MMA you get fucked in the “ring” in front of everybody. On pay-per-view TV. The “perk” is the whole, er, perking point, man. And UFC, by far the most successful purveyor of MMA fights for the cable TV voyeur, looks remarkably like gay porn for straight men: Ultimate Fuck-Fighting.

Read the article in full here.

The British Museum launches a major new Hadrian exhibition later this month called ‘Hadrian: Empire and Conflict’ (if the title sounds like an expansion pack for a PC strategy game wait until you see the portentous BM trailer).

Below is a piece I wrote for the Independent on Sunday newspaper back in 2002 on Hadrian (left) and his lover Antinous’ (below) rather queer relevance today — a relevance which seems to have only become more pronounced since then.

After all, young men nowadays seem to aspire to both Hadrian’s lifestyle and adorable beard and also Antinous’ face, body and hair, along with clothes that seem to be - whoops! - falling off. (Though maybe today’s youths are a little more fake-baked.)

Antinous was, pederastically speaking, Hadrian’s Apprentice - winner of an Empire wide Ancient World talent contest.

I don’t know about you, but I reckon his talent still shines across the centuries.

————————

The very first Pop Idol

Why does the love story of Hadrian and Antinous seem so contemporary? Mark Simpson argues that we’re all pagans now

(Independent on Sunday, 09/06/2002)

Of all the men who wore the purple of Rome, Hadrian was perhaps the most “modern”, the most sympathetic and the most tasteful.

This second-century Emperor’s characteristics read like a contemporary TV schedule: there’s his aestheticism (a patron of the arts), his muscularity (an Army man, he could march 20 miles a day and “would withstand all elements his head uncovered”), his yen for travel (he spent much of his reign touring the far-flung provinces of the Empire), his insecurity, his melancholia, and of course his fascination with architecture, interior design and elaborate gardens with complicated water features (for example at his famous villa at Tivoli). If he were alive today, Hadrian would definitely have his own cable channel: Imperial Lifestyles.

It was, however, his passionate and public love-affair with the athletic, handsome, curly-haired Greek lad Antinous which was undoubtedly the most modern and enduring legacy of his reign - more enduring than all his grand monuments and buildings, including that wall he built to keep Caledonian laddies out (back then they didn’t shave and rarely washed). As much as we might want to get to grips with this Caesar’s material achievements, it is the romance which keeps catching our eye. Perhaps it’s a reflection on our time rather than his; and then again, perhaps it’s the way that he wanted it. Whichever, Elizabeth Speller’s new book, Following Hadrian’, a meandering though often interesting journey in the footsteps of the emperor, returns again and again to the hypnotising figure of Antinous.

Hadrian, arguably the first pop Svengali, discovered the lowly born but divinely beautiful Antinous on one of his great tours of the Empire, making him famous and turning him into the last pagan god by Imperial edict after his mysterious death by drowning in the Nile in AD130. A grief-stricken Hadrian employed all the media power of the mighty Roman Empire to make his boy Number One, erecting statues and temples to him across the ancient world, and even founding a theme park to him called Antinoopolis: a city on the Nile, complete with statues of the expired youth on every street.

Antinous was the Pop Idol of the ancient world, at a time when “idol” meant something you looked up to rather than down on. He was cuter than Gareth or Will - and also rather better at hunting and wrestling (he may have been Hadrian’s boy but he was all male). Perhaps because he came to represent the very idea of the Beautiful Boy, perhaps because people were less fickle back then, or perhaps because there wasn’t much in the way of reality TV in the ancient world, Antinous was worshipped enthusiastically all over the Empire, especially in the Greek East, for hundreds of years after his death.

Just as today, narcissism and intimations of mortality were at the root of this cult of personality. At that time it was customary for Emperors to adopt their heirs rather than sire them. Hadrian himself was adopted by the Emperor Trajan (with whom he was thought to have been romantically involved). Later, when Hadrian had grown too old and bearded for Trajan, they very nearly fell out over some pretty young men in Trajan’s court. All this is hardly surprising, since the “adopt an heir” Imperial game show itself echoed the Greek model of homosexuality - in which an older man chooses a youth to “reproduce” him and his tastes.

