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

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

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

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

After all those ads in which Becks thrusted his giant Armani wrapped package in our faces if not down our throats, an Italian satirical TV show decided to do a little consumer product testing.  You know that in Italy they like to handle the sausage and tomatoes – and haggle over the price – before they part with their Euros.

Both parties are clearly unimpressed.

For those who don’t speak the most beautiful, most musical language in the world: the rubber-gloved lady shouts at a hooded, glowering Beckham driving off in his (ridiculously large) car full of minders: ‘HOW COULD YOU TAKE US FOR A RIDE!!??’

The incident has caused some anger in the UK, and some see it as outright sexual assault.  But if you are paid very large wedges of cash to put your lunchbox on the side of buses to sell overpriced underwear to the masses then perhaps the only shocking thing is that more punters don’t cop a feel of the goods.

Mark Simpson on John Hughes’ legacy

(Arena Hommes Plus, Winter 2009)

So here’s the pitch:  A Hollywood teen movie in which nothing happens.  All day. In a school library. Introduced by a pretentious quote from David Bowie’s ‘Changes’.  Or how about this: A boy bunks off High School to take his friends to mooch around an art gallery, to the strains of something especially delicate by The Smiths.

What do you mean you’ll call me?  Don’t you want to invest your millions in these sure-fire hits??

When the director John Hughes died this August, aged 59. much was made of how ‘influential’ he has been for today’s generation of movie-makers.  But it’s difficult to conceive of almost any of his classic mid-80s teen films, which included Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being made in Hollywood today.  Unless you re-wrote them to include slo-mo amputations.

John Hughes movies had great scripts, they had great characters, winsome, quirky actors: all these years later young Molly Ringwald with her red hair and angsty complexion still looks to me like the prettiest, loveliest girlfriend I never had (while Emilio Estevez looks a lot like a lot of the boys I have had – at least in my mind’s eye). Hughes movies had feelings, they had intelligence, they had heart – all of which tend to get in the way of films being made today. They also had a view of the world that, while often-times wise-crackingly cynical — ‘Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?’ — wasn’t afraid to be lyrical: ‘Life moves pretty fast.  You don’t stop to look around, you could miss it.’

Just like, in other words, the best British pop music, with which Hughes peppered his films liberally.  In fact his work, although celebrated now, often by a forty-something crowd crying over their spilt youth, looks like fragments of a lost America.  A much better one than the one we ended up with – with much superior taste in pop music.

Precisely because of their humanity and wit, Many of Hughes’ movies are as startling twenty years on as the Union Jack on the back of Ferris Bueller’s bedroom door, the posters on his walls for Blancmange and Cabaret Voltaire – and a glam Bryan Ferry puckering up over his bed. Matthew Broderick’s intoxicating mixture of all-American, unblinking, huckstering confidence and very Anglo, coquettish flamboyance is inconceivable in a lead Hollywood actor in a teen movie today.  It would be loudly dismissed as ‘TOO GAY!’.

The famous parade scene where he jumps on a parade float and mimes to a 1961 recording of fey Wayne Newton crooning ‘Danke Schoen’ like a Vegas Marlene Dietrich, and then to the Beatles’ deliriously, adenoidally sexy ‘Twist and Shout’ (from the previous Britpop invasion of John Hughes’ own youth) and everyone in Hughes’ hometown of Chicago, black and white, male and female, young and old, falls in love with him, is nothing less than a dreamy pop cultural epiphany.

It was a false one, however.  The future, as we now know, belonged not to sentimental, art-loving, anglophile, androgynous Ferris in a stolen red 1961 250GT Ferrari Spyder (which apparently, and quite appropriately, was actually a glass fibre fake with a British MG sports car underneath), but to ruthless career-planner and Reaganite Republican Maverick in an all-American F-14 Grumman Tomcat: Top Gun and Tom Cruise were launched into the stratosphere by steam catapult the previous year, in 1985 – the  same year as The Breakfast Club were chewing their fingernails and wondering, oh-so-deliciously, what they were going to do with their fucked-up lives.

Despite success with the warm adult comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), which once again spoke of a better, kinder America than the one that actually happened, one full of belly-laughs rather than today’s comedy cringe, snobbery and sadism, Hughes Hollywood career didn’t quite make it into the 90s, never recovering from the frightening success of annoying kiddie comedy Home Alone in 1990, for which he wrote the script.  He later left Hollywood and became a farmer.  Growing things for people to eat was the perfect riposte to today’s terminally toxic movie business.

