MARK SIMPSON .com

By Mark Simpson

Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the best footballers ever to play in this country, and one of the best looking, brought out the worst in the English.

He prickled you see, our ugly, mean-minded, spiteful, spitting jealousy. We were jealous of his talent, his looks, his body, his youth, his money and most of all of his total lack of interest in what the English media and terrace culture thought of him and his dress sense and the way they kept shouting ‘winker!’, ‘poof!’, ‘twinkletoes!!’ to try and get his attention.

It just made us even more frenzied and passionate and helpless that the way we obsessed over everything about him from the darkness of his tan to the size of his beach shorts meant nothing to him. He ignored our stalkerish behaviour, and our playground bullying, and just kept on being Cristiano. He didn’t need us. He didn’t even bloody notice us. He was hot. He knew he was hot. And worst of all, there was nothing we could do about it. No wonder we hated him.

And now it seems he’s leaving us behind for good – and will probably forget about us before he even lands in Madrid. The bastard!

Our most popular tabloid The Sun has run a particular vicious and bitchy campaign against him for years. Most recently, they devoted pages of phoney outrage to the fact that he wore a pink baseball cap on holiday in LA, and had the effrontery to wear a flower in his ear. Apparently he’s also personally to blame for turning today’s pro footballers into metrosexuals and is the evil ‘queen’ behind what they like to call ‘The Campions League’. In short, Ronaldo has been on the receiving end of abuse that would be deemed ‘homophobic’ in a trice if it were directed at someone actually gay. But this isn’t just homophobia in the form of metrophobia, this is good old English hypocrisy at work: The Sun exploits the way young footballers look today to sell papers, filling their pages almost daily with pictures of them being tarty – and then of course damns them for making us look at them.

Ronaldo united the English in ways that few other things do these days. The editor of snooty Esquire for instance, a magazine that likes to see itself as being the opposite end of the media and social spectrum to The Sun, recently joined in the national gang bang of Ronaldo, taking aim at his pretty pouting face in a piece sniffing at the vulgarity of English footballers, and the way they ‘pile on the designer labels with gay abandon (Ronaldo), accessorise with far too many sparkly things (Ronaldo) and haven’t yet discovered that logos a go-go have gone out of fashion (Ronaldo).’

Yes dear, but Ronaldo has more natural beauty, sexiness and vitality in his left foot than a hundred back issues of Esquire – a magazine that would benefit enormously from a little vulgarity: I mean, it might be mistaken for something actually alive. It’s probably Ronaldo’s ‘gay abandon’ which is the most wonderful and insufferable thing about him to the English. After all, it’s the sign that someone is genuinely free – they genuinely don’t care what the neighbours/bloke down the pub/The Sun/Esquire think, and they do and wear what they like, damn them.

This is also probably the reason why he was hated so much for his on-pitch naughtiness – not so much the cheating itself, but the brazenness of it. The flamboyance of it! Ronaldo was hated and envied because he broke the rules in plain view. And could behave like a spoilt child. The English you see can never forgive someone for doing publicly what they have to spend so much time and energy hiding.

As Ronaldo said, matter-of-factly, in response to the English media’s frenzy over the pink hat with the flower: ‘I don’t see what is wrong with that if you are comfortable with your sexuality.’ But the English aren’t comfortable, Ronaldo. In any sense. Don’t remind us of it!.

Of course David Beckham managed, more or less, to get away with sarongs and nail polish and worse. But that was partly because Beckham wasn’t as talented a footballer as Ronaldo, wasn’t as pretty, or as young – and, unlike Ronaldo, was very, very concerned with handling the English press and his public image: he really cared about us and what we thought, and so was generally regarded as ‘nice’. Most importantly, in the end Becks was English. He may have been a tart, but he was our tart (though at the moment he appears to be Mr Armani’s.)

The problem with Portuguese Ronaldo, and the reason ultimately why he was so resented and the target of such passionate ambivalence, was that he wasn’t ours. He was always only on loan – which is why whenever rumours of a move abroad surfaced the hate campaign in the press would reach new, tremulous heights.

But now he’s really going. And we’re really going to miss him. But being English, the way we’ll express that is by saying: ‘Good riddance, you WINKER!!’

Copyright Mark Simpson 2009

Mark Simpson on fashion’s new love-affair with black males (Arena Hommes Plus, Spring 2009)

Shortly after Obama’s election last year, Israeli-American designer Elie Tahari made a prediction: ‘I think the fashion industry will have a ball with him.’ So far, this is one fashion prediction that has been on the money. Since Obama’s glitzy inauguration this January, the men’s fashion world, too often associated with a ‘Whites Only’ catwalk, hasn’t stopped dancing with the first non-white in the White House.

At the menswear shows in Milan this January a waving, smiling young Barack Obama look-a-likey led the final walk-out for Lanvin, complete with Inaugural Address overcoat, leather gloves and USA tie-pin. Givenchy meanwhile included several male models of colour for their show, and their new poster campaign features a Obama-esqe young man in an open, white silky shirt with sleeves rolled up for business, full lips parted as if caught mid-speech.

Oscar Garnica, agent at Request Models in New York says that he and his contacts in the business have seen a more consistent use of black models recently. ‘Since the Black issue of Vogue, and the Obamas took the White House, that inspiration is running through a lot of the collections,’ he says. ‘Having more images of people of colour around has probably made designers more comfortable about adding colour to their aesthetic.’ But he is cautious about the long term impact: ‘Now that we are seeing four-five models of color on the runway, will the designers continue booking these numbers? Well, that remains to be seen.’