We will never know whether Hadrian would have chosen Antinous to succeed him. Politically. However, by building statues and temples to him and declaring him a god, he “chose” Antinous personally in the most public way and ensured that Hadrian - or his desire - was immortal. Antinous remains, even after all these centuries, the face of desire, at least in the sphere of art history. Perhaps this is why some whispered at the time that Hadrian had either killed Antinous himself, or persuaded the lad to take his own life, in a form of human sacrifice to grant Hadrian immortality. Poetically, hubristically, Antinous’ death by drowning echoes that of Narcissus - though it may have been Hadrian’s vanity he drowned in.

Whatever the truth of this rumour (Speller dissects the evidence and concludes that it was unlikely), the beautiful boy who represented Hadrian’s spiritual immortality rather than his worldly legacy would, after his death and deification, never grow old; or even into full, bearded manhood. Interesting that both Christianity and the cult of Antinous should have been founded on images of naked young men effectively sacrificing themselves to their daddy’s desire. Hadrian even named a new star in the heavens after Antinous, believing that it was Antinous’ soul ascended into the heavens.

However, stars can signify nemesis as well as deity. A peaceful and pragmatic ruler who consolidated the Roman Empire by withdrawing from unnecessary conflict, Hadrian is nevertheless remembered forever by the Jews as the destroyer of the Temple and the architect of the Diaspora. His intolerance of Judaism helped foment a bloody rebellion in Judea shortly after Antinous’ death, led by the latest self-styled Messiah, Shimon bar Kokhba - which means in Hebrew, “son of the star”. It may even be the case that the nova Hadrian named ‘Antinous’ was the same portent that bar Kokhba used to prove his Messianic claims. Reading Speller’s accounts of the ruthlessness of the Imperial troops, the fanaticism of the Judean underdogs and the Emperor’s implacable opposition to any kind of accommodation or compromise with the indigenous population, it’s difficult not to be put in mind, with bitter irony, of Ariel Sharon, current Emperor of Israel. The revolt was finally quelled, but not before it cost several legions and much of the reputation of Hadrian in Rome.

Some historians have suggested that Hadrian’s anti-Semitism was a product of his Hellenist tendencies. Greek and Jewish culture were in competition at that time, and perhaps this goes some way to explaining why the Judeo-Christian tradition turned out so hostile to homoerotics. Certainly, Hadrian’s transformation of an ordinary Greek boy into the last pagan god of Rome 100 years after the death of Christ ensured that the Christians would be more than a little bit sour. Not least because the pagan god looked better with his clothes off.

As part of his preoccupation with immortality and posterity, Hadrian penned his own memoirs. Sadly, these have been lost. Speller tries the device of introducing each chapter with “memoirs” of the poet Julia Balbilla, friend of Hadrian’s neglected wife Sabina. It’s a nice idea, and apparently endeavours to correct the “male bias” of the Hadrian story, but alas, it doesn’t quite work; Speller isn’t able to bring Balbilla to life, or even distinguish the voice of “Julia” from that of the rest of Speller’s prose.

Ultimately, the most striking thing about Hadrian is not how modern he was, but how much we in the West appear to be revisiting his reign: an extraordinarily sustained period of affluence, persistent uprisings in Judea, the Beautiful Boy worshipped and immortalised in the temples of Hollywood, advertising and pop music — while aesthetics, narcissism, interior design and complicated water features in gardens have become all-encompassing concerns. The Early Christians saw all this as evidence of the decadence of Rome and how doomed paganism was. Now it just looks like evidence of its longevity.

We may or may not all be Hadrian now, but most of us seem to be living in Antinoopolis.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2002

Ever with its middle finger on the cultural pulse, this year, Gay Shame, the Duckie collective’s artsy alternative to the pink poppered-up roller-skating jollity of Gay Pride, has this year decided to go retrosexual.

