MARK SIMPSON.com

Is this the end of frantically trying to tear shiny foil with lube-covered fingers while your arousal ticks ever downwards and your partner admires the wallpaper?

Consumerism, in its endless quest to make everything oh-so effortless, does also tend to make things somewhat pointless.

Here however it actually helps you to maintain your pointyness.

All in all a gadget Mr Bond would have found rather more useful than most of those Q foisted on him over the years.

(Originally appeared in Attitude, 1998 as ‘Slick Willy’)

Once upon a time, becoming a rock star was the only way a young male could be assured of getting free blow-jobs from females. This, not private jets or yachts or tax havens or leather trousers is the reason why so many young men aspired to be Mick Jagger.

Or so it was until Monica Lewinsky got under President Clinton’s desk to do some French polishing and the Oval Office became the Oral Office. Since then, teenage boys everywhere are practising making speeches, shaking hands with bewildered people in shopping malls and kissing babies

Fellatio is the way to a man’s, well, if not exactly heart then at least his gratitude. Even if, as many women will tell you, men are not always grateful enough to actually return the favour. (The ‘sixty-eight’, or I’ll owe you one’, is a very popular position with straight men – come to think of it, it’s a very popular position with me. ) But learn to suppress your gag reflex and you will be invited to all the best parties, even if no one will share your glass.

Most sex surveys show that the favourite sexual practice for straight men is receiving head. This is slightly odd, since it’s not ‘normal’ – it’s passive and it’s perverse. Not to mention lazy. Biblically speaking, oral sex is sodomy as it doesn’t make babies. Legally speaking, oral sex of any kind was until very recently considered an offence under the Puritan anti-sodomy laws of many US States. J. Edgar Hoover kept a list of public figures who were suspected of engaging in ‘oro-genital’ contact because he considered it a sign of subversiveness – and in case he found himself at a loose end of a Saturday night.

To some people a bit of a lick round the family heirlooms can be more shocking than other, more pungent perversities. Jim, my best mate at Junior School, after a surprisingly frank sex education class for the 1970s, in which we’d been told ‘what gays do in bed’, including ‘sucking one another’s penises’ (I think our biology teacher had a bizarre view of homosexuality as some kind of mutuality), sputtered: ‘It’s so, so, so… dirty! I mean, I can understand putting it up someone’s arsehole,’ he said shaking his head in disbelief, ‘- but… that!’

Looking back on it, his remarks made a certain kind of sense. Willies are dirty, bums are dirty, so: a bum + a willy = something still dirty. On the other hand, mouths are supposed to be clean, so a mouth + a willy = angry Mummy.

Perhaps it was the ‘now wash your hands’ dirtiness of pee-pees that caused the lad that used to toss me off in the Fifth Year in a darkened deserted Geography class-room every Tuesday afternoon after Games to make an intriguing offer. ‘I’ll suck it for you next time,’ he promised, in response to my increasingly frantic suggestions. ‘But only,’ he added, ‘if you bring some toothpaste to put on it.’ Maybe I just hadn’t yet got the hang of foreskin hygiene. Whatever, to this day I still get an erection every time I brush my teeth.

The idea of what is natural and what is perverse is not always as obvious as a knob in your gob. In Renaissance Florence they encouraged their citizens to denounce one another for crimes against God and Nature anonymously on bits of paper slipped into a ‘Sodomy Box’ (today, of course, this would be the name of a fashionable restaurant). Tens of thousands of denunciations were made every year. Apparently most of the population of Florence, male and female, was accused at some time or other. Clearly Renaissance Florence was a little bit like being in today’s US Republican Party.

Some academic who doesn’t get out much has spent years sifting through the records and discovered that there was a hierarchy of sodomy back then. Interestingly, and contrary to the mores that hold sway today, (Presidents excepted), it was thought a greater offence and shame to receive a blowjob than to give one – whatever the sex of the participants. Being a suckee rather than a sucker is what really sucked.

Gore Vidal would have agreed. He mocked the fond notion the sailor receiving a bj from a fag is in control. In fact, Vidal observes, the subservient fag literally has the sailor on the tip of his tongue. And this is a very vulnerable position to find yourself in, bearing in mind how sharp the tongues of fags in general – and Gore Vidal’s in particular – can be.

Interestingly, until the Seventies, homosexuals in the US tended to be known as ‘cocksuckers’. Which suggests that a) American women were even less interested in playing the hairy oboe in those days than they are now, and that b) fags were probably much more popular after closing time than they are today – ‘cocksucker’ being less a term of abuse than a user’s guide.

The great and incontrovertible truth of oral sex is that no man, however straight he may be, would turn down the opportunity to suck his own penis. Which is, of course, exactly why God placed it where most men can’t reach it with their own mouth. Homosexuality is a sin because it’s a form of cheating. Getting your cock sucked isn’t supposed to be so easy. In his Infinite Wisdom Our Lord gave every man except Jeff Stryker a penis shorter than his backbone to make sure that men expended an awful lot of energy doing other things to get blow jobs, things that would seem rather daft and pointless otherwise, but without which the world would be a duller place – things like rock ‘n’ roll, politics, cunnilingus and odd-jobs around the home.

If homosexuality wasn’t discouraged, most of human history would have been nothing more than a man leaning against the wall in the back-room of a gay bar in San Francisco with his flies unbuttoned.

© Mark Simpson 2006

‘Shamed TV entertainer’ – as he was re-Christened by the British press – Michael Barrymore’s new autobiography ‘Awight Now: Setting the Record Straight’ has just been published by Simon & Schuster.

I’ve yet to see a copy, but the title and the blurb, the publicity, the large publisher behind it and the reports of a C4 series later this year suggest that Barrymore’s remarkable fight-back from being depicted as the most reviled figure in British light-entertainment history, if not British public life, and exiled to the penal colony of New Zealand, continues. It was dramatically kick-started earlier this year by his surprise appearance on Celebrity Big Brother and, even more surprisingly, not only somehow surviving right to the end but being voted the most popular actual celeb in the house. This in the teeth of a vicious hate campaign against him in the press.

It was a rather reckless move - it could easily have ended very differently, especially given his erratic behaviour - but perhaps it was entirely of a piece with our times that the victim of a (press) media show-trial should have volunteered to appear in another (TV) media show-trial as a way of rehabilitating himself. Particularly a man who had once been the nation’s favourite TV entertainer.

Almost everyone loves a winner, it seems. Especially The Sun, which didn’t spare him anything when he was in the House, making endless ‘jokes’ about ’swimming pools’ and stirring up ‘outrage’, but then performed an impressively shameless volte face after his victory. The week after the series ended they finally printed the facts of the case instead of the fantasies, and presented Barrymore as a man wrongly blamed by the press for Lubbock’s death and injuries – cleverly stealing a march on its rivals, who were still peddling the tired old story of Barrymore the anal-rapist-murderer, or, sorry, ‘morally responsible’ anal-rapist-murderer.

All this was of course presented as a ‘scoop’ and the result of The Sun’s own ‘special investigation’ but, as was pointed out by at least one media commentator, much of what they ‘revealed’ as ‘new evidence’ was to be found in a three-year-old Independent On Sunday article by yours truly (posted below) – which I had based on the fiendishly clever strategem of simply reading the transcripts of the public inquest into Lubbock’s death. The same inquest at which all the major newspapers - including The Sun - had staff reporters.

