MARK SIMPSON.com

By Mark Simpson (Arena Hommes Plus, Spring 2008)

German is a punishing tongue. It is, as anyone who has tried to learn it can tell you, very precise, very strict. Very unforgiving. So imagine what it’s like actually being German.

It’s a fact hardly acknowledged that if the Germans have been so hard on Others in the past it may be because they are so hard on themselves. It’s no coincidence that the father of psychoanalysis was Sigmund Freud, the German-speaking Austrian Jew who struggled to treat the neurotic effects produced by a punishing super-ego shouting ‘Nein!’ to id-level drives wanting to borrow dad’s car for a Friday night joy-ride.

German strictness and deferred gratification has, in addition to psychoanalysis and a little mid-twentieth century unpleasantness, given the world precision engineering - reliable, premium cars that really shift. And no one is more associated with this Germanic gift than BMW.

In the UK the Bayerische Motoren Werke’s marketing slogan is the rather Freudian ‘Sheer Driving Pleasure’. In Germany it becomes the heavily Freudian ‘Freude am Fahren’ (Driving Pleasure). BMW cars promise driving pleasure via German precision and strictness: their deferred gratification becomes our fuel-injected hit. Not for nothing are BMWs popularly associated with marketing men and drug dealers.

BMW are based in Munich, capital of Bavaria (just across the border from Freud’s Austria), a place so German that even its beer has been strictly regulated: in the 16th Century The Bavarian Purity Law decreed that only barley, hops and water could go into beer. Likewise BMW’s famous Munich architecture is impressively pure, austere but intoxicating. Their HQ, the glorious ‘Four Cylinder’ building, opened in 1972 next to the Olympic Park, named after their most famous and distinctive car, was designed, along with the ‘silver bowl’ BMW museum, by Austrian architect Karl Schwanzer.

The latest addition, the BMW Welt, designed by Schwanzer’s pupil Wolf D. Prix (and no, I’m not making these names up), and opened last October, also sits at the feet of Dr Schwanzer’s work - literally and aesthetically. With it’s low, flowing, silver and matt profile and shiny double cone ‘grille’ at the front it resembles the architecture of a modern BMW. Inside it showcases all the latest models. The New York Times described its cathedral-like apparently ‘floating’ roof as ‘the closest architecture has come to alchemy’.

The real alchemy of the building however is the transformation of a mass-produced car into something personal something emotional - the philosopher’s stone of 21st Century consumerism. The Welt is primarily a place for the customer to be seen collecting his immaculate new car, with all his specially-selected modifications, presented like a pristine work of art or airbrushed supermodel revolving slowly beneath a spotlight on one of the 20 turntables on the first ‘Premiere’ floor - a floor that, like the roof, seems to hover, religiously, in mid air. Less of a new car pick-up than a celebrity wedding, complete with photographer snapping you and your glossy, expensive betrothed clinching and an envious gazing on from the gallery.

In the noisy but very orderly BMW Plant next door, which you can tour before meeting your lifestyle-mate, ‘marriage’ happens to be the technical term used to describe the lowering of the car body onto the chassis and engine (by headless robots). But it is the pleasure-factory of the BMW Welt, with 170 new cars delivered daily, that performs the much more important ceremony of marrying the owner with his vehicle - a marriage of individualism with mass production - auto-eroticism.

Fired up by witnessing the inspiring, fuel-injected nuptials on the first floor of the Welt you can rush downstairs to the Designkonfigurator, a hi-tech matchmaker, where you can select your ideal BMW partner: the model, package, trim, interior and colour - and then zoom around it in 3D on a giant screen to make sure it is really something you want to share/express your life with. Or something that will get you hard.

Alas, the Designkonfigurator is ultimately limited - repressed even - in the degree of personalisation it can offer. For a glimpse of something really expressive, you have to take a look at BMW’s famous Art Cars, a number of which are housed in the BMW Museum. Design engineers work as part a team (designing for a mass, if moneyed market). Artists on the other hand are more… sociopathic.

It seems apt that BMW’s famous Art Cars were the idea not of a German but of a Frenchman, the racing driver and art auctioneer Herve Poulain who wanted to combine his two passions in one object - driven, of course, by him. In 1975 he persuaded BMW to commission the American sculptor Alexander Calder to paint his BMW 3.0 CSL sixcylinder4valvestwinoverheadcamshafts480bhp (stats are more arousing when rendered in German) who styled it in bold primary colours and white stripes that worked against traditional streamlining asserting a perverse individuality - Go Slower stripes.

They didn’t slow down Poulain, however, an who drove Calder’s artwork in the 1975 Le Mans 24 hour race and was in number 5 position when mechanical failure forced his departure. Engineering not art failed him.

The following year Frank Stella, another American, was commissioned to art up another Le Mans car, the BMW 3.0 CSL sixcylinderinlineturbocharged4valvestwinoverheadcamshafts750bhp (above), which in its precise geometric designs seemed to turn the car’s engineering inside-out: ‘my design is like a blueprint transferred to the bodywork’, he said about his handiwork which, like other things found on graph-paper, managed to be both interesting and slightly boring at the same time.

Probably the greatest Art Car was designed the following year in 1975 by Roy Lichtenstein, the Daddy of Pop Art, who, with ‘speedlines’ and oversized dots, transformed a Le Mans 320i fourcylinderinline4valvestwinoverheadcamshafts300bhp BMW into a 3D comic strip (above). Or rather, revealed it as a comic strip. Lichtenstein’s Art Car is both the boyish, joyous idea of a car, and also the story of a car, reflecting the sky, sunshine and scenery as it whizzes freely through our imagination. One of the most beautiful, most pleasurable cars - perhaps the most car car - ever. It really should be an option at the Designkonfigurator.

By contrast, Warhol’s 1979 racing M1 sixcylindertwinoverheadcamshafts470bhp BMW (above) looks slightly earthbound. Like a car vandalised by a man’s angry wife with some Dulux emulsion that he was supposed to decorate the bathroom with weeks ago. But it is a Warhol and so is probably now worth more than BMW.

Spanish sculptor and architect Cesar Manrique took a 730i sixcylinderinlineoverheadcamshaft188bhp BMW in 1990 and turned it into a moving sculpture of colours (above). “I tried to unite the notion of speed and aerodynamics with the concept of aesthetic appeal in one and the same object,” he said. He succeeded. Half car, half training shoe - but in a very good way. I’d wear it.

It wasn’t until 1991, sixteen years after Calder, that the first German-authored BMW Art Car appeared - the Z1 sixcylinderinlineoverheadcamshaft170bhp by A.R. Penck (above). Perhaps it isn’t without significance that, with its black inked abstract symbols tattooed on blood red this first German-authored Art Car looks less pleasurable than scary-psychotic - the Cape Fear Art Car.

Perhaps as an antidote, in 1995 British West Coast émigré David Hockney produced a Surfer Art Car with his breezy X-ray of a brooding BMW 850CSiVtwelvecylinder380bhp (above). Hockney’s open-air beach-buggy treatment, complete with dachshund, was almost an act of subversion against the austere, extremely serious Bavarian engineering. His only comment was equally Hockneyian: ‘It was lots of fun’.

But pleasure, as the Austrian dentist Sigmund showed, produces its own anxieties. In 1999 the American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer emblazoned the white body of a BMW Le Mans Roadster twelve-cylinderVinduction580bhp with the words ‘PROTECT ME FROM… WHAT I WANT’ - in chrome, reflecting the sky, and light-absorbing paint, which, like our desire and our conscience, glows in the dark.

By 2007 consumerism in general and cars in particular were, according to the headlines, threatening us with destruction. The Danish artist Olafur Eliasson famous for his ‘weather’ installations, was commissioned by BMW to turn their revolutionary hydrogen-powered racing car the H2R into an Art Car. Hydrogen is clean-burning and produces mostly heat and water - and, to guarantee their future, BMW plan to use it in their production cars instead of petro-fuels.

