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C4 have been running this rather clever new cross-dressing Renault Twingo Sport ad heavily during Celebrity Big Brother ad breaks.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that Alex Reid, Jordan’s transexy cage-fighting beefy boyfriend, is one of the house-mates this year? And rapidly stealing the show, despite being the tabloids’ whipping boy and the way he was loudly booed when he entered the House.

The Twingo ad is quite a departure for a car commercial, especially one for a hot hatch aimed at young men.  Jeremy Clarkson must be pulling what’s left of his 1970s dad hair out.

Instead of displaying shame, shock, anger or embarrassment at being humiliated in front of his mates the hot-hatch metrosexual son sees his father’s cross dressing as an opportunity to be socially exploited: ‘Dad?  Can you get us in?’.  We live in modern times indeed.

So it’s been entertaining to watch dinosaurs in the Big Brother House like Vinnie Jones give Alex pseudo fatherly ‘advice’ — which boils down to: ‘Don’t ‘ave anyfin’ to do wiv any of that fackin’ queer stuff, my son.’  If you want to be a washed-up bit part actor-thug with sphincter cramp, that is.

I literally spilt my tea last week when Vinnie announced, after getting up sharpish and moving, backs-against-the-wall-stylee, right to the other side of the room when Alex volunteered he was ‘try-sexual’: ‘I wouldn’t be in a movie wiv you if they paid me five million quid!’

Well Vinnie sweetie, you are in a movie with Alex already — it’s called CBB and you did it, according to reports, for just 350,000.

Alex, bless him, looked crestfallen, but then almost all of them, including former Madam Heidi Fleiss, the one with prolapsed lips, were lining up to have a go at him for being ‘confused’. Translation: interesting.  Let’s hope they don’t succeed in straightening him out.

House rule-book memorising Vinnie is playing CBB dad, but a very bad one — with badly dyed hair.  He’s so jealous of Alex you can taste it.  He’s jealous of his youth, his hair, his looks, his tits, and jealous of his cross-dressing, or at least his lack of hang-ups about it. He’s also threatened by Alex’s real as opposed to ‘Guy Ritchie’ fighting ability.

‘Hard Man’ Vin is also shaping up to be a major gossiping bitch — cross-dressing Alex by contrast mostly keeps his tongue in his head and hangs onto his sense of fun.  Vinnie knows Alex is his main threat, in every sense: that’s why he keeps needling him and nominating him. He’d make a great Blakey in any remake of On The Buses.

But the bad CBB dads don’t end there.  Mega-swish Stephen Baldwin, who puts me in mind of the crazy camp ‘Begone foul demons!!’ preacher on the make in There Will Be Blood, is completely obsessed with Alex, spending scads of time and energy trying to seduce him — into the ways of Je-sus!– with flattery, love-bombing, back massages, mentalist preaching, and lots and lots of inappropriate eye-contact during endless shaggy dog sermons.  Stephen, who clearly doesn’t know his parable from his allegory, thinks he’s ‘helping’ Alex and showing him and us the viewers at home the revealed truth of the Holy Book he likes to thump so much and his own superior, saved status, but is in fact just making a very convincing case for American evangelism being sublimated – or rather congealed – homoerotics.

Alex is too nice a bloke to tell him to piss off.  Besides, he likes attention — and I suspect he knows that The Conversion of Alex just gets him more camera time.

I haven’t really watched CBB, or BB, since Pete Burns’ legendary appearance on it a few years back as a mischievous, sometimes downright malevolent, Eastern pagan goddess with a scouse accent.  Nor have many other people, which is why C4 isn’t renewing the franchise with Endemol.  But this final CBB is shaping up to be almost as good.

And I haven’t even mentioned Stephanie Beacham and Ivana Trump….

The Naked Civil Servant is the best and funniest TV drama ever made. And I’m sorry, but it’s a scientific fact.

And like its subject it could only have been made in the UK.  Even if Crisp said he hated England –and he did, over and over again –only England could have made Crisp and The Naked Civil Servant.

So many lines in Philip Mackie’s superb screenplay for the Thames TV adaptation glitter like, well, the icy aphorisms that Crisp filled his eponymous autobiography with.  But it was Hurt’s breakthrough performance as Crisp which is most historic: rendering Crisp, as Quentin himself acknowledged — and welcomed — something of an understudy to Hurt’s Crisp for the rest of his life.

The actual, quasi-existing Crisp, born Dennis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey in 1908, sometimes sounded by this stage (he was nearly 70 when the drama aired) like a vintage car tyre losing air ve-ry slow-ly.  And was almost as immobile.  Hetero dandy Hurt injected a kind of rakishness – a hint of phallicism, even – to Crisp’s defiantly passsssive persssssona that came across rather more invigorating and sexy than he actually was.  Hurt rendered Crisp rock ‘n’ roll when he probably wasn’t even up for a waltz.  When Hurt repeatedly intoned Crisp’s Zen-like answer to the world and Other People and Desire in general – ‘If you like’ – it sounded slightly more aggressive than passive.

(And for me, Hurtian Crisp was further improved and made edgier by what I shall call Hoyleian-Hurtian Crisp: when I met the performance artist David Hoyle in the early 80s when we were both teenage runaways to London’s bedsit-land he would perform key moments from TNCS mid conversation about the weather or who was on Top of the Pops last night, adding a dash of David Bowie and Bette Davis to the mix.  David always succeeded in making these impromptu excerpts sound as if they were flashbacks to his earlier life.  Which, since he grew up a sensitive boy in working class Blackpool in the 1970s watching a lot of telly, they were.)

TNCS, book and the dramatisation, is criminally funny precisely because so much of what Hurt/Crisp says/declaims is so shockingly true.

The line whispered delicately in the ear of the leader of a 1930s queerbashing gang is now almost a cliche, but still has hilarious force: ‘“If I were you I’d bugger off back to Hoxton before they work out you’re queer.”  Some toughs are really queer, and some queers are really tough. Crisp’s truths, particularly about human relationships, are the truths told by someone who has nothing to lose – largely because they’ve already lost everything to the bailiffs of despair.  This is the ‘nakedness’ of the Civil Servant.

Because it was one of the first TV dramas to depict a self-confessed and unapologetic — flaunting, even — homosexual TNCS has been frequently misrepresented as a ‘gay drama’.  But Crisp’s sexuality is not really what TNCS is about – or in fact what Crisp was about.

To a degree it is about being ‘out and proud’, or at least determined to inflict oneself on the world, but not so much as a homosexual, and certainly not as ‘a gay’, in the modern, respectable, American sense of the word. It’s not even, thankfully, a plea for tolerance.  Rather it’s a portrayal of the heroic self-sufficiency of someone who decided to stand apart from society and its values, henna their hair and work as a male street prostitute – and then, lying bruised in the gutter, turn a haughty, unsentimental but piercingly funny eye back on a world which regards him as the lowest form of life.  It’s the blackest and cheekiest kind of comedy — which is to say: the only kind.

‘I am an effeminate homo-sex-u-alll’, declared Crisp to the Universe, over and over again.  And the Universe had no choice but to agree. By being utterly abject Crisp forced the Universe to do precisely as he instructed.  A blueprint for celebrity that was to be repeated many, many times by others before his death in 1999 and even more times after — though usually rather less wittily.

Crisp added that as an effeminate homosexual he was imprisoned inside an exquisite paradox, like some kind of ancient insect trapped in amber: attracted to masculine males – the famous Great Dark Man – he cannot himself be attracted to a man who finds him, another male, attractive because then they cannot be The Great Dark Man any more.  Hence the famous, Death-of-God declaration in TNCS, after many, many mishaps and misrecognitions: ’”There. Is. No. Great. Dark. Man!”’

