MARK SIMPSON.com

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)

Get ready for the Men on a Mission calendar: 12 topless, buffed, young, male Mormons keen to show you the beauty of God’s creation. 

By Mark Simpson (Guardian, 20 Sept 2007)

‘As a sodomite, being knocked up by Mormon missionaries isn’t always an experience I look forward to. I don’t know about you, but that air-conditioning salesman look doesn’t really do it for me….’

Read the article here.

Whitney had it all. The looks, the heritage and that elemental voice. So where did it all go so wrong? Mark Simpson on the diva who fell to earth

(Originally appeared in the Independent, 15 September 2002)

I was never a fan of Whitney Houston - it wasn’t necessary.

Whitney was something that simply happened to you, whether you took notice or not, like the weather - though if Whitney was the weather, it was always very, very sunny. Whitney was so blindingly, scorchingly successful in the 1980s and early 1990s, that she was pop music. She was the mainstream air that we all breathed, or at least the air that MTV, car and workplace radios conducted into our heads. Her debut album went double-platinum overnight. She then collected seven consecutive US number ones, outstripping the Beatles and Elvis. Not bad for a skinny 22-year-old black girl from New Jersey.

But then, as we were told over and over again, Whitney wasn’t just any skinny black girl from the wrong side of the Hudson: she was Soul Aristocracy, the daughter of Cissy Houston (acclaimed singer with The Sweet Inspirations, backing vocalist for Elvis), goddaughter of Aretha Franklin and niece of Dionne Warwick. But for all this pedigree, her Nefertitian looks and a voice like a fifth element that made earth, wind, fire and water seem insubstantial by comparison, the most striking, and possibly most irresistible, thing about Whitney has always been that it is very difficult to believe that she bothers to mean any of the words she sings, however well she sings them.

Except, that is, for one word: “I”. When Whitney sings the personal pronoun you are left in no doubt that this word means something very special indeed. Which is why her ballads are so funny and so terrifying all at once: “The grea-test love of all is hap-pen-ing to MEEEEEEEEEE!”. This is also why the country singer Dolly Parton’s earlier interpretation of “I Will Always Love You” with its delicate, charming, make-believe masochism had more soul than Whitney’s bullet-proof Kevlar version used in The Bodyguard (1992), the massive popularity of which confirmed her status as the world’s No 1 superstar (and favourite taped singer at funerals).

Mind you, the supersonic nuclear blast-wave of Ms Houston’s version - “IAEYAEYAEYEA!!!!!” - just flattens everything before it. Whitney’s voice didn’t need any soul; it was pure Will. Whitney is speaking a frightening truth here about romantic love: it’s a form of egotism. “I will always love you” is a stalking, psychotic declaration of a love for one’s own ability to love, regardless of all obstacles, such as, say, the beloved’s indifference. In fact, next to Ms Willpower’s transcendent egotism, that other bullying Mistress of the 1980s, Ms Blonde Ambition, is just a goofy backing dancer who got lucky.

But now, 10 years on, Whitney’s ego isn’t quite what it used to be. Nor is she, it turns out, quite so invulnerable. In the last decade she has suffered a legion of personal and professional disasters as messy as she used to be squeaky clean, and appears to be struggling with an alleged drug habit that many worry could overwhelm her completely.

But all this means she’s now interesting! And for something other than the sheer scale of her success and the preternatural power of her voice (which, it is rumoured, may anyway not be what it used to be).

A Channel 4 documentary, Whitney Houston: The True Story, broadcast this Tuesday, examines the rise and fall and rise - and possible final fall - of the Whitney Empire of the Ego, though, as you might hope, the programme focuses rather more on the fall, which pride seems, rather satisfyingly, to have gone before. The photographer for the cover of I’m Your Baby Tonight recounts how Whitney kept her the rest of her staff waiting on set 12 hours, and when she finally showed there was no apology, explanation or even embarrassment. A promoter recalls how a concert was cancelled 15 minutes before it was due to start. “There was no explanation and no suggestion of it being rescheduled,” he whines, like the mere mortal he is.

However, for those prone to the German vice (i.e. most of us) there’s plenty of shameful joy to be had. We hear about the jeers she received at the Soul Train Awards in 1989 from a black audience who felt she was too “white”. The violent, co-dependent but enduring marriage to “bad-boy” rapper Bobby Brown. The marijuana drug-bust in 2000 and her reported indignation that the drug laws might apply to her. The persistent accusations of lesbianism, even from her own husband. Her wraith-like appearance at the Michael Jackson anniversary concert in 2001. Her removal from the Academy Awards Ceremony in the same year by her old friend Burt Bacharah for allegedly forgetting the words to her songs (including “Over the Rainbow”?).