Eliasson removed the body and replaced with steel mesh and reflective steel panels, then sprayed it with 530 gallons of water (H20, geddit?), frozen over the course of several days, to produce several layers of ice. Lit from within, it looks like a Futurist igloo. Though of course the futurists would have made it look like it could actually move. Meant as a commentary on man-made global climate change, this most recent Art Car is provocative - but looks least like a car: it appears to have been completely entombed by the icy disapproval of environmentalists.

But then, environmentalism, long politically powerful in Germany, is perhaps the new punishing German super-ego shouting ‘Nein!’.

One that we’re all beginning to hear.

© Mark Simpson 2008

Out magazine, March 2008

How do you turn a penis into a vagina?

It’s not as difficult from a medical point of view as you might think. Yes, it involves some rather delicate major surgery and the risk of all kinds of ghastly complications, and nobody undertakes such a project lightly. But — and I know this will come as a disappointment to many — male and female genitalia are, anatomically speaking, sufficiently alike to make the procedure relatively straightforward. Essentially, the penis is turned inside out, inverted, and placed inside a cavity tunnelled out of the lower abdomen.

Or as my good friend Michelle, a post-op MTF transsexual, joked with typical tact: “I’m now shagging myself 24/7 — and don’t even need to buy myself dinner!”

Michelle is a very special lady. Not because she turned her penis into a vagina, but because back in the early 1990s she was a sexy male stripper on steroids called “Stud-U-Like,” whose tattooed muscles and XL penis were the toast of hen nights and gay bars up and down the U.K.

One day Mitch, who had always had gender identity issues, decided that despite the whoops and wolf whistles, the whole boy thing wasn’t working for him. Mitch became Michelle, stopped taking steroids, and started taking female hormones instead — becoming with the aid of hair extensions and dangerous crash-dieting even sexier than Mitch. After living as a woman for a while, she finally said goodbye to the last of Mitch, i.e., her nine-inch chopper, and had the Op. - breaking the heart of many a gay man.

“Operation Pussycat,” as she dubbed it, was fortunately a total success. “I now have a 7.5-inch punani!” Michelle declared proudly while recovering in the hospital the Day After. “And in about six months, Mark, with use it will stretch to the full nine inches I had when I was a man!”

“More like a month in your case, dear,” I quipped.

Michelle pursed her lips (the old pair).

Michelle’s trans-tastic voyage, from Stud-U-Like to Chick-U-Love, turned out to be eerily prophetic. She herself has adjusted well to her life as a woman with large breasts, but I’m not so sure about the rest of us.

Looking around at our sexually transparent, stimulated-simulated, implanted-imploding cam-fun-anyone? world, it’s difficult not to conclude that most of us are going tranny but without the, er, balls to actually change sex or even properly cross-dress. We’re all becoming male-to-male and female-to-female transsexuals: transexy.

“Male and female created He them” — but now He’s watching His handiwork rush down to the cosmetic surgeon for a nip and tuck, liposuction, rhinoplasty, pec and buttock and calf implants, breast reduction, breast enlargement, penis extensions and girth widening, vaginal tightening, revirgination, six-pack etching, and labial and scrotum reduction. He must be feeling a little bit miffed.

It’s not enough, you see, to be male or female anymore. You have to both embody and go beyond sex. You have to turn yourself inside out. We’re all becoming…Pamela Anderson. Which is nice, but we don’t all have the legs for it.

Transexy is not quite the same thing as androgyny — which, in addition to David Bowie being enigmatically fey in a spangly 1970s leotard to a glam-rock soundtrack, means a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics. Androgyny is actually quite affirming of sexual difference. Transexy, because it’s obsessed with transparency, transcends masculine and feminine and obliterates sexual difference — even and especially when it’s trying oh, so-hard not to look androgynous.

Let me give you a very hairy example. Newsweek recently reported the case of “George,” a 6-foot-3 man “with chiseled pecs and a bushy beard” who “seemed like a model of manliness.” Yet two years ago the 47-year-old decided he didn’t look quite macho enough. “So he had 3,000 hair follicles ripped from his scalp and transplanted into his face, chest, and belly.” He still wasn’t satisfied. So a year later he returned to get an additional 2,400 grafts done. “‘I could still have another surgery and not be completely covered,’ says George today. ‘I’m very pleased, but 2,400 grafts is not a very hairy chest.’”

A little bird tells me George is never going to be satisfied. After all, what is a very hairy chest? Once you start obsessing about such things, there’s no end to this.

And, boy, have we have started. Says Newsweek: “George’s quest for maximum hirsuteness isn’t as unusual as it may sound. He’s part of a growing group of ‘retrosexuals,’ men who shun metrosexuality…in favor of old-school masculinity.” The article also cites an increase in the number of men asking surgeons for “manlier” chins and noses as further evidence of the so-called “rise of retrosexuality.”

Since when did “old-school masculinity” persistently perceive itself as chronically lacking in masculinity and obsess over its physical appearance, and since when did “old-school” men resort to repeated painful and costly cosmetic surgery of questionable effect to make themselves more attractive, more worthy of love — more “manly”?

It’s a measure of how totally transexy we’ve become that surgically fixated MTM Pammy-trannys are seen as “retrosexual” by Newsweek. Like last year’s mendacious “menaissance,” with all those prissy-missy lists of manly dos and don’ts, this is just Fight Club the Musical, which by the way is coming to tap-dance and gush and bray on Broadway soon - no, really.

But why not? This after all is a generation of men on hormones: hundreds of thousands are taking steroids, according to recent reports. Most of them not circuit party queens. Not only do baseball players apparently now need to take them to be baseball players, and high school football players to be high school football players, but also ordinary nonathletic, non-body-building men need to take them to be nonathletic non-body-building men. (Only 6% of steroid abusers in the United States play sports or consider themselves body builders.)

The vast majority of males taking “the juice” are not doing so to be stronger or faster or scarier, all traditionally masculine ambitions, but simply to look more attractive in the gym, on the dance floor, at the beach, or in their online profiles — to look, in other words, like male strippers: Stud-U-Like. Or what is much the same thing, Vin Diesel.

But steroids, like transexiness itself, can have a paradoxical effect. In addition to testicle shrinkage and erectile problems, in large doses they can turn into estrogen in the body, which causes “bitch tits” and female fat distribution: Stud-U-Like into Chick-U-Love. Perhaps this is why Sylvester Stallone looks more and more like his mother, Jackie. Given his recent steroid scandals, the tagline for his new Rambo movie, “Heroes never die…they just reload,” probably refers to syringes rather than ammunition.

The world of celebrities is of course transexy with knobs and knockers on. This is really the whole point of celebs — and the reason we’re so interested in them. They’re what we would be if we had the time and money and could be bothered. Celebrities are the personal fitness instructors of postsexual identity: inspirational and motivational and very shouty. Women such as Paris and Nicole are ads for transexiness — not because they look like skinny boys with smacked lips holding water balloons, which of course they do, but because they look like women who have had all sorts of costly, painful, and occasionally risky procedures — to look, in fact, like Woman. They are all, like sex in the digital age, copies of an original that doesn’t exist. The question we continually ask of celebs is, How can we be like you? How can we copy your copy of sex?

Attacks on fashion designers for their unreal and unhealthy ideals of feminine beauty somewhat miss the point that fashion is fashion. The fashion world, for all its dictatorial gestures, only reflects culture — or what is the same thing these days, what culture wants to be.

Celebrity males are, of course, at least as transexy as the women. Tom Cruise, still the biggest Hollywood box-office draw despite jumping the chat-show sofa, is a pint-size all-American action hero who is the absolute epitome of artifice. After 22 years he’s still playing his Top Gun character, Maverick (and the Scientologists appear to have his portrait in their attic). The tagline on the posters for the Missy Impossible movies should read, “Can you spot the weave?” Weaved or not, Cruise’s zooming narcissism always outguns his leading ladies.