Strictly 19^th Century sexologically speaking, Mr Crisp was probably more of a male invert than a homosexual and often said that he thought that he should have been a woman, and even wondered whether he was born intersexed (this despite famously dismissing women as ‘speaking a language I do not understand’ — perhaps because he didn’t like too much competition in the speaking stakes).  Either way, he doesn’t appear to have been terribly happy with his penis or even its existence – something homosexual males, like heterosexual ones, are usually delirious about. But then again, perhaps rather than expressing some kind of  proto-transsexuality Quentin’s Great Dark Man complex was merely setting up a situation in which he could remain ever faithful to his one true love.  Himself.

In Thames TV’s TNCS, which begins (at Crisp’s request) with a pretty, pre-pubescent boy as Quentin/Dennis dancing in a dress in front of a full-length mirror, Hurtian Crisp is an out-and-proud narcissist, who simply refuses to take on board the shame that such an outrageous perversion should entail. When he attempts to join the Army at the start of the war he causes apoplexy in the recruiters for being completely honest about his reasons for doing so: he doesn’t mouth platitudes about ‘doing his duty’, ‘his bit’ or ‘fighting Nazis’.  He just wants to eat properly and the squaddies he knows seem to have quite a nice time of it, loading and unloading petrol cans in Basingstoke.  His openness about his homosexuality is palpably less shocking to the Army officials than his honesty about his self-interestedness.  About his interest in himself.

Or as Hurt/Crisp replies as a preening adolescent youth when asked by his exasperated, buttoned-up Edwardian petite-bourgeois father: ‘Do you intend to admire yourself in the mirror forever?’

‘If I possibly can.’

And boy, did he.  TNCS, which aired slap in the middle of the 70s, was probably more of an inspiration to the glam, punk, new-wave and new romantic generation than to gays in general.  Hurtian Crisp and his hennaed hair and make-up sashaying the streets of 1930s London symbolised in the 1970s the idea of an aestheticized revolt against Victorian ideas of proper deportment and dullness that had dominated Britain for much of the Twentieth Century.  The best British pop music had always been a form of aesthetic revolt, and Crisp seemed very much his own special creation, which is what so many teens now aspired to be.  Crisp was taken for a real original and individual in an age when everyone wanted to be original and individual.  Or as Crisp put it himself later: ‘The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.’

TNCS changed Crisp’s life and made him very famous indeed.  A reality TV winner before such a thing existed, his prize was the chance to move to America.  Since he had loved Hollywood movies from childhood and was later treated like a Hollywood starlet (albeit in air raid shelters) by American GI’s in London during the Second World War, no wonder he grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

But if there’s anything to be learned from An Englishman in New York, the sequel to TNCS broadcast on ITV recently, it’s that it may all have been a terrible mistake.  Even if Mr Crisp never thought so.

Although Hurt turns in a technically fine performance, he seems to have become more Crispian and less Hurtian.  Perhaps that’s inevitable with the passage of time (Hurt is nearly 70, the age Crisp was when he first played him).  Or perhaps it’s simply that his acting skills have increased.  Whatever the reason, it’s not a welcome development here.  And I’m sure Crisp would have agreed.

But much, much worse is the redemptive reek of this sequel.  Everything is made to turn on Crisp’s ‘AIDS {upper case back then, remember} is a fad’ quip made in the early 80s and the trouble this got him into in the US – and why he was a good sort, really.  Despite the things he actually said.  So we see him adopt a gay artist dying of the ‘fad’, fussing over him and arranging for his art to be exhibited.  We discover him sending secret cheques to Liz Taylor’s Aids foundation.  We even hear him explain what he meant by ‘fad’ (supposedly it was a political tactic: minimize the gay plague to avoid a hetero backlash).

Now, this obsession with redemption may be very American and has of course, like many American obsessions, become more of an English one of late – especially when trying to sell something to the Yanks, as I’m sure the producers of this sequel are hoping.  But if there was any point to Crisp at all it was that he was utterly unsentimental – except where royalty were concerned – and relatively free of the hypocrisies of everyday life.  This sequel supposedly about him is full of them.  So forgive me if I’m unconvinced.

Crisp was invincible in his determination to regard the US as the dreamland of the movies of his youth made real: America was as he put it ‘Heaven’ where England was ‘Hell’.  And why not?  If you’ve spent most of your best years deprived of almost every single illusion that comforts most other people, why shouldn’t you have one big one in your retirement?

And to be fair much of what he had to say about the friendliness and flattering, encouraging, open-hearted nature of Americans compared to the mean-minded, resentful, vindictive English is quite true, even today.  But Crisp’s whole approach to life was even more at odds with American culture, even in its atypical NYC form, with its emphasis on self-improvement, aspiration, uplift and success. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style,’ said Crisp, who regarded himself as a total failure.  Could there be a more un-American worldview?  Apart that is from, ‘Don’t try to keep up with the Jones’.  Try to drag them down to your level.  It’s cheaper.’

In an early documentary from the 1960s Crisp, sitting in his London bed-sitting room sipping an unappetizing powdered drink he takes instead of preparing food, which he can’t be bothered with, that ‘has all the vitamins and protein I need but tastes awful’ he describes himself as a Puritan.  Actually Crisp was a Puritan with an added frosting of asceticism.  Crisp was deeply suspicious of all pleasure (save the pleasure of being listened to and looked at) and most especially sex, which he described as ‘the last refuge of the miserable’. And four years of house dust is a very good way of showing how above the material world you are.

It’s a very middle class, middle England, middle century Puritanism – just like Crisp’s background.  But Crisp was also his own kind of revenge on himself, or on the world that had made him — of which he was a living parody.  Ultimately none of us are really our own special creations. The most we can hope for is a special edition.

Crisp’s Puritanism was part of the reason why he could never embrace Gay Lib (‘what do you want to be liberated from?’).  He was recently subjected to a stern posthumous ticking off by Peter Tatchell, an original Gay Libber, in The Independent newspaper prompted by what he sees as the ’sanitising of Crisp’s ignorant pompous homophobia’ in An Englishman in New York. Post-60s Crisp was apparently jealous of a new generation of out queers who were stealing his limelite: he wasn’t the only homo in town any more.

This broadside was a tad harsh and Tatchell sometimes sounds as if he’s on the Army board that rejected Crisp (while accusing him of ‘homophobia’ threatens to make an absurdity of the word) but I agree that the sequel does ’sanitise’ Crisp, though I think this a bad thing for different reasons to Mr Tatchell.  I also suspect there’s some truth to the accusation of ‘jealousy’, but I’d be inclined to put them in another form. Maybe Crisp didn’t want homosexuality to be normalised because if it were it would undo his life’s work.  Likewise, I think Crisp would have loathed metrosexuality.

And as the sequel suggests, in one of its few insightful moments, one reason for Crisp’s failure to answer the gay clarion call was simply that he didn’t believe in causes, or the subjugation of truth and dress-sense to expediency that inevitably goes with causes. Unless that cause is yourself.

Besides, like many ‘inverts’, Crisp was a great and romantic believer in Heterosexuality — the ideal kind, of course, rather than the kind that heterosexuals actually have to live, and which they execute very, very badly.  He used to call heterosexuals ‘real people’ (as opposed to ‘unreal’ homosexuals), but I suspect he thought he was the only real heterosexual in town.  And in a sense, he was.