Whatever else Obama’s Presidency might signify, the fashion world seems to have decreed that, for this season at least, the black male is power, hope, leadership – in a word: style.

Ironically, part of the reason that Obama’s booking by the American electorate has helped non-white models get bookings with the fashion industry is because as Tahari has pointed out, ‘he looks like a male model… he’s built so well.’ Obama has the height, the looks, the teeth – the ‘suntanned’ skin as Italian Premier Berlusconi infamously put it – and the instinctive understanding of where the camera is and what angle best suits him. He is patently photogenic – and his photogeneticity has helped to make this young, inexperienced man Presidential. To some degree, he got the job because he gave good face. Even his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last Summer was delivered at the end of a catwalk.

So no wonder the fashion world wants to appropriate some of that. Michelle might be First Lady, and Obama might have exclaimed to the world ‘How beautiful is my wife?’ on inauguration night, but pretty as she is, she probably made the cover of Vogue because of her husband’s looks.

As a result of his religiously regular gym sessions on the Stairmaster, Obama is not the same shape as most US male politicians – or in fact, most US males. He really is ‘un-American’ – he can wear fashionable clothes. Even though he usually chooses to wear those Teflon-coated Hart, Schaffner, Marx & Hillman suits from Chicago, his have a narrow cut that advertises the fact that he has a body, buns and even angles. Gone are the flapping flannels of traditional US male politicians. (Even his political message was self-consciously stylish: those famous campaign slogans ‘HOPE’ and ‘CHANGE!’ were printed in Gotham font – originally developed for the men’s style magazine GQ.)

Most remarkably of all, he gets away with it. In a white US male politician such self-care and stylishness would probably be ridiculed. John Edwards you may remember got into terrible trouble for combing his hair and being pretty.

The fickle fashion world will of course tire of its clinch with Obama. But perhaps something will endure: perhaps the men’s fashion business will be less inclined than in the past to think of blackness as something ‘street’ and thus ‘sportswear’.

As Oscar Garnica at Request Models puts it: ‘Despite images of suave black men like Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr, Harry Belafonte, Denzel Washington, there has always been a narrow definition of what black is allowed to be. My best hope is that Obama’s rise to the highest office in the land will shine a spotlight on the fact that there is more to the black male image than just the stereotypes.’

Copyright Mark Simpson 2009

Rachel Kramer Bussel at The Daily Beast thinks that male bisexuality has become ‘cool’.

‘…whereas bisexual women had their fling with pop culture in the 1990s-when everyone from Drew Barrymore to Madonna messed around with women, not to mention the famous Vanity Fair cover showing Cindy Crawford shaving k.d. lang-”bromances” are now the driving force behind Hollywood comedies and Style section features, as men find more ways to play for both teams, or at least act like they do.

Examples are everywhere. In John Hamburg’s recent movie, I Love You, Man, the gay guy who unwittingly goes on a date with Paul Rudd isn’t just played for laughs, but to some degree, sympathy. This summer will also see Lynn Shelton’s buzzed-about Humpday, in which two straight male friends decide to make a homemade porn video. And Brody Jenner’s reality show Bromance blurs the line separating friendship and attraction in what Videogum’s Gabe Delahaye calls “basically the gayest thing ever, made more gay by everyone’s desperate attempts to provide chest-bumping proof of their heterosexuality.”‘

For my part however, I’m not entirely convinced that male bisexuality has become ‘cool’, not least because most of the bisexual guys I meet are still terrified anyone will find out – and I still can’t name off the top of my head a single out male bisexual celeb in the UK (aside from my friend the novelist Jake Arnott – but as a self-described ‘gay bisexual’ he is rather exceptional). Whereas almost any female star under the age of 40 has to pretend to be bi-crazed or else risk that Nuts/FHM cover.

And the recent trend for ‘bromance,’ far from proving the hipness of male swinging is, as the name suggests, almost defined by its incest-taboo-driven need to purge the male love affair of the possibility of anything physical, any trace of erotics whatsoever, to a degree which male buddy flicks in the past didn’t, and in fact often went out of their way to inject: e.g. Top Gun, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Thunder & Lightfoot, Midnight Cowboy. By contrast these modern buddy flicks make me think ‘bromance’ is just another word for ‘bromide‘.  Or lesbian bed-death for straight men without the honeymoon. (The arthouse movie ‘Humpday’ seems to be another story – and precisely because it is another story, it is highly unlikely to be a hit.)

But we are certainly living in interesting times, and the culture is slowly – and frantically – trying to negotiate, however ineptly, however deceptively, the thing staring them in the face like the outsize erections in the mandigo gang-bang porn so popular with straight guys these days: male bi-responsiveness is probably very common, rather than the deviant, bizarre, incredulous exception (it certainly was at my boarding school).

The metrosexual is also, of course, part of this journey – and also sometimes perhaps part of the attempt to deflect it.

But there’s a long, long way to go before male bisexuality is even approaching the same level of acceptability let alone coolness as female bisexuality.  A recent study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality found that the famous ’sexual double standard’ has now reversed polarity and shifted in the direction of inhibiting men’s sexual adventurousness while encouraging women’s.  According to The National Post men are:

‘…more limited by what is considered taboo in the bedroom; hit by a new double standard that expects men to be highly sexual, and yet expects them to be less experimental – while the opposite is true for women.