As Tom’s multimillion-dollar smile shows, male and female nowadays mean exactly the same thing: a ravenous, ruthless desire to be desired. And they both have the number of the same plastic surgeon. Sexual difference has been replaced by sexualized competition. As with Blu-ray and DVD HD, there’s not much to choose between the formats: One has more storage space, the other has a better interface. That’s pretty much it.

Put, say, a picture of Nicole Kidman next to ex-hubby Tom, and you’ll see what I mean. Can you really say that these two people are opposite sexes? Or even different sexes? Or put a picture of her next to Keith Urban and watch them blur into one. it’s no wonder these two ended up together. After all, their stylists seem to be.

No wonder Sharon Stone recently announced that she is sick of men who “act like women” and claimed she’d rather be romanced by a “masculine lady. It is difficult to have a relationship because I like men in that old-fashioned way,” she sighed. “I like masculinity, and in truth only women do that now.” So true, Sharon, so true. My TS mate Michelle, who is also an old-fashioned girl at heart, agrees with you completely. She’s really fed up with the first thing straight blokes ask after she tells them her little secret being: “Will you fuck me?” Having been through all that trouble to have your large penis turned into a vagina, it’s a tad annoying to have to buy a selection of strap ons.

I suspect Sharon’s been watching that show Entourage, in which a group of young men from blue-collar backgrounds behave like Sex and the City women, only more superficial. The Entourage generation of men lives to shop and to be looked at and aspires to be nothing more than trophy-man wives. “Hug it out, bitch,” is the transexy motto of transexy men everywhere.

Speaking of trophy-man wives, take a look at today’s celebrity couples. Actually, don’t even look; just say their names: Demi and Ashton, Jen and Marc, Angelina and Brad, Maddy and Guy. None of these couples even sounds remotely man-and-wifey. They resemble — you can look now — anatomically incorrect kids’ toys. Where is sexual difference here? In the drag-king stubbly beards that the sack-and-crack-waxed toy-boys wear to emphasize their Timberlakian adorability? No wonder these celeb couples end up being called two-headed single names like Brangelina or TomKat: flesh of my undifferentiated flesh.

Even when a celebrity couple, like Maddy and Guy, act out a reassertion of traditional roles, it only serves as parody. When Madonna brags about her mockney gangster groupie husband bossing her about, it only serves to make it clear that Guy is the English nanny whose duties include having to pretend to dominate Madonna seven or eight times a week.

But none can compare, of course, with the ultimate transexy couple: Victoria Adams and David Beckham. Somehow, Posh and Becks’s extraordinary appearance becomes, daily, more heroically artificial - perhaps because they seem to embrace their transexiness completely, performing it shamelessly to the hilt in fashion shoots in which they simulate transexy sex (which is, by definition, simulated anyway).

If a recording of Posh and Becks having sex at home were to make its way onto the internet, as it has done with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, or Paris Hilton and Rick Salomon, it probably wouldn’t test the server’s bandwidth much. Not because their naked angularity might be uncomfortable to watch, but because there’s nothing more to see.

Porn has become the celeb sensibility because porn literally makes sex transparent. By ceaselessly ‘showing’ sexual difference and turning it inside out, straight porn overexposes it, along with heterosexuality — and turns it transexy. Most female porn players look like Pamela Anderson — did they copy her, or did she copy them? Or was it both? Meanwhile lesbianism and sodomy, i.e. non penile-vaginal sex, are pretty much de rigueur in ‘straight’ porn. On the rare occasions penile-vaginal sex actually occurs, it’s usually either in the form of a man lying flat on his back while a woman bounces up and down on his penis (either fucking him or giving him a vaginal blow job, take your pick) or is joined by several other science-fiction-size penises at the same time.

Which reminds me, the male models in straight porn are no longer the penises attached to fat hairy fucks of yore but increasingly resemble those in gay porn; they are getting younger and more attractive, and their bodies are shaved and more worked out, and the camera won’t shy from showing this off. Or so I’ve heard….

Meanwhile, something interesting — at last! — seems to be happening in the world of gay porn. Perhaps inspired by Michelle’s journey, an impressively hung young model called Stonie — who bizarrely also played Borat’s son in the Sacha Baron Cohen movie — is now taking female hormones. He’s already had breast implants and has changed his name to Brittany Coxxx (though for now he’s hanging onto his cockkk). And apart from the hexagonal breast implants, he looks rather hot.

The curious thing, though, is that he also looks even more like a gay-porn star now than he did before.

As Borat, perhaps the last true retrosexual left, might say: “Transexy time!”

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Special thanks to Michelle and Donald K.

Yesterday’s London Times ran a three page piece called ‘Oral History’ interviewing some of the ‘players’ (or perhaps ‘chancers’ would be more accurate) in the Monica Lewinsky ’scandal’ that was to engulf the Clinton Presidency for more than a year, lead to his impeachment and, very nearly, to his departure from the White House.

The piece was pegged to the tenth anniversary of the surreal crisis and also, of course, to the Presidential Primaries in which Hillary Clinton, energetically supported by her husband Bill is trying to secure the Democratic nomination.

After all that has happened in the intervening decade, Bush’s disputed election, 9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, Paris Hilton, it’s difficult to believe that the US worked itself up into such a frenzy over whether or not Clinton had a blow job. But, boy, did they.

If Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, then we can bank on some of that frenzy being revisited. In fact, it’s already happening, as both this article and it’s introduction with its regurgitation of that myth about Hillary’s Senatorship and thus her Presidential bid being based on the ’sympathy vote’ for the ‘wronged woman’ shows. A myth that is, strangely enough, most popular with those who used the ‘wronged woman’ angle ten years ago to try and destroy her husband - when they hated her even more than him.

Here’s a piece I wrote in early 1999 at the height of the scandal about what I believed was really at the heart of the brouhaha: sexual hypocrisy. Not Clinton’s - ours.

The nurnurnurnurnur! response in both the media and in the blogosphere, liberal and conservative, to Senator Larry Craig’s recent entrapment in a men’s rest-room by a pretty, tap-dancing policeman, and the religious certainty that everyone, gay and straight, has expressed about a) what happened and b) exactly what this reveals about the Senator from Idaho’s ‘real’ sexuality and c) his political fate (he should resign), has shown that we haven’t come very far.

The Sex Terror

(Originally published in The Seattle Stranger, January 1999)

by Mark Simpson

In the midst of all the over-discussion - and all the over-exposure - of the Republican show-trial of William Jefferson Clinton, the real charge against him remains curiously under-reported. In fact, it’s not reported at all. Oddly, the media is thunderously silent to the point of discretion about it.

What is this crime of crimes that can lay someone so high so low and which can’t even be mentioned? It isn’t perjury, the obstruction of justice, or the betrayal of his Oath of Office. It isn’t even being a successful Democrat President.

No, it’s having the effrontery to resist the most magisterial, sovereign and powerful force in the land - the ‘sex’ terror. Clinton is being made an example of - one that everyone, even editors of academic journals, should fear.

Last week [15 Jan 1999 the American Medical Association impeached George Lundberg, editor for seventeen years of the AMA journal. Lundberg’s High Crime and Misdemeanour? He included in this month’s issue of the AMA journal research from 1991 which showed that 60% of college students did not define oral intercourse as sexual relations. A spokeswoman for the AMA explained his sacking: ‘Through his recent actions he has threatened the integrity of the journal by inappropriately and inexcusably interjecting the journal into a major political debate that has nothing to do with science or medicine’.

Who can blame the AMA for purging Mr Lundberg’s heresy? Everyone, of whatever political hue, whether they think Clinton should be censured, impeached or impaled, seems to be agreed on one thing-that Bill Clinton is a liar, that he did have sexual relations with ‘that woman’, and that his distinction between sexual intercourse and ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ (in this case fellatio) is pure sophistry and legalese.