I can’t leave you without pointing out that while Quentin Crisp may have dismissed Aids as a ‘fad’, Hurtian Crisp became more associated with ‘the gay plague’ than almost anyone save Rock Hudson: literally becoming the sound of the seriousness of the subject.  In 1975 hetero Hurt plays the most famous stately homo in England. The success of this gets him to Hollywood, where four years later in 1979 he is cast in an even more globally famous role – as ‘Patient Zero’ in Ridley Scott’s Alien: the first host for the terrifying unknown organism that enters his body by face-raping him and which proceeds to kill-off in horrifying, phallic-jackhammer fashion his shipmates — two years before the first identified Aids cases in NY.

Eight years later, Hurt was the unforgettable fey-gravelly voice for those terrifying tombstone ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ ads (complete with jackhammers) that ran in rotation on UK TV, urging people to read the Government leaflet pushed through their letterbox and practise safe sex.

In other words, The Naked Civil Servant had become a rubber-sheathed civil servant.

Old Spice: interview Crisp gave Andrew Barrow of the Independent a year before his death.

Crispisms

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing.

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, “I wish you hadn’t made every line funny.  It’s so depressing.”

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

Someone asked me why I thought sex was a sin. I said, “She’s joking, isn’t she?” But they said, “No.” Doesn’t everyone know that sex is a sin? All pleasure is a sin.

Amidst the swathe of drearily predictable ‘decade  in review’ pieces that appeared at the end of December this one by Amanda Hess at The Sexist stood out as one which actually managed to offer some observational cultural insight, rather than just recycled cuttings and cliches:

Think boys are simply born into their masculine gender role? Consider, for a moment, how quickly the cultural norms of acceptable maleness can change. The past decade of masculine fads saw cultural expressions of manliness range from finely-groomed boy bands to shlumpy stoners to blowed-out “guidos.” The versions of masculinity that gained popularity in the aughts saw an infusion of traditionally feminine traits—along with a heavy dose of hyper-masculine compensation.

Sharply observed and well-informed (after all, she quotes me) Hess is one of the few decade-end commentators to notice that the Noughties signalled a major, if not epochal shift in masculinity — but perhaps this isn’t so surprising since as I know very well myself the media in general is highly resistant to any serious analysis of the subject, despite or perhaps because of the space it gives to women’s issues.

Hess’ section on ‘bros’ is worth quoting at length:

Like the metrosexuals who rose alongside them, bros incorporated some traditionally feminine aspects into their own version of masculinity—think pink polos, pastel ribbon belts, and store-bought scents. But bros differentiated themselves from the metro set with a healthy dose of crippling homophobia that encouraged both aggressive heterosexual behavior and subversive homoerotic displays among the bros. And so—we got aggressive heterosexual sexual conquests (banging some chick in the frat house), alongside decidedly homoerotic sexual conquests (banging some chick in the frat house with three of your best bros). We got extreme masculine contests (CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!) alongside absurd homosocial displays (fraternity initiation paddling). At least women got a reliable warning sign of likely brodom—the double-popped collar.

I would submit however that most of Hess’ listed masculine trends, particularly ‘boy bands’, ‘bros’ and ‘Guidos’ are more like fads or subspecies within the wider trend of metrosexuality itself and the breakdown of traditional male gender and sexual norms that it represents.  Bros and Guidos for instance seem to be examples of how metrosexuality is being assimilated (and resisted — often in the same gesture) in different areas of American life, according to class, ethnicity, age etc.

The homophobia of bros for example, looks very familiar and very ‘gay’ to me: it’s the homophobia of ’straight acting’ gay men towards ‘queens’.  While Jersey Shore looks to me very much like metrosexuality for boys who love their Momma’s cooking too much to go to college (they also look a lot like metrosexual young men from matriarchal working class backgrounds in the UK, such as Geordies — who tend to be just as orange and plucked and just as prone to fights and making fun of men who cook).

Hess lists the ‘peak year’ of metrosexuality as being ‘2003′ — in reality, this was the peak year not of metrosexuality but of metrosexmania, the global media’s insatiable craving for literally skin-deep stories about male spas and sack-and-crack waxes — and trying to wear out the ‘m’ word with empty repetition.

Metrosexuality, men’s passionate, epoch-making desire to be desired, is a long, long way from peaking.  And the Twenty First Century is going to have to get used to it.

I’ve often thought that Bear Grylls’ ’survival’ programs with his frequent nakedness and subby eagerness to put all sorts of eeeurgh! things in his mouth in extreme close-up while generally putting his body on display and in harm’s way are really a form of fetish porn.  Bear Grylls: Nature Gimp.

Yes, it’s true that I see porn everywhere – especially if it involves fit young chaps – but in this instance I think it’s quite deliberate.

The clincher is Gryll’s terrible acting.  It’s passionately unconvincing.  Acting so bad that almost by itself it renders what you’re watching pornography, even on the rare occasions he keeps his clothes on.  And as in porn, his bad acting is a major part of the sadistic pleasure of voyeurism.

I would describe Bear as taking the role of the bottom in gay porn but this probably isn’t accurate enough.  Bottoms in gay porn generally don’t make nearly as much noise as Bear: it would be a bit of a turn off.  No, Bear makes as much noise as women in straight porn.  Bear’s job, like female porn stars, is to act out (very, very badly) the pain, pleasure and degradation – and glamour – of being on the receiving end.  Of being ‘the bitch’.  For the male viewer.

Every time Bear the rufty-tufty ex-SAS explorer jumps naked into an ice hole or eats dung the ridiculous noise he makes lets us know that we’re watching something much kinkier than a survival programme.

But this clip in which he gives himself an enema ‘Only as a last resort’ takes everything to a whole new level.  The noise he makes as he ‘lies back and thinks of England’ should get him an Adult Video Award.  I’m sure that giving yourself an enema with seagul poo-flavoured water in a chunky plastic hose is a trifle uncomfortable, but Bear manages to make it sound like he’s being fisted by a Rhino.

Bear Grylls: Use only as a last resort – if you can’t find any proper porn.

The wheels appear to have come off the gay marriage bus in the US and no one seems to know how to put them back on.  Not even the lesbians.

And that’s not according to meddlin’ Limey Uncle Tom ‘slut’ me (as I was dubbed by the Voice of Gay America) but according to the gay-marriage-supporting  New York Times in a piece last week titled ‘Amidst Small Wins, Advocates Lose Marquee Battles’:

…the bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York failed by a surprisingly wide margin on Wednesday. In New Jersey, Democrats have declined to schedule the bill for a vote, believing that the support is no longer there. Voters in Maine last month repealed a state law allowing same-sex marriage despite advocates’ advantage in money and volunteers.

And on the other reliably liberal coast, California advocates of gay marriage announced this week that they would not try in the next elections to reverse the ban on gay marriage that voters approved in 2008; they did not believe they could succeed.

Gay marriage doesn’t appear to be something that even liberal ‘bi-coastal’ America has much of a stomach for, let alone the God-fearing ’flyover’ States that of course make up most of the US.  So how earth did the US gay rights movement turn down this gay marriage cul-de-sac, apparently without a reverse gear? 

Even supporters of gay marriage say that all the optimism got ahead of the reality.

“I think there was some overreading of the political marketplace for gay marriage,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. “It’s not so much that something changed. There was a misreading of where the public was at.”