And perhaps most poignant of all, the Spin magazine journalist who witnessed a dazed-looking Ms Houston playing the piano - in a room which had no piano, and who opines that “the general consensus seems to be that she’s a complete junkie… There are [false stories every day about her having died, being on the brink of dying, having just checked in to hospital…”

Alas, with the exception of Whitney’s make-up artist who is touchingly loyal, there is a shortage of members of her inner circle dishing the dirt or anything at all. But then, as one forthright American female journalist puts it, “She’s the cash cow. Nobody wants to upset her.” The producer Sam Kingsley explains: “A number of people close to Whitney, including Whitney’s former manager, did agree to be interviewed but when they realised she hadn’t given her royal assent they quickly withdrew.”

Real revelations about Whitney’s private life are much more likely to appear in the tabloid press which possesses a chequebook large enough to wean embittered confidantes off Ms Houston’s monetary udders.

Perhaps no one has more stories and kisses to tell than Robyn Crawford, the childhood girl friend and close business associate assumed by many to have been Whitney’s lover since the early Eighties. “She wouldn’t speak to us at all,” says Kingsley. “She’s rumoured to have been given a big payoff, post Bobby Brown, which includes a silence clause.”

While Whitney may at her peak have come to represent a will even purer than her voice, it wasn’t purely her own. “Whitney” was a product of the ambition and determination of several people. Robyn, an intelligent, shrewd and imposing woman. Her mother Cissy, who never got the recognition for her own talents she felt she deserved (when Whitney’s career took off at the stripling age of 22, she reportedly told friends over and over again “and to think we’ve waited so many years for this to happen!”). And one flamboyant white man - the Svengali president of Arista Records Clive Davis.

Clive signed Whitney when she was just 19. He realised that Whitney possessed a great talent and could be a very successful recording artist but he also realised that she could be much more than that. She could be the biggest recording star in the world.

In Whitney Houston: The True Story, Kenneth Reynolds, marketing director at Arista Records, recounts: “Clive had a formula already. Whitney was just a talent to mould. She had to lose the gospel roots. The early version of ‘Saving All My Love’ sounded like the new Aretha Franklin. But Clive didn’t like it - ‘No, it’s too black’. Clive also complained that the cover of Whitney’s first album made her look ‘too ethnic’. He wanted her to look more like everyone else.”

So Whitney was put in blond wigs and colourful make-up that made her light-black skin look even lighter (in the video for “How Will I Know” she looks as if she is wearing a basket of dyed poodles on her head). But Clive Davis was proved right - Whitney became huge instead of just successful. She became pop music.

But by the end of the 1980s tastes were changing. Hip hop and R ‘n’ B, black music that wore its “ethnic” and “street” credentials on its sleeve, was the new pop - in other words, it was what white kids wanted.

Meanwhile, the US black community itself was beginning to resent Whitney’s success and what they saw as her “betrayal”. Hence her humiliation at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards, where she was called “Oreo” (an American biscuit which is black on the outside and white on the inside).

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that she ended up marrying the very next act up - rapper Bobby Brown - who had a reception as rapturous as hers had been the opposite. Bobby, known for his partying, seemed an unlikely match for Whitney. But perhaps that was the point. Rather than the nice girl seduced by the naughty Bobby from the Boston projects, “soul aristocracy” Whitney saw Bobby as her ticket to “ghetto fabulousness”.

Whatever the truth of this, Whitney began to become known as a party girl and the successful 1998 comeback (sometimes almost singalong) album My Love is Your Love, with guest appearances by a new generation of R ‘n’ B stars - and a promo video which depicted a 1970s party in the streets of Harlem - succeeded in relaunching Whitney’s credibility. However, it seems that there has been a price to pay for Whitney’s new fashionability and “improved” blackness - but then, suffering is supposedly good for the soul, and, now it seems, sales.

Whether that price includes, as some maintain, that elemental voice, will become clear with her new album, Just Whitney, scheduled for release at the end of the year. If it turns out that she has finally squandered her talent, it will be sad but perhaps understandable. Such a vast “gift” is undoubtedly also a curse. Squandering it might be the last act of will available to a very wilful lady called Whitney.

© Mark Simpson 2007

Why is Britain’s best-selling, sauciest tabloid so unsure of its sexuality?