But unlike the mainstream appropriation of retrosexuality - e.g. those tiresome cloney beards all men, straight and gay, have to accessorise these days - Duckie’s, held this Saturday night at The Coronet, Elephant and Castle, South London, is being done with a rather keen sense of irony and parody.

It also sounds a hoot.

On Gay P**de night 2008 it’s time to make men pay. Collect your wad of nine bob notes on the door and spend them in the market place as Duckie turns consumers into real men.

It promises over 30 stalls that ‘test your masculinity’, including:

fighting
fucking
football

boxing
boozing
betting

Now that’s what I call a night out. And no expense has been spared, apparently:

…designer Robin Whitmore turns The Coronet into an interactive nightclub-theatre with the aesthetics of a giant fucking mini-cab office: sticky, brown, stained, a bit pongy and distinctly lacking a feminine touch.

Maybe though they could have saved Robin the trouble and stayed at the Vauxhall Tavern, Duckie’s venerably pongy venue on Saturday nights….

Hosted by Amy Lame, a panoply of stars familiar to Duckie regulars will be performing, including Justin Bond, Marisa Carnesky, Susannah Hewlett and Chris Green - all sound-tracked expertly as ever by The Readers Wifes.

If you’re thinking of having a gander and a flutter please note the dress code:

straight blokes, plumbers, fat darts players, dads, butch lesbians.
No pink, no make up, no heels, no floral patterns, no humanity

It’s not yet clear whether Guy Ritchie’s butch lesbian will allow him to attend.

James Maker, former lead singer with cult 80s Indie band Raymonde and 90s drag metal sensation RPLA, and one of Morrissey’s longest-serving friends, is writing a memoir.

And what a memoir. It has very probably the best, and unquestionably the most honest title for an autobiography ever: ‘Autofellatio’.

Maker recently posted a very short excerpt from it, recounting his first meeting with Morrissey in 1977, titled ‘Gide the Ripper’, on his MySpace webpage. Inevitably, despite the profile being set to ‘Private’ and only having two and a half authorised friends, the excerpt ended up on a Morrissey fansite in less time than it takes to read most Morrissey song titles.

Now that the excerpt is ‘out there’ Maker’s kindly given permission for it to be posted it on marksimpson.com. As you can see, Maker’s prose more than lives up to the audacious promise of his memoir’s title.

I’ve been given a privileged peek at several chapters, and can report that this memoir is simply one of the funniest, sharpest pieces of writing I’ve come across: a veritable comedy of aphorisms. A very English rock and roll memoir, with nary a wasted or ill-chosen word: Ronald Firbank meets the New York Dolls, has a sweet sherry or three and causes a scene on the night bus home. In court shoes.

But when will it be published? James says that he’s ‘broken the back’ of his Autofellatio, but wants to be entirely happy with his technique before showing it to agents….

Here’s Mr Maker in 1994 performing RPLA’s court shoe-tapping stonker ‘Absolute Queen of Pop’ (and no, it’s not about Guy Ritchie’s husband), kindly affording us a look at his agile tonsils:

And here, in Raymonde in 1988, in a nice fur hat and lippy belting out the irresistible and ineluctable ‘Destination: Breakdown’:

by Mark Simpson (Guardian CIF, Sunday January 6, 2008)

It’s official. The scientists have finally proved it. Gay men are as bad as women.

Or as the Daily Mail puts it in a somewhat unnecessarily long headline: “Gay men are as bad at navigating as women”.

The Daily Telegraph headline was a little more direct: “Women and gay men are ‘worst drivers’”. Actually, this wasn’t what the researchers into spatial learning and memory at Queen Mary’s (no, really, that’s actually their name) College claimed at all, but I say why allow the facts spoil a good headline? Or Jeremy Clarkson column? (You know it’s coming.)

What the researchers did actually claim however was that both gay men and women appear to “share the same poor sense of direction and rely on local landmarks to get around”.