The study, published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, found that society accords men less “sexual latitude” than women, deeming it abnormal for a man to be disinterested in sex, to engage in homosexual fantasy, and to engage in submissive sexual acts.

“The double standard used to give men more sexual freedom than women, but these findings indicate that the dynamic is changing” said Alex McKay, research coordinator for the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada. “Men are forced to abide by a certain gender role, while women are today more free to be themselves. In this sense, the standard actually works against the man.”‘

I came to the same conclusion three years ago in a piece posted on here called ‘Curiouser and curiouser‘ – based on my own very private ‘research’:

‘That women are being encouraged to talk about their bisexuality as an enhancement of their femininity and sexuality is rather marvellous – but it also heightens the double standard about male bisexuality, one as pronounced than the double standard about promiscuity used to be (men were ‘studs’ and women were ‘slags’), and makes it more inevitable that male bisexuality – by which I simply mean ‘straight’ male sexuality that doesn’t fit into heterosexuality, and boy, there’s a lot of that – will have to be addressed candidly sooner or later.

The tidy-minded inhibitions which keep male bi-curiousness under wraps are still powerful, but have largely lost their social value, their attachment to anything real; they are mostly remnants from a Judeo-Christian (re)productive, world that doesn’t exist any more, except perhaps in Utah, every other Sunday…. When enough young men realise this – or maybe just the desperate preposterousness of the prejudice and ‘science’ deployed against male bi-curiousness – the change in attitudes will occur very quickly and dramatically indeed.’

As the Canadian report suggests – and Canada is about as liberal and relaxed a country as you could conceive – that day is not yet here.  However, the fact that such a study exists at all is perhaps a sign that that it’s coming closer.

Either way, more research is needed.  And I need a grant to conduct some more ‘interviews’….

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to blow up the Twentieth Century’s most infamous evil genius in his heavily fortified bunker in the East, escape alive and then fly back to Berlin where you will lead a coup, negotiate an armistice with the Allies and save Germany from total destruction and eternal ignominy. Oh, and also save your own reputation which has recently sunk to near Hitlerite levels.

This plot will self-destruct in five seconds….

I finally got around to seeing Missy Impossible IV the other night, the one directed by Bryan Singer with the art-house name: Valkyrie. Although it has by far the most improbable plot – because of course it’s based on real events – and this mission is, we all know (at least those of us who are not American High School students) destined to spectacular failure, for me this is probably the most watchable product of Tom Cruise’s James Bond knock-off Mission Impossible vehicle. And I’m someone who always finds Mr Cruise watchable – even if I like to say unpleasant things about him.

Of course, Valkyrie is not officially part of the MI franchise, but in terms of the way it presents itself it doesn’t pretend too hard not to be. The credits tell us that Tom Cruise is cast as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the leader of the abortive 1944 July Bomb Plot against Hitler, but Mr Cruise is bigger than Hitler, let alone some German aristo officer who tried and failed to knock him off. Hence Claus von Stauffenberg is mostly just another, mid-Twentieth century, Prussian look for Mr Cruise’s morality-in-action-hero persona, while the twilight of the Nazi regime and the last desperate attempt by Germans to overthrow their crazy Fuhrer is just another exotic cinematic backdrop for his photogenic looks.

The poster for the film also looks like it’s advertising the latest MI (Mr Cruise leading his ‘team’ into the villain’s lair). Even the theme music is the same. In the film Mr Cruise names the secret coup plot ‘Valkyrie’ after listening to the thrilling, high-energy string intro to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ – which sounds remarkably similar, I couldn’t help noticting, to the start of the MI theme tune.

But Tom Cruise vanity vehicle or no, Valkyrie throws up some interesting themes. It opens by showing us on screen the text of the personal oath that all members of the Wehrmacht had to swear to Adolf Hitler from 1934 onwards:

‘I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be ready, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.’

The oath, which of course the July Bomb plotters were all flagrantly breaking, was one of the favourite reasons often given by German soldiers after the war was lost as to why they continued fighting to the bitter end. Regardless, it was certainly one of the reasons why the plotters had to kill Hitler – and the main reason why their failure doomed them.

The movie is built on the premise that the ‘brave soldiers’ are the ones who tried to kill the Fuhrer, knowing that, as Eddie Izzard (perhaps playing a bargain-basement Philip Hoffman playing a German staff officer) puts it to Mr Cruise in a men’s room: ‘the SS will pull you apart like warm bread’. We spend much of the movie looking forwards to this climax, but alas, in the final reel, Cruise manages to get himself shot before the SS arrive.

Odd to think though that what essentially was a ‘til-death-do-us part’ marriage vow that every German soldier had to make to Hitler came about largely as a result of the murder of homosexual SA leader Ernst Rohm and much of the rest of SA leadership during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, the first extra judicial killings by the Nazi regime, justified shrilly by Goebbels – who of all the Nazi leadership was genuinely, passionately,  devoted to Hitler – railing about the ‘degeneracy’ of the SA leadership and claiming, falsely, that they were planning a coup. (Rohm, much more socially radical than Hitler, did though want the SA to replace the Wehrmacht – in part because he saw it as being run by counter-revolutionary aristocrats like Stauffenberg. The Wehrmacht was so grateful to Hitler for backing them and eliminating Rohm they were happy to pledge alleigance to him after President Hindenburg’s death the following year, effectively making Hitler dictator.)