Mark Simpson, the Guardian (August 24, 2007)

The Sun’s TV critic Ally Ross is an unhappy camper. You see, he’s always bitching about TV being ‘too gay’. Which is a rather peculiar thing for a TV critic to complain about. Perhaps his dad wanted him to be a (much less well paid) sports writer.

Last Friday, he proved what a pugilist he is by laying into the recently launched ITV Anthony Cotton daytime chat show, and by attacking all things poovey on telly. He concluded with his 0ver-familiar refrain: ‘TV is way too camp, i.e. gay and rubbish, for its own good’. At the end of a column simply chocka with catty clawings and rubbish campery.

In fact, so keen is big butch Ross (who likes to pose as the Test Card Girl above his byline) to straighten out telly and get rid of gays and gayness, in an unrelated piece about Big Brother on the same page, recounting how one male contestant was lovingly describing women as ‘tits, baps, breasts, erm, womb people’, he interrupts this red-blooded reverie with: ‘cuts to Gerry (the gay Greek contestant) fantasising about the Greek Army.’ Thanks for that straight thought, Ally.

Actually, I agree. TV is too ‘gay’ and camp and rubbish. But so are you, Ally dearie. And so, these days, is the Sun. Though, like its TV critic, it seems rather confused and conflicted.

In the same issue, readers were treated to another gratuitous ‘gay’ fantasy titled ‘Brokeback Putin’ - a spread of shirtless snaps of Russian President Vladimir Putin and (fully clothed) Prince Albert of Monaco on a blokey fishing holiday, complete with ‘camp’ captions that try to portray him as homo (and therefore ridiculous and impotent): ‘Oooh Vlad, I’ve got a tiddler’ ‘Here let me hold it Albert’. Er, calm down will you? They’re just fishing.

The Sun’s breathless, squealing addiction to rubbish, dated campery - and its campaign to convince us all that ‘camp’ is exactly the same thing as ‘gay’ and that of course male homosexuality is a form of emasculation - is literally perverse. Even more than most papers, the Sun is desperate to attract young readers - readers who don’t share that early 1970s worldview, not least because they weren’t even born in the 1970s. Headlines like “Hello Sailor!”, the mocking front page that greeted the Navy’s recent decision to actively recruit gays and lesbians, are limp Dick Emery imitations that no one under forty-five is going to get. In the same pink and fluffy Sun-speak vein, any out gay male celebrity, regardless of their demeanour, is instantly given a new first name - ‘Camp’.

Then there’s Sun gossip columnist Victoria Newton’s creepy endless ‘Gay-O-Meter’ obsession with comedian David Walliams. Every time he’s photographed socialising with a woman the meter reads STRAIGHT (coloured blue). Every time he’s photographed with a bloke it goes into GAY (coloured pink). I thought that the whole point of gossip columnists was that they got out more.

But hang on a minute. Isn’t socialising with women girly and ‘gay’? Isn’t drinking with your male mates (or, for that matter, going fishing) something that a proper bloke is supposed to do? Isn’t the Sun actually queering things rather than straightening them out?

In fact, at the risk of it exploding in your face, that Gay-O-Meter should be turned on the Sun itself - a newspaper that is nowadays just a daily edition of girly gossip rag Heat magazine with some news about especially vain celebrities who happen to play sport at the back. A recent Sun item revealed how Man United were remodelling their player’s changing rooms and lockers to ‘accomodate their manbags’ which apparently are full of ‘more cosmetics than their WAGs’.

There is though a difference between Heat magazine and the Sun: there’s much more queer sex in the Sun. Point the Gay-O-Meter, if you dare, at the Sun’s agony aunt section with its daily ‘lesbian lust’ confessions and ‘am I gay?’ letters (not written, I hasten to add, by their TV critic). Illustrated with photo-porn novel strips of naked women and men with equally desirable, equally undressed bodies getting into messy love triangles and even messier threesomes of every possible permutation. Or all those ‘Footie Studs in Sordid Roasting Vid Scandal!’ (see centre pages for full colour spread) news stories.

The Sun is obsessed with ‘camp’ and ‘gayness’ for the same reason telly is - because popular culture is. The reason it’s so conflicted and confused is partly because of its own very recent past as an out-and-out queerbashing daily, and partly because the expensively educated people who now edit the Sun, most of whom I’m sure have lots of gay friends and even more camp straight friends, are worried about being sussed by the ‘chav’ readers they condescend to (‘chav’ is a favourite Sun word). It doesn’t appear to occur to them that their readers’ attitudes might have changed more than their own.