I predicted at the end of the piece that this scandal could turn out to be Barrymore’s last and biggest hit show and that the British public would never be able to forgive him or themselves for the crimes he committed in their minds, rather than real life. CBB seems to have proved me wrong about the first part and Barrymore seems to be doing his best to prove me wrong about the second.

Tears of a Clown

A young man drowns in the pool of television’s highest-paid entertainer. The star is branded a killer. But, says Mark Simpson, the case against the ‘OJ of Essex’ doesn’t add up. Now, as fresh evidence emerges, Michael Barrymore talks about that tragic night, his demons and why the facts weren’t allowed to get in the way of a good story
(Independent on Sunday, uncut version, 02/03/2003)

“Follow the brown signs,” Michael Barrymore’s PA tells me when giving directions over the phone for the Essex leg of my car journey to the infamous “House of Horror” of the former Mr Saturday Night. “The ones pointing to Paradise Wildlife Park,” he adds, without a hint of irony in his voice.

The 50-year-old comedian’s Roydon home may not be an official tourist attraction, but since the body of 31-year-old Stuart Lubbock was discovered in his swimming pool in the early hours of 31 March 2001, it has become, like its owner, the ‘butt’ of countless off-colour locker-room jokes. Many of these focus on the serious sexual injuries the young man was said to have suffered.

But most of the Barrymore “jokes” didn’t come from the changing-room. They were supplied by the Fourth Estate. Most memorably, Private Eye ran a front-page picture of Barrymore being asked: “What killed Stuart Lubbock?” His balloon reply: “Buggered if I know!” And also the front page of the Sunday Mirror (15 September 2002), two days after the inquest into Lubbock’s death delivered an open verdict and the press declared open season on Barrymore, featured a picture of Barrymore and the huge, hilariously serious headline: “YOU ARE A KILLER!”

Jokes are irresistible ideas, as seductive as they are preposterous. Laughter, after all, is a very physical response to something we are rejecting and accepting at the same time; a reflex located somewhere between orgasming and vomiting. Over the past few months, this preposterous idea of Barrymore, the television funnyman, as a kind of murdering anal rapist has proved irresistible to the British media. It’s been having hysterics. Retching, raving, shuddering hysterics.

Barrymore, however, isn’t laughing. “I’m not letting that one go. At all,” he says of the Sunday Mirror’s “Killer” verdict. “It’s being dealt with. Action is being taken,” he insists. Written off only a few months ago, Barrymore seems to be regaining the initiative. In recent weeks the perjury investigation against him, prompted by his ex-wife Cheryl’s allegations, has been dropped and Essex police have reopened their inquiry into Lubbock’s injuries because of fresh claims that they occurred after he was declared dead.

According to Barrymore, the Sunday Mirror headline was a form of revenge. “It only came out because they didn’t get their way,” he says. Apparently, the paper rang the day the inquest finished asking if Claire Wicks [Lubbock’s ex-girlfriend could visit Barrymore’s house with her two children by Lubbock as they “wanted to see where their Daddy died”.

“Not a problem, we said. Would be very happy to have Claire and the kids here for the day. But, of course, they wanted photographers and journalists to come with her so we asked, is this Claire’s idea? And they had to admit it wasn’t. So we said no. Two days later: ‘You Are a Killer!’” says Barrymore.

Possibly only Iraq or OJ Simpson’s house have been photographed from the air more than Barrymore’s home. He is, after all, by decree of the popular press, the Sodom Hussein of Roydon, the OJ of Essex. The bungalow is not as large as it looks from above through a telephoto lens, but it’s certainly large enough, as are the vast, shiny leather sofas we are sitting on. The “death pool”, as the News of the World dubbed it, clearly visible through the French windows, also looks smaller at ground level but it is also, alas, big enough to drown in.

“I’m actually quite quiet,” says Barrymore, talking about how people expect him to be the hooting extrovert they see on telly. There does appear to be a low-energy shyness to him. He’s sitting diagonally across from me, initially with his arms and legs crossed and his body quarter-turned away. But then, I am, after all, a journalist.

“This is not a trial,” the coroner had declared at the start of the Lubbock inquest. The inquest, however, was turned into a media show trial of epic proportions, and set the climate for others that were to follow, such as that of John Leslie and Matthew Kelly. As with all show trials, Barrymore was guilty until proven innocent and then still guilty anyway - or “morally responsible”, if you’re a broadsheet reader.

I suggest that there has been an almost playground spitefulness in some of the press coverage. “Yeah,” he says, now looking at me directly, “but what have I actually ever done to them? In the playground, or anywhere? What have I done to them?” His gaze doesn’t waver. “Say they succeed in finishing me off, what good does that do them? They haven’t got you any more to exploit, have they? What do they gain from that? Tell me?”

IF YOU’RE GOING to drown in a celebrity swimming pool, choose carefully. Not all celebrity swimming pools are equal. In March last year Daniel Williams a 23-year-old fireman drowned in another male celebrity’s pool. But while Lubbock, a butcher by trade, became a household name, Williams became yesterday’s news.

As with the events surrounding Lubbock’s death, there was a party, Williams amused himself in the pool at the London house, while the other guests drifted indoors. No one saw him drown. He was found submerged dead, or dying, in the early hours of the morning. The toxicologist’s report showed that Williams had consumed the same quantities of alcohol (nine pints), ecstasy (four or five tablets) and cocaine (a line or two) as Lubbock. Likewise, there was no forensic or witness evidence of any struggle.

Unlike the Lubbock case, the press didn’t find Williams’s death mysterious or even particularly interesting. They accepted the results of the police inquiry (which, as with Lubbock, ultimately produced no charges) and the Home Office pathologist’s conclusion was that he had died by drowning. They didn’t splash each day’s (carefully selected) inquest “highlights” across their front pages, printing speculation as scientific fact, or constantly interview Williams’s family and friends. Nor did they lynch his host’s career from the lamppost of public indignation. Instead they treated the death for what it was, a terrible accident.

Why? What was the difference? Was it in part that Williams drowned, accidentally, in a swimming pool belonging to a married film celebrity - the actor Art Malik - instead of a very famously gay and off-the-rails television celebrity called Michael Barrymore?

There was however another ‘fundamental’ difference: the injuries to Lubbock’s anus, described as serious and significant by the pathologists, “fearful”, “nightmarish” and “horrific” by the press. These injuries, combined with his hosts very public homosexuality, presented an irresistible idea – arousing all those column inches and making the inquest one of the most heavily and excitedly reported - and distorted - of recent times.

For example, the papers, tabloid and broadsheet, told us repeatedly how Lubbock was found floating face down in Barrymore’s pool. Untrue. All the witness statements agree that Lubbock was found at the bottom of the pool face up. Apparently, the image of a “handsome”, “heterosexual father-of-two” floating dead, face down, and arse up - literally drowning in passivity – in the pool of Britain’s most famous ‘arse-bandit’ was just too seductive for the press to resist.

But this relatively minor kind of kinky distortion was just the beginning. For example, in the space of his first few sentences, (13 September 2002) the Sun’s resident sodomy expert Richard Littlejohn, forced all the important facts to surrender themselves to the impatient heat of his passion: “The inquest is finally underway into the death of the man found floating face down [false in Michael Barrymore’s swimming pool. Stuart Lubbock was pumped full of drink and drugs [false: in fact, he helped himself to Barrymore’s drinks and toxicologist reports showed he was a long-term user of cocaine and/or ecstasy, and had been rogered senseless [fantasy. Pathologists agree he suffered a serious sexual assault [false.”

In fact, the pathologists were divided as to how the injuries were caused. It was not even established that the injuries were caused by sexual activity. Indeed, DNA testing showed that Lubbock had not had sexual contact in the hours before he died.