As Ferris in his dressing gown put it, raising a quizzical eyebrow at us: ‘You’re still here??  It’s over!  Go home!’

© Mark Simpson 2009

by Mark Simpson (Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, September, 1996)

You might think me obsessed with men’s bottoms. And you’d be right. But if you want to know what a real bottom obsession looks like, one that makes my own heavy breathing look positively flirtatious, just visit the movies.

Take the Summer blockbuster ‘Independence Day’. Here’s a film so fixated on bumholes that it can’t see anything but bumholes. Bumholes so big and special-effected that they threaten to swallow up the whole world. Literally.

In this startlingly excremental (figuratively as well as literally) movie, American civilisation is dwarfed by vast, round alien arseholes which saucily postition themselves over the biggest, proudest, pointiest buildings in New York, LA., Washington etc. After twenty-four hours of teasingly hovering above these phallic monuments, they open up their sphincters to dump a stream of shit-from-hell which first demolishes the skyscraper below and then engulfs, destroys and generally wreaks havoc on the nicely ordered American metropolis beneath it. That’s some bottom.

In case we’ve missed the point, the gung-ho US pilots who attempt a counter-attack, talk a great deal about how they can’t wait ‘to give it to those aliens up the ass!’ However, they fail to penetrate the aliens defences with their hot, hi-tech rockets – even the nuclear-tipped babies – because the cheeky Pushy Controlling Bottom aliens have a force-field hymen protecting them from such unwanted attentions.

Fortunately, Jeff Goldblum’s wily jewishness saves the day and mankind’s reputation as fuckers not to be messed with, by craftily working out that what is needed to lower the aliens’ defences is a virus. Jeff infects one of the smaller alien vessels and thence the mother vessel by ‘docking’ with it, and soon the virus is transmitted to all the alien ships, whose force-fields/immune systems collapse.

This allows Randy Quaid, playing a kamikize love-missile, to fly up the sphincter of an alien vessel opening to crap destruction on a city below, while shouting ‘Alien assholes! Up yours!’, before exploding and destroying the alien ship, helpfulling showing the rest of the Earth forces ‘Where the aliens’ weak-spot is.’ That is to say: it’s in the same place as men’s.

You can’t get more botty-fixated than this. Except, that is, in last year’s Sci-Fi blockbuster ‘Stargate’. This film, made by the same team as ‘Independence Day’, featured basically the same explosive anal ending in which an alien desert despot is destroyed by an American bomb which is sent shooting up the arsehole of his space-craft by Kurt Russell (who is much the same thing as Randy Quaid), shortly after Kurt has uttered the only expletive in this 15 Certificate movie – ‘Fuck you, asshole!’.

Men’s bottoms are officially meant only to allow one-way traffic, any reminders that it can admit as well as expel tend to make men uneasy – unless they can be projected onto something hated. ‘Stargate’ was a movie which begins with the discovery of a huge ‘ring’ in the Egyptian desert which turns out to be a ‘portal’ to other worlds – which is fine and dandy. But it is also a point of entry to our own – which isn’t. So commander Kurt and his men are dispatched to plug that hole good and proper and protect Earthmen’s virtue.

As film star Mel Gibson made clear in an infamous interview where he was asked about whether he worried that people might think he was a homosexual because he was an actor, the possibility of two-way traffic in the region of your own posterior must be denied. Pointing to his not uninviting arse he allegedly shouted: ‘This is for shitting; nothing else!’ All the same, it’s just a little odd that his hard, manly, hairy performance of Scottishness in ‘Braveheart’ against the soft, smooth, nancy-boy English reached its climax in a scene where he was publically disembowelled by the Sassenachs without so much as blinking.

Of course, invasion, enslavement and defeat have long been seen as analagous to anal rape – a form of emasculation. Recent revelations about the sexual-humiliation practises of victorious troops in the Bosnian conflict on their male prisoners have only reinforced this idea. Perhaps this is why in ‘Independence Day’ Randy Quaid, the man who finally ‘gives it to the aliens up the ass’ on behalf of all Earth men is an alcoholic ex-Vietnam vet who, we’re told, years ago was abducted by the aliens and subjected to ’sexual experiments’.

