MARK SIMPSON .com

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

By Mark Simpson

(OUT, Feb 2007)

‘You like to be beat again?’ asks the gruff, naked former Red Army soldier. ‘I do very gently this time.’ Sweating profusely, I turn my back to him and he begins expertly working me over.

I visited my first Russian bath-house, in Tallin, Estonia, capital of the rapidly Westernizing Baltic country and I nearly didn’t leave. By the time I finally did, I was a wraith of wrinkles and covered in an alarming, stinging, if cleansing rash - from being whipped with a Christmas tree by totally starkers Russians high on beer and pigs ears.

I was also covered with a conviction that we in the West have forgotten how to be comfortable in our own naked skin.

The banya, or Russian sauna, is as central to Russian culture as vodka, poetry and passionate friendship. Nearly half the population of Tallin, capital of Estonia, is Russian descent and speaking. Independent since the early 90s, Estonia still has a strong Russian legacy, though one that is rapidly being erased in the rush to embrace the West and forget the immediate past. Tallin is a popular destination for cruise liners and British stag parties looking for cheap booze and leggy strippers and the simple, purifying pleasures of the banya are fading fast - there is now only one banya left in Tallin.

I however was looking for naked sweaty backslapping Russians - though only for comradely, purifying purposes you understand. And I found them at Tallin’s last banya.

I was taken there by my buddy and banya enthusiast Steve Kokker, a Canadian turned Tallin resident (director of a remarkable and touching film about Russian military cadets called ‘Kameraden’), After undressing and showering in the (open, non-compartmentalised) wet area, we encountered a group of bollock-naked shaven-headed middle-aged Russians, most of whom looked as if they’d had a hard if quietly dignified life. They were instantly welcoming and friendly despite the language barrier and despite - or perhaps because of - the total lack of clothing.

One, a 69-year-old wounded infantry veteran of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary who looked twenty years younger, showed me the shrapnel scars on his legs: ‘We all disagreed with it, but we had no choice’. Steve translated for me the low, impressively butch Russian sounds. Many patrons were replete with what looked like homemade, borstal tattoos. Learning that I was a newbie, they extolled the benefits of the banya: ‘It will keep you young.’ ‘It will keep you fit.’ ‘You will not lose your strength in bed.’ Their lean, rangy bodies were the most persuasive argument.

Sharing their smoked pigs ears and warm Russian beer with us, they began arguing vehemently over how long I, as a Banya ‘virgin’, should spend in the steam room and what I should be whipped with first, the white birch twigs? or the juniper? or perhaps the nettle bush? (whipping with forestry is part of the banya experience - it is thought to cleanse the skin, and perhaps also the soul).

They finally agreed on the correct procedure and led me into the steam room - much hotter than any of the Nordic or Turkish saunas I’d experienced. The heat was almost solid. I tried to hold my breath rather than risk scorching my lungs. About twenty naked men were seated on the tiers of benches. Several of them were being whipped with branches by other men, their sweat spraying everywhere. Including, before I could close it, my mouth. Some were talking animatedly, some staring grimly ahead, mutely enduring the heat. Occasionally someone ladled water onto the hot stones, which instantly vaporised into hissing heat.

Trying to impress, I sat about half way up - after having been advised to sit near the bottom. After about five minutes shifting uncomfortably on the scalding wooden bench, (many banya regulars sit on special ‘padjopnik’, or ass-pads) I was dripping like a spatchocked chicken. Then I was led me to the ice-cold plunge pool and more or less pushed in . ‘It is good for circulation!’ they laughed. ‘If it doesn’t stop it altogether!’ I gasped.

Back in the steam room initiators decided I was ready to be whipped. It was agreed that I would first be lashed with white birch tree branches (the birch is sacred in Russia - once a country of forest-dwellers). I turned my back, leant forwards a little and thought of England. I don’t know whether being whipped is purifying, but I can tell you it certainly clears your sinuses. It’s a little like being dragged through a hedge backwards. After the onslaught stopped and I hadn’t flinched I felt that I had passed some test.

A little later, I let someone whip me with juniper leaves. This did hurt - like being caught naked in a blizzard of pine needles. Actually, it was being caught naked in a blizzard of pine needles. After less than a minute of this the Hungary invasion vet intervened and called a halt: ‘This is too much for your first time,’ he said. I didn’t argue.

At this point a stag party of ten or so young British males turned up at the banya, obviously a ‘real Russian banya’ was on their heavily programmed itinerary, squeezed between lapdancing clubs and driving a rusty T34 ex-Soviet tank. They looked pallid and puny and ill at ease in their own bodies next to the Russian regulars - and terrified by the nudity and the whipping, keeping their towels tightly wrapped around them, eyeing the swinging Russian dicks with alarm. This was altogether too real and, ironically, male for the stag party. I stuck close to my new Russian friends, hoping to be mistaken for a Russian myself.

I noted with some pleasure that none of them endured the heat of the sauna for more than a few seconds, even sitting on the lowest bench, and none of them submitted to the ritual of the birch. No more than about 20 minutes after they arrived they were shepherded out and onto the next stop on their itinerary. Then no doubt back to the safety of the UK and corporate gyms with their changing rooms within changing rooms, cubicle showers and ‘Swimwear Must be Worn At All Times’ signs.