Then again, perhaps the Sun is so confused because it’s being doing too much spinning around in sequins. I can reveal that according to ‘sources close to the Sun’ they recently all went on a ‘team-building’ weekend in some camp seaside resort. The team-building task? Ballroom dancing.

I wonder if their TV critic’s team won?

Elvis died 30 years ago today but this ‘virile degenerate’ refuses to let us rest in peace

by Mark Simpson, (Independent on Sunday, April 2000)

Elvis didn’t want to be black, he wanted to be Tony Curtis.

A natural blond, Memphis’ belle boy dyed his hair in imitation of his 50s idol’s shiny black pompadour and continued tinting it that unnatural-supernatural blue-black colour until the very end (though later it was probably merely to hide the grey). Even those virile sideburns, which by the early Seventies seemed to be bracketing the world, were deceivingly dyed too.

I know this is a shocking, indecent thing to bring up, and not just because of the way Tony Curtis’ ‘hair’ looks now. We like to think of Elvis as rock’s Unmoved Mover, The King, the original, the alpha and omega - the fount of all pop cultural sovereignty. ‘Before Elvis there was nothing,’ as John Lennon famously put it. In a world where popness has become the measure of everything, we’re all Elvis impersonators now - and we don’t want to think that we might be inadvertently ‘doing’ Tony Curtis.

As the parade of celebs who lined up for the premiere of the re-released, re-edited, re-mastered 1970 Vegas gig movie ‘Elvis: That’s the Way It is’ bears testimony, all the new pretenders want to be seen in His presence, even if it’s only a celluloid one. Maybe it’s just the PopStars in Your Eyes, but Elvis seems to keep on getting bigger while those that came after him keep getting smaller. Elvis was the first truly giant pop star created by post-war consumerism and it’s attendant media. Since then, shopping and looking have become everything, and Elvis has become the personification of the looking-glass world we inhabit now, a latter-day Narcissus who drowned in his own reflection (on his bathroom floor) - but granted immortality in a universe of surfaces and permanent (shallow) memory. ‘Elvis’ is Fame’s first name in an age when ‘fame’ is something we’re increasingly over-familiar with.

Perhaps this is why in Elvis’ face we can see an angelic/demonic premonition of the needy faces of so many of those stars that have come after: Tom Cruise, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Jim Carrey, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Diana, Jeffrey Dahmer. Elvis’ masculine androgyny and animal smartness seem even more modern today than when he launched his career. In footage of The King in action, all the male faces in the crowd - and many of the women - seem strangely frozen and meatish next to his, even when he is clearly half-paralysed by downers, the eyes all hooded and sleepy. As the lesbian Elvis Impersonator k.d. Laing observed: ‘He had total love in his eyes when he performed…’. It only makes his ‘total love’ all the more potent that when he sang, he didn’t mean it, or didn’t know what he meant, we are left to sort it out, like the swooning victims of a passionate but exquisitely, totally careless lover (which is the condition of human subjectivity in a mediated world).

Elvis the Lover is also however the archetype of the post-war male ‘Pervert’. Radiantly narcissistic and dramatically unable to negotiate his Oedipus Complex, he is the prime idolatrous icon of a decadent, post-patriarchal age. Again, he may not have invented virile degeneracy (Clift, Brando and Dean, whom he also imitated, have a prior claim) but he patented it. True, it may have been campy Liberace who was accused of being the ‘quivering distillation of mother-love’, but it was good ol’ boy Elvis-the-pelvis (and Liberace fan) who got away with it and in fact made it cool. Elvis, the beautiful boy who loved his mammy and almost forgot he had a daddy (as we did too: we always call him by his first name), the boy who desired to be desired so much he persuaded the whole world to eat him up, is the patron saint of the New Matriarchy.

Even today, twenty four years after his death, as we stumble into a century he never actually swung his hips in, Elvis the rock star, pop star, stand-up comedian and self-medicating Vegas showgirl remains the acme of the mediated male, and also of male desirability. Male love-me-tender passivity and vulnerability was endorsed and legitimised and transmitted by Elvis, helpfully preparing men for the (prone) role that consumerism had in store for them.

Tony Curtis fixation notwithstanding, Elvis really is ‘the original’, the template from which everything else is stamped, because he has become the ego-ideal of a mediated, ‘perverted’, dyed-sideburns culture. Since his death, through a process of global mourning and melancholia and constant re-runs and revivals, the lost lurve-object has been introjected into our collective Unconscious so completely that we don’t have to be lonesome tonight or tomorrow or in fact ever again. His absence has become an overwhelming presence.