In fact, this point has become the crux of the whole scandal (which, as I’m sure the AMA know, has everything to do with science and medicine). Clinton’s ‘crime’, the justification for all those ‘LIAR!’ banner headlines, the approval of the articles of impeachment and now his constitutionally unprecedented Senate trial has boiled down to his refusal to agree that fellatio constitutes ‘sex’.

After the broadcast of his four hour inquisition in the Starr Chamber, in which he admitted ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ with Lewinsky, many liberal papers cautiously applauded his forbearance but still called on him, for the sake of Mother’s Milk and Western democracy, to either throw himself on the Republican’s sword and resign, or admit to Congress ‘what we all know’-that he lied, and that oro-genital contact constitutes a ‘sexual relationship’ (in other words, fall on his own sword).

But is Clinton really a ‘liar’? Is it really absolutely clear what ‘sex’ is? Isn’t ‘common sense’ a fickle, not to say tyrannical mistress? Aren’t we just joining in the shouting because we want to distract from the necessary hypocrisies and disavowals that make our own lives bearable - and because we don’t want the Sex Terror to come for us? Isn’t Clinton’s trial more than just a farcical accident of history? Isn’t it perhaps the clearest sign anyone could ask for that no-one is safe from the Sex Terror?

It is a measure of how bad things have got that this has to be said at all: Everyone makes distinctions about what ‘sex’ is. Prostitutes, for example, know very well that most married men distinguish between ‘full sex’ and fellatio and ‘hand relief’, often opting for the latter two because it doesn’t feel like they’re really cheating on their wives; while the prostitutes themselves don’t even acknowledge vaginal intercourse as ‘a sexual relationship’: they regard it as ‘business’. Good Catholic girls in Latin countries often masturbate or fellate their boyfriends or even allow them bugger them, so they will remain virtuous virgins on their wedding night.

Of course, nowadays we smirk at their ‘naiveté’ and ‘denial’, and congratulate ourselves on our sophistication and honesty, but who are we to say they’re wrong to make that distinction? Isn’t it a form of erotic totalitarianism to insist that all sensual contact is ‘sex’? To refuse to acknowlede that the ‘meaning of sex’ isn’t actually incoherent - that it might even be occult?

Perhaps the only indisputable ‘fact’ about sex is that the meaning of it changes with the context. What happens in private, in the dark between two people takes on a different meaning - or just a meaning - when put under the spotlight. The ‘Oh boy was I drunk last night! I don’t remember a thing!’ line is not the recourse of someone who did something they regret the night before, but someone who doesn’t wish to regret, or even think about, what they did the night before. Yes, this can be the refuge of a scoundrel or worse, but the difficulties prosecuting so-called ‘date-rape’ cases merely demonstrates the difficulties in trying to draw one unambiguous meaning out of an intimate exchange between two people in the dark (or windowless, locked corridors off the Oval office).

Clinton occupies the most sober, most brightly lit office in the world. In a sense, he’s not so much the victim of his own stupidity, mendacity, promiscuity or even Republican hostility, but of the late Twentieth Century mania for dragging everything private out into the open. The more the meaning of that private activity changes once it is put in the public sphere, the more imperative it is to expose it. And what could be more private and therefore more worthy of being made public than the sex life of the President of the United States? The Starr Report was la $40 M, half-ton tabloid scandal sheet, though, alas, not so well-written.

But this is not to down-grade its importance. As tabloid editors and Kenneth Starr know very well, despite the protestations of the public to the contrary, everyone wants to know the ‘truth’ about sex and in particular the ‘truth’ about celebrity sex lives. More than this, everyone thinks that the ‘truth’ about sex is the most important truth about us.

This is why pretty much everyone, except the Pentagon and Pat Buchanan, seems to want private homosexuals to come out as public gays these days-after all, gays are the living proof that the truth about our sex lives is the most important truth about us. They are literally defined by it; Telling the Truth About Sex is what they’re for. Even the uptight, soul-of-discretion Brits, for goodness sakes, want them to ‘come out’. Disgraced British Minister Ron Davies’ crime wasn’t cruising for sex on Clapham Common but refusing to ‘come out’ as ‘gay’ after this emerged, and give the public what they wanted. He was berated by a sneering press for being ‘hypocritical’ and ‘dishonest’ (the tabs) and ‘in denial’ or ‘mentally ill’ (the broadsheets). However, if he had been caught in a red light district visiting prostitutes would he have been called upon to announce to the world that he was a congenital visitor of prostitutes and confess that this ‘truth’ about his sexuality was more important than, say, his relationship with his wife and children? (Prostitution and male cruising grounds are both age-old, ‘secretive’, ‘hypocritical’ institutions which have made the public virtue of marriage tolerable to millions of men who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to meet its demands).

By way of contrast, George Michael, ever the showman, knew exactly what the public wanted after his entrapment by the Beverly Hills PD’s finest and gave them full confessions which earned him the approval of the press for co-operating with their enquiries. The outing of Michael happened despite the fact that for several years George Michael had been fairly open in his work and interviews about not being straight. What the world wanted was for him to come out as ‘gay’; to stop being equivocal about sex and recognise instead its irresistible sovereignty in all our lives.

Interesting that many gay activists in the US have been largely silent about the Lewinsky affair, despite the fact that they know all too well the vicious, violent hatred of pinched pious people like Kenneth Starr, a hatred barely hidden behind a smiling respectability and constant invocation of The Law. As the shock troops of Telling the Truth About Sex, who originally elected Clinton so they could go on telling the Truth even more, they are ideologically hamstrung.

Barney Frank the outspoken and openly gay Senator, who is a close political ally of Clinton’s, exemplifies this dilemma. Although, unlike many others in the Democratic Party, he has consistently fought his President’s corner, he has nevertheless called on him to be ‘truthful’ about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and abandon his pedantic ‘sex’ distinction. In other words, to ‘come out’.

Frank has however pointed out one of the curious paradoxes of this whole affair-that those leading the inquiry into Clinton’s sex life and publishing their findings on the Internet are the very people who told Frank to shut up about his sex life and keep it private.

Putting Clinton’s behaviour into the context of America’s history and his own Baptist background the charge against him that he is a ‘liar’ because he didn’t consider having non penile-vaginal relations with Lewinsky ‘sex’ becomes even more confused. The Starr Report effectively brands Clinton a ‘sodomite’. Under the anti-sodomy laws still on the statute books of many US states [at time of writing, ‘sodomy’ is defined as oro-genital or anal-genital contact between members of either sex. That is, pretty much anything that isn’t penile-vaginal intercourse. Everything that isn’t potentially baby-making is a perversion, or ‘inappropriate intimate contact’ to use Clinton’s telling phrase. This is why gay marriage is so fiercely resisted in the US - including by Clinton who signed into law a bill banning gay marriage - because it bestows recognition and respectability on an act which is, by definition, un-respectable.

Sodomy was, until quite recently, not only unlawful but a crime against the American State. J. Edgar Hoover, who along with Senator Joe McCarthy, begat (spiritually) Kenneth Starr, kept secret files on public figures that were reported to engage in ‘oro-genital contact’, as he considered this meant they were subversive and ‘un-American’. McCarthy’s hysterical - and probably jealous - view of oral sex as a form of treason is echoed today in the repeated shrieks of a Republican spokeswoman on a recent TV debate: ‘HE WAS HAVING A BLOW JOB WHEN HE SENT TROOPS INTO BOSNIA!!!’

Since Hoover, we have had Kinsey, the Sixties, gay liberation and feminism and the meanings of what is ‘sex’ have been widened enormously. Hoover himself has been ‘outed’ posthumously as a ‘closet gay’. But the effect of this ‘sexual liberation’ is not unambiguously ‘progressive’ or ‘liberating’ as most liberals seem to think. You don’t have to be Michel Foucault to see that the old imperative to control people’s erotic lives by prohibition has not been abolished. Instead it has been supplanted by a compulsory, puritannical transparency in people’s erotic behaviour - and indeed their whole sense of themselves is controlled, defined and produced through the ritual of public confession (i.e. Protestant rather than Catholic confession). Everyone must submit to ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’, even and especially Presidents.