The ending of ‘Stargate’ also owed something to recent American history: A T-shirt popular with US forces during the Gulf War, depicted Saddam Hussein – that other scary despot the yanks liberated desert people from – bent over with an American missile up his butt and the legend beneath it reading: “WE’RE GONNA SADDAMIZE YA!’

The direct representation of male violation, like consenting male homosexuality itself, used to be a taboo; in the Seventies the play ‘Romans in Britain’ was prosecuted for indecency because it featured a simulated male rape scene (defended, interestingly, as being ‘a metaphor for imperialism’). John Boorman’s film ‘Deliverance’ (1972) was considered ‘controversial’ because it hinted rather heavily at male-male sexual assault. Nowadays, however, in the arsehole-anxious nineties, male rape scenes are practically de rigeur in mainstream movies, popping up (and being held down) in films such as ‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994) and ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (1994), while, as we’ve seen, the theme of forced, vengeful posterior penetration has even become the stuff of science fiction movies ostensibly aimed at kids.

This might just have something to do with the rising visibility of homosexuality and the increasing fascination with male passivity – along with the inescapable fact that, no matter how many aliens the guys blow away at the movies – and in ‘Stargate’ and ‘Independence Day’ saving the world is strictly a guy thing – they still keep losing the sex war with the aliens they live with: females.

So, without wanting to come over all Vito Russo, it’s probably no coincidence that the ‘Stargate’ alien is played by Jaye Davidson who also played the tricky tranny in ‘The Crying Game’ (1992), is surrounded by muscular young men in leather, and flies about in a spaceship that likes to sit on pointy pyramids. Nor is it without signficance that in ‘Independence Day’, Harvey Fierstein, playing as usual an extremely annoying gay constantly on the phone to his mother (“Oh, mother, it’s AWFUL, the aliens are getting more attention than ME!”) is the first character to be killed by the alien attack.  Eliminating early on (but not early enough for my money) the only Earthling who willingly takes it up the ass.

Hollywood science fiction these days is not so much about men’s fear of invasion from outer space as that of the invasion of men’s inner space. As Kevin McCarthy shouts to the freeway traffic in the classic 50s sci-fi paranoia flick ’Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – ‘They’re here already!’

Standing right behind you.

‘It’s you that needs to watch it. You go out reeking like that and people will start saying things about you!” 

You were right, Pat, so right.

Thanks to Caleb Everett

There’s a naked man standing laughing in your dreams.
You know who it is, but you don’t like what it means.

A number of people have forwarded Morrissey’s pubes to me. (For which, many thanks.)

I thought I could get away with not discussing the Moz minge, but this Red Hot Chili Peppers pastiche, nostalgic vinyl taking the place of stuffed socks, which appears on the inside sleeve of Morrissey’s new single ‘Throwing My Arms Around Paris’, has generated a lot of commentary, some amused, some not, and some, such as Paul Flynn in the Guardian, citing it as ‘the latest sign of artistic decline’.

But all of it suggesting Morrissey’s curlies cannot be ignored.

It’s funny how Morrissey manages to repeatedly surprise people with his consistent, insistent coquettishness. Only last year, legions were scandalized when that picture taken in the early 90s of His Mozness’ naked hairy arse with ‘YOUR ARSE’N'ALL’ scrawled across it in Magic Marker appeared in a booklet for his Greatest Hits collection. Some fans (mostly Americans) complained, ‘So gross! This must mean he’s, like, totally gay!’

But Morrissey, odd, reclusive creature that he is, has never exactly been a shrinking violet. His work has always had a naughty, ‘cheeky’, exhibitionist side. As he sang in The Smiths: ‘I’d like to drop my trousers to the Queen – every sensible child will know what this means’. His first single featured a close-up of naked male gay porn star’s bubble-butt. His first album had a shot of the torso of a naked male hustler on it. (Like all the artwork during his Smiths period, it was all selected and directed and probably even pasted up by him.)

After The Smiths split, he became his own cover star and was to be found hugging his topless solo self on his 1997 ‘Best Of’ collection.

And while he may have once criticized her shamelessness, Moz’s outrageous ‘November Spawned a Monster’ promo in 1990 out-Madonna-ed Madonna, featuring him writhing in the desert in a skimpy see-through mesh blouse that somehow keeps slipping off – perhaps because he appears to be being bummed by an odd-shaped boulder.