Elvis really is alive. It’s just the rest of us that I’m not so sure about.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

This week British PM Tony Blair is finally handing over the reins of Government to former Chancellor Gordon Brown’s ‘big clunking fists’. Despite what they say about what big fists mean (big surgical gloves), it remains to be seen what exactly is under our Scottish premier’s kilt.

It won’t be until New Labour’s newly crowned king stands over the ventilation grill of the next General Election that Gordon will be revealed as either tossing a big fat caber of a mandate - or merely an embarrassing minority.

Tony Blair must be wondering where all the love went. Ten years on Tone, who once sported a poll so big that it caused a ‘landslide’, whose whopping majoritys made psephologists faint, is now largely reviled by voters and widely seen as Bush’s pussy.

New Labour hopes that good old Gordo will reignite the kind of passion that people once had for their party - and indeed there is some speculation on him calling an early election. My money however is on Brown proving, in the privacy of the polling booth, to be an immense disappointment.

Here’s a piece published just before his election in June 1997 which attempts to explain the fickleness of the electorate - with a final prediction about Mr Blair’s reputation that proved rather accurate. Even if it took ten years.

Cock au vote

by Mark Simpson

(Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, 1997)

Dame Democracy is a bit of a size queen.

Actually, she’s a lot of a size queen. The vital statistics she’s really interested in are not the size of the money supply or the rate of inflation, but the heft of a politician’s inflatable. All those graphs, statistics and ‘swingometers’ on election programs are trying to answer the only question that anyone’s really interested in: which candidate is hung like a baby’s arm?

And like a lot of size queens, Dame Democracy instinctively feels that men with faces like a bag of spanners are more likely to be packing a bigger monkey wrench. This is why we vote for men - and they usually are men - that you might be forgiven for thinking no-one, except the occasional bimbo with The News of the World’s telephone number and a cocaine habit to support, would lay if they were the last suit left standing at the office party.

Of course, there are exceptions: Kennedy was a looker and still made the Presidency of the United States. But the American public was swayed by the fact that his father had one of the largest penises in the American Underworld, and Jack’s encouraging habit of fucking everything that moved (including one or two things that didn’t, such as Cuba and Vietnam).

Nixon was a man who strutted around like the proud possessor of a real tonsil-teaser. Perhaps this is why he was elected in 1969. However, a special Senate Committee was set up to investigate the true dimensions of his masculine virtue, calling witnesses and threatening to sub poena certain ‘tapes’ which, it was rumoured, would reveal the ‘whole picture’ and the full extent of his naughtiness.

Exposed as a liar, Tricky Dicky spent the rest of his life in disgrace, proving that there’s nothing the public hates more than a pussy-teaser who doesn’t deliver in the luncheon-truncheon department. His successor, Gerald Ford, didn’t measure up either, despite the encouraging impression conveyed by his habit of losing his balance and falling forwards whenever he became excited.

President Carter, it goes without saying, had the smallest penis in the history of American democracy. Political scientists had to employ high-powered optical instruments to locate it. The American public was initially fooled by his lazy, self-satisfied Southern Drawl and his intimate knowledge of farming practises, but Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis soon revealed him for the short dick man he was.

So the US dumped Jimmy and plumped for Ronald ‘It’s Morning in America and I’ve got a woody’ Reagan whose virility was so enormous that it even promised to reach out into space, where it’s vast, hi-tech dome would protect America from penetration by Russian warheads, and eventually cow the Reds into submission. Which indeed it did. Even if it actually belonged to Nancy.

That his Republican successor was called ‘Bush’ was hubris indeed. Despite his reaming of Saddam in the Gulf War, it was inevitable that someone called ‘Slick Willy’ would force him to submit. By the same token, Dole was never in with a chance in 1996 as his name rhymed with ‘hole’.

The last British leader to sport a world-class weapon was Winston Churchill, a man who didn’t need to read foreign muck like Freud to understand what sucking on a Havana cigar could do for his public image. But then we lost an Empire and gained Clement Attlee, someone Churchill once described as ‘a harmless, penisless, grass-grazing creature in the clothing of a harmless, penisless, grass-grazing creature’.

Sir Anthony Eden lost his dignity up the Suez Canal in 1956 but his successor Harold Macmillan thought he knew what the public liked when he crowed that we’d ‘never had it so good.’ Even though he was a promisingly tall man with large feet, the punters decided that they had had it better, actually, and dumped him for Harold Wilson who smoked a big black pipe.