The modern, ‘scientific’ discourse of ‘sex’, a la Kinsey and Masters & Johnson, which demands that sex be confessed, exposed and measured allied in the Sixties with the explosion of personal politics. That alliance was in turn given an irresistible momentum by the exponential increase in media, and exponential decrease in respect for privacy since then. The rise of political correctness and battles over sexual harassment has only intensified the need in the Nineties to confess ‘sex’ in the courts, the workplace, the television studio.

Now, at the end of the Twentieth Century, this Sex Terror has made it’s way into the highest office in the land. It has become a Scylla to America’s Puritan, scolding, sodomy-hating Charybdis. With ‘Elvis’, the Sixties baby-boomer liberal Baptist telegenic talk-show President, in the middle. The supreme irony is that the Republicans, who believe that the distinction between sex and sodomy should be maintained in life and law, are trying to impeach a President on the grounds that he made that very same distinction in life and law. The Grand Old Party which once was the Party of discretion in matters of Eros is now a party of sexual Jacobins in the service of the Sex Terror, branding popular Presidents Enemies of the People for not confessing every detail of their private life - even outing themselves as adulterers on the steps of Capitol Hill - and turning American public life into one gigantic, insane Denunciation Box.

Prophetically, ironically, Clinton whose Presidency began with an attempted coup over his intention to lift the ban on sodomites serving in the military, now seems to be ending with another attempted coup over his own (heterosexual) sodomy. The compromise solution he came up with for that first crisis has turned out to be the most apt - if most hopeless - solution for what may turn out to be his last, as well as a romantic resistance slogan in an era where ‘sex’ is a sign we must all submit to: ‘Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t pursue’.

© Mark Simpson 2008

By Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 23/12 2007)

You know that queasy, hungover, fed-up-to-the-gills feeling of not knowing what day of the week it is - or what year? Wondering whether the banks will be open or not and whether you can be bothered to brave the freezing crowds and the thronging fog and exchange those fluffy Bhs slippers you were given by your niece for something more fetching? That sense of quietly increasing secret dread at the imminent approach of another bout of slightly hysterical binge-drinking and smiling at people you’d much rather spit in the eye?

Yes, the festering season is nearly upon us - that fag-end, cold-turkey, limbo-time between Christmas and New Year that cruelly drags out the whole experience, and the year, by another four days and feels like a fortnight of 1970s Sundays.

The sheer numbing tedium and disorientation of the festering season drives people to do crazy things - like accepting invitations to visit friends and relatives you haven’t seen for ages, only to remember, too late, that the reason it’s been so long is that you don’t actually like them. Even worse, some people find themselves spending time with their partners.

The festering season is clearly a major social problem that needs an urgent solution. Shockingly, the major political parties have yet to take this issue seriously - I’ve checked, and can confirm that neither the Conservative, Labour or Lib-Dem manifestos propose legislation to deal with the festering season.

Fortunately, the solution is as clear as the night Good King Wenceslas looked out. What’s needed is a Christmas Anschluss: a union of Christmas and New Year. For far too long, Christmas and New Year have been artificially divorced by that demoralising boundary period in between. Soaked in booze and regrets, festooned with goodwill and domestics, they obviously deserve one another. It’s time to bring them together.

By moving New Year’s Eve to Boxing Day (what is Boxing Day for, anyway?), we can eliminate that date-nibbling, walnut-cracking period spent wondering whether to treat ourselves to another sweet sherry or not. We can all get completely rat-arsed on Christmas Eve and not sober up until New Year’s Day. One moment you’re putting out milk and mince-pies for Santa, the next you’re waking up on someone’s sofa with an end-of-the-world hangover, your pants around your head, smelling of candied fruit and vomit. Hello, 2008!

Alternatively - and this happens to be my personal preference - New Year could be run parallel with Christmas. Not only does this shorten the whole experience down to a more humane - and liver-sparing - two days, it gives you the perfect get-out to spare the feelings of those who you don’t want to spend either event with, as well as providing those people who just don’t like either Christmas or New Year - or both - the opportunity to opt out completely.

“Oh, sorry,” you’d say, “I’d love to come to yours and gnaw my leg off with frustration this Christmas but unfortunately I can’t - I’m doing New Year this year.”

Or, alternatively, “Oh, that’s a shame, I’d adore to come out with you and the gang on New Year’s Eve and shout ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR!!’ at strangers so aggressively that I manage to cover them in gob even though they’re on the other side of the street, but I’ve already promised to do Christmas this time.”

Copyright Mark Simpson

By Mark Simpson (Arena Hommes Plus, Winter 2007)

Is it… him? Is it really the man who ended the Cold War? The man who brought down the Berlin Wall - the human face of Soviet Communism, the last face of Soviet Communism? Is he still alive? What in Lenin’s name is he doing in an ad for designer luggage? Is that his bag, or is it Raisa’s? Why is he apparently about to jump out of a moving car? And how much did he get?

So many questions assail you on seeing the ad for Louis Vuitton (shot by the power-lens of Annie Leibovitz) with the famously soberly-dressed Mikhail Gorbachev in the back of a Khrushchev-era limousine sliding past a remnant of the Berlin Wall, it’s difficult to decide whether the image is very smart or very funny, liberating or terrifying. Was the ‘End of History’ really just a photo-op for luxury luggage? Was Perestroika about making the world safe for Louis Vuitton? Well, perhaps.

Wealthy Russians keen to make a statement are a fast-growing market for luxury goods such as LV, both in Mother Russia and abroad: A journey brings us face to face with ourselves, as the strapline to the ad puts it. Whatever Russians themselves may think of the old apparatchik, Gorbachev’s face, heavy with history and tragedy, is the face that launched the new, passionately consumerist Russia.

Oh, and the bag is Gorby’s not Raisa’s. LV are keen for more men to buy their products - products they have decided should be depicted in their ads not as ‘heroes’ themselves, as is customary in fashion and luxury advertising, but as ‘companions on the journey’. So the bag might even in some unconscious way stand in for this hero’s famously glamorous wife - who, alas, died from leukemia in 1999.

How much was Gorbachev paid? This information is discretely unavailable - though LV acknowledge they made a donation to his Green Cross International environmental charity.

One thing we can be certain of: Gorby, a decent man who tried to do the decent thing, was paid considerably less for his services than his arch-rival and bullying, drunken successor Yeltsin was for breaking up the Soviet Union and signing over Russia’s hard-gained industrial wealth to Western-backed oligarchs.

Perhaps that is the real meaning of the image: Gorbachev is travelling back from Yeltsin’s funeral, into posterity - with a nice bag to keep his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize in.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

By Mark Simpson (Guardian CIF 15 October, 2007)

For the sake of the Planet, Al, don’t do it!

Al Gore, former Next President of the United States, Inventor of the Internet, Saviour of the World, PowerPoint Presenter Extraordinaire - and now Nobel Peace Prize Winner - is rumoured to be considering a last-minute bid to be the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate.

There’s been a lot of media speculation about whether Al will actually throw his carbon-neutral hat into the ring, but you don’t need to launch a political weather-balloon or take core samples of pack ice to estimate the seriousness with which Gore, despite protestations to the contrary, still covets the Oval Office: the evidence is all there, up on the big screen, in his celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Except it isn’t a documentary. It’s essentially a 100 minute Presidential Election Campaign advertisement, with some alarmist extreme weather reports thrown in, which, even by the standards of US campaign ads shamelessly sells Gore, his apple-pie all-American childhood on his parent’s 1950s farm, his sister’s sad death from lung cancer, his diligent, pointy-headed study at University, his public-spirited time in High Office, and his saintly-but-oh-so-lonely proselytising about global warming, dragging his laptop and long face around the US just for the price of a hot cup of coffee (you’d be forgiven for believing), once out of it. All with a schmaltzy tear-jerking sound-track and Gore’s scripted croaky-voiced sincerity.