You don’t say.  Perhaps though it was not so much an ‘overreading’ or ‘misreading’ but rather more a case of complete illiteracy.  I mean, who would have guessed that screaming ‘BIGOT!!’ at beauty queens for believing, like most Americans, including President Obama, that marriage is between a man and a woman wasn’t going to be a terribly persuasive strategy? Whoever would have imagined that trying to blame black voters for California’s re-banning of gay marriage last year at the same time as trying to hijack their history of civil rights struggle and proclaim gays as ‘the new blacks’ wouldn’t play so well?  

And who could have possibly conceived that self-righteously denouncing civil unions, a much more politically achievable – and in my Limey Uncle Tom slut opinion also much more appropriate and modern – institution for giving same-sex couples legal protection as ‘riding at the back of the bus!’, and instead going pell-mell after gay marriage and respectability would have turned out to be such a tactical and strategic blunder? 

Empowered by judicial decisions affirming a constitutional right to gay marriage, beginning in Massachusetts in 2003, advocates argued to move away from a strategy that had focused on more incremental change.

“The gamble has not paid off,” Mr. Garin said.  “We leapfrogged from civil unions to marriage, primarily as a result of judicial decisions that were followed in some cases by legislative action. But the reality is that the judicial decisions were substantially ahead of public opinion, and still are.”

And, it might be added going pell-mell after gay marriage also helped George Bush get re-elected in 2004. Which as we know was such a wonderful outcome for everyone, gay or straight.

Mr Garin may be more clear-headed on this issue than many gay marriage advocates, but the expression ‘ahead of public opinion’ sounds to me like more ‘overreading’.  Maybe most Americans don’t accept that a relationship between two men – and after all, it is this double-penised aspect, not two wombs together, that the straight public think about — is ‘just the same’ as a relationship between a man and a woman, not because they’re backwards, or ignorant, or prejudiced, but because, if you’re not blinded by liberal platitudes, it clearly isn’t. 

And please, can someone over there point out, if only just to be really annoying, that the assimilation of the radically new phenomenon on modern gay relationships to the moribund institution of marriage with its reproductive role-playing, religious flavouring, and history of treating women as chattel does not exactly represent ‘progress’?

Fortunately, there’s one American homo left who isn’t Gore Vidal doing exactly this — though not of course in the NYT.  The novelist Bruce Benderson, interviewed by Christopher Stoddard in the latest issue of East Village Boys about his new book Pacific Agony makes some salient points about male sexuality which the Andrea Sullivanized American gays don’t want to hear:

Bruce Benderson: I have a kind of old-fashioned idea about what a homosexual is, and I think it’s somebody who is made to live outside the social norm. And the reason he was made to live outside the social norm is because one of the main functions of the structure of a social norm is to perpetuate the species, but I don’t think that’s a natural thing for male homosexuals. Not just homosexuals, but men in general are naturally too promiscuous. It’s their relationship with women that makes them more stable so that they can channel it into building a family. These gay couples are going around saying, “Oh, we’re just like you straight couples, really! We just happen to be two men.” I don’t believe that. I think they’re different.

Christopher Stoddard: Okay, so you think that gay men are essentially subject to “vice”?

BB: If you want to make that moral judgment… Suppose a bomb dropped and there were only 100 women and 1 man left. Well, theoretically, that man could repopulate the species by impregnating 100 women a year. Now, take 100 men and 1 woman after the bomb drops; we could only make 1 baby a year, okay? To perpetuate the species, men have been programmed by evolution to be promiscuous. Marriage is the social taming of a man’s sexual energies by a woman, which is necessary to build a social structure. Because a man is made to screw more than one person, there’s nobody to stop him if he’s with just another man.

CS: You sound like the proverbial Repulican who believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

BB: I think that marriage should be illegal! Just like pledging to God should be illegal. Marriage is a sacrament that has absolutely nothing to do with the State, and it should have no legal status whatsoever. A domestic partnership should be recognized by the State, and it should hinge on things like wills, joint tax filing, inheritance, things like that. And any two people should be able to do it. A marriage is just this left-over sacrament that somehow wiggled its way into legal status.

CS: You don’t believe that two men can be devoted to each other in a monogamous way and not cheat because of these carnal needs?

BB: Correct. I believe two men can be totally devoted to each other, but it probably won’t be in the same way that a man and a woman can be totally devoted to each other. I know several gay male couples who’ve been together a long time and go to the baths together, or they both go to one of those, you know, orgy places.

CS: I think I know who you mean. {chuckles}

BB: Yet they’re totally close, and they totally trust each other, and it’s a wonderful pairing.

Be careful, Bruce!  You can’t just go around talking the truth about gay men in public!  Not if you want to be taken seriously, that is.

3:AM Press and James Maker have parted ways. From James’ blog:

Due to unforeseen events at 3:AM Press which are not connected directly to either my book or to me, we have decided to annul the contract in an expeditious and amicable fashion.

Therefore, I have decided to serialise some chapters of the book, at this dedicated blog, while I look for an alternative publisher. Enjoy.

It’s a crime of global proportions that a book as funny and sharply written as this should be currently without a publisher. But then we’re living in an age of global crimes a-go-go — and the printed word is looking a bit… fucked. Frankly.

All James’ posted chapters from Autofellatio are shockingly well-written and criminally funny, but because of its content the one titled ‘Morrissey: Gide the Ripper’, a taster of which appeared on marksimpson.com last year, is probably going to generate the most attention, offering as it does inside insight like this:

I feel that Morrissey has achieved the impossible. It is the straightforward that eludes him. He had to become famous because although he is a savant in the auditorium, he is a dead loss in a launderette.

And anecdotes like this:

It was at Morrissey’s Cadogan Square apartments in London’s Chelsea that I met Sandie Shaw when she was enjoying a return to the stage and to television performing Morrissey and Marr compositions. I have always thought of Sandie Shaw as the ‘Nico of Dagenham’ and, to this day, I still feel a pleasurable shiver at Long Walk Home, released in 1967. With the mild success of Hand In Glove and Please Help The Cause Against Loneliness she was naturally keen to consolidate her comeback. So keen, in fact, that she contrived to enter his apartment building, without a key, and proceeded to ring the doorbell. She is an Essex girl and there is nothing like the direct approach.

But with Morrissey, the direct approach or the approach without charm, rarely works. One must learn to play canasta. We were in the sitting room listening to the musical score of her doorbell chiming when we decided to move across the hallway to the adjacent kitchen for some much-needed refreshment. Adopting the ‘Leopard Crawl’, a military manouevre designed to advance oneself with the smallest silhouette possible, the body close to the ground, we chanced our luck and stealthily crept towards the kettle. Halfway across the hallway, the letterbox flapped open.

“I can see you. Open up.”

The printed word may be in a bad way, but I think it’s just a matter of time before Autofellatio finds its way onto vellum.

For the record, I didn’t meet James until after Saint Morrissey was published. So, as I maintained at the time, everything in that outrageously unprofessional biography — or, as I dubbed it, ‘psycho-bio’ –was sheer guess-work and none of it was based on anything so sensible as speaking to people who actually knew him. Nor of course, speaking to Morrissey himself, whom I’ve never met. But I have spent most of my life listening to him.

I still haven’t met my subject, thankfully. Although there was a dicey moment when I travelled to Manchester’s Move Festival in 2004 in James’ Winnebago (he and Noko 440 were supporting Morrissey). I heard M was popping in to say hello to James so I went for a walk and admired The Ordinary Boys’ tight jeans on the?main stage for a while. Cowardly? Possibly. But definitely tactful. How embarrassing it would have been for the both of us to actually meet.

After all we’ve been through together.