On-stage he pole-dances around his songs often ending on his back with his legs in the air, obligingly lifted towards the auditorium, while yodelling. Even today, it’s still an absolute and legal requirement of all tickets sales that Moz strips off his sweat-soaked shirt at least once every show and throw it into the crowd, who instantly rend it to tiny fragrant shreds, which they then appear to eat. If Morrissey doesn’t get his tits out for the lads and lasses you’re fully entitled for a full refund, I believe. It’s always been a flagrantly, probably pathologically sexual thing between Moz and his fans. Though as he’s got older and thicker around the midriff the pole-dancing, (though apparently not the yodeling) does get a bit more awkward.

Oh, and the naked Moz showing us his shaved armpit shot by Eamonn McCabe (which seems to be an update of the famous Narcissus statue by Cellini) used on the jacket of Saint Morrissey – partly to undermine the title – originally appeared on the cover of the NME in 1988 and on a big, fold-out, blue-tac-to-your-sweaty-teen-boy-bedroom-wall poster inside.

Today’s naked Moz looks very different, which is only natural since he’s now nearly 50 – though of course ageing naturally is the height of unnaturalness these days. But the boyish exhibitionism is largely unchanged. Yes, he has the body of a middle-aged male celebrity who scandalously refuses to hire a personal fitness trainer (even if one or two of the chaps in his employ look as if they’d rather be on a ten mile run). But he’s also showing us that inside the body of a pub landlord from County Mayo is still a skinny lonely boy from Stretford, nakedly demanding our love. With a seven inch pop single where his manhood should be. That’s how people don’t grow up.

If you look closely – and clearly I have – this jokey pic isn’t really very funny.  Like ‘Throwing My Arms Around Paris’, it’s sadly, proudly defiant. It’s Morrissey’s family portrait.  This is what his love-life looks like.  It’s all here: Pop music. His band-mates. His fans (we’re looking at him again – he’s that naked man laughing and crying in our dreams). And, centre of shot, perhaps his most enduring relationship of all: the one he has with his hair.

Both ends.

Mark Simpson ponders the trouble the two Georges, Boy and Michael, have been getting in lately in this month’s Out:

What is it about middle-aged queer British pop stars from the ’80s? Why can’t they settle down, keep their noses clean, their peckers zippered, and their faces out of the papers? More precisely, what is it about middle-aged queer British pop stars from the ’80s named George?

George Alan O’Dowd, slightly better known as Boy George, former Culture Club front/frock man, starts 2009 being “banged up” — as we call prison sentences in the U.K. — for attacking and imprisoning a Norwegian male escort he’d invited to his home.

Read the article in full here.

by Mark Simpson (A shorter version originally appeared on Guardian CIF November 2, 2008)

“It’s better to marry than burn with passion,” declared St Paul. But now marriage itself seems to have become a burning issue – or at least, gay marriage.

The re-banning of gay marriage in California earlier this month with the passage of Proposition 8 has been presented by gay marriage advocates as a vicious body-blow for gay rights. Angry gay people and their allies have protested across the US, some reportedly even rioting. The timely release of the Gus Van Sant movie Milk, about the murder in 1977 of Harvey Milk, the US’s first out elected official, has fuelled the sense of gay outrage and defiance. Surely only a hateful bigot like the one that gunned down Harvey would be opposed to gay marriage?

Gay marriage is the touchstone of gay equality, apparently. Settling for anything less is a form of Jim Crow style gay segregation and second-class citizenship.

But not all gays agree. This one for instance sees gay marriage not so much as a touchstone as a fetish. A largely symbolic and emotional issue that in the US threatens to undermine real, non-symbolic same-sex couple protection: civil unions bestow in effect the same legal status as marriage in several US states – including California. As a result of the religious right’s mobilisation against gay marriage, civil unions have been rolled back in several US states.

Perhaps the lesson of Proposition 8 is not that most straight people think gay people should sit at the back of the bus, but that if you take on religion and tradition on its hallowed turf – and that is what marriage effectively is – you’re highly likely to lose.  Even in liberal California.

Maybe I shouldn’t carp, living as I do in the UK, where civil partnerships with equal legal status to marriage have been nationally recognised since 2004. But part of the reason that civil partnerships were successfully introduced here was because they are civil partnerships not “marriages” (the UK is a much more secular country than the US, and somewhat more gay-friendly too – but even here gay marriage would almost certainly not have passed).

At this point I’d like to hide behind the, erm, formidable figure of Sir Elton John, who also expressed doubts recently about the fixation of US gay campaigners on the word ‘marriage’, and declared he was happy to be in a civil partnership with the Canadian David Furnish and did not want to get married. Needless to say, Mr John wasn’t exactly thanked for speaking his mind by gay marriage advocates.