The real genius of this election ad though is not that it’s the first to win an Oscar or a Nobel Prize - it’s that it’s persuaded the public to actually pay to see it. But what it has in common with more traditional election ads is that it’s full of lies: nine of them according to the High Court last week.

‘An Inconvenient Truth’ endlessly promotes Call Me Al as the President the United States - and the world - should have had. Even those terrifying giant red graphs as big as houses he flashes up (with axis rubric that, strangely, is so small we can’t read it) are really the exit polls from the 2000 election showing how he was robbed.

When he tells us towards the end of this self-abnegating presentation, that global warming is ‘not a political issue but a moral and spiritual issue’, it’s absolutely clear what he means: ‘Al Gore is not a political issue, but a moral and spiritual issue.’

In other words, a pompous ass.

It isn’t Gore’s vanity that is so impossible to stomach - it’s his total inability to own it. His vanity is the vanity of the ‘humble preacher’ - the deadliest vanity of all.

One of the nine lies that the High Court nailed moral and spiritual Gore with recently was his claim that Hurricane Katrina was the result of global warming. In terms of the naked scaremongering of Gore’s film - vote for me or else you all drown/starve/die of thirst/boredom - this isn’t just a minor issue. Very early on in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ extensive footage is used from Katrina while we see Gore tirelessly studying his graphs on his trusty laptop. It’s made clear that this catastrophe (and perhaps other ones in far-off hotter, dustier climes) wouldn’t have happened on Gore’s watch. Gore, who walks on water, would have solved global warming and saved New Orleans.

‘In the US, political will,’ says a very tired looking Gore at the end of his film, ‘is a renewable resource!’

Actually, if you want to blame someone for the US’s cancellation of the Kyoto agreement, the inept response to Katrina, the catastrophic invasion of Iraq and the disastrous collapse of the US’s relations with much of the world, don’t blame Bush, who is after, all, what he is and does pretty much what it says on the tin. Blame Gore.

After all, it wasn’t, as the film suggests, Bush or the Supreme Court that stole the 2000 election, so much as it was Gore that threw it away. It should have been a cakewalk, but it became a near dead-heat because he was too moral and spiritual to allow Clinton - the man who’s charisma and political realism had put him in office as Vice President for two terms and put him in a position to lead the Democrats in the election - to campaign on his behalf. Even if Clinton, the most phenomenal campaigner of modern times, had only succeeded in mobilising the black vote Gore would have won without any recounts.

Whatever Bush’s faults, he isn’t a pompous ass. And Americans, unlike Nobel Prize judges, don’t like pompous asses. I don’t like pompous asses. Do you?

If anyone can get the Republicans re-elected, it’s not Hilary’s femininity, it’s not Obama’s blackness. It’s Gore’s pompous ass-ity.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

by Mark Simpson, Arena Hommes Plus, Winter 2007 (Out Now)

Imagine the perfect relationship.

Imagine a relationship so perfect that it will be the only one you need. One that is better and cooler and smarter than all the rest. A relationship that will make you the envy of your friends and the centre of attention at dinner parties. Imagine a relationship that is entirely controlled by you.

A relationship, in fact, that is - finally! - all about you (I know I have).

Imagine the iPhone. The perfect lover. The perfect friend. The perfect child. The perfect accessory. The perfect kit. The perfect kick. Walking, talking technosexual porn.

Due to be launched in the UK this autumn, after provoking near-hysteria on its release in the US this summer, Apple’s iPhone is unquestionably an object of desire. Perhaps the object of desire (so far) of the 21st Century. You ache for one, admit it. You feel hollow and empty and ugly and unplugged without one. You would flog your dear old Nan’s internal organs on EBay just to hold one for a few precious seconds.

You may tell yourself it appeals to you because it is a wonderful synergy of iPod, email terminal, Web browser, video player, camera, Palm-type organizer and, oh yes, mobile phone. Or you may kid yourself that you yearn to possess it because it has really fast software that is menu-free and surprisingly simple to use. Or because you can see your voicemails listed on-screen like emails (and decide who you deign to listen to pleading for a response). Or because it has the best Wi-Fi pickup available on a mobile device. Or because it is a thing of appetising Apple-flavoured gorgeousness.

You may even tell yourself that it represents a technological revolution - that if mobiles were Kirk’s communicator, the iPhone is Spock’s Tricorder but smaller and better and even cooler.

But really, you know deep down that the i-Phone is something you want because, just like the iPod, it’s all about you. And what a wonderful, irresistable, indispensable - and priceless - thing you are!

The iPhone is really the Iphone. It’s a direct line to yourself. Now, isn’t that a call we all want to take? Anytime, anyplace? If the iPod was such a wonderful way of magicking away millions of people in the busy, hostile metropolis, full as it is of things that have the effrontery to be non-you, and curling up instead with several gigabytes of you on the subway or the plane - how much better will the iPhone be at blotting out the evidence of other people’s existence. In fact, the iPhone assimilates the ‘real’ world to your imagined one: YouTube, iTunes, and even your iFriends’ will become part of your digital, portable, solipsism of sounds and hypnotic lights.

No, no, no you say. You misunderstand me. I’m a hardware man. Practical. That ARM 1176 CPU is the thing. Or the 2 Megapixel camera. Or the 4/8 GB internal flash memory. Or Bluetooth 2.0. Or the Very High Resolution 3.5″ (320×480 px at 160 ppi) LCD floats my boat.

Yeah, right. The hardware on the iPhone you really covet is the silky touch-sensitive optical quality glass screen. The screen which will literally light up your face - and reflect it back when dark. Touch screens aren’t an Apple innovation, of course. LG’s sleek Prada phone has a touch-sensitive screen - and in fact LG have, rather bitterly, accused Apple of stealing their design. But Apple have succeeded in turning it into… a beautiful, if slightly ill relationship.

Coquettishly, the screen refuses to respond unless you touch it with bare skin. Gloved fingers or stylus produce not a flicker. There is only one button - the ‘Home’ button. Typing has to be done by tapping the screen. Scrolling can only be performed by stroking the screen. Zooming in and out by pinching. Touch me. Stroke me. Caress me. I’m always here for you. I share all your interests - and all your secrets. We even have the same friends. We were meant for one another. Don’t look away!!

The iPhone is the adult, incestuous, convergent Tamagotchi. Your very own technobaby to gaze at, fuss over and flirt with endlessly. One that, moreover, reproduces you, disseminating you and your thoughts out into the world. How could anyone not want one? American consumerism has finally achieved its greatest ambition, the thing it has been working towards ever since Edison recorded the first human voice - to replace scratchy analogue people with shiny digital things. iRobot anyone? (Actually, there’s already an iRobot, an ‘intelligent’ automatic hoover - and, like you, I want one of those in my lazy, lonely life too.)

There’s only one small problem with this iPhone. No, not the fact you can’t send MMS, or make videos. Or voice-dial. Or watch Flash videos or handle Java. Or that typing on the touch sensitive virtual keyboard is rather ttrucky. No. It’s much worse than that. Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but… it’s not your baby at all. It’s Steve Job’s baby. The iPhone is something an iCuckoo.

Apple are such teases. They coo in your ear that their products are all about you, but really they’re all about Apple. Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, may well be God, but he is a jealous and selfish God. Itunes cannot be played on other devices. Likewise the iPhone won’t play non Apple software and, for the moment, you’re tied into a single network that offer Apple all the things they demanded but might not be offering you very much in the way of price plans, coverage, or download speeds. And, like the iPod, you can’t even replace the battery yourself. You have to give custody of your pride and joy, full of all your love and sins, to Apple to do that (and pay them a fee for the privilege).