But Wilson suffered a foreign exchange crisis which shrank the ‘penis in his pocket‘ and eventually lost to Heath who had the biggest nose in British political history but who led us into an unwilling threesome with Europe and its garlicky vagina dentata. Happily, he was brought to his knees by the stalwart miners (stiffened no doubt by being raised on Attlee’s free school milk, which did much to ensure the full muscular development of the lower orders).

So Wilson won again, but suddenly cut himself off only two years into his term of office. Callaghan plugged the gap but despite palling around with the TUC big boys he never quite got over this psychological blow and was forced into the hands of Jeremy Thorpe and the Liberals who massaged his frail majority for him.

Little wonder then that he was no match for Margaret Thatcher, a woman with the largest penis since Winston, her idol. Indeed it is rumoured that her penis was Winston’s (which after his death had been pickled in a jar at Conservative Central Office for the day when England would need it to rise again).

But Thatcher proved that even in the greedy world of politics you can have too much of a good thing. The Poll Tax and EMU had nothing to do with her downfall. In-party jealousy over her gargantuan Hampton Wick was to blame. Excessive endowment, you see, can blow up in your face (see also Alan Clark and Michael Portillo).

To appease the humming-bird tendency and heal the rifts in the party, Maggie’s successor, John Major, was chosen precisely because, despite his bragging name, he possessed an even smaller penis than Jim Callaghan. After being trampled on for years by Maggie Stryker, Major was a man that the Tories could at last look down to.

That he managed to defeat Neil Kinnock, a bald Welshman with a large nose who played rugby is further evidence that size alone isn’t always the determining factor. Sometimes the electorate will choose a man with a smaller penis simply because he doesn’t have red pubes. Shape and symmetry also count for something. Despite a consensus amongst psephologists that Blair’s membrum virile is bigger than Major’s Minor, there does appear to be some anxiety as to the actual width and weight of his instrument and whether it is one of those nasty numbers that has an unexpected bend to the left.

Whoever Britain’s next Prime Minister is, and whatever the dimensions of his electoral tackle, it seems inevitable that Dame Democracy’s attitude will eventually echo that of Michelle, a tranny friend of mine who always crows about the size of her latest amour’s penis, only to announce, usually about a week later, that she’s no longer seeing him, saying: ‘Oh, I didn’t like ‘im anyway - ‘e ‘ad a really small dick.’

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Mark Simpson drops the Gay Bomb

by Mark Simpson

(Originally appeared, Salon.com April 23, 2004 as ‘Who’s the hunted now?’ in the same week that CBS aired controversial images of a dying Diana. Tonight the UK’s C4 ran a doc featuring less explicit images, despite emotional appeals by her sons Princes Harry and William, not to do so. This Sept sees the tenth anniversary of her death.)

In the seven years since she died in a high-speed car crash in a tunnel in Paris, the pictures of the bafflingly mangled black Mercedes that ferried Diana to her death have become almost as famous as its most precious passenger.

Looking at the pictures, snapped at night with flash photography (like many of the pictures of Diana), it’s difficult not to wonder at how such an expensive, glamorous, chauffeur-driven, bodyguard-accompanied limousine could end up such a shapeless mess — or how such a mess could have been a car at all, let alone such a famous one. To wonder how a limo whisking someone from the Paris Ritz could have turned so suddenly into a hearse. To wonder just how mangled the expensive, glamorous Diana was.

But of course, no matter how hard you look at the picture, you can’t see her — she has already been whisked off to the hospital where she would die soon after from “internal injuries” (something we know she had been suffering from for many years, and they were not caused by any car accidents). Until this week, Diana’s expiring body is literally obscene — “off scene” — in a way that much of her life was not.

Standing in for the totaled body of Diana, the wrecked Merc — the ultimate rubbernecking image — has somehow become a symbol not of prurience but of discretion. We all knew that pictures of a dying Diana in the back of the car were snapped by the paparazzi pursuing her moments after the impact, and that these landed on the desks of newspapers the next day. Until the CBS documentary about her death this week, no English-speaking publication or TV station has dared to show us the pictures. The media always has to navigate between catering to public curiosity and voyeurism, and on the other hand avoiding provoking the disgust of their audience — with themselves. “What kind of lady do you take me for?” is ever the response of Dame Public when they feel they haven’t been romanced enough before being given “what they want.” The public could not get enough of Diana — but after her death, they turned out to be as bulimic as the shy, awkward, exhibitionistic, sophisticated, vulnerable, feisty girl they voraciously consumed.