Since it seems to have been such an important part of the coverage, I ask Barrymore if he fancied Lubbock when he met him in the Millennium, the nightclub in Harlow that the star attended with his then-boyfriend Jonathan Kenney before returning home in a taxi with Lubbock and two other party guests, Kylie and Jonathan Merritt, who he had met that evening (Kenney following later). “I spoke to that many people at the Millennium that night. I wouldn’t have picked Stuart out. It was reported that I couldn’t even remember his name. Well, I didn’t know his name. He jumped in the taxi with Kylie and Jonathan and I thought he was with them. When he was here he did whatever he was doing, like most of the other guests; I just said here’s the drink and here’s the music. Most of the night I was with James Futers and Simon Shaw, who I knew from the village. If I was trying to chat Stuart up, I think I would’ve spent a bit more time with him. Besides, my boyfriend at the time, Jonathan, was here.” Barrymore adds, “It just doesn’t tally up.”

Barrymore is convinced that the papers built the story the way they wanted to build it. ‘That’s why most of them didn’t mention that there were three girls at the party, because it got in the way of the “Gay Sex Orgy” headlines.’

How many of the guests were actually gay? “None. Just me and my boyfriend,” says Barrymore.

So not much of a gay orgy then. “Nope. Not much of an orgy of any kind. No sexual activity took place whatsoever,” insists Barrymore.

I ask him about the only indisputably culpable thing he did that evening: his departure from his house after Lubbock’s body was retrieved from the pool - and catch a glimpse of the evasiveness that irritates many. “Yeah, well, it was wrong,” he says quickly, “but I’ve answered that. I didn’t run away… immediately - I ran into the house and got Jonathan who knows about resuscitation, while the lads {James Futers and Simon Shaw} were getting Stuart out of the pool. I wouldn’t have know what to do… there were four people working on him… it wasn’t my idea to leave the house. James and Simon said, ‘Come away, there’s nothing you can do here….’

“I’ve admitted it was a stupid thing to do,�? he continues, sounding irritated, perhaps with himself as much as the question, “but no one knows how they’re gonna react… it was just a nightmare. I rang my PA to tell him where I was going so that I could be contacted. Why would I do that if I was running away?” Barrymore’s call to his PA, which was reported in some papers as a call to his PR (“something I’ve never had�?) was taken as further evidence either of his guilt or his celebrity arrogance: “I’m a celebrity, get me out of this!” Of course, it was precisely his celebrity status which meant that his fears about what the press would do were well founded.

Likewise his reported silence at the inquest was seen as callous and suspicious. In fact, he answered all the questions put to him - save those relating to illegal drug taking in his house. Barrymore’s exercise of his legal right to refuse to incriminate himself was seen as doubly incriminating. Much was made in the press of the allegation that, during the party, Barrymore tried to rub cocaine on Lubbock’s gums; however, leaving aside the fact that Lubbock was a long-term user of drugs, the small amount of cocaine - a stimulant - in his system was not identified at the inquest as a likely factor in his death.

It’s worth mentioning that perhaps that the most unbelievable thing about that night for some was the fact that television’s highest-paid celebrity would attend a nightclub in Harlow, and invite working-class strangers back to his house for a ‘chill-out’ party simply because he might enjoy their company, and that he might not want to treat a butcher like a piece of meat. “It wasn’t unusual for me to have people back for drinks. Wasn’t a regular thing. Just not unusual. It’s partly my Irish background and it’s partly that I don’t like being alone,” explains Barrymore. Much of the broadsheets’ hostility to Barrymore, their almost universal failure to criticise the tabloid gang-bang of his reputation, and indeed their complicity in it, was down to class: Barrymore was a vulgar man who entertained vulgar people in a vulgar way. Worst of all, he was paid vulgar amounts of money for doing so. (A senior editor on a liberal broadsheet, explaining shortly after the inquest why no, he definitely would not be running an article anatomising the press’ distortions, told me in no uncertain terms that Barrymore was ‘low life’.)

Born Kiernan Michael Parker into a working class family in Bermondsey in 1952, this Norman Wisdom fan and former Redcoat’s adopted stage moniker (‘there were too many Parker’s on Equity’s books’) became a household name with his madcap comedy performances on the TV game show Strike it Lucky in 1986. Barrymore brought the physical, audience involvement comedy that he had perfected on the workingmen’s club circuit to the relatively up-tight and staid world of prime-time commercial TV with great success. By 1992 Barrymore was one of TV’s highest paid entertainers, and a prime target for tabloid gossip. After many run-ins with the press over his drinking, drug abuse and sex life, this married working class hero finally came out as gay in 1995 – the first family entertainer to do so. ‘I thought I was finished,’ he says. In fact, more awards and hit TV shows followed, and he remained ‘Mr Saturday Night’ - even after Lubbock’s death in his swimming pool in 2001. It wasn’t until the universally damning coverage of last September’s inquest that his career finally ran aground.

However, the real inquest into Lubbock’s death, rather than the virtual one reported in the media, largely went well for Barrymore. It emerged there was no evidence that he, or his guests, were responsible - even indirectly - for Lubbock’s death or injuries. However, the summing up of the coroner, Caroline Beasley-Murray, seemed to assume, despite evidence to the contrary, that Lubbock’s injuries must have occurred at Barrymore’s house, and appeared to criticise the partygoers and the host for not being able to explain them. This and the open verdict – itself not uncommon in inquests – provided the press with enough rope with which to hang Barrymore again and again.

“If his injuries occurred here,” asks Barrymore, “why was there no blood on his boxer shorts? Why is there no blood in the house? Or in the pool?”

It’s a vital question. Lubbock’s anal injuries, lacerations as well as bruising and dilation, would have involved a substantial amount of bleeding and even small bloodstains are notoriously difficult to eradicate. Moreover, since the inquest, Stuart Nairn, one of the A&E nurses who worked without success to resuscitate Lubbock for over two-hours, has provided a detailed sworn statement to Barrymore’s solicitor which has sparked the new investigation by Essex police and thrown the coroner’s presumption about where the injuries took place into even more doubt.

Nairn’s assigned task for the entire two-hours was repeatedly taking Lubbock’s temperature rectally with a small, thin, thermal probe. Nairn performed this operation 16 times, pulling apart Lubbock’s buttocks and opening his sphincter each time. His statement makes clear that he saw no evidence of the injuries described at the coroner’s inquiry. Indeed he noticed no dilation or significant bruising (according to the pathologists’ report, even if Nairn’s small temperature probe were actually quite large, he would not have needed to open Lubbock’s sphincter muscle at all). “I am sure that I would have noticed this,” says Nairn. “Moreover, I would have reported this to the doctor.” He also mentions that aside from a small smear of blood on the probe towards the latter stages, which was not unusual given the number of insertions, there was no evidence of bleeding. (Perhaps this level of information is distasteful to you – perhaps, like Yasmin Alibai-Brown of the Independent, you are keen to assert it makes you ‘want to throw up’; but Lubbock’s anus has been made an object of such fascination and symbolic importance not by Barrymore but by the Great British Press and its readership.)

Nairn was due to appear as a witness at the inquest but the police say they lost contact with him. A similar statement by Nairn was read out at the inquest, but it was dismissed by Professor Crane, one of the pathologists, who claimed that someone in A&E would not have had time to notice such injuries, and would have been preoccupied with other things anyway. Nairn’s second statement makes it clear that he would have noticed. In fact, he probably spent more time observing Lubbock’s anus than any pathologist.