So much for the perfect relationship. To paraphrase Princess Di, there are two people in this marriage - you and Steve Jobs. And it’s a bit crowded.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

By Mark Simpson, The London Times, 10 October 2007 [uncircumcised version

Ah, rugby. A man’s game. Played by real men. Big hairy men. With big chins. Nothing metrosexual about rugger buggers at all. A welcome respite from all that David Beckham, Frank Lampard love-me, love-my-shaved-pectorals stuff!

Wrong. So wrong.

For starters, rugby players have also become clothes-horses and walking endorsements for male vanity products. Fake-tanned, highlighted Jonny Wilkinson models designer clobber. Josh Lewsey is the face, or rather, hot, ripped, torso, of Nike Pro kinky lycra vests. New Zealand’s Dan Carter models Jockey underwear. Ronan O’Gara is the decorative face of an Irish jewellery company. While glam French fly-half Frederic Michalak, who seems to be his own mobile jewellery shop-window, has sashayed for Christian Lacroix, endorses a French condom brand, is the wrinkle-free face of Biotherme Homme cosmetics (a branch of L’Oreal), and is the eye-catching package for a skimpy underwear line.

And then there’s Welsh rugby star Gavin Henson, the prettier half of the Henson-Church celebrity couple, who likes to shave his legs and cover himself in fake tan and moisturiser before a match ‘because I like to look good for my team-mates’. David Beckham complained recently that Gavin Henson had stolen his gay fans.

To give you an idea how much has changed take a look the life story of the England Rugby strip. Not so long ago a rugby shirt was a baggy, shapeless beer towel that flapped around a hairy beer monster in a sweatband. But in the last few years it has morphed into a tight, tarty, stretchy muscle-top that seems to have been designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

It wouldn’t look out of place dancing under a spotlight on a podium at a gay nightclub. The 2007 World Cup strip features a saucy red arrow that runs from the right shoulder down to the left hip, which is supposed to confuse the opposing team. Perhaps that’s because it seems to shout: ‘If you want to score, flip me over!’

I’m sure there are all sorts of reassuringly practical reasons that can be cited as to why the England strip has changed so much of late, but clearly aesthetics is also calling the shots in rugby these days, which, like football, is now increasingly a form of show-biz. English rugby has gone ‘pro’ - and English rugby players now have ‘pro’ pumped, cut, muscular bodies they’ve worked hard on and that need to be shown off to their best advantage.

And oh, boy, do they show off. In the last few years rugby has become nakedly spornographic. Take a look, if you dare, at the Dieux du Stade French rugby Calendar, and accompanying, shrink-wrapped ‘Making Of’ DVD, featuring oiled, naked, shaved, designer tattooed rugger buggers naked in the locker room in poses that are frequently deliberately, provocatively homoerotic in a way that football wouldn’t countenance (unless it was after a match with a groupie present and filmed with a mobile phone).

Whilst showcasing the, er, talents of their own players, Stade Francais, the Paris team behind the Dieux Du Stade calendar, also invite especially blessed foreign players into their changing room. The eye-popping star of the 2007 calendar is humpy Scottish rugby player Sean Lamont, photographed on his back and on his front - showing the world his versatile endowments.

Dieux du Stade even has it’s own male cosmetics line’ Retour Au Vestiare’ - ‘Back to the lockeroom.’ (just make sure you knock before you enter.)

Phenomenally popular, the Dieux Du Stade sporno calendars have dramatically increased the popularity and coolness of rugby in France with women (who seem to like the homoerotic teasing) but also with men - gay and straight. Rugby sporno has helped make rugby seem that most modern, most covetted of things - shaggable.

Little wonder then that France is also the country that is tipped to win the Rugby World Cup. (Six of the French squad play for Stade Francais.)

After all, last year’s football World Cup was won by not so much by Italy’s superior football skills but their superior sporno. In the run-up to the tournament, Dolce & Gabbana recruited several of their national team’s players to be photographed oiled up and hanging around in the showers in their D&G underwear apparently waiting to gang-bang us - in a clear, if slightly toned-down, echo of Dieux du Stade (the same stunningly provocative photographer, Mariano Vivanco, worked on the 2007 Dieux Du Stade).

The current ‘Ce’st So Paris’ advertising campaign promoting travel to Paris ‘Capital of Love’ which features rugger buggers scrumming and snogging (‘Make love not war’) is clearly meant to be funny, which it is. But given the rise of sporno in the world of rugby it isn’t so absurd.

The only unbelievable thing about the ad is the fact that none of the fake snogging rugger buggers are nearly as buffed or beautiful as some of the real-life ones.
© Mark Simpson 2007

The USAF’s ‘Gay Bomb’ has won an illustrious gong at this year’s prestigious Ig Nobel Awards.

Armed and Amorous

by Mark Simpson (Guardian, June 13 2007)

Look out! Take cover! Backs to the walls, boys! It’s the Gay Bomb!

No, not a bomb with fashionably styled fins or one that can’t whistle, but rather a proposed “non-lethal” chemical bomb containing “strong aphrodisiacs” that would cause “homosexual behavior” among soldiers.

Since the United States Air Force wanted $7.5 million of taxpayers’ money to develop it, it probably involved more than the traditional recipe of a few six-packs of beer.

According to the Sunshine Group, an organization opposed to chemical weapons that recently obtained the original proposal under the Freedom of Information Act, a U.S.A.F. lab seriously proposed in 1994 “that a bomb be developed containing a chemical that would cause [enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another.” The U.S.A.F. obviously didn’t know how picky even horny gays can be.

Despite never having been developed, the so-called Gay Bomb is a bouncing bomb or perhaps a bent stick-it keeps coming back. The media have picked up the story of the Gay Bomb more than once since 2005-after all it’s a story that’s too good to throw away, and, as this article proves, it’s a gift for dubious jokes.

Mind you, it now seems to be the case that the Pentagon didn’t throw it away either, at least not immediately. In the past the Pentagon has been keen to suggest it was just a cranky proposal they quickly rejected. The Sunshine Project now contradicts this, saying the Gay Bomb was given serious and sustained attention by the Pentagon and that in fact they “submitted the proposal to the highest scientific review body in the country for them to consider.” The Gay Bomb was no joke.

So perhaps we should seriously consider probing-however gingerly-what exactly was in the minds of the boys at the Pentagon back then.

The date is key. The Gay Bomb proposal was submitted in 1994-the year after the extraordinary moral panic that very nearly derailed Clinton’s first term when he tried to honor his campaign pledge to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the U.S. military and that ultimately produced the current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) compromise that allows them to serve so long as they remain closeted and are not reported.

The newly sworn-in commander-in-chief was successfully portrayed by the homo-baiting right wing-and by the Pentagon itself in an act of insurrection-as a dirty pinko Gay Bomb that was seriously weakening the cohesion of the unit and molesting the noble, heterosexual U.S. fighting man’s ability to perform his manly mission. “Why not drop Clinton on the enemy?” is probably what they were thinking.

The Pentagon’s love affair with the Gay Bomb also hints heavily that ticking away at the heart of its opposition to lifting the ban on gays serving, which involved much emphasis on the “close conditions” (cue endless TV footage of naked soldiers and sailors showering together) was an anxiety that if homosexuality wasn’t banned the U.S. Armed Forces would quickly turn into one huge, hot, military-themed gay orgy - that American fighting men would be too busy offering themselves to one another to defend their country. I sympathize. I too share the same fantasy - but at least I know it’s called gay porn.

Whatever its motivations or rationalizations, the DADT policy of gay quarantine has resulted in thousands of discharges of homosexuals and bisexuals from the U.S. Armed Forces, even at a time when the military is having great difficulty mobilizing enough bodies of any sexual persuasion and is currently being publicly questioned. But the Pentagon seems unlikely to budge its institutional back from the proverbial wall. Its top commander, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, recently defended the policy in outspoken terms, saying: “I believe that homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” (The good General probably didn’t mean to suggest that homosexual acts involving only one person or more than two were not immoral.)