That would be cottages and shoe shops, I suppose.

According to the Mail, a study of 140 straight and gay, male and female “volunteers” by Queen Mary College, London claims to have found that “gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in much the same way and shared the same weaknesses.” For South American Chardonnay and men’s buns, perhaps?

But hang on a minute. And lesbians? What are they doing lumped together with gay men and straight women? I thought that if gay men are women trapped inside men’s bodies, lesbians were supposed to be trapped inside an articulated lorry cab with their feet on the dashboard smoking roll-ups.

But as you read on it dawns what this sophisticated psychological test was really assessing. “The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University.”

Ah, so they played computer games. Not very good computer games, by the sound of it:

In one, the Morris Water Maze (MWM) test, volunteers were placed in a “virtual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find hidden submerged platform … The other task, the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), involved finding “rewards” by exploring eight “arms” radiating out from a circular central junction. Four arms contained a reward and four did not, and participants had to avoid traversing an arm more than once.

Well, maybe it’s because I’m gay and dizzy, but you’ve lost me already. I want to log on and hunt for meaningless sex for hours via my scores of online profiles. You can keep your rather tedious reject Xbox game.

There may well be generalised differences between men and women when it comes to driving or other spatial based activities, such as computer games (men seem to play them rather more than women, though often with straight men this appears to be a way of getting away from women). And these may well have some relationship to sexual orientation, though what we mean by sexual orientation is a question in itself - after all, bisexuals are not mentioned in this survey. But it doesn’t appear that this study has shown it - instead it has merely shown up some cultural prejudices (e.g. that Telegraph “worst drivers” misleading headline).

Even the findings of this study appear to confirm gay men’s role as confusers of assumptions about gender. The leader of the Queen Mary team is quoted as saying: ‘”Gay people appear to show a “mosaic” of performance, parts of which are male-like and other parts of which are female-like”‘. So in other words, gay men watch porn, leave toilet seats up but also do a spot of dusting.

Perhaps though the disoriented gay men in the study weren’t gay men at all, but pissed-up fruit flies escaped from another scientific study published this week, which claimed to show that alcohol produces “homosexual tendencies” in male fruit flies. The researchers claimed the amorousness the flies showed one another after repeated exposure to alcohol is a model for how alcohol lessens inhibitions in humans.

I suspect this is one claim that isn’t terribly controversial.

—————

It has been pointed out to me since this piece appeared that Dr Quazi Rahman, the man behind the study which claimed to have ‘discovered’ similarities between gay men and women’s brains, is the author of a book called ‘Born Gay’. If only snarky commentators like me could learn to be as objective as psychobiologists.

Brains! Give me gay brains! The global media has been moaning this week, arms outstretched and flailing, sightless eyes staring fixedly ahead.

You can hardly have missed this story.

We’ve been here several times before, most recently with the story about ‘gay drivers being as bad as women’, but the press clearly can’t get enough of this kind of ‘gay science’. Especially when it appears to confirm the popular, consoling and time-honoured view of gay men as women’s souls trapped in men’s bodies.

The only intelligent piece I’ve read on this story was by Mark Liberman, kindly forwarded to me by my friend David Halperin. It debunks the headlines about ‘gay brains’ rather, er, brainily.

It’s also worth pointing out that, as is usually with this kind of brain research, these differences - if they exist rather than being an artefact of sampling - have not been shown to be innate. The brain is ‘plastic’ and the differences in size could have been in effect ‘learned’, or be the product of behaviour and not t’other way around. That’s to say, shopping for shoes and salad with gal pals might increase the part of your brain that ‘processes emotion and language’. If this rather important proviso was mentioned in the news reports at all, it was right at the end.

And of course, you only have to think for less than a minute about the claim that gay men and straight women have the ’same brains’, especially when it comes to the area that ‘processes emotion’, to see a major flaw with this apparently ‘common sense’ finding. I mean, how many hetero women - or lesbians - have the same attitude towards emotion-free sex that gay men have?