But then, Valkyrie is a heavily homosocial movie with some distinctly homoerotic overtones: almost everyone in it apart from a couple of telephone operators and Stauffenberg’s long-distance wife, is male and the romantic interest in the movie is provided by the spectacularly cute and devoted young blond male aide de camps resplendent in tailored Hugo Boss uniforms that all the generals have tagging along, including Mr Cruise (his lad played by Brit Northerner Jamie Parker ). In the opening scene of the movie, Cruise is badly wounded in North Africa trying to save a young soldier; at the end Parker voluntarily puts himself between the firing squad and Mr Cruise – facing him in death. And also meaning that Cruise sees Parker’s handsome face instead of the muzzles of the firing squad. This, the film seems to suggest, is the right kind of male soldierly devotion. Devotion to ugly evil old Hitler the wrong kind.

Even more than most Hollywood films Valkyrie is extremely fetishistic, openly revelling in the ‘sexiness’ of German Second World War uniforms (thanks to Hugo Boss, everyone in Second World War re-enactment societies wants to be the Germans). Perhaps this is because the subject here for once is ‘good’ Germans. ‘Real life’ though can be even more absurd than Hollywood: the actual Stauffenberg decided to assassinate Hitler himself after a previous assassin lost his nerve during an inspection by Hitler of… new uniforms.

The key assassination attempt scene at the Wolf’s Lair is uniform-related in the movie: in order to get some privacy to arm his briefcase bomb, Cruise asks one of Hitler’s flunkeys ‘Do you have anywhere I can change?’ showing a tiny shaving cut bloodstain on his crisp starched white shirt-collar (we saw him deliberately nicking his neck earlier). All in all, you can’t help but think it a terrible shame that the Red Army was going to arrive at Berlin the following year and get everyone’s uniforms very dirty indeed.

Most of the other lead actors in Valkyrie are British. Perhaps to lend a sense of Old World classiness to the proceedings that Mr Cruise, as an all-American, clean cut, apple-pie, autoerotic action hero isn’t able to – shouldn’t do . Or perhaps because they’re cheap. Whatever they cost, their faces lend character and credibility, and perhaps even a little Shakespearean gravitas (though perhaps not Eddie Izzard). Tom Wilkinson puts in a particularly seasoned performance as General Fromm, whose opportunistic vacillation helped seal the coup’s fate (he also played a corrupt East End Godfather in Guy Ritchie’s latest homosocial and even-more-bumming-obsessed-than-usual gangster movie Rocknrolla.) But Mr Cruise looks strangely out of place amidst all this – less like the altruistic Prussian officer than one of the British luvvies’ American male escort.

Valkyrie manages to play a little with Mr Cruise’s own celebrity and global narcissism (which today’s audience of course identifies with). It places much emphasis on Stauffenberg’s missing right hand, two fingers on his left hand and his left eye in North Africa, almost presenting this as the reason for his joining the resistance. Stauffenberg was a born warrior from a long line of warriors so he probably was less concerned with his wounds than we are: this motif only really resonates because it’s Tom Cruise, the most famous and recognisable actor in the world, one of the most officially desirable men in the world, whose entire film career from Risky Business onwards has been based on his heroic determination to see himself as a sex-object – and make you see it too.

The frequent close-ups on Cruise’s eye-patch and glass eye which he keeps in a silver box also seem to reference Minority Report, where he goes through an agonising eye-swap process so he can escape arrest. Apparently, Mr Cruise was attracted to the role of Stauffenberg because of what he saw as the resemblance of his profile to that of the warrior aristocrat.

In fact, any similarities there are between the two men’s profiles only throws into greater relief the dissmilarities – both in terms of their appearances and their character. At 46, Cruise often looks younger than 37-year-old Stauffenberg did in 1944 because looking forever boyish is Cruise’s job – it certainly wasn’t Stauffenberg’s. Most obviously of all, the difference between their profiles is that Mr Cruise is demotic, whereas Stauffenberg is aristocratic. Put another way, Mr Cruise has a much bigger schnozzle.

I do have one major complaint about the film, however. One of the greatest comedy moments of the Twentieth Century is missing. A scene sadly uncaptured on film at the time which would in itself almost justify making this movie (though probably not the mass execution of the plotters and much of the non-Communist German resistance). While he himself was left largely unscathed by the attempt on his life by Stauffenberg, Herr Hitler’s apparel was less fortunate. The bomb blew off the Fuhrer’s trousers leaving him unceremoniously debagged.

Now that Risky Business was some 26 years ago, I bet Mr Cruise wishes that he could achieve that effect more often.

Thanks to Pedro for insisting I watch this film.

A couple of ‘now’ and ‘then’ images selected for me by my chum Steve Zeeland from Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy’s veritable treasure trove of photo archives of the male form, which includes all kinds images of fleeting, winsome, youthful masculine beauty from the last hundred years – now looked at with very knowing eyes.

Steve chose these two images because they depict our loss of innocence – and perhaps what you could get away with when we were officially innocent – and because they’re cute.

They don’t really need captions, but I’m afraid couldn’t help myself (you need to mouseover to see them).

I love these kind of shower units.  Which is probably exactly why you don’t see them any more….