Mark Simpson boldly goes to Comic-Con – but then wants to run away screaming

(Out magazine, September 2009 – uncut version)

‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,’ confides Batty, the beserker droid played by Rutger Hauer towards the end of sci-fi classic Blade Runner. ‘Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate…’.  Yeah, but that’s nothing. I’ve seen over 125,000 nerds in full flight, nostrils flared with the scent of freebies, limited issue action figures and the possibility of glimpsing Gandalf on the other side of a hall the size of the Death Star’s flight deck.

And every fibre of my body is screaming: RUN! RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIFE!!!

But I can’t move.  An inch.  I’m completely surrounded.  Who would have thought nerds were such pack animals?  The San Diego Convention Centre, all 615,701 square feet of it, is full to bursting point with people who have left their dank, toy-stuffed bedrooms to don their favourite costumes, circulate the hundreds of stands and booths,  countless talks, lectures, panels, fill their ‘swag bags’ with promotional pap – and bash them into me.

I can hardly breathe either. Who knew so many Americans could have such poor personal hygiene?  In the UK, my birthplace, this would be unremarkable: but I always imagined that in the US bad breath was a Federal Crime, BO positively unconstitutional. Apparently I was mistaken.  And while this vast crowd is mostly male and mostly under 40, I’m not getting much in the way of cheap thrills out of all this gratuitous close proximity.  I flew all the way to San Diego, home of the Pacific Fleet, several USMC bases, and a huge gay porn industry – and I went to Comic-Con.  Cleverly, I’ve managed to find all the young men in the US I don’t fancy at one giant over-dressed, sweaty circuit party of unsexiness.  Welcome to Nerd World. (‘FREE HUGS’ seems to be a popular T-shirt here, but although I’m as much a freeloader as the next journo I can’t say I’m exactly tempted.)

Comic-Con is a mind-bogglingly huge yearly celebration of pop culture that began forty years ago as a simple swap-meet between geeks with boxes of surplus comic books.  Today it includes pretty much every genre of pop culture from video games to card games, anime to fantasy novels and is a favourite stomping ground for Hollywood, featuring promotional appearances by big Hollywood names such as Robert Downey Jr, Johnny Depp, James Cameron and Peter Jackson promoting films like Iron Man 2, Avatar, District 9, G.I. Joe,  The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Alice in Wonderland. Comic-Con has become the Godzilla of pop culture and swallowed Hollywood whole –though some old-timers worry that Hollywood and Corporate America has swallowed Comic-Con.

The crowd is moving, and taking me with it.  Towards some escalators that loom up ominously ahead like an unexpected waterfall.  A middle-aged escalator supervisor lady is bawling to the crowd: ‘STEP THIS WAY!  YOU LOOK AWFULLY TIRED! – STEP THIS WAY! – TRY TO SMILE!!’  I think she means me.  At the bottom of the escalators I pass a booth selling ‘Star Trek Cologne’: ‘Tiberius’, ‘Khan’ and ‘Red Shirt – Because tomorrow may never come.’   A young man dressed as a Vulcan asks ‘Why no Spock fragrance?  After Zachary Quinto played him in the new movie he’s the hottest of the lot!’.  Pause.  ‘Or so my girlfriend tells me,’ he adds quickly.

Swept along by the maddening crowd again towards the Lego stand in the middle of the main hall I bump into Michael and Cesar, Comic-Con veterans in their early thirties doing what a lot of people spend a lot of time doing here: waiting in line.  I ask if I can hang with them – and escape the crowd – and very kindly they agree.  But what are they lining up for?.  ‘Limited edition toys and books, explains Michael.  ‘You line up for a lottery ticket, which then gives you the chance to line up again to buy a toy.’

‘That doesn’t sound much fun’, I say.

‘Hah! But these are limited edition Star Wars toys’

‘Guys, I’m the sort of person who gets a rush out of throwing things away.  The idea of collecting things fills me with dread.  Think of the dusting!’

‘Oh, we like to hoard!’ says Michael.  ‘I’ve got a garage FULL of SW figures!  Over 3000!  And hundreds of vehicles!’

‘Do you guys actually play with the toys?’

‘No,’ says Cesar, ‘I don’t take them out of the box.  It decreases the re-sale value’.  Cesar is trading to help pay for medical school.  Michael for his part always unpacks them: ‘I’ don’t sell them and I like to play with them a bit before I put them into storage.’

Both from San Diego, Michael is gay and works as an administrative nurse, while Cesar is straight, married father of two, and is studying to be a doctor.  Michael is very friendly and talks very fast; Cesar, a shy Mexican American chap, is quieter but has twinkly dark eyes that seem to say a lot.  His backpack is completely covered with cute Star Wars badges like ‘Star Wars Republic Commando’, ‘Rogue Squadron’, ‘Revenge of the Jedi’.

How did Michael get involved in the nerd lifestyle?  ‘My dad was in the military and a strict disciplinarian.  We weren’t very close to him.  He bought us off with toys, I suppose.’ So George Lucas was your adoptive father?  ‘Yes, you could say that.  I had the entire collection when I was a kid.  Sold them when I was a teenager because I wanted to buy a car.  But then I regretted it later and bought them back.’  So when you became a man you put away childish things – and then got them out again?  ‘Yeah,’ laughs Michael, ‘Adulthood wasn’t quite what it was cracked up to be.’  ‘You can say that again,’ says Cesar, who is currently in the process of getting a divorce.

This is probably part of the reason why nerd culture is becoming much more mainstream – if not actually dominant.  Nerdism is crossing over and coming out.  After all, in a consumerist, single-mom society most boys are being fathered by Playstation or Nike.  ‘Do you like Star Wars?  LOTR?, asked a promotional flyer I was handed as I lined up to enter the Convention Centre.  ‘How about Lost?  Harry Potter?  Big monsters, talking robots and sexy aliens?’ Well, doesn’t that cover pretty much everyone these days?  Throw in computer games, which are an increasingly important part of Comic-Con (and a bigger industry than Hollywood, even catching up with porn), the nerdish ‘rejects’ of yesteryear are becoming the norm.  Nor is it just a boy thing any more: the arrival at Comic Con of legions of screaming teen girls for the ‘Twilight’ event prompted some Comic-Con traditionalists to walk around with placards declaring: ‘TWILIGHT RUINED COMIC-CON’.

But what’s the deal with the Star Wars figures?  What is so compelling about them for a grown man? ‘They remind me of how I felt watching the film,’ explains Michael.   And what is that feeling?  ‘Oh, TOTAL EXCITEMENT!’  Love?  ‘Yeah, maybe!’  ‘I think of them like a diary,’ explains Cesar.  ‘Or like the way that smells or tastes can remind you of memories.’  Cesar’s family background is very similar to Michael’s.  ‘My dad ran a restaurant and worked very long hours.  He wasn’t really around.  He bought us off with toys.’

It seems toys can buy you love.  Cesar and Michael met on the to the 3^rd Star Wars Convention in Indianapolis seven years ago.  ‘He was on the same flight as me with his girlfriend,’ recounts Michael.  ‘We were stuck on the fucking tarmac for two hours with no air conditioning  MISERABLE.  We got to chatting – we were inseparable from that moment on.  In 2008 Cesar stood in my wedding party.  He is truly one of my best friends’ says Michael.  Cesar chest swells visibly at this.  ‘We go to all the conventions together and are inseparable.’

Does Larry, Michael’s husband, feel jealous of Cesar at all?  ‘Oh, no!’ laughs Larry.  ‘I’m just glad I don’t have to go to these fucking circuses with Michael!’  Larry shares Michael’s love of Star Wars and 80s Brit band Duran Duran, but not Comic-con: ‘I’m a proper nerd – I don’t do crowds’.