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy that even Joseph Heller would have had difficulty satirizing, may be confused and confusing, and it may or may not be repealed in the near future, but it clearly shows that the U.S. remains dramatically conflicted about itself and the enormous changes in attitudes and behavior that its own affluence and sophistication have helped bring about.

After all, the Gay Bomb is here already and it’s been thoroughly tested-on civilians. It was developed not by the U.S.A.F. but by the laboratories of American consumer and pop culture, advertising, and Hollywood. If you want to awaken the enemy to the attractiveness of the male body, try dropping back issues of Men’s Health or GQ on them. Or Abercrombie & Fitch posters. Or Justin Timberlake videos. Or DVDs of 300.

Or even the U.S.’s newly acquired British-made weapons system for delivering global sexual confusion and hysteria known as David Beckham.

To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington: I don’t know whether they frighten the enemy, but by God they scare the Bejeesus out of me.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

The Independent recently ran a charming feature by William Shaw on how hitching has gone out of fashion and how no one is willing to stop for a strange young man these days.

Here’s a piece I penned some years ago about the last time I picked up a strange young man….

Casual Pick Up

A couple of miles past Newark, bored and hot and topless, I zoom past a crop-haired sexy young lout in a T-shirt and jeans with his thumb out. I eye him in the rear-view mirror as he shrinks into the distance.

I don’t give lifts to hitch-hikers. It’s asking for trouble.

OK, so I used to hitch-hike everywhere myself years ago when I didn’t have the price of a bus ticket to my name. But now I have my own car, a nice sporty little (used) soft-top, things have changed. I now realise the Daily Mail was right: hitch-hikers are layabouts and bad news. Only loonies, drug addicts and convicts hitch-hike these days. So, really, letting a complete stranger into your car and your nicely ordered life is a bad idea. It’s dangerous. It’s messy. It’s daft. Unless of course, they’re cute.

I brake. Hard.

In the rear-view mirror the lad sees me pull over but seems hesitant. I twist around and shout: ‘Well, c’mon then mate! Do you want a lift or not?’ He finally runs up to the passenger-side window.

‘Where are you headed?’ I ask.

‘London, mate,’ he says.

I look him up and down. In his mid-twenties, he’s not bad looking, but he isn’t as cute as he was at 75mph. But then, who is? He could do with a bath. And he definitely looks like trouble.

‘Get in,’ I say, leaning across and opening the door. ‘I’m headed for Cambridge,’ I lie. ‘I can take you another thirty miles.’

‘Nice one!’ he says with a wide grin, jumping in.

Rejoining the flow of cars headed south, we chat the casually polite chat of hitchhikers and drivers. I introduce myself; he introduces himself as ‘John, but me mates call me Jonno’. He tells me he was in Newark ‘visiting relatives’ and now he’s on his way back home to Dover: ‘I’ll catch the train in London’. He tells me about his wife and his three-year-old daughter in Dover: ‘I love that kid to bits - I live for her mate’. We pass a sign: ‘London: 60 miles’.

‘I’m really glad you stopped mate,’ he says for the third time.

‘Yeah?’ I say. ‘S’funny. You seemed a bit reluctant at first. Thought you were going to run away.’

Jonno looks a bit sheepish. ‘Well, thing is mate, to be totally honest wiv you, there are some people after me. I owe money to some geezers in Newark. I thought you might have been sent by them - not being funny, but you look a bit of a bruiser mate!’

‘Don’t worry,’ I reassure him. ‘It’s just for show. What do you owe them money for?’

‘Oh. This and that.’

‘Drugs?’

Jonno shifts in his seat, looks down and shakes his head. ‘No - no way mate!’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter to me,’ I explain.

Jonno looks down at his hands. ‘Well, to be totally honest wiv you mate, it was drugs. But only speed, and a bit of hash. Nothing hard. I’m trying to get off the shit, you know? I’m trying to get clean. I’ve gotta think of the kid, man. I can’t be fucked up around her, can I?’

‘No, mate. Not a good idea.’

London: 30 miles

‘Mark mate, haven’t we passed the sign for Cambridge?’

‘Yeah. To be totally honest with you, I’m going to London, not Cambridge. I usually don’t tell hitchers how far I’m going in case we, er… don’t get on.’

‘Oh, right mate. I understand.’ Jonno grins at me. ‘So you’re going to London? Sorted!’

‘So…’ I probe, ‘what were you really doing in Newark?’

‘You’re not stupid, are you? Well, to be totally honest wiv you I was on remand there for a week.’

‘Really?’ I say casually, trying not to look too interested.

‘Yeah. Nothing serious though. Just non-payment of a fine, like. Never again. It was disgusting in there mate. Hottest week of the year in a shithole with no showers or change of clothes. I fucking stink mate’

‘Yeah, I noticed! So what was the fine you didn’t pay?’

‘Well, to be totally honest wiv you mate, I was done for breach of the peace and criminal damage. I kicked my ex-wife’s door down because she wouldn’t let me see my kid. I was really drunk at the time, I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘So, you’re not with your wife any more?’

‘No mate. We separated a couple of years back, and she lets me see my kid once a week. But she wouldn’t that night coz I was steaming. I ‘ate prison. I was sent to borstal when I was thirteen and had the shit kicked out of me. It was that bad I tried to top meself.’ He holds out his hands, wrists uppermost, revealing a pair of ropy white scars across his dirty wrists.

Jonno continues: ‘I only ended up in borstal coz me stepdad used to knock me about. He used to kick the shit out of me mum and I tried to stop ‘im, and so he turned on me. The worst of it was, she was egging ‘im on! Didn’t spend much time at home after that. Fell in wiv a bad crowd.’

London 20 miles

‘I’ve got some mates who live in London,’ Jonno announces, as the sun lowers itself into a red bath on the Western horizon. ‘They live in Soho. Is that anywhere near you?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I live a very long way from Soho - as far as you can get without actually leaving London. Your friends must pay a lot of rent to live there.’

‘Yeah, but they don’t care. They make a packet.’ Pause. ‘To be totally honest wiv you, they’re on the game, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’

‘They’re gay,’ he adds, driving the point home. He looks at me anxiously. ‘You don’t mind gay people do you?’

‘No, I don’t mind gay people,’ I lie. ‘Actually, some of my best friends are gay.’

‘Really? Sorted. I was a bit worried there, coz some people really hate gays.’

‘Terrible isn’t it?’ I say.

London: 10 miles

‘Are you sure you don’t mind gay people?’

‘Sure.’

‘OK. Well, to be totally honest wiv you, right, I swing both ways.’ Jonno steals a sideways look at me.

‘Yeah?’ I say.

‘Yeah. That’s not a problem is it?’

‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Not at all. Everyone’s thought about it, at least once, haven’t they?’

‘I like women and that, but I also like, y’know a really good seeing to by someone who takes control. Well,’ he laughs, ‘in the bedroom, not in real life like me mum!’

Like your true destination, you don’t tell a hitch-hiker your real orientation until you’re certain you want to go all the way with him. But I can see that this lad has the measure of me and where this car journey is headed. It’s a balmy evening; it’s sort of spontaneous. He’s rough, he’s certainly ready. But I’m not. And not just because he’s not washed for a week. I’ve heard much too much for it to be casual. We’ve come too far.

It’s dark when we arrive in London - without any unplanned stops at bushy lay-bys. I drop him off. He shakes my hand firmly looking me in the eye: ‘Cheers, Mark, thanks for the lift,’ he says, a faint flicker of disappointment in his face. ‘It was good talking to you.’ And he’s gone.

I drive off. A minute later I suddenly feel I have to speak to him again. I turn the car around. Maybe to lend him some money - I’m sure he hasn’t got any for the train to Dover. Maybe to be ‘totally honest’ with him. Maybe to offer him a place to crash. Or have a bath.

But there’s no trace of Jonno. He’s dissolved into the warm, unfriendly London night.

Like I said, it’s a bad idea letting a complete stranger into your life.

Some details have been changed to protect the innocent.

(Originally appeared in Attitude, 2000)