The teenage Tom of Finland’s gay fantasies from the 1940s of muscle-bound men have come to define a mainstream view of masculinity, says Mark Simpson (The London Times, Nov 2008)

The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a well-thumbed, seventh-hand issue of Fiesta, a top-shelf favourite of schoolboys in the 1970s. The image, buried at the back, was in a small ad for more “specialised” publications, probably missed by most of my schoolchums who had thumbed the issue before me. But it jumped out at me like an outsized erection.

It depicted a pair of muscular butch young men with big chins and broad grins grabbing each other’s bubble butts and straining packets while winking at the reader. I immediately rushed out to the post office to buy as many postal orders as my pocket money would allow.

Although I was sorely disappointed with the ‘Biker Boy’ lame leather gay fetish magazine with no Tom of Finland drawings that eventually turned up, I have spent much of my adult life and a fortune on gym membership trying to recreate that Tom of Finland image that I glimpsed as a teen.

I needn’t have bothered, however, because as it turned out the whole world was going to become a Tom of Finland drawing. His sensualised, cartoonish über-male body and its endless potential for pleasure and pleasuring have become as common as, well, shameless hussies. Think of the rugby player Austin Healey pulsating on BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing in tight pants and a sleeveless top. Or all those footballers keen to strip off and show us their assets on the sides of buses.

The notes for artist retrospectives usually make extravagant claims, and those for a major retrospective of Tom of Finland in Liverpool, part of that city’s annual Homotopia queer culture festival, make some very extravagant ones indeed: “Tom had an effect on global culture unmatched by that of virtually any other artist,” we are told. But for once, there’s something to this hyperbole, despite the artistic merit of his work being very debatable.

Tom was born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland, in 1920 and his work is literally the masturbatory fantasies of a lonely young homosexual Finnish boy – he began drawing in his locked bedroom in the 1940s, pencil in one hand, penis in the other. His fetishised, overobserved, long-distance gay appropriation of masculinity has in a mediated, long-distance world become… masculinity.

It’s often said that Tom’s greatest achievement was in drawing gay men who were masculine, happy and proud at a time when they were supposed to be effeminate, neurotic and shameful. This is certainly the reason why so many gay men are Tom devotees, wittingly or not. Today’s gay porn is merely filthy footnotes to Tom, endlessly replaying the narrative of “regular guys” with very irregular-sized penises and pectorals having spontaneous, shameless sex at the drop of a monkey wrench.  (And it’s entirely apt that one of the sponsors of this retrospective is Gaydar, the gay ‘dating’ site where gay men post Tom-ish pictures of themselves looking for other Tom-ish men to have Tom-ish sex with.)

However, the out-and-proud gay biker look – identity even – that Tom perfected after seeing Marlon Brando in The Wild One (Brando was a Tom drawing in 3D) and which became so popular in the pre-Aids 1970s and early 1980s, reaching its peak with the climactic success of the Liverpool band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, has become a cliché – see, for example, the tangoing, mustachioed leather men in the Blue Oyster basement bar in Police Academy – and few if any young gay men today aspire to it.

But when you look at Tom’s drawings in this retrospective, which features 25 of his works in the basement (predictably) of the Contemporary Urban Centre in Liverpool, it becomes apparent that his achievement goes much further than just making gay men feel good about themselves or love the snugness of leather harnesses. Tom, who worked as an illustrator in the Finnish advertising business until the early 1970s, when he became a full-time gay propagandist, sold the male body as a pleased, pleasuring and pleasured thing several decades before Calvin Klein thought of it. In the middle of the 20th century, Tom was effectively sketching the blueprint of 21st-century man. And boy, was he blue.

Before Tom no one drew men like he did, making them such unabashed sex objects and sex subjects, giving them such exaggerated male secondary – and primary! – sexual characteristics: big chins, strong jaws, full lips. Masculinity, and virility end up looking so… nurturing. Buxom. Busty. Tom’s men have round firm breasts, saucer-like aureolas and nipples you can adjust your thermostat with. One (from 1962) struts down the street, biceps bulging, chest literally bursting out of his shirt, and dressing very much to the left: no wonder he’s being followed. His saucy curvaciousness a testament to the way in which aestheticised hyper-masculinity is oddly androgyne. And while Tom’s men may have had their tits out for the lads, the kind of Tom-ish male body he helped to invent is nowadays getting them out for lads and lasses, gay or straight, online or in real time.

Likewise Tom’s drawings also reveal the male derrière as a sexual organ: not just in some of the more hardcore examples, but the way that Tom-ish buttocks are so spherical, so inviting. One of the most striking and prescient sketches, from 1981, is also one of the tamest: a row of bedenimed male bubble butts sticking out at a bar – awaiting perhaps the attentions of the hugely powerful Abercrombie & Fitch photographer Bruce Weber (a big Tom fan), or perhaps the vaselined, wide-angled lens of a Levi’s commercial.

Tom’s big break came in the 1950s from Physique Pictorial, an underground, semi-legal gay American fanzine disguised as a straight men’s bodybuilding magazine, which frequently put Tom’s men on the cover. Half a century later, and 17 years after his death in 1991, the world is inverted: flesh-and-blood men who look like Tom’s drawings appear on the cover of bestselling corporate mags such as Men’s Health. Flick one open, and you’ll find it full of advice on how straight men can turn themselves into something Tom-ish.