But amidst all the gay gnashing of teeth about the inequality of Proposition 8 it’s worth asking: when did marriage have anything to do with equality? Respectability, certainly. Normality, possibly. Stability, hopefully. Very hopefully. But equality?

First of all, there’s something gay people and their friends need to admit to the world: gay and straight long-term relationships are generally not the same. How many heterosexual marriages are open, for example? In my experience, many if not most long term male-male relationships are very open indeed. Similarly, sex is not quite so likely to be turned into reproduction when your genitals are the same shape. Yes, some gay couples may want to have children, by adoption or other means, and that’s fine and dandy of course, but children are not a consequence of gay conjugation. Which has always been part of the appeal for some.

More fundamentally who is the “man” and who is the “wife” in a gay marriage? Unlike cross-sex couples, same-sex partnerships are partnerships between nominal equals without any biologically, divinely or even culturally determined reproductive/domestic roles. Who is to be “given away”? Or as Elton John, put it: “I don’t wanna be anyone’s wife”.

It’s increasingly unclear even to heterosexuals who is the “man” and who is the “wife”, who should cleave to the other’s will and who should bring home the bacon. That’s why so many today introduce their husband or wife as “my partner”. The famous exception to this of course was Guy Ritchie and his missus, Madonna – and look what happened to them. Pre-nuptial agreements, very popular with celebs (though not, apparently, with Guy and Madonna), represent the very realistic step of divorcing before you get married – like plastic surgery, this is a hard-faced celeb habit that’s going mainstream.

If Christians and traditionalists want to preserve the “sanctity” of marriage as something between a man and a woman, with all the mumbo jumbo that entails, let them. They only hasten the collapse of marriage. Instead of demanding gay marriage, in effect trying to modernise an increasingly moribund institution, maybe lesbian and gay people should push for civil partnerships to be opened to everyone, as they are in France – where they have proved very popular.

I suspect civil partnerships, new, secular, literally down-to-earth contracts between two equals, relatively free of the baggage of tradition, ritual and unrealistic expectations, would also prove very popular with cross-sex couples in the Anglo world at a time when the institution of marriage is the most unpopular it’s ever been among people who aren’t actually gay. Yes, cross-sex couples can have civil marriage ceremonies, but they’re still marriages, not partnerships. If made open to everyone, civil partnerships might eventually not just be an alternative to marriage. Marriage might end up being something left to Mormons.

Perhaps my scepticism about gay marriage and marriage in general is down to the fact that I’m terminally single. Perhaps it’s all just sour grapes. Or maybe I prefer to burn with passion than marry. After all, St Paul’s violently ascetic world-view which regarded marriage as a poor runner-up to chastity, also ensured that the Christian Church would burn sodomites like kindling for centuries.

Either way, I think it needs to be mentioned amidst all this shouting about gay domesticity that, important as it is to see lesbian and gay couples recognised and given legal protection, probably most gay men (though probably not most lesbians) are single and probably will be single for most of their lives. With or without civil partnerships/unions.

Or even the magical, symbolic power of gay marriage.

Postscript: The Voice of Gay America responds – loudly.

by Mark Simpson (GT Magazine, November 2008)

Why, I wonder, are gays – or at least the busybody, button-holing, milk-monitor types – so keen on ads being nice to them and telling the world it’s OK to be homo, especially when this strategy frequently leaves them with mayo on their faces?

Stonewall’s apoplexy over the pulling of the Heinz ‘gay kiss’ ad earlier this year is a messy case-in-point. Excuse me, but it wasn’t a gay kiss, it was a joke: Heinz’s sandwich spread is so good, it turns mum into an ugly New York deli short-order chef whom dad pecks on the cheek before leaving in the morning. They’re not a gay couple. The fact it wasn’t a very good joke doesn’t make the sulky gay boycott of Heinz look any less humourless than the literalist Christians and ‘family-values’ freaks who complained about it in the first place. Likewise, whatever Snickers were saying in that TV ad featuring Mr T barking, “Get some nuts!” while firing candybars at a swishy speed-walker, the much swishier response of gay groups on both sides of the Atlantic who succeeded in getting it banned sent out the entirely unambiguous message that gays don’t have any.