If, as now seems likely, the injuries to Lubbock occurred after he was finally pronounced dead at Harlow General Hospital and Nairn’s treatment ended, then they must have occurred in the seven hours between this time and the body’s examination by the Home Office pathologist, who was the first person to record them. Essex police are unable to confirm that the body was guarded during this time. Instead they can only say that this matter, and the issue of who had access to the body during this time, is “part of the current investigation�?.

Does Barrymore have any idea how the injuries occurred? “Well, I have my ideas about it, but it would be wrong for me to speculate,” he declares. “That’s for the police to investigate. I’m not about to point fingers at anyone.”

If those injuries did occur after Lubbock was pronounced dead, it seems possible it was Barrymore’s special kind of fame, which was to blame. At the inquest, Emma Bowen, another former girlfriend of Lubbock’s, who was at the Millennium in Harlow that night, stated that when clubbers spotted Barrymore with his partner Jonathan, they “were shouting out: ‘That’s Barrymore’s boyfriend!’ ‘Up your bum!’ and other such comments.” Perhaps “for a laugh”, someone couldn’t resist sticking something up the bum of the dead man who had been found in “that Michael Barrymore’s” swimming pool?

The tabloids were given more ammunition by the scorn of Barrymore’s ex-wife and former manager, Cheryl, and her book Catch a Falling Star about her marriage. It was published immediately after the Lubbock inquest and was luridly serialised in the Daily Mail with front-page headlines including “The Night Michael Tried To Kill Me”. Her claim that Barrymore lied to the inquest when he said he couldn’t swim, sparked a perjury investigation, which has now been dropped.

Barrymore’s views on his ex-wife’s interventions are clear. “She jumped in on the drowning affair, demanding, ‘I wanna know what happened!’ when it was nothing to do with her whatsoever, but she started to get involved as if she cared about Stuart and the Lubbocks and that, and yet has never been to see them once, yet made all these statements. What for? To sell a book. And then in the middle of it turns round and tries to get me done - possibly seven years - for perjury, saying that I lied in court about not being able to swim! The police went to speak to the list of friends of hers that she said would corroborate her statement and not one of them did. They just said, ‘I’ve only seen him stand in the shallow end.’ That’s why they dropped it. They didn’t even get as far as questioning me.”

What about her allegations that he was violent towards her in their final years together? “It got heated sometimes,” he admits, “but I’ve never ever punched her. I pushed her away. If she comes flying at me then I’m not going to stand there and get scratched to bits. I’d push her away. The way she dramatises it, well, it just makes you sick,” he says.

Barrymore complains now that she wanted to control him, but I put it to him that perhaps the things that drove him away from Cheryl were the things which attracted him in the first place. “Yeah, well I was quite happy to hand over the control, and most of our 18 years together were very happy. But the control got completely out of control. I couldn’t make a move without her say so, even if I went out fishing it would have to be with somebody who worked for us. Somebody who could then give her a run down of everything that happened. That’s one of my weaknesses, I allowed it to happen. It suited me.”

How easy has it been to live without it? “Well, I’ve got freedom from that. It was the thing that was killing me. Or one of the things that was. I just couldn’t live with it any longer.”

But freedom doesn’t appear to have cured Barrymore of his addictions. “Being in a relationship or being free, drinking and drug addiction is entirely different - it’s the disease which takes control.�? Barrymore says he attends AA meetings almost every night. “It’s all or nothing. One drink’s too much, 1,000 isn’t enough. You have to keep it in check on a daily basis. I’ve had 21 months of sobriety now, have got involved more [with AA and become secretary.”

One of his dogs, a Jack Russell, jumps on my lap. “JD! Get down!�? says Barrymore. His dogs are called JD and Sprite, his former favourite drink. Since the police inquiry was reopened, Barrymore has had a few offers of work. It was only in November of last year that Granada finally released him from his exclusive contract, having put him on ice for over a year. “‘We’re not using you,’�? they said. “‘We’re not paying you. And you can’t work for anyone else.’”

Given the headlines, can you blame them? “I’m not responsible for what the press has done - but the network made me responsible. So that means that they base their business on, on…”

What’s popular?

“Even if it’s incorrect?”

If Barrymore is feigning innocence of the ways of the world, he’s convincing. “That’s a bit sad isn’t it? They were the ones who suggested in caring tones that I go to rehab. I haven’t had one phone call from them since. Haven’t phoned me to ask if I’m well, or have kept off the drink. They haven’t phoned once to ask my office or me, ‘Is this or that true?’”

Maybe they’re not interested. Maybe they’re only interested in what sells.

“If I don’t sell, then why is Strike It Lucky on twice a day on Challenge TV? If I can’t be on family time, as they said in one of their letters, why was I on GMTV the other day at eight in the morning? I was on The Salon the other day on C4.”

It’s slightly pathetic that Barrymore, once the unchallenged king of prime-time, should be invoking re-runs on cable television, or an appearance on an exploitative reality television show, as proof of his popularity. But then, this is a man who, after the inquest, was publicly branded by TV executives as “finished”. Questions were asked about him in Parliament. His autobiography, commissioned long before Lubbock’s death (though portrayed in the press as a ‘cash in’ on it) was dropped by BBC Books. Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee Potter declared that she would “rather stick pins in her eyes than watch Barrymore on TV again”.

Barrymore thinks the television bosses should go with him on his trips to Tesco. They can take him four hours because so many people greet him with smiles and laughs and handshakes, asking when he’s going to be on the telly again, and then call up their mums, dads and kids on their mobiles and ask him to bark “Awoight!” down the phone. “They feel that they can approach me,” he says. “With someone else famous they might say, ‘Oh look there’s so and so over there,’ with me they come up and shake my hand. It’s what my act is based on. If you tried to fake or contrive that you’d be sussed out straight away.”

I suggest though that these are the very people that buy the papers which have attacked him so viciously. He doesn’t disagree. ‘It’s gossip, isn’t it? The tabloids save you chatting over the garden wall.’ I press the point further: couldn’t their casualness towards him be because, like the press, they consider him their property? “They consider me part of the family,” he corrects. “Because of the way I work on telly, which is about approachability and vulnerability. And because,” he adds, resignedly, “yeah, because much of my private life has been acted out in the tabloids.”

How much of Barrymore, or for that matter of Michael Parker (his real name perhaps offering an anonymity which he might be forgiven for missing now), is left after all of this? Has his latest and darkest experience of the celebrity cycle taken the edge off his appetite for ‘success’?

He comes up with a paradoxical and possibly self-deluding reply. “You ask yourself, do I need all this? But thing is, what they’ve done this time in being relentless is they’ve allowed me to get well. Because what used to happen before was I’d go straight into rehab then come back out, go straight into a studio and be ill again. But this time that hasn’t happened, so I’ve had a chance to get well properly this time.”

Oddly, for all the accusations of self-pity, Barrymore hasn’t played his main victim card. He has not cried “homophobia”. Several times in the course of this interview I’ve given him the opportunity to mention it, but he hasn’t taken the bait. Perhaps it’s down to his wish to reclaim his stake as a mainstream entertainer; perhaps it’s down to pride. Whatever, it’s clear that the way the press played the Lubbock story was in large part, a delayed but apparently highly satisfying backlash for his coming out several years ago (a move which, if nothing else, deprived the gentlemen of the press of one of their favourite sports: bullying the closetted gay celeb).