Tom of Finland is at the Contemporary Urban Centre, Greenland St, Liverpool 1 (0151-708 3510; http://www.homotopia.net), until Nov 30.

By Mark Simpson (Guardian, 20 October, 2008)

‘What other culture could have produced someone like Ernest Hemingway,’ waspish bisexual American exile Gore Vidal once asked of America’s favourite so-butch-he’s-camp writer, ‘and not seen the joke?’. The answer, was, of course, that only a culture that couldn’t see the joke could produce a Hemingway.

I don’t know whether Matt Lucas and David Walliams read Vidal or Hemingway, but in Little Britain USA, the recently launched HBO spin-off of their hit UK TV comedy sketch series (which is also airing on BBC1), they seem to be posing that question again – though this time the answer has some bearing on the likelihood of Stateside success of their show. In Little Britain USA ‘Our Boys’ (as a cheer-leading UK media seem to have tagged the camp duo) have put their probing finger on one of the most ticklish fault-lines of US culture: how ‘gay’ big butch God-fearing America can seem – and how comically in denial of this Americans can be.

There certainly seems to be a bit of Hemingway, who loved his guns, in the moustachioed cop (played by Walliams) who gets a visible hard-on while demonstrating his impressive collection of weapons to his fellow officers. But it’s in the steroid-scary shape of the towel-snapping ‘Gym Buddies’, Tom and Mark, who like to take long showers together after pumping iron, and graphically re-enacting what they did to the ‘pussy’ they pulled last night – with each other’s huge latex bubble-butts and tiny penises – that the so-butch-it’s-camp not-so-hidden secret of American culture is graphically outed by Little Britain USA.

Along with pathological denial. In last week’s episode, when an alarmed bystander glances nervously at them humping naked in the locker room they retort: ‘Whaddyou lookin at? Are you A FAG??’  Walliams, who is so camp he’s almost butch (a ladies’ man off-screen he has been described repeatedly by the UK press as ‘the ultimate metrosexual’), seems especially proud of the Gym Buddies sketch – describing it as ‘possibly the most outrageous we’ve ever done’. Certainly it’s drawn most fire from critics in the US, who have given the series very mixed reviews.

Lucas and Walliam’s gleefully amoral queer sensibility – they’re basically drag queens on a revenge trip, especially when they dress up as men – was always going to be difficult for America to swallow. But touching Uncle Sam up in the locker room may well make it a lot harder… er, I mean, more difficult. America, even that part of it that watches HBO, may not want to get that joke. Especially when made by a couple of faggy Brits. And by the way, while we over here might think American butchness tres gay – e.g. the locker-room and volley-ball scenes in Top Gun – all Europeans look ‘faggy’ to Americans, especially us Brits. The sketch featuring Walliams as a flaming Brit Prime Minister trying to get into the straight black US President’s pants probably won’t offend as much as Walliams hopes since most Americans thought Tony Blair was gay anyway.

Rather sweetly, compared to the UK, America is a country where masculinity and machismo is still sacred – despite having done more than any other country to make it obsolete by inventing men’s shopping magazines. In the US of A, it seems, anything masculine can’t be gay and vice versa. Hence Hummersexual Tom and Mark. Hence ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’. And hence all that fuss the US made over that mediocre gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain which, when it arrived in the UK, promptly bored everyone senseless.

America’s love of the masculine body, is gloriously ‘gay’ – or, more accurately, homoerotic.  But alas, until now Uncle Sam has been terribly ashamed of his natural, red-blooded and blatantly bloody obvious bi-responsiveness.

Only America, God Bless, could have produced UFC, a hugely popular pay-per-view ‘full-contact-sport’ that involves two young muscled men in shorts trying to get each other’s legs around their ears (Tom and Mark probably watch it together – in their UFC shorts). Only America could produce a best-selling men’s workout magazine like Men’s Health, put men’s pumped tits and abs on the cover every month and strenuously maintain the pretence that none of its readers are gay or bisexual – or even metrosexual. Only America could produce a film like last year’s ‘300′, essentially a toga-themed Chippendale flick for teen boys – but because it was made for American teen boys its denial was even more preposterous than its pectorals and so the baddie had to be a big black club queen in a spangly Speedo.

Mind you, ‘300′ had at least one virtue, albeit unintentional: it was rather funnier than Little Britain USA. Perhaps the biggest problem Walliams and Lucas face in ramming their sensibility down Uncle Sam’s throat isn’t America’s gay denial or gagging reluctance to see the camp joke, but simply the fact that, on the basis of the first couple of shows, their American ‘outing’, just isn’t very funny.

Either side of the pond.

Timing is everything for an actor, and Newman’s curtain-call, coming as it does amidst meltdown on Wall Street and panic on Capitol Hill, and at the end of a decade defined by the twin disasters of 9-11 and Iraq, is nothing if not dramatic.  The myriad obituaries and tributes to Paul Newman in the last few days have been richly deserved, but his passing seems to symbolize more than just the death of a great and well-loved actor, or even the curtain falling on one of the last products of the Hollywood studio system.  It seems almost to mark the demise of the American Dream itself.  A dream that is looking more and more like a distinctly mid-to-late 20th Century reverie.