Michael married Larry before same-sex marriage was banned again in California in November last year.  Larry, an office manager in his early thirties, has an easy-going demeanour and a wry sense of humour.

SW was the entry drug again: Larry attended the first showing when he was just five years old.  Dad was a USMC Vietnam vet working as an alarm installer who wasn’t easy to get close to.  ‘You didn’t know who was going to walk in the door – the coolest dad in the world or the asshole.  He had us help him build a 25ft model of the USS Hornet in our garage – with working elevators.  And then he tore that apart and we built a full size Apollo capsule.  And then an F-14 cockpit – in which all the electrics worked.’

He sounds a bit manic-depressive, I suggest.  ‘He wasn’t very happy with his job.  Either way, I ended up keeping my distance from him and became more interested in toys.’  Like Michael he sold his SW collection to buy a car when he thought he’d grown up – but later changed his mind and started buying them back.  ‘Being an adult, whatever that is these days, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  As my father kinda demonstrated.’

Taking a breather outside the convention hall with Michael and Cesar, while a staged fight is going on involving men sweating in the June sun thwacking each other noisily with swords, I ask if Comic-Con a kind of nerd Pride.  ‘Yeah, I guess it is in a way,’ agrees Michael.  ‘We used to be fearful of those words.  But now we tend to use them of one another.  Kind of like gay people with ‘queer’ and ‘faggot’.  And like gay people we don’t like it so much when others use them.’

‘I think things are also changing so that you can see a few jocks in their muscle Ts coming to this event now, with their girlfriends.’  Before I can ask him where?? Michael points to the sword-thwackers.  ‘I mean, I look at a bunch of guys beating the shit out of each other in plastic armour and think it’s crazy, but is it really so different, or more crazy than collecting action figures?’  Geekiness is in the eye of the beholder.

Touched by Michael and Cesar’s friendship and fired up by their enthusiasm I join them in queuing up for a couple of hours in the sun to see the ‘Star Wars Spectacular.  Sweating and blinded by the Southern California sun we’re finally herded into a vast darkened, frigid auditorium where, projected onto a vast video screen Anthony Daniels, AKA C-3PO, is on stage sucking George Lucas’ cock.  Metaphorically, of course.  Even camper in the flesh than in his famously courtesy droid costume, pursing his lips and flapping his hands about, Mr Daniels, is enthusing in a very scripted fashion about the SW Music Tour (basically: you watch clips from Star Wars while a live orchestra plays the soundtrack). ‘The size of it!’ he exclaims.  I didn’t fully realise how big it was until I saw the video of it afterwards!’

Daniels turns out to be the highlight of the ‘Spectacular’: he’s followed by various fat, bearded no-neck George Lucas lookalikes from Lucasfilm’s marketing department, droning on about forthcoming SW computer games, introduced by a couple of lamely ad-libbing male and female local TV presenters in Luke and Leia outfits.  Hype about hype isn’t always terribly interesting.  Even to die-hard fans.

First Michael and then Cesar turn to me half way through and say: ‘This sucks.  Let’s go.’  And we do.  I really hope it wasn’t my Dark Side presence that brought them down.

***

Adam May is not attending Comic-Con this year.  ‘I’ve only been to Comic-Con once,’ he tells me on the line from his home in Atlanta.  ‘I have a panic attack just looking at photos!  It’s sensory overload for me.’  I hear you.  ‘I manage to make it to Dragon Con here in Atlanta quite often.  And of course the Star Wars Celebration Events.’  Of course.  Adam, 33, a graphic artist who describes himself as ‘Atlanta’s answer to the wrong question’ has the distinction of being the first openly gay Star Wars action figure.  Many are called; few are chosen.

Adam’s plastic obsession began the first time he saw Princess Leia.  ‘Carrie Fisher with those buns on her head – she really was my first gay experience. ‘ Star Wars helped Adam grow up, in a manner of speaking: he had a speech impediment as a child, and by repeating Luke Skywalker’s lines over and over he help himself ‘talk it out’.  He also  remembers that when his mother took him to see a child shrink she’d buy him a figure.  ‘I was a latch-key kid.  An “oops” that my parents didn’t expect..  We had an “account” at the little shop down the street, so I could get all of the comics and candy that I wanted.  My folks never said a word about it.’

Contrary to my impression of Nerd World as somehow pre-sexual in a post-sexual world, it seems there are such things as superhero sex parties.  ‘I’ve been along to a gay one as a voyeur, confesses Adam.  ‘I’m not really into dressing up – or superheroes.  My heroes are in music – like Morrissey and James Maker.  The parties are not really out-and-out sex.  Lots of frottage, and depending on the costume, there is kissing, licking – and whatever else you can do with your mouth.  Some bondage and role-play: the Evil Joker tying up Boy Wonder, that kind of thing.’

Other gays mostly recoil in horror though when they find out Adam’s plastic habit.  ‘They typically assume I’m some strange man-child.  I joke that the 80s jingle: “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a toys R Us kid!’ wasn’t just a jingle.  It was an oath!.’

‘I know many SW collectors, straight and gay, who refer to their spouses as SW widows.  My partner thinks a smattering are cool – he has a pristine Maximus Prime toy – though most are tedious to him.  But I’ve reach the point where I don’t care what anyone thinks about my toy fetish.  That said, I do try to keep my gay friends away from the Three Storey Toy Box.  I have a collection of about 10,000 action figures –  with all of the accoutrements that go with them (space ships, play sets, light-sabres).  The stairwell in my house has a wall that is 2 1/2 stories of shelving, acrylic risers and every SW figure that Hasbro made.’

Including the one they made of Adam himself after he won a competition to have a SW action figure based on him.  He chose the name Stormy Sevenspire – an anagram for Steven P. Morrissey.  ‘I had hired a make-up artist to paint me up as I wanted to be in action figure likeness.  I made sure the hair was just the right kind of quiff.’

Adam knows this kind of thing can make some people dangerously envious, but isn’t sure who is most likely to ‘shank him’: hardcore Morrissey fans or Star Wars obsessives.  Watch your back, dude.

***

‘Please. Again.  No flash photography,’ announces the MC.  ‘This is an amateur contest.  So, if we want to encourage people to dress up in off-balance outfits they can’t see properly out of for us to laugh at for nothing – and I think we do – it’s probably not a good idea to kill them.’

It’s the final night of Comic-Con and I’m attending the famous Masquerade Ball with my new best friends Michael and Cesar, in which those not fortunate enough to have been turned into an action figure by George Lucas have to do it themselves.  With papier mache and sticky-backed plastic.

So someone dressed as an AT-ST Walker stalks the stage, followed a little later by someone dressed as Luke Skywalker singing ‘Star Wars Cantina’ to the tune of Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’.   But my own personal favourite is She-Woman confronting Skeletor with a full backing troupe and singing Britney Spears’ ‘Womanizer’ at him while wagging her finger in time to the music.

‘Yes, I’m sure he learned something from that,’ comments the MC drily.

Skeletor may not have done, but I certainly did.  I had been a little miffed that at the airport on my way to Comic-Con: the bearish airport security officer looked me up and down, smiled and asked: ‘Here for Comic-Con?’  But I needn’t have worried.  I’m not a nerd.  And that’s not just the voice of denial.

Truth is: I’m not nearly man enough to be a nerd.

Adam May’s Star Wars blog

This story about men sealing their texts with a kiss got a lot of coverage around the world: Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald:

New research from mobile phone firm T-Mobile reveals nearly a quarter of men (22 per cent) regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates, T-Mobile said in an emailed statement.