Unsurprisingly, the British press has been fairly unanimous in its condemnation of CBS. The left-liberal Guardian denounced the way CBS had plumbed “new depths of prurience”; the Daily Mail thundered on about the “ultimate betrayal.” Much of the media here, though, had few qualms about showing images of, say, mutilated Americans in Fallujah. JFK’s head has, of course, exploded on U.K. prime time more often than fireworks on the Queen’s birthday.

Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi al-Fayed, Diana’s consort that evening who also died in the crash, ordered his lawyers to write to CBS before the broadcast to make a “personal plea” stating, “We cannot imagine that CBS News would want to be the first enterprise to breach the collected understanding of the media based upon good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy.” Good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy are qualities that Mr. al-Fayed, the Pharaonic proprietor of Harrods and chief retailer of Diana conspiracy theories, is well known as exemplifying.

What is really remarkable is not that CBS showed these images but that these images have not been shown before, that for seven years we have been satisfied with the “discretion” of the mangled Merc in the “tunnel of death,” as empty as her womb (according to the doctor who famously testified at the British inquest that she wasn’t pregnant). Part of the reason why there are so many conspiracy theories is because people don’t want to let go of Diana or her “secret life.”

Diana, queen of the English-gossiping world in the last two decades of the 20th century, the celebrity princess, was anything but discreet herself (CBS was responding to rival NBC’s recent airing of tapes recorded by the princess talking about her marriage and confrontation with Camilla Parker Bowles in the early ’90s). Her life was a series of revelations, ever more dramatic and orchestrated, which left the British monarchy looking rather like her last ride. But this was part of the disavowal of her death that was engaged back in 1997. It was the paparazzi, you see, rather than our own appetite for her — and her appetite for us — that turned Diana the huntress into the hunted, and that ultimately killed her. “They” wouldn’t leave her alone! “They” afforded her no privacy! “They” hounded her to her death! “They” have no decency!

I remember standing with the crowds outside Westminster Abbey in the September sunshine in 1997 as the funeral service for Diana was being conducted. In the passion and the heat a lady fainted. One of the many news teams there began filming the collapsed woman. A posh middle-aged lady shouted out “Have you no decency at all! She’s not well!” As one, we all bristled at the camera crew, who quickly fled. Satisfied, we all went back to the private business of crying in front of the myriad other TV cameras.

There was also much talk after her death about how “the boys” — William and Harry — would not be exposed to the same treatment. And out of “respect to Diana” or rather the public outcry/self-disgust following her death, the boys have been off-limits for much of their adolescence. However, the boys are growing up (William is 21; Harry, 19), and the death of Diana and the collective guilt associated with it is receding into the past. Photos of William having his feet massaged at rugby matches by girlfriends and sharing ski lifts have made their way into the press despite protests from the palace. Most recently the world was ogling pictures of Prince William, heir to the throne, in snug Speedos at a water polo match.

The pictures are eerily reminiscent of some of the most famous images of Diana before her death — snapped on al-Fayed’s yacht in her bathing costume (allegedly after tipping the tabs off herself). Those shoulders, those long limbs, those cheekbones, those flashing teeth, that foggy, English, aristocratic skin. William is being offered to us by the media in almost as sexualized a fashion as his mother, even when taking part in something as innocent and boyish as a water polo match. Much discussion followed about whether tight Speedos and their “anti-grab” material flattered William or not — and whether his wearing them would increase sales. The same Google search that listed these stories also provided a link to a posting on a gay Speedo fan Web site where, on the basis of the tiny picture, someone deduced with scientific precision that William is averagely endowed (”if not smaller — though that may be an effect of temperature”).

Tawdry, slightly pervy speculation about the “crown jewels,” yes. But is it really so different from the more innuendo-based noises the respectable press had been full of?

Interestingly, CBS insisted that its pictures of dying Diana were “tasteful” and featured only her “head and shoulders.” The program also featured the French doctor seen attending to Diana in the pictures, assuring us: “I can tell you her face was still beautiful. She didn’t have any injuries on her face.” This is both reassuring and slightly disappointing. You don’t have to be J.G. Ballard to see that horror and glamour are closely intertwined.

Celebrities tend to lead car-crash lives, and if they also happen to have car-crash deaths then who can blame us if we want to slow down and take a good look?

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Mark Simpson probes Men’s Health and finds it in painful denial (originally appeared on Guardian Unlimited)

Isn’t it about time Men’s Health, the world’s biggest-selling ‘men’s lifestyle’ magazine, came out to itself?