But what a reverie! Newman was stunning in his youth, like a neo-Classical Florentine statue brought very magically to life: those proud cheekbones, that straight nose connecting with his thoughtful brow, the square dimpled chin and his tight little (non-steroidal) boxer body, that claspable neck, those white teeth, those pouting lips and those preternaturally pale blue eyes, more inviting than penetrating, that seemed to contain in their coolness, the un-spoilt, exciting, abundant promise of America’s plains, lakes and shining seas. The fact that in his personal life he turned out to be an extraordinarily generous and socially-concerned chap makes that promise even more poignant.

Newman, who himself was part of the ‘Greatest Generation’ (he served in the Pacific during the Second World War), was the post-war American Dream made beautiful, friendly flesh. Somehow, projected on silver screens around the world in the 1950s and 1960s, this demigod managed to be entirely desirable but also entirely approachable. In other words: American. Everyone, male and female, wanted to buy him a drink and be his buddy or lover or both – and, crucially, thought they could be. Newman was one of the actors (all from the 1950s and 1960s) I watched as a kid on TV that made me announce to anyone that would listen that ‘when I grow up I’m going to move to America to become mates with those blokes in the movies!’.

In terms of projecting the American way of life around the world, Hollywood’s Paul Newman was worth more than a fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers - and probably rather more fun in bed.

It’s no accident that Newman’s two most popular movies were both buddy-love vehicles with the (almost) equally all-American Robert Redford: ‘Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid’ (1969) and ‘The Sting’ (1973). Newman seems to have been slightly exasperated that most people had missed the point of ‘Butch Cassidy’: that it was a film about male love – a male romance. It was in many ways the original and much superior Brokeback Mountain, thirty years before the tedious, mawkish Ang Lee ‘remake’. For my popcorn money, Butch/Newman’s and Sundance/Redford’s love for each other is much more convincing and affecting than that of their Noughties men’s-fashion-shoot-with-a-Western-theme counterparts, despite never being consummated.

Newman’s tough vulnerability and deliciously flawed masculinity seem to have made his relationship to homosexuality symbolically central to his cinematic persona; the fact he seems to have been a very happily married heterosexual in ‘real’ life only adds to his mythos.  Below is a YouTube clip of Newman (with a Placebo soundtrack you can mute), pouting peerlessly as Brick in the 1958 movie version of Tennessee Williams classic ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ as an all-American jock struggling with his secret love for Skipper his buddy who has committed suicide, Big Daddy’s expectations of a grandson and the ‘mendacity’ of family-values American life.

Because of the mendacity of 1950s Hollywood, the movie-version of William’s script bowdlerised Brick’s latent homosexuality.  However, such was the troubled erotic power of Newman’s appearance on the screen that the original meaning still somehow shines through, despite the baby-making happy ending.

Perhaps it’s just me, but all these years later Elizabeth Taylor, wonderfully youthfully glamorous as she is here, now sometimes looks less like Brick’s wife and more like his incestuous young mother.  There was already something not quite right about the American Dream back in the 1950s, and Tennessee Williams couldn’t leave it alone.

As for the rest of us, we couldn’t leave Paul Newman alone.

Mark Simpson goes on a top secret mission to the bottom of the garden

(Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 14 March 2004)

I never had an Action Man (G.I. Joe to Americans). He was for sissies. I only garrisoned my bedroom with tiny non-moving, non-camp Airfix soldiers I’d painted myself. Naturally, this didn’t stop me playing endlessly with the famous male doll when I visited my mates. My best chum had the Eagle Eye Action Man with working combat hang-glider – which is why he was my best mate. When he finally realised my real affections lay not with him but his 12-inch piece of moulded plastic, he dumped me in a fit of understandable pique.

It was my parents who had planted the suspicion of Action Man’s masculinity in my head and turned me into a closeted Action Manophile: “No, Father Christmas won’t be bringing you one of those dolls, Mark.”

“He’s not a doll!! He’s a soldier!!”

Of course, they were entirely correct in their concerns. Despite his butch trademarked name and rugged camouflaged gear, he was clearly Passive Man, as was betrayed by the advertising copy that shrieked at you to: “Move him into action positions!” Action Man: on land, on sea, and legs in the air.

My parents, though, were being more practical than prejudiced. They knew that once he entered our house, he’d take over. They knew this because my older sister had had a Barbie doll, made by the same company that made Action Man. The dolls themselves were a loss-leader – it was the apparently infinite outfits and accessories they demanded that were the real agenda and the real money-spinner.

NG Taylor, author of ‘Action Man: on land, at sea, and in the air’ obviously had less cautious parents; that, or several paper rounds. Splendidly pictured on the back of his book in a forest setting with moustache and camouflaged shirt, peering through field binoculars, he has been collecting Action Man since 1966. He has kept in impeccable, quartermasterly condition almost every outfit and accessory ever produced for the little plastic man. Hence perhaps the mention of his wife in the introduction.

Even if you have never understood the appeal of Action Man, this book will make you fall in love with him faster than Action Man would take to strip down a Stirling submachine and reassemble it – if he actually had any fingers. Taylor has photographed him in more than a hundred different outfits, all in “real-life situations”, from “frozen Alps to tropical seashores and jungles”. That this probably means from his backyard in January to Skegness in August only makes the tableaux all the more fetching.