Barrymore, whose act and popularity depended on crossing boundaries of taste, class and genre (and sexuality), grabbing and manhandling members of the audience, male and female, was cast as the predatory gay rapist of the public’s nightmares, and his deceased guest as an awful example of what happens when a homosexual manages to get between a straight-man’s back and the wall. This, against the evidence of the case and also, ironically, despite the fact that penetrative sex, according to Barrymore, ‘is not my bag’. As Dr Freud pointed out, we like to laugh at what we fear, and by the same token we also fear what we laugh at. One irresistible idea can lead to another. In the same way that laughter provides a socially acceptable way for people to vent their anxieties, the Barrymore-Lubbock affair provided an acceptable route for the media and the public to ‘out’ pent-up fears about male homosexuality, that ‘gay-tolerant’ contemporary Britain otherwise might feel slightly embarrassed about.

He may not quite realise it, he may not want to realise it, but Barrymore, the nation’s most popular, most ‘loved’ funny man, has just been starring in his latest, biggest, if possibly final, hit show. The currently ongoing police investigation at Harlow General Hospital may or may not show conclusively that the injuries to Lubbock’s anus occurred after he arrived there. But whatever the outcome, it will most likely prove difficult for Barrymore to rehabilitate himself – after all, his ‘crimes’ were committed in the minds of the great British public, and they will be unlikely to fully forgive themselves such thoughts, or him for provoking them.

The writing was on the toilet wall as long ago as 1995. After he had outed himself, the front page of the new, ‘gay-tolerant’ Sun joked, “WE’RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU MICHAEL – BUT NOT TOO CLOSE!’ In fact, they were there all along – and much too close. Just waiting for Barrymore to drop the ball.

Independent on Sunday, 02/03/2003

Postscript 3/10/2006

• A month after this piece appeared Essex Police concluded their (reluctant) investigation into whether the injuries to Stuart Lubbock occurred at Harlow General Hospital or not by saying: “ We are as satisfied as we can be that the injuries did not occur at Princess Alexandra Hospital.’
• The Home Office Pathologist, Michael Heath, the man who first discovered the anal injuries resigned this year after it was established that he found foul play in at least two other cases when there was none, leading to innocent people being charged for crimes which had not occurred.
• It seems possible now, according to The Sun report, that, contrary to what was stated at the time of the inquest the injuries to Lubbock’s anus may not have been quite so ’serious’ after all and might have been caused by the rectal temperature probe used repeatedly by Stuart Nairn.
• Whilst Barrymore was in the BB house Stuart Lubbock’s father, Terry, Barrymore’s nemesis appeared almost daily in the papers denouncing him and tried to obtain permission to bring a Private Prosecution against Barrymore relating to the death of his son (it was eventually thrown out of court for lack of evidence). Shortly after Barrymore left the house in triumph Terry finally agreed to meet him and told him ‘I don’t blame you, Michael’ (according to The Sun’s front page headline). Though he later retracted this. And then un-retracted it. Now he has reportedly penned a book with well-known homophobe Anthony Bennett called ‘Not Awight: Getting Away With Murder’ due for publication later this month and is picketing Barrymore’s book-signings calling him a ‘liar’ and condemning him for ‘making money off the back of Stuart’s death, how low can you go?’.
• Shortly after Barrymore’s CBB victory and The Sun’s volte face, Essex Police announced they were ‘routinely’ re-opening the investigation into Lubbock’s death. Both Barrymore and Terry Lubbock have welcomed this, though for apparently different reasons.
• Essex Police investigated but declined to charge one of the witnesses from the fateful party for perjury, following her retraction of her sworn statement that Barrymore had rubbed cocaine on Stuart Lubbock’s gums that night. She made this retraction when faced with a lie-detector test organised by Barrymore’s new ally – and long-term abusive co-dependent in this celebrity marriage from Hell – The Sun.

© Mark Simpson 2006

This month’s Details magazine carries a letter, which Details strangely neglected to show to me, by veteran gay writer John Rechy, author of the cult 60s hustler novels ‘City of Night’ and ‘Numbers’, and the 70s plea for homo tolerance ‘The Sexual Outlaw’ (books I enjoyed as teenager in the 80s) which takes issue with my recent story on the gay porn scandal involving the 82nd Airborne.

After agreeing that it was wrong for the young enlisted paratroopers to be punished so severely by the mighty US Army for what they did in their own time and with their own bodies – literally out of uniform – he gets to the main business of his letter:

‘…he [Simpson is entirely naive when he upholds the absurdity that “straight men who perform – for pay or otherwise – consensual gay sex are still straight, despite being aroused to the point of orgasm. This is strictly a lure by the cunning operators of these sites to their gullible clients who want to believe the fantasy. Those seven paratroopers should not have been prosecuted, but they should not claim to be “straight either. By doing so, they compound the dishonesty of the whole situation.’

In other words, they shouldn’t be punished for appearing in a gay video – but they deserve to be horsewhipped in the letters pages for their ‘dishonesty’.

I’m grateful to Rechy for clarifying matters. For years I’ve laboured under the naive and absurd delusion that I was homo because I preferred males. Now I realise my dishonesty: how can I be homo? I’ve had sex with women! ‘To the point of orgasm’. And I wasn’t filmed. Or even paid.

It is perhaps too easy to make fun of his argument. Many people have difficulty today accepting the idea that when two males have sex with another this does not necessarily mean that, before the spilled semen has even had time to cool, they have to book their own float at Pride. Once upon a Kinseyian time, probably most male-on-male sex involved men who were otherwise heterosexual. In the 1940s Dr Sex famously found that 37% of his interviewees admitted to sex ‘to orgasm’ with other males. (Though he was of course attacked for this finding by those who claimed he was entirely naive and hadn’t interviewed enough ‘normal’ men.) As recently as the 1960s, a paniced British Navy called off an investigation into homosexuality on Her Majesty’s ships because it was found that at least ‘50% of the fleet have sinned homosexually.’ The authorities decided they would rather have a fleet than kick out every man who had ever engaged in spot of sodomy, with or without the lash.

Obviously a proportion of Dink’s ActiveDuty models must be gay or bisexual. After all, I appeared in an ActiveDuty video. (And in fact not all of them are presented as straight.) A certain amount of scepticism is understandable, advisable even. But most of them are probably otherwise heterosexual. I can’t of course prove this, and perhaps it really is my gullible fantasy – but then neither can Rechy prove they’re not. And the onus of proof is with the prosecution.

Homosex is not some magical, irresistible juju that robs hetero men of their preference for pussy should they ever experience it. Even when it’s me they have sex with (I like to think my dick is magical, but nonetheless…). For quite a few straight men, especially those who aren’t schooled in bourgeois niceties, like the country boys who become paratroopers, homosex is much less of a deal than it is for many gays. It’s just a naughty giggle. Or a quick way of earning some cash. Something Rechy should know from his hustler novels - though as I recall they were usually about hustlers who thought they were straight but eventually realised that they were actually John Rechy.

I suspect that part of the reason so many homos want to see straight guys having sex with one another - and will pay good money for it - is the paradoxical appeal of seeing innocence ‘corrupted’, and corruption rendered ‘innocent’. Straight gay porn, when it’s done right (and Dink of activeduty.com seems to know exactly how), looks like a fulfilment of the fantasy of most if not all gay porn: a carefree, smiling, laughing, rascalish discovery of masculine erotic pleasure - free of shame and pride, free in fact of ’sexuality’. Tom of Finland drawings, pre 1970s, brought to life. Ironically, straight guys are sometimes better able to embody the gay ideal than gays.