“Metrotextuality” is most widespread among 18-24 year old males with three quarters (75 per cent) regularly sealing texts with a kiss and 48 per cent admitting that the practice has become commonplace amongst their group of friends.

Nearly a quarter of this age group (23 per cent) even appreciate an “x’ in a text exchange from people that aren’t close friends.

Ever the keen/obsessive observer of masculine trends, I mentioned the phenomenon of young straight men signing off their text messages with kisses very briefly towards the end of this piece two years ago on The Sun’s attempt to queerbash footballers for holding hands (and I also mention how this old poof can’t quite bring himself to respond in kind.)

Thanks to technology and consumerism, male behaviour is changing extremely rapidly, despite what some of us might like to think of as ‘hard-wired’ and ‘immutable’ characteristics.  This recent story from Radiolab about what happened in a community of baboons in which most of the alpha males were killed off by TB, is also illuminating in this area: the surviving males, instead of fighting and spitting at one another, started grooming one another – which in baboon terms ‘would be less shocking than if they had grown wings and started to fly.’  Even more remarkable is the way in which males joining the group from outside also adopted the new non-aggressive male-grooming routine – despite growing up outside this culture in the baboon-bite-baboon world.  It suggests that even for apes a great deal of behaviour is socially mediated. And perhaps affection between male baboons can be as strong as competition.

Back in the world of the naked ape, because of the private, intimate yet long-distance nature of text messages men needn’t fear being humiliated and kept in line by the pack for daring to groom one another with xxx’s and within this discrete-indiscrete techno-ecosystem this practise has apparently become widespread. Now that it has been outed, note the baboonish response of many of the male commenters, who can’t quite choose between deriding the men who do this and denying it happens at all.  Either way, their violent response is completely impotent and far, far too late.

These ones posted below a similar article in Canada’s National Post seem to have been made by very red faced baboons indeed:

Wattowattowatto: BS! Homosexual men may do such a thing, and they may text in disproportionate numbers amongst other homosexual men. Normal men would never do such a thing. Once again, a non-story using misleading data to shock readers.

Jocko2: How gay! I don’t know why they need to invent a word like “Metrotextual,” when plain old “homosexual” will do. T-Mobile’s research that nearly 22% of men (and 75% of 18-25-year-old men!!) do this is clearly abject bull. This looks like something put out by The Onion. I smell a hoax here, bigtime!

And I smell someone panicking because they’re beginning to realise that their painfully uptight lifelong investment in homophobic ideas about masculinity might have been a complete waste of ulcers.

It isn’t just the way that men are using kisses at the end of their text messages to other men that is such a departure from expectations of ‘innately’ masculine behaviour – it’s the fact they’re sending these messages at all.  Back in the 90s baboonish stand up comedians made a good living out of awful jokes about how phones revealed the strangely reassuring differences between men and women: men were monosyllabic and practical and women wouldn’t’ shut up.  Men used phones as an instrument; women used them as an end in themselves.  Now a generation of young men have grown up who wear their pretty phones as accessories they’re never seen without and are always chattering pointlessly on them.

Usually at the gym, looking in the mirror, while sitting on a piece of equipment this old poof wants to use.

Tip: Marcelo and Sisu

by Mark Simpson

This month the metrosexual is fifteen.

Back in November 1994 I wrote a piece for The Independent called ‘Here come the mirror men’ prompted by a visit to an exhibition in London organised by men’s glossy GQ.  In it I claimed to have seen the future of masculinity and that it was moisturised (according to several dictionaries this article was the first sighting of the word ‘metrosexual’ in print).  I also explained the key role that glossy men’s magazines had in spreading metrosexuality:

The promotion of metrosexuality was left to the men’s style press, magazines such as The Face, GQ, Esquire, Arena and FHM, the new media which took off in the Eighties and is still growing (GQ gains 10,000 new readers every month). They filled their magazines with images of narcissistic young men sporting fashionable clothes and accessories. And they persuaded other young men to study them with a mixture of envy and desire.

Some people said unkind things. American GQ, for exampled, was popularly dubbed ‘Gay Quarterly’. Little wonder that all these magazines – with the possible exception of The Face – address their readership as if none of them was homosexual or even bisexual.

The magazine Loaded had been launched earlier that year and its hysterical heterosexuality was to provide a template for persuading unprecedented numbers of men to buy a men’s glossy that wasn’t Penthouse, without being thought a ‘poof’.

The New Lad bible ‘Loaded’, for all its features on sport, babes and sport, is (closeted) metrosexual. Just as its anti-style is a style (last month it carried a supplement for ‘no nonsense’ clothes, such as jeans and boots), it’s heterosexuality is so self-conscious, so studied, that it’s actually rather camp. New Lads, for all their burping blokeishness, are just as much in love with their own image as any metrosexual, they just haven’t come to terms yet.

Nobody likes a smart-ass, let alone a Cassandra, so I was largely ignored.  Men’s magazines and men’s vanity products did become a boom business of course but the media in the 90s remained resolutely entranced by the oxymoronic mirage of ‘New Lad’, determinedly refusing to notice that all this  ‘blokeishness’, particularly in the form of the most successful exponent of it — FHM — was narcissistic and homoerotic: the real money shot was the scads of ads for clobber and vanity products featuring expensively attractive male models.

It wasn’t until I returned to the subject in 2002 for the then popular American online magazine Salon.com (‘Meet the metrosexual’), this time naming names — e.g. that David Beckham guy — that the world finally noticed what I was going on about.

Fifteen years on from the metrosexual’s birth, the men’s magazine market has clearly peaked.  A number of them have closed this year, including Arena (The Face was axed years ago), while Maxim has gone online-only. How the mighty have fallen.  Partly this is because in an online, i-Phone world magazines and the printed word in general have peaked and the recession has brought this into sharper — and, for those of us who work in the media, painful — focus.

But perhaps the main reason is because men’s magazines, having done what they were invented to do — metrosexualize a generation of men on the sly — aren’t needed any more.  If men have space in their hectic consumer lifestyles for a magazine at all it has to be one that doesn’t beat around the bush, or the breasts, and instead addresses their narcissism directly: hence tits-out-for-the-lads Men’s Health magazine recently became the best selling men’s magazine in the UK.  Straight men are now their own High Street Honeys.

So, having achieved what they set out to do and made bitches of us all, have the men’s glossies that remain loosened up? Now that metrosexuality has been embraced by the mainstream and become essentially ‘normal’, have men’s mags finally dropped the straight-acting act and finally come out to themselves?  Do they now dare to acknowledge that some of their readers might be gay or bisexual?  Do magazines full of images of male desirability and products promoted to make the male reader more desirable themselves now accept men’s interest in male beauty and male sensuality and — shock! horror! — even bi-curiousness?

Earlier this year (before the news emerged about sales of Men’s Health overtaking FHM) I went down to my local newsagents, cruised the men’s mags on the racks and brought a bunch of them back to mine for coffee….

 

LOADED

Coverline: ‘How many balloons does it take to float a dwarf’?

Covergirl: Gemma Merna

Concept: Imagine a magazine edited by Guy Ritchie, but without his taste in men or 80s American female pop singers. And even more irritating.

Metrosexual Money Shot: Not a lot.  But there is a back page ad featuring three famous sportsmen advertising Gillette’s batter-powered male vibrator.  The concept for which seems to be based on the appeal to straight men of stroking a buzzing Federer, Henry and Woods across your face every morning.

Buy-Curiousness: Still hysterically closeted – but if you look very closely you’ll find a gay dating ad at the back.