More to the point, besides Stonewall and pensioners, who watches TV ads these days? Isn’t that what the fast-forward button was invented for? Gay people, and for that matter most straights, are too busy uploading their ‘home movies’ onto their on-line profile to watch TV in real time. ‘Impressionable’ kids that the gay busybodies want to protect certainly aren’t watching: they don’t see the point of TV that doesn’t turn the world into a lake of fire at the touch of an Xbox controller. I’ll bet ready money most people only heard about these ads after the gay milk monitors started huffing, “How very dare you!” – and driving even more traffic to YouTube. It was the only place I actually saw either ad.

Gay protests about ‘homophobic’ ads today sometimes seem to exist in a virtual world, defending virtual people from virtual slights where the only thing that’s real is pointlessness. I’m old enough to remember when people did watch ads. It was a time when they were, as everyone used to say repeatedly, “the best thing on telly,” when, instead of diving for the mute button, people would turn the sound up.

And it was a time when ads were doing their damndest to turn everyone gay. It was the 1980s.

In the 1980s, advertising was gay porn – and the only gay porn generally available. Which is why it was so powerful. Now, thanks to the net, porn is porn – or rather, porn is advertising: I want those pubes/ that body/ that cock/ that orifice/ that surgery/ that lampshade.

The legendary UK Levi’s male striptease ads of the mid-1980s (inspired by the success of the 1983 Calvin Klein underwear poster campaign featuring a giant Tom Hintnaus stripped down to his Y fronts in Times Square) in which humpy young men took their clothes off in our living rooms – and introduced the existence of the worked-out, attention-hungry, proudly passive male body to an equally astonished and enraptured British public – not only brainwashed an entire generation of straight boys into joining the gym and then going to gay discos and starting boybands to show off the results. It also succeeded in making even straight women gay. After all, in place of cooing about “twinkly eyes,” it taught women to look at the male body with the same critical, impossibly demanding, carnivorous eye that gay men had used for years. (And in fact, so much have all our expectations been inflated that Nick Kamen’s ‘fabulously hunky’ body as it was described back then by the tabs, today probably wouldn’t get past the audition stage – he’d be told to go back to the gym and inject some horse steroids.)

Pre-1980s there wasn’t much gay lust in ads or, for that matter, Britain. I remember as a kid spending most of the 1970s watching an Old Spice Aftershave ‘Mark of a Man’ commercial, which featured a surfer riding a vast, spuming wave in very long-shot, to the climactic strains of ‘O Fortuna’ from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The number of times I waited for that ad to come on as a kid, hoping, praying that this time the camera would move in closer. In the 1980s, my prayers were answered and the lens moved in, big time. Since then, it’s never moved back. It has zoomed ever closer, until now we’re looking at the mitochondria on the walls of men’s small intestines. Maybe I’m an incurable romantic/ masochist, but I sometimes find myself missing the aching, blurry, long-shot tease of 1970s’ Old Spice masculinity. Because it never quite delivers, it never disappoints.

You might think my take on how 1980s advertising queered up Britain and made it safe for metrosexuality fanciful, but there were lots of people who objected to the Levi’s commercials back then because they saw them as promoting sodomitic immorality. If those nay-gay-sayers had succeeded in having the ads pulled – in the way that gay groups succeed today with ads they deem to be immoral – who knows what kind of pec-less, ab-less world we might be living in?

In the post-advertising, post-gay porn world we’re living in, there’s an American website called Commercial Closet devoted to how ads treat homosexuals, which you can visit if you want to get worked up over ads you haven’t seen – most of them foreign. It has a gay grading system for each ad that, using a complicated very American formula, scores them from 0 to 100. Anything under 49 is deemed ‘Negative’, between 49-69 is ‘Caution’; 69-89 ‘Equal’; and 89-100 ‘Elton John’ (OK, I made that last bit up).

One of the more interesting contributions is a series of ads for the trainers ASICS, which ran in France this year. In them, two male French comedians, Omar & Fred, one black, one white, ‘go gay’, making passes at one another. Sans ASICS, they’re rebuffed indignantly by the other party. Avec, they go gaga for them. There’s nothing especially offensive about the ads. They resort to fewer stereotypes than gay-adored Little Britain and, more importantly, are (mildly) funny and seem to be entirely accurate in what they’re saying about the effect that consumerism in general – and advertising in particular – have had on men.

How does it score according to Commercial Closet’s gay-friendly grading system? ‘40: Negative’.

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.