I couldn’t get to sleep the other night and so resorted to flicking through last month’s UK issue: I find the pictures of semi-naked men’s perfect, sweating muscles and the droning narcissistic hypochondria of the copy in this notorious metromag strangely soothing.

Then I happened across a five page cringemakingly earnest article about ‘heteropolitans’ (complete with a deathly serious ‘Am I heteropolitan?’ questionnaire), which MH wants us to believe have replaced metrosexuals. Apparently metrosexuals were too gay and too vain. HETEROpolitans on the other hand are just perfect: they’re really, really hetero, really attractive, really buffed, really rich, really stylish and really successful. What’s more they also find the time to be really great husbands and dads, and are not in the least bit gay, vain, or even single. Did I mention that they’re not gay already? And guess what? Men’s Health readers are all goody-two-shoes ‘heteropolitans’!

Now this single, childless, beer-bellied bum-bandit REALLY couldn’t get to sleep.

Who do they think they’re kidding with this guff? Their mother? Men’s Health, with it’s front page pin-ups of studly six-packed shirtless men and pages and pages obsessive-compulsive advice on how to get the perfect pecs/skin/low-fat soufflé has long been one of the most nakedly metro of the men’s metromags. You might be forgiven for thinking that the only questionnaire MH needs to run is: ‘Am I Gay? Or Just Bisexual?’

It looks like we’ll have to wait a while for that one. Of course most of its readers are not card-carrying homos like me (though most of them probably have a Boots Storecard). Or closeted. Or even particularly bisexual. Though I’d take a wild guess that a fair percentage of them are. But even the majority hetero readers of MH and other men’s shopping and gyming ‘men’s lifestyle’ mags are not that hetero – they’re clearly metro. Even if MH is in massive denial about this.

The prissy pretence that that any suggestion of gayness is utterly inconceivable between their pristine pages can lead to hilarious results: such as the recent MH sex guide which encouraged readers to get in touch with the hidden pleasures of their prostate gland by ‘getting your girlfriend to massage it for you with her finger’. Or maybe your boyfriend could do it with his penis? (In fact, it’s MH and consumerism in general that is really ‘massaging your prostate’, no vaseline.)

I haven’t been exactly what you’d call a devoted reader over the years (the UK edition of MH was launched in 1995), I tend to dip in when I’m feeling in need of masochistic motivation at the gym or just some eye-candy, but I don’t recall MH always being so comically keen to insist on its Totally Het credentials. Yes, like almost all men’s glossies, the copy didn’t openly acknowledge any of its readers might be homosexual, bisexual, bi-curious, or even just straight but-not-narrow. But then, with those covers it didn’t need to.

Obviously there’s been a rethink at MH Towers. MH is published by Rodale, an American-owned company and I suspect they’ve been influenced by all that mendacious ‘menassance’ marketing twaddle in the US last year in which manly manliness and old-time real-guyness supposedly made a comeback knocking that faggy metro back into the closet ‘Reclaim your manhood – go shopping for moisturiser in a Hummer’, that kind of thing. Maybe this faux-macho Hummersexual over-compensation works in God-fearing, Bush-voting, fag-baiting America – after all, as Gore Vidal once observed, Ernest Hemingway was a joke that only America couldn’t get – but it just looks as camp as a row of camouflage print tents over here. When it doesn’t come across just plain creepy.

Every month gets more surreal in the flawlessly worked-out world of MH. In addition to the usual advice on how to achieve the most desirable body on the dancefloor, the May issue of MH includes an oh-so butch ‘Spartan warrior workout’ based on the Chippendale epic ‘300’, random expressions of disgust at male homosexuality in the Dining Out section, and a ‘welcome aboard’ piece on the Contributors Page in which the editor chastises a new boy from Total Film for spending too much time reviewing films ‘in darkened basements with other men’.

Not to worry though lads, nothing queer about him: he’s a fan of Rocky movies (I kid you not) ‘We’re now ensuring he spends as much time in daylight and in the company of women as possible,’ smugly assures the – rather gay and grey looking – editor. Which means, I guess, that he won’t be spending much time in the gym. Or reading Men’s Health.

After taking rather a lot of paid advice from MH over the years, I have some advice for them I’ll offer gratis. The editorial staff at MH should really give some thought to all those nasty stress hormones released into the bloodstream by having to live a lie, and the terrible things they do to complexions, hair and muscle tone.

Not to mention looking absolutely bloody ridiculous by being so nancy about mansex and so coy about something as natural and irrepressible as good old male vanity.

Especially when your business is built on it.

© Mark Simpson 2007