Speculation aside, the ‘bottom’, slightly counterintutive line here is that the fact that someone appeared in a gay porn video, even with an outsized membrum virile in one or both of his orifices, doesn’t tell you what his sexual preference is. All it tells you is that he appeared in a gay porn video. And perhaps that he can take it like a trooper.

As one of the paratrooper models replied when confronted by a shell-shocked Fayetteville woman who’d recognised him on the ActiveDuty site demanding to know how he could have done such a thing:

‘It was no big deal,’ he replied laconically. ‘And besides, I got paid.’

A perfect response to the military, to offended/confused straights and gays alike. And to explanations in general. Foucault would have approved - even if it does somewhat undermine the need for three volumes of ‘A History of Sexuality’.
———

Salon vs Details: James Collard of The London Times speaks to Salon.com editor about his decision to spike Simpson’s original piece because it was deemed too risque for Salon - two years before the Active Duty scandal became a major international story - and a major feature in Details magazine. [link removed as page no longer active.

Tomorrow sees the First International Masturbate-A-thon in London.  Their slogan is ’Come for a Cause’ - in addition to using a lot of tissues, they aim to raise money for the THT and Marie Stopes Society.  In a move that has provoked much media comment, and a few protests, the event will be filmed by Channel 4 for broadcast later this year during what it promises will be a themed ‘Wank Week’.

Seems like a good opportunity to whip out this perky piece from 1999 on how masturbation has gone from shameful private vice to boastful public… broadcasting.
 

Hand-job: Mark Simpson gets to grips with a man’s favourite bad habit
‘WANKER!’.

A bastard blue van has just cut me up, pulling out suddenly from a side-street right in front of me, forcing me to brake.  Hard.  So I responded in the customary way: winding down the window, leaning out and calling him, at the top of my voice, an Onanist.  Tasting his oil-seasoned exhaust while rolling the window up I feel a warm sense of satisfaction.

Calling someone a wanker is one of the great pleasures of being English.  ‘Wanker’ is after all, a full-bodied Anglo Saxon word which can be relished in its pronunciation.  Especially if you deliver it – as most people south of Watford seem do nowadays – with an Estuarian twang: as in, ‘WAN-KAH!’.  Even better, it’s possible to drive this insult home visually, by making that cute jacking gesture with your half-closed fist, (though when I do this to other men I sometimes get a bit confused whether I’m offering an insult or an invitation).

The best thing about calling someone a player of pocket pool though is that its a crime you’re just as guilty of.  As the jigging fist does rather hint, the man accusing another man of being a hand galloper is no stranger to Mrs Palm and her five daughters himself.  Unlike, say, ‘motherfucker’ (unless you live in Thebes), using ‘wanker’ as a term of abuse is a tad self-incriminating.  It’s a bit like calling someone a ‘nose-picker’.  Everyone does it.  You might as well be calling someone ‘human’.

For most of us males, ‘wanking’ is the normal form of sexual behaviour and intercourse is the deviation.  Most men, even those in relationships, have orgasmed alone rather more times than they have with others – after all we peak sexually long before anyone will go out with us.  And if God hadn’t wanted us to wank, would he have put our hands at crotch level?  Unless he just really wanted to make things difficult for us?  As any anthropologist will tell you, when Homo erectus stood up, the first thing he reached for was his tool.  (The original Obelisk scene in Kubrick’s 2001, in which an apelike man grabs his ‘bone’ for the first time was cut by the 1970s censors and had to be re-shot in its current, symbolic form).

Of course, once upon a time having a Jodrell Bank was somewhat shameful.  Not any more.  Nowadays, there’s a whole TV channel devoted to it: it’s called Channel Five.  Everyone talks incessantly about it on TV, in magazines, on the No.73 bus.  Wanking has finally come out of the cubicle, with some tissue stuck to its shoe.  George Michael might have been arrested for it, but then he did turn it into a hit pop single celebrating it.

In the good old days, masturbation was regarded as a sin and a sickness, an enervation of the nation’s manhood, and a waste of its precious jism.  Boys were solemnly told that it would make them go blind/deaf/grow hair on their palms – which of course was all true, they just forgot to mention that it would take about fifty years.  All these warnings and threats may have made lads a bit anxious, but you can bet it made the slightly sad business of auto-eroticism much more fun because it made it naughty and dangerous.

These days however, masturbation is as rebellious as a side parting.  On their seventh birthday boys are given videos by their mothers called ‘How To Pull Your Pud Properly’ featuring Toyah Wilcox.  Not masturbating is now considered pathological.  [Health organisations now recommended that men masturbate regularly to avoid prostate cancer.

Public schools in the Nineteenth Century were as obsessed with preventing their boys from jerking their gherkin as we are today with encouraging them.  They developed a whole way of life which we called ‘Britishness’, designed to stamp out ‘self-abuse’.  Cold showers, thin blankets, bad food, soccer and rugby football were all deployed to ward it off.  This approach may not have been terribly successful, but we did at least get an Empire out of it.

Crackdowns on monkey spankings were not however exclusive to Britain.  One reason why American men are circumcised is because it was thought that circumcision would discourage masturbation by removing that naughty, oh-so slidey bit of skin.  A notion that was for some inexplicable reason promoted most enthusiastically by the Crisco vegetable oil company.

But neither cold showers nor genital mutilation can stop boys playing with themselves.  Male adolescence is just too irresistible a force.  When you’re fourteen, everything gives you a hard on: sitting on a bus, fizzy drinks, strong breezes, the smell of pencil shavings (oh, was that just me?).  And almost anything can bring you off.  I shagged pillows, mounted my mattress, and even managed to turn the cold showers so beloved of my public school into a masturbatory device by allowing water from the shower head to drip onto the end of my dick, in a pervy variation on Chinese Water Torture.  Each large drop of water brought me tantalisingly closer to the edge.  The only problems was that by the time I came, I’d usually caught a cold.

It goes without saying that this method of self abuse wouldn’t work for me today.  Now I’m in my thirties and the hormonal frenzy has long-since receded, it would take a water cannon to bring me off.  If boyhood was a time when you masturbated four times a day, despite your best efforts to curb your habit; adulthood is when you masturbate only once a fortnight, despite your best efforts to do it more often.

Understandably, one of the reasons why masturbation used to be so heavily discouraged was because it was rather too close for comfort to homosexuality.  After all, at its minimum, ‘homosexuality’ is no more than a wank shared with a friend.  All men, however straight they might consider themselves, know what it is to feel a hard cock in their hands and how to please it.  Come to think of it, at its maximum, homosexuality is no more than a shared wank.

Not so long ago, adult men with girlfriends or wives would rarely admit to having a Barclays, unless they were separated from their missus by war or the Law.  The whole point of being an adult, being a man, was that you didn’t have to play with your pee-pee any more – you now had a woman to do that for you.  Or else you were too busy and too grown up for such things.  Hence the insult ‘wanker’.  It means: ‘useless’, ‘worthless’, ‘contemptible’.  But these days hen-pecked, feminist-badgered men want to advertise, or at least pretend to, their independence from women, and also their immaturity.  Wanking is now aspirational.

So all those seedy top-shelf wank-mags I remember from my youth which were full of fantasies about women giving them hand shandies on buses, have been replaced by big-circulation middle-shelf men’s glossies full of pieces by men bragging about giving themselves hand-shandies.  It’s not just cheating on the girlfriend, you see – it’s cheating on the whole female sex.