Perhaps because, unlike Jean Paul Gaultier, I think that the only men who look good in a kilt are Scottish football fans and trained killers, my personal favourites are the breathtaking photos of AM sporting the Argyll and Sutherland Highlander full dress uniform. Photographed on a craggy moor, or perhaps atop a rockery in Taylor’s local park, Action Man with his tasselled sporran and polished tunic buttons is a vision of pint-sized, manly pride and gorgeousness that I defy anyone to not be moved by.

The photos themselves with their saturated colour, grass and stones a bit too big, buttons, stitching and zips a little outsize, are subtly evocative of the innocence of childhood. But while the glorious outfits are the main objects of attention, it is Action Man who is the star. This book proves him to be an incredibly versatile actor, one who puts most of today’s Hollywood males to shame. The Tommy pictured in brown battledress is a Cockney sparrer who might cook you up a brew while whistling Colonel Bogey. The German Stormtrooper’s chin and jaw is Germanic and brutal beneath his square helmet, his eyes those of a merciless Aryan killer. The easygoing Action Sailor snapped by the sea in adorable blue denim bell-bottoms and shirt with cap is about to cadge a fag or a pint and tell you a dirty joke. The French Foreign Legionnaire in his white képi and cobalt blue greatcoat has a haunted look about the eyes that makes you want to buy him a Pernod or three.

In fact, AM’s face is exactly the same in all these pictures. It’s moulded plastic, after all. And yet, magically, his face seems to take on an entirely different aspect, character and romance according to the angle at which it is photographed, the outfit, the nationality and the background.

No doubt this is down to Taylor’s skill, and also the fantasies we – or is it just me? – project on to the different togs. But I also think this fetish has a life of its own. I’m convinced that AM’s face actually moves when you’re not looking: that pouty mouth with the jutting lower lip, those brooding eyes gazing forward to the world of masculine adventure which is never coming. He must have practised it in the mirror when we were all asleep.

Butchness may require paralysis of the facial muscles, but it’s a very calculated kind of paralysis all the same.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

By Mark Simpson

The makers of BBC2’s ‘The Tudors’, know which side their Irish buns are buttered. They recently announced that Jonathan Rhys-Meyer’s Henry will not be allowed to get fat in the third series, currently in production.

In case anyone’s interested, the actual, historical Henry VIII became a big porker in later life and needed a crane to hoist him on to his poor horse.  Quite rightly, the makers of ‘The Tudors’, now half-way through its second saucy series, have decided that Henry’s historical obesity is a little bit too proley for BBC 2.  “We still want him to be appealing,” explained Morgan O’Sullivan, an executive producer. “We don’t want to destroy his good looks. An exact portrayal of Henry is not a factor that we think is important.”

No, what is important today is that HD Henry be shaggable.  In TV’s TudorWorld, no king can expect to hold the loyalty of his subjects if he doesn’t look like he would serve them faithfully in the bedroom.  In other words, TudorWorld is a lot like the one we live in.  As Rhys-Meyers put it himself, actors ‘don’t get famous for being pug ugly, do they?’

They certainly don’t.  And I certainly don’t tune in to ‘The Tudors’ for the dodgy history, or the campy script (Henry to Thomas More, author of Utopia: ‘Your ideas are a bit… Utopian’).  Nor, frankly, for Rhys-Meyer’s acting – though admittedly there is some enjoyment to be had in watching the wife-axing Pope-baiting founder of the Royal Navy and in fact England as we understand her today played as a young Captain Kirk with anger management issues.

No, the only thing I really want to see him do with his pouty face with that Billy Idol perma-sneer is snog.  Oh, and spasm during those orgasmic close-ups.  Which is fortunate, because both these things happen about every three minutes.

Maybe the Tudor thermostats were set too high, or maybe it’s those leather pants, but even when he’s not snogging or coming, he seems to be allergic to shirts.  On the rare occasion he has to wear one he seems unable to button it up.  Which is probably just as well, as the naughty lad would only stain it.

Yes, there are lots of comely, busty ladies in TudorWorld and their bodices keep ripping, and Jonathan keeps shtupping them.  But the fact that they’re usually rather better actors than him just underlines the fact that HD Henry is the real sex-object in his sex scenes, whichever wench he’s deflowering.  His tits and ass are always the first out and the last in, and the widescreen camera makes sure his body is always, very vulgarly, on display. In fact, Rhys Meyers’ looks more rent boy than royalty.  Maybe that’s why his King of England speaks – on the rare occasions when he doesn’t have his mouth full of wench – like an escort ordering in a posh restaurant (which he is – it’s called BBC2).

Besides, the lovely young ladies in TudorWorld are outnumbered by the number of slutty young males in tights, every one sporting one of those cloney, immaculately trimmed Beckhamista beards no self-regarding metro can be seen without (Henry Cavill of course could wear a Yak on his chin and still be smoothly irresistible).  And while the occasional plain woman appears to be tolerated in TudorWorld, plain men who don’t happen to be smelly old Chancellors or Archbishops most definitely aren’t (and even they usually end up in The Tower).  And the ancient Holy Father, played by a surprisingly-still-alive Peter O’Toole, appears to have had more bad plastic surgery than Joan Rivers.

Unlike the bigger-budget, better-directed and scripted ‘Rome’, which in its Imperious second series almost succeeded in convincing you that its very trashiness and tartiness was probably the truest, most accurate thing about it – that Ancient Rome really was like this – ‘The Tudors’ is just Footballer’s Wives in codpieces.  Or, what is the same thing, Footballers Wives for BBC2.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008