Category Archives: gay

How to Spot a Sodomite

Mark Simpson reviews some famous Victorian bum holes in Neil McKenna’s Fanny & Stella (the Independent) “I had never seen anything like it before… I do not in my practise ever remember to have seen such an appearance of the anus, as those of the prisoners presented.” So testified Dr Paul in shocked tones at the trial of …

February 9, 2013 – 10:13 am | By Mark Simpson | Posted in gay, review | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Camp For Beginners

Mark Simpson interviews David Halperin about his controversial new book How To Be Gay at Out.com  I’ve always been a big fan of Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, and Doris Day. But it was a secret, shameful love — until, that is, David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay (Harvard University Press), finally gave me the strength to …

August 21, 2012 – 12:34 am | By Mark Simpson | Posted in gay, interview, journalism | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

Harry Daley: A Beat Poet

Just finished reading This Small Cloud, a wonderful posthumously published memoir (as all the best ones are) by Harry Daley, a London copper in the early part of the 20th Century. Daley had a weakness, as you do, for young boxers and gangsters. And an intolerance for Mosely’s Blackshirts, whom many of his colleagues sympathised …

June 8, 2011 – 1:34 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in commentary, gay | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

The Last Gay Picture Show

From tortured lawyers, drag queens and cowboys to Mickey Rourke — on the Fiftieth anniversary of Victim the film that started it all, a concise history of the birth, boom, and bust of the big gay movie by Mark Simpson (Out magazine). A tortured, be-quiffed Dirk Bogarde, backed into a corner by his wife’s questioning, shouts: …

March 1, 2011 – 3:01 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in film, gay | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (33)

The End of Heterosexuality (As We’ve Known It)

By Mark Simpson A bullet-pointed column in the NYT by Charles M. Blow examines a sea-change in attitudes towards homosexuality suggested by a recent Gallup poll which found that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as “morally acceptable” has crossed the symbolically important 50 percent mark. Also …

June 11, 2010 – 2:58 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in bisexuality, commentary, gay, metrosexual | Tagged , , , , | Comments (35)

Why Straight Soldiers Can’t Stop Acting Gay on Video

Way back in the last century, before the Interweb swallowed everything, my friend and accomplice in literary crime Steve Zeeland were visiting, as you do, Camp Pendleton, the giant US Marine Corps base in Southern California with some jarhead friends. We spent the afternoon watching the Marine Rodeo — scores of grinning fit Texan boys …

May 14, 2010 – 2:56 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in commentary, gay, masculinity, metrosexual, porn | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

The Tories’ New Section 28

by Mark Simpson (Guardian CIF, 25 March 2010) Whatever happened to the Tory party of the 1980s that refused to use taxpayers’ money to prop up failing industries making things people didn’t want? That told us sternly, usually in a helmet of hair-lacquer, “the market must decide”? It turns out the Tories aren’t so laissez-faire if …

March 25, 2010 – 5:23 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in gay, gay marriage | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5)

Quentin Crisp and Hurtian Crisp

The Naked Civil Servant is the best and funniest TV drama ever made. And I’m sorry, but it’s a scientific fact. And like its subject it could only have been made in the UK.  Even if Crisp said he hated England — and he did, over and over again. So many lines in Philip Mackie’s superb …

January 13, 2010 – 6:06 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in celebrity, commentary, film, gay, media, metrosexual | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (12)

Edmund White’s Vulgar Fag-ism

I’ve always liked Edmund White’s refusal to get with the contemporary gay hypocrisy program and shrewishly condemn promiscuity in the hope that this will deliver lots and lots of wedding presents. In contrast to that pasteurised movie Milk, which lied shamelessly about gay men’s sex lives in the 1970s to make it easier for them to …

October 18, 2009 – 3:29 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in gay, journalism, review | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (56)

Mark Simpson Talks About Sporno Packets in Berlin

Yours truly will be giving talk on ‘Sporno: How sport got into bed with gay porn — with Mr Armani taking pictures ’ in Berlin on Thursday 18th June — i.e. tomorrow — at 8pm at the Dorrie * Priess Gallery (details below), courtesy of Manner-Magazin, CSD and Queer Nations.  It’s a dirty job, but …

June 17, 2009 – 8:48 pm | By Mark Simpson | Posted in Beckham, gay, metrosexual, sporno | Comments (4)