The much-touted next evolutionary leap for humanity, the Interweb, is of course all about wanking too.  Described by my friend the American decadent Bruce Benderson as a fulfilment of the Protestant vision of each man at home alone with his God, the Net is more a case of each man at home alone with his cock.

And yes, people in sex chat rooms do actually use the word ‘wanker’ as an insult – even when they have to type it with one hand.

A nd I sho uld knw .

[Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, 1999

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

The MP Chris Bryant has faced calls for his resignation for appearing in his pants on a gay website - but others see Gaydar as the future of dating. So what is it really like? Mark Simpson speaks with the (exhausted) voice of experience

Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 7 December 2003)

Gay men are having sex! Lots of it! Every night! With a different man! And they don’t even have to leave the house! There was more than a hint of sexual jealousy surrounding the ‘outrage’ in the press last week’s over Gaydar, the cruising website where gay and bisexual men exchange instant messages, personal pictures, addresses and then sexual positions, sometimes in less time than it takes to get served at a West End bar.

To condemn it however is to protest against the inevitable, since Gaydar’s methods will probably end up being adopted by everyone from 18-30 dating agencies to golden oldie matchmakers - and, judging by the envy on display, its sexual mores will soon follow.

Oscar Wilde once famously defined a moralist as someone who likes to lecture on the evils of vices of which he has grown tired. In this accelerated age, a moralist is someone who likes to lecture on the evils of vices that they are about to try. However, as a (mostly) former internet cruiser, I’d like to report from the frontier of human degradation/innovation in the more traditional, Wildean form - as a sinner who has grown jaded. If internet cruising is the future of dating, then there is certainly no future - or place - for romance and probably no future for sex either.

At the height of the record-breaking summer heatwave I visited the gay reservation of Hampstead Heath in the naive hope that the torrid weather might have made gays more (anti)social, more retro, more inclined to leave their pokey, humid bedrooms. But the Heath was deserted. There were one or two punters, but these were men of a certain age who had not yet figured out how to get online with the obsolete computer that a nephew off-loaded on them.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but what is the point of sex to a single homosexualist if it doesn’t get you out of the bloody house? On the hottest night of the year? Gays - all of them, every last one of them, especially those in relationships - are “logged on” with lob ons, looking for someone who will “travel” while they “accom”.

If Joe Orton had his time again his diaries would have been just printouts of thousands of Gaydar profiles and alarming digicam photos. I, for my part, look back on my pre-internet days of compulsive cruising of the Heath in the driving sleet and rain as a golden age of warmth, romance and human contact.

Moralists who protest at gay e-promiscuity should actually be encouraging the Government to provide gays with grants for permanent broadband connections, since the internet not only keeps them off the streets and out of the parks, it turns all that messy sexual energy and appetite into … typing. Gays have become the unpaid secretaries of desire, filing and cataloguing human weakness. Promiscuity is now a form of bureaucracy. Tedious, eye-straining, number-crunching slave work.

Don’t bother feeling jealous, all you sexually frustrated, non-online non-gays: internet cruising is its own form of punishment, Dante’s e-ferno where thousands of disembodied souls in e-ternal torment constantly prod one another with inquisitorial malice: “stats?”, “into?”, “travel or accom?” and “how big’s your cock?”

The evil of internet cruising - and the reason why it will become irresistibly, devastatingly mainstream - is precisely its efficiency. IT plus a wired world means lust can be much more productive, much more accurate, much more all-consuming, and much more pointless. Internet cruising allows you to pursue endlessly and ever more obsessively your ultimate “type”. Like an especially well-organised, if unfriendly, Roman orgy, there are chat rooms for every (legal) fetish and taste. Gaydar members can search the database on height, age, hirsuteness, ethnicity, hair colour, pec-size and sex role (passive, active, or versatile). Strangely, there isn’t a box to check for “twinkly eyes” or “great sense of humour”.

But efficiency is precisely what sex is not about. Sex is a journey where, if you’re lucky, you get lost - like Hampstead Heath on a foggy night. Arriving is not really the point, it’s the confusions, the collisions, the diversions that are (sometimes) rewarding. With internet cruising there’s ultimately no escape from your own desire. Even when you actually meet someone off the net - one of you, reluctantly, agreeing to leave the house - they never really exist, and nor do you. You are both merely each other’s computer-generated horny hologram, one that dissipates with orgasm - “Cheers! ‘Ave a good one mate!” is the universal, embarrassed e-kiss off.

The most familiar cliché/complaint about internet dating is that when they turned up “they weren’t the person in the picture”. The real disappointment is that they were exactly the person on the profile. To the inch. It was a profile rather than a person you met and got groinal with. You were tricked, not by the flakiness of others, but by the emptiness of your own desire.

And no matter how “hot” the sex was for both of you, and no matter how much you both say you can’t wait to do it again and even make explicit arrangements to do so, it won’t happen. Come the appointed time, you’ll both be online again, looking for another profile that more exactly matches your requirements. What the internet giveth, the internet taketh away.

You see, the real efficiency of online dating, just as with internet anything, is not the way it delivers you lots of pointless sex without leaving the house, but the way that it ensures that you will be spending more time on the internet. The web is a jealous lover, and will countenance no infidelity that lasts longer than a hurried shag with some data it has selected and loaned you for an hour or so. Like a Las Vegas casino, the internet always wins. I’ve never met Mr and Mr Gaydar, and don’t know anything about them except that, having figured out a way to tax gay lust, they must be living in a penthouse apartment atop their own luxury skyscraper in Manhattan.

This kind of fierce fidelity can’t be supported indefinitely, however. Something has to give. Martin Luther may have described marriage as a curative for lust, but today that role has been usurped by the internet. Burn-out is the inevitable consequence of on-line dating. Or heart attack. If I didn’t find myself cured of lust I certainly found myself disenchanted.

By allowing me to focus on the boring “sex” to the exclusion of the arousing “journey” or “travelling” aspect of desire, internet cruising and the spinning bedroom turnstile it brought, utterly demystified sex. It was like working as a hustler but for free, and having to do all that hard work of choosing your clients instead of the other way around. Unforgivably, the internet has deprived me of the most cherished illusion of every homosexualist: my faith in sex.

Which is really unfair. I mean, what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? Not that I expect anyone to feel much sympathy. But let my jadedness be a warning to you all: internet dating will ruin your sex life.

By giving you one.

© Mark Simpson 2006

The current (May) issue of the proudly metrosexual Details magazine includes an ‘undercover’ exclusive by yours truly on the globally-reported gay porn scandal involving paratroopers from the elite 82nd Airborne, ‘America’s Honor Guard’.

A couple of years ago my buddy and The Queen is Dead co-author Steve Zeeland tipped me off to the existence of activeduty.com, the then little-known military porn website now at the centre of the scandal. Ever the over-keen observer of masculine trends, metrodaddy travelled to North Carolina to meet Dink Flamingo, the man behind activeduty and find out more about straight men ‘acting gay’ - this time in the form of mansex rather than manicures.

For contractual reasons I can’t reveal more about what happened here: if you feel the need to know you’ll have to buy, beg or borrow a copy of the highly fragranced men’s fashion magazine to find out all the (slightly less fragranced) ‘details’. Or, if you’re feeling brave, try a Google search. Let me just say that Dink is a real character and his military models real friendly.

The piece also looks at why mostly straight, in some cases married, elite military men would get involved in gay porn, despite the US military’s explicit ban on appearing in skin-flicks – not to mention your actual homosex. And why they might actually have less of a problem with it than straight civilian men.

Why, in other words, fighting men might not be pussy about dick.