Far more significant than the findings of the research was the way it was reported. As Liberman points out, none of the stories headlined with ‘Lesbian brains are the same as straight male brains’. Almost all of them were a variant of ‘Gay male brains the same as heterosexual women’s brains’

To be fair, most of the research in this area isn’t terribly interested in lesbians either. That’s because the problem that needs to be explained from a biological determinist point of view, is human males who don’t impregnate women - which is what ‘male’ means to such people - and instead, in their view, try to impregnate other men, or be impregnated by them. Women, on the other hand, only exist to be impregnated from a biological determinist point of view, so their ‘orientation’ is utterly irrelevant.

Which should tell you all you need to know about biological determinism.

Gays who hope that this kind of research will deliver them from the ‘it’s a choice’ religious right and ‘it’s unnatural’ homophobes are possibly jumping out of the moralist frying pan into the eugenic fire. Of course, they wouldn’t be the first. Magnus Hirschfeld (and also Karl Ulrichs) the ‘father’ of the modern gay rights movement believed that homosexual men were women’s souls trapped inside men’s bodies. Homosexuals should not be persecuted and criminalised, in Hirschfeld’s view, because they couldn’t help themselves, and, more to the point, as women trapped inside men’s bodies, they weren’t really homosexual at all - they were congenitally confused heterosexuals with a hormonal imbalance. When they had sex with another male they were trying, in their own ‘crippled’ way, to be faithful to their heterosexual impulses.

Then along came the Nazis, who largely agreed with Hirschfeld about crippled, congenital homosexuals not being real men, but had a rather different view about what this meant - i.e. degeneracy - and, of course, what to do about this. Which, in additin to concentration camps, included operating on them to find the causes of their heriditary weakness, and injecting them with massive quantities of male hormones (though the latter of course is something they pay good money for these days).

Back to the possibly eugenic future: In the real world, as opposed to the one of psychobiology, gay and straight men are more and more difficult to tell apart, both in terms of appearance, behaviour and even sexual practises. So I look forwards to the research into which part of the brain is responsible for straight men spending most of their sexual lives masturbating to online porn, or why so many of them favour anal or oral sex when confronted with an actual female - predelictions which, from a biological determinist point of view, aren’t really so different from homosexuality.

Human sexuality is far more perverse and cunning and kinky than poor square old biological determinists can ever accept, because for them heterosexuality is necessarilly the same thing as reproduction which is the same thing as sex. When much of human culture has been very energetically devoted to making sure that these things aren’t the same.

In a sense, homosexuality represents one of the crowning (over-) achievements of that energy. And perhaps that’s the very reason there remains such an intense, curious, and sometimes murderous, ambivalence about it - as shown by the countless and continuing attempts to explain it away.

That shameless hussy show Big Brother will soon be spread-eagled across our screens again.  The puddle-deep fame factory and test-tube celembryo hatchery starts it’s Summer-long domination of the TV schedules next week.

I have no intention of watching it - like most, I had my BB fling years ago and wish it would stop trying to woo me back.  But I do have a slight curiousity about who the contestants are this year.  Why?  Because they might have been my housemates this Summer. They might have been people I was arguing with over crumbs in the margarine, bitching with about other housemates, or pretending to have sex with under a duvet.

If only I wasn’t so precious.  Or was a bit more of a masochist.

Late last year I received an email via this blog from Endemol, the makers of BB, trying to persuade me to ‘audition’ for BB 9.

I inititally dismissed it out of hand, of course.  But then I actually thought about it for a while - if only because I was trying to make sense of it.  Why me?  Am I so obviously mad and desperate and unknown?

I quickly stopped asking myself those questions… and began to think practical instead.  Yes, the whole notion of appearing on BB filled me with horror and terror, but perhaps I was just being snobbish, and cutting off my own snooty nose to spite my face. 

Was there any way, for instance, that I could make something nice and vulgar like money out of it? 