How to bed Mr Loaded: Tell him you shagged Liam Gallagher’s Nan.

Verdict: A parody of a parody. But somehow still not gay enough.  And its breath smells — of death.

—-

NUTS

‘Britain’s BIGGEST selling men’s weekly!’

Covergirl: Lucy Pinder

Coverline: ‘100 SEXIEST FOOTBALLER’S WIVES 2009’

Concept: Like Zoo, Nuts isn’t really a men’s style mag, more a male version of Heat magazine – with celebrity tits instead of celebrity pricks. Snickersome fare and office-friendly limp porn for those who can’t get online to download mandingo gang-bang flicks because they’re at work/too stupid/mum won’t let them.

Metrosexual Money Shot: As a sign of the times, even Nuts has a fashion and grooming double page spread – apparently because their readers insisted on it.

Buy-Curiousness: ‘Man-Love Corner’ featuring suggestive photos of footballers seemingly bumming or groping one another with captions like, ‘Feeling the pinch!’. In Nuts, anything to do with ‘man-love’ is sniggersome or terrifying. Which is fair enough. But Nuts isn’t exactly heterosexual either: its idea of red-blooded lurving is tranny-looking women pouting their bee-stung lips while reaching for each other’s silicone.

How to bed Mr Nuts: Wax off all your pubes, hang some water balloons around your neck and say you love pussy. Alternatively, buy him twelve pints.

Verdict: The letter accompanying a snap supplied by a reader of a road sign saying ‘Semenville’ sums up the slightly confused mentality of Nuts: “This has got to be the worst-named place in the entire world. I definitely wouldn’t want to live there!’  I think Adam, Plymouth, doth protest too much. I mean, if you don’t like semen, why buy a wank mag called ‘Nuts’?

—–

GQ

‘Britain’s Best-Selling Quality Men’s Magazine’

Circulation: 130,000 a month

Covergirl: Clive Owen (am I the only person that finds his face eminently slappable?)

Concept: Fashion supplement of The Spectator magazine.

Metrosexual Money shot: Ralph Lauren Polo fold-out four page ad, inside cover.

Buy-Curiousness: Although American GQ used to be known as ‘Gay Quarterly’ the UK edition of GQ is so glacially pretentious it’s often difficult to believe it’s actually alive, let alone has a sexuality.

Nonetheless, in this month’s issue lady sex columnist Rebecca Newman bravely introduces GQ readers to their prostate gland and anal beads:

‘…as you become aroused you’ll find that, rather than resisting, your backside becomes hungry and takes the first bead…. It may feel peculiar to begin with; the sensation will improve as you become accustomed to it.’

That’s what I usually tell them too! Perhaps that’s why Rebecca is very careful to state repeatedly that it’s ‘your girlfriend’ feeding your arse.

Incredibly important and well-connected GQ editor Dylan Jones meanwhile, could do with some anal beads in another orifice:

‘…as I was standing in the bar at Brown’s Hotel with Piers Morgan, having just had a gossip with David Cameron, he witters breathlessly, ‘I turned to Piers and said, “You know what? I don’t buy all this stuff about Gordon being bisexual.” We chatted away for a while, both of us recounting the old stories we’d heard, and then after about five minutes, Piers turned to me, gave me a quizzical look and said, “We’re not talking about the same Gordon are we?”

How to bed Mr GQ: Do you really want to?

Verdict: GQ probably thinks itself the most ‘grown-up’ of the men’s mags, and to be fair, it has occasionally covered gay issues (without sniggering), but since it’s generally so dull, who cares?

—-

ESQUIRE

‘THE MAGAZINE FOR MEN WHO MEAN BUSINESS’

Circulation: A not very businesslike 60,000

Covergirl: Clint Eastwood

Concept: Snobbery. Here’s editor Jeremy Langmead sniffing about how Britain’s footballers

‘…dress appallingly: 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).’

I rather like Ronaldo – particularly the way that his looks, talent and ability to wear whatever he wants provokes both The Sun and Esquire to call him a poof. Not bad going. (As an indication of where they’re coming from, in the same issue, Esquire’s Best Dressed Man in the World is… ‘HRH Prince of Wales’.)

Metrosexual money shot: Diesel double page spread featuring a hustler-like male model in shorts sitting in a chair with a shirtless, fat, bald, middle-aged male punter at his feet, sweating face pressed against his Diesel baseball shoes. (However much the lad was paid by Diesel, Esquire was paid much more to grovel at their feet.)

Buy-curiousness: I wasn’t looking.

How to bed Mr Esquire: Tell him you write for GQ

Verdict: Ronaldo every time.

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MEN’S HEALTH

‘WORLD’S BEST-SELLING MEN’S LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE’

Covergirl: Another personal fitness trainer with either great genes or really good ‘vitamins’.

Coverline: LOSE YOUR GUT! ‘The 60 Minute 6-Pack Plan’ BIGGER ARMS!! (The same ones every month)

Concept: For the man who wants to be a covergirl.

Metrosexual money shot: Too many to mention.

Buy-curiousness: Off the scale. This month’s nipple Count: Male = 73 (two on the cover). Female = 4 (mysteriously covered in ‘superfoods’ berries and honey in this issue). One article is called: ‘How to hide your computer porn files from your girlfriend’ – yes, but what about your copy of Men’s Health?

How to bed Mr Men’s Health: You probably already have.

Verdict: The most flagrantly, fragrantly metro of the metromags but American-owned Men’s Health is still in major pissy-prissy denial about this insisting that all its pec-worshipping, calorie-counting male readers are straight, married with kids and not in the least bit vain.  Which is, frankly, really gay.

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FHM

‘VOTED BEST MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD’

(Until recently biggest selling most successful UK men’s monthly )

Coverline: ‘”Lesbian Vampire Killers”: The undead have never been hotter.’

Covergirl: Mischa Barton

Concept: Male vanity made easy – and normal.

Metrosexual money-shot: Fashion and grooming and bodybuilding supplements ads featuring impossibly pretty young men in various stages of undress throughout, but most noticeably the inside cover ad for United Colors of Benetton starring a blue eyed lad way prettier than Mischa.

Buy-curiousness: Wads of it. For all its ‘High Street Honeys’, FHM seems the least uptight of the mens mags when it comes to enjoying/exploiting male beauty and acknowledging it, albeit with a giggle. One photo spread (‘Train like a soldier – FHM hits the gym with real life US marine turned Generation Kill actor Rudy Reyes…’) shows an impossibly buff, shirtless chap in tight pants. ‘Alone at sea, Ellen MacArthur removed her top’, reads one of the captions (FHM’s jokiness, unlike most men’s magazines, can actually be quite funny).

Beneath some pics of him with his bubble butt in the air the copy explains that he’s performing ‘Hindu Push-Ups… or what some people sardonically call “the prison push up” on account of where your bottom goes…. It’s also a big favourite down at the gym with the US Marines.’

How to bed Mr FHM: Dress well, work out, moisturise, have a sense of humour. And do the prison push-up.

Verdict: Although FHM like most if not all the men’s mags reviewed here, still officially assumes its readers are all straight, its highly buy-curious pumped-up metro content, along with its cheeky, flirty sense of humour suggests that it’s anything but narrow.

(Full disclosure: I’m a contributer to men’s bi-annual fashion mag Arena Hommes Plus — I don’t review it here, partly because of my self-interest, and partly because it’s a men’s fashion magazine rather than a men’s general circulation magazine.  But generally speaking, as the fact that I write for it might suggest, it has no problem about ramming homosexuality down its readers’ throats.)

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008