Most significantly, it also reveals that there have been numerous gay porn scandals involving the US military since the 1970s, and uncovers evidence that the seven paratroopers charged by the US Army over the scandal have been unfairly scapegoated - that this has been going on for many years, probably with the Army’s knowledge, and involves many more than the seven paratroopers, ‘isolated to one unit’, claimed categorically by the Army as the ‘only ones’ involved.

Homos and soldiers, it seems, can’t stay away from one another. Certainly homos can’t get get enough of soldiers. It was Marcel Proust who observered a hundred years ago that: “A homosexual is not someone who likes other homosexuals, but someone who on seeing a soldier immediately wants him for a friend”.

Perhaps in this less literary, less innocent, more mediated age this should now be modified to: “…immediately wants him for a porn star.”

Apparently, Brokeback Mountain is now available on DVD.

Save yourself some money and watch this instead.  It’s free, it’s a lot more fun, you get six cowboys instead of two, they don’t age, none of them get tyre-ironed, they have a lot more sexy moments and there’s no mumbling dialogue.  Plus the soundtrack is a little more upbeat. 

Oh, and it lasts about thirty years less than that tedious, mawkish film.  

Why can’t gay men grow up?  Why can’t they get themselves a nice cat instead of behaving like dirty dogs?  Why can’t they listen to Radio Four more instead of trawling the net for sex?  Why don’t they get a pipe and slippers instead of thongs and crystal meth?  Why can’t they stop being so damn undomesticated and be more… lesbian?  

And why oh why can’t gays settle down with nice Simon Fanshawe, especially when he’s done so much for them?  Surely they could have drawn straws and allocated him somebody?  Or maybe set up a rota?

The Trouble With… Gay Men TV polemic presented by Fanshawe recently on BBC3, took ‘gay men’ to task for still ‘behaving like rebellious teenagers’ despite now ‘being accepted as equals by society’ and was one of the funniest programmes I’ve seen in ages.  Unfortunately for comedian-turned-busybody Fanshawe, the humour was all unintentional. 

There’s not really much point in seriously dealing with his argument as there wasn’t one, instead there was just an hour-long Grumpy Old Gay Man Special in which Fanshawe went round London and Brighton’s gay scene feebly tutting and harrumphing at gay men’s vanity, promiscuity, drug-use, and failure to settle down and make curtains – despite all the sterling work people like him and the Stonewall Group have done to make homosexuality respectable and suburban.  At one point, instead of even pretending to offer an argument, Fanshawe merely wandered shiftily around the dodgems on Brighton pier while a lot of headless statistics about gay drug use and STD infection rates were flashed on the screen.  Great telly, that.

Even this witless approach might have worked – after all, no one could seriously deny that the gay scene is founded on questionable habits, and even the keenest hedonist tires of his vices from time to time – but only if Fanshawe hadn’t presented it. 

Hilariously, this middle-aged moral mary moaning about muscle marys was the best argument for a life of untrammelled irresponsibility, superficiality and fleshly obsession.  I’ll bet that after the programme aired the gay gyms, saunas and back-rooms in London had a major rush on, and crystal-meth dealers were working overtime.  Even I, who recently moved to North Yorkshire in part to get away from urban gayness, and also give it a chance to get away from me, felt the urge to change into something less comfortable and take a taxi all the way to Soho.

More to the point, it became rapidly apparent that this paragon of the community who kept denouncing gay men’s failure to ‘grow up’ was himself suffering from a form of arrested development.  Clearly he’d never progressed beyond the point of being the bossy fat girl at school with the clipboard who thought they were God because they’d be put in charge of the school dinner queue.  And what was all that whining about the lack of ‘role models’?  Why should gay men have someone to copy?  Why should they be so special?  Grow up and do it yourself, like everyone else these days.

Now I’m all in favour of more self-criticism in the gay world, and being beastly to gays is something I’m rather fond of.  After all I did edit Anti-Gay back in 1996, the book which gave a bunch of chippy non-heterosexuals the opportunity to take on the sacred orthodoxies of the gay world and gay identity, or at least the gay press, and generally have a good whinge (and which was, funnily enough, violently denounced by the gay press).

But this programme wasn’t taking on mindless conformity, gay self-censorship, or feelgood propaganda, instead it seemed to be about one middle-aged middle class man’s exasperation at how gays have let him down by being so, well, gay, and his corresponding desperation to prescribe a one-sized-fits-all homo-counties identity.  Fanshawe is only exercised by gay bad habits because he’s so transparently even more desperate for respectability than he is for a boyfriend.  Hence the shameless mugging to camera during his visit to a gay sauna, pretending to be shocked by a sling, or not knowing what ‘watersports’ means.  Who were the appalled-of-Tunbridge-Wells looks for?  The gay men the programme was ostensibly aimed at?  The gay men who apparently spend all their time in saunas like this?  Clearly not.

Ironically, the people that Fanshawe was really addressing – straight TV producers looking for a nice respectable gay presenter and ‘role model’ – also know what slings and watersports are, and in fact were probably lying in one being peed on whilst they watched the programme.

Again and again Fanshawe showed himself as someone with an almost endearing naivety about the real, grown-up world, let alone the gay one, as he went around posing as the adult voice of the reality principle.  Visiting a Mr Gay UK heat he dismissed the oiled-up contestants as ‘superficial’, ‘pathetically deluded’ and ‘vain’.  I wonder if he’s taken a look at young straight men lately.  In fact, it was blindingly obvious that the main problem with the gays he was talking to was not that they were vain, but that they had nothing to be vain about – a skinny bunch of munters who would be laughed out of the gym by most straight lads. 

And what was Fanshawe’s answer to all this vain, promiscuous, drug taking?  An inspirational trip to the feet of ‘role model’ Chief Inspector Brian Paddick, ‘one of the most senior policemen in the country! And he’s gay!’ during which Fanshawe made it embarrassingly clear he’d love nothing more than to be Mrs Paddick and attend the Chief Inspector’s Balls.  Strangely, there was no mention of that troublesome ex who went to the papers to proclaim he and Paddick often took drugs together in the Chief Inspector’s house, and who also claimed that Paddick was a regular visitor to gay saunas (Paddick has denied both these claims). 

Then came the chaste climax of this hour-long programme, the summit of everything that Fanshawe says gays should be aiming for and the answer to all the problems he had decried: two chubby inoffensive gays in a country house choosing what chocolate cake they were going to have at their registration reception. 

Now, I’m sure they’re nice enough fellas, but if they had known that they were going to be flaunted by Fanshawe as the ultimate role models for gays everywhere, the compulsory ideal for all - not simply one option amongst many - and the wonder cure for all that meaningless sex, drug use and existential angst then maybe they would have had second thoughts about appearing on this programme.  Or at least they might have tried to look a bit happier.

The real problem with gay men, even the campest variety, is that they’re men.  Men without wombs in their lives to take responsibility for or slow them down – or give life a point.  But instead, lots of testosterone and spunk and spare time.  It’s this that makes them homo.  Why do so many gay men have so much sex and take so many drugs, often - and this is something Fanshawe utterly failed to acknowledge - even when they are in a relationship?  Because they can. 

I’m not particularly recommending promiscuity or drugs – and who, frankly, gives a flying fuck whether I do or don’t – but I can tell you in no uncertain terms that neither Simon Fanshawe, nor Brian Paddick, nor gay registrations, nor even really expensive chocolate wedding cake are going to persuade homos to become neutered heterosexuals. 
© Mark Simpson