But then I realised that the only way you make money out of BB, aside from winning - which, along with surviving more than a couple of weeks would be completely out of the question for Nasty Mark - is through tabloid interviews and provincial club appearances.

Somehow, I don’t think tabloid readers or clubgoers anywhere are going to get very excited over me.

I very briefly thought about the ‘inside the belly of the beast’ pop-cultural angle, but realised that the so-called serious press wouldn’t really be interested in that either.  They’d just want wordy, hypocritical pieces about the girl with the big knockers who kept fellating bottles.

Besides, imagine agreeing to a BB audition and being rejected?

So I replied to Endemol:

‘Whilst it’s always nice to be asked, I think I’ll have to turn down your offer because:

a) I don’t do telly for free (terribly old-fashioned, I know, but that’s me)

b) Although I do have prison fantasies, they don’t usually involve Davina McCall’

After yesterday’s disastrous Nantwich by-election defeat for Gordon Brown by David Cameron’s resurgent, re-branded, made-over, moisturised Tories, which came hard on the heels of the drubbing the Brown One received a few weeks ago in the English local council elections, the media - and a substantial part of the Labour Party itself - is now baying for his head.

I hate to say I told you so.

But I told you so.

Twenty months ago, in the dying days of Tony’s Premiership, when the media was getting all excited about Leader-in-Waiting Brown and giving rave reviews to his dreadful speech to the 2006 Labour Party Conference - and dissing Cameron - I predicted that His Brown-ness couldn’t win the next election:

The delivery of his speech yesterday was full of visual proof of this. I have no idea what Brown is like in the flesh, but on telly - i.e. the real world - Brown looks like a loser. Dead, hooded eyes which offer no contact with the audience or the camera, choreographed but strangely ill-timed, clawing hand movements and weird goldfish-like gulps at the end of each line. After nine years of Tony’s glamorous drag queen charisma, he looks like a particularly deluded punter auditioning for X-Factor while Simon Cowell pulls faces.

Brown may well, as he says, ‘relish’ the opportunity to ‘take on Cameron’, but Cameron looks increasingly likely to simply sweep him aside. After a couple of years of Brown-ness the electorate will stampede to elect the smooth, moisturised, green-ish manipulator Cameron, someone who knows exactly what we want to hear and how to coo those sweet nothings in our ears. By then he’ll be seen as Tony Blair without Iraq. Tony Blair without the TUC. Tony Blair without the haggard face.

Tony Blair without Gordon Brown.

Of course, Brown has been rather unlucky of late. But then, politicians are supposed to make their own luck. Or at least tell us stories we want to hear - and want to believe. Brown has proved singularly, catastrophically unable to do this. And it was staggeringly, appallingly obvious all along. True, things could perk up for Brown before the General Election in a year or so.

But I don’t think it very likely. Do you?

This weekend Communist Cuba held a large government-backed rally against homophobia, the first of its kind in that country, presided over by Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela.

“This is a very important moment for us, the men and women of Cuba, because for the first time we can gather in this way and speak profoundly and with scientific basis about these topics,” said Mariela Castro, director of Cuba’s Center for Sexual Education.

Cuba’s metrosexual revolution, the modernisation - perestroika even - of attitudes towards sexuality and gender after decades of stagnation and embargo, seems to be picking up speed after hirsute, retrosexualist revolutionary Fidel Castro’s official departure from the scene (in a tracksuit).

I’m sure Mariela is sincere in her motivation and goals, however it should be pointed out that this new, enlightened approach is also a rather good, relatively inexpensive way of ‘rebranding’ Cuba after years of bad press. Being nice to gays is after all one of the ways in which all sorts of out-of-touch and oppressive institutions such as the British Army, the BBC, The New York Times, and even the Guardian have attempted to update their fusty, daggy image in the past decade.

As part of the new drive to change attitudes, Brokeback Mountain was also aired on prime-time Cuban TV over the weekend.

Which just goes to remind us that all revolutions have downsides.

An ad for Braun in Germany.

I have nothing to say.