A well-preserved 50 year-old Russian with piercing blue eyes, who sported the most heavily tattooed and most formidable body there, and whom Steve and I both wanted to believe was an ex-con, was determined to use a large nettle bush on me. Repeatedly and eagerly he enquired, eyes shining, if I was ‘ready’. ‘He’s very keen to have you bend over and make you feel that stinging sensation,’ translated Steve, almost without smiling.

Eventually the Hungary vet intervened again, announcing that I’d had enough for my first visit, and that besides, the nettles would stop me sleeping (apparently they stimulate the nervous system, like a Russian peasant version of crystal-meth).

Nettle Man looked dejected, and muttered something before sloping off.

‘What did he say?’ I asked Steve.

‘He said he will be here ready for you next time.’

© Mark Simpson 2007

By Mark Simpson (Arena Homme Plus, Spring 2007)

The American Dream has turned into a nightmare. Count the shudders and the sweats in reel time: Bush. Iraq . Guantanamo Bay . Global Warming. Iran . Tom Cruise. Pop a Nytol or three with a glass of warm milk and put on ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and regress to a happier, more Technicolor dreamtime.

Once the lean, shining beacon of freedom and aspiration, as innocent and happy-go-lucky as Dorothy’s freckles, now lumbering, flak-jacketed, trigger-happy, and yet terrifyingly impotent, America is deeply unpopular. After the twister of the War on Terror the Statue of Liberty has been replaced by an effigy of the Wicked Witch of the West.

America’s triumph in the Cold War and the rapid globalisation/Americanisation that followed has, with irresistible hubris, undone the American Imperium. Everyone is American now so no one needs America any more - so Yankee Go Home. Russian President Putin’s widely-reported recent speech attacking the US ’s arrogance encapsulated this sentiment: ‘the United States ,’ he said, ‘has overstepped its borders in every way.’

All this is as obvious and objectionable as America ’s obesity problem. Except for one small detail: It isn’t true.

Or at least, it’s only half the story. For all it’s troubles, the American Dream is anything but dead. Much of the world may say it hates America now, but really its heart still belongs to Uncle Sam - it will still pay top dollar to dress up in the lineaments/linenments of the American Dream - as the global triumph of classy Yankee dream-merchants Ralph Lauren shows, this Spring opening up not one but two major new stores in Moscow itself (and perhaps providing the real reason for Putin’s outburst).

Meanwhile, as part of the Yankee rag-trade pincer-operation on the global psyche, Abercrombie & Fitch, purveyors of the frattish American Wet Dream is building its own overseas Empire, opening its first international flagship store in Europe - on Saville Row, London, home of the bespoke tailor, the place where the British Establishment has gone for hundreds of years to have its inside leg measured. To rub our noses in it, A&F have erected huge billboards of towering god-like Yankee models flaunting their abs and pecs at dumpy London pedestrians shuffling past at crotch level.

At a couple of fashionable strokes, American cultural imperialism has knocked down the Berlin Wall again and humiliated the British Empire Suez-style. Not bad for something as dead as a Norwegian Blue. Hollywood may be in terminal decline, and this year’s Oscar Ceremony a glorified AA meeting, but American men’s fashion brands are still exporting the American way of life, liberty and snappiness.

Perhaps that’s because Ralph Lauren is the real Hollywood , or rather its merchandising wing. Born Ralph Lifshitz in 1939 in the Bronx this Jewish boy modelled his clothes on the black and WASP grainy High Summer Hollywood of his childhood: Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Gary Cooper - as is often the case in the world of images, his faux moneyed Yankee style supplanted the ‘real’ thing. Transformed from privilege into a polo shirt or a cable-knit jumper it was more democratic, more ‘American’. More saleable.

Memorably described by one fashion critic as ‘a white elephant covered in cricket bats’, Ralph Lauren wore the 1980s tied over its shoulders like a cashmere tennis sweater. RL’s cool, leisured classiness symbolised aspiration in the most sweatily ambitious and nakedly American decade. Ralph Lauren rapidly became the world’s first and most successful lifestyle fashion brand, a total, wraparound vision that everyone wanted to share. The Polo logo became the more tasteful, more international version of a Stars and Stripes lapel pin (in 1999 RL formalised its status by donating $13M to preserve the Star Spangled Banner). Today RL have sales of nearly $4B, making it a behemoth covered in cricket bats. RL’s flagship store in Moscow ’s Tretyakovsky Passage, one of world’s most expensive shopping areas, will paint 8000 square feet of Mother Russia a Yankee shade of red white and blue. No wonder Putin is pissed off.

Mind, the Russians don’t seem to be as upset as the Brits, whose outraged protests forced A&F to reduce slightly the size of the body parts terrorising Saville Row. But this all seems to be part of the naughty A&F gameplan. ‘We’re shaking up the neighbourhood,’ a chirpy spokesperson explained to the press. ‘It’s going to be an extension of the irreverence of the brand into London . It’s going to be fun and we’re thrilled.’ What’s more, the store will be ‘just like our one’s in the US ‘ and the staff will be British ‘but look A&F.’

In fact, A&F are re-enacting in England itself a battle against dusty ‘Englishness’ that they have already won Stateside. Ironically, A&F was once almost the brand that RL sold itself as. Founded in 1892 as an excursion outfitter their clients included Katherine Hepburn and Ernest Hemingway. Elephant-bagging American Empire builder Teddy Roosevelt was one of their regulars.

After the 60s A&F went into decline - it was seen as ‘too square’ and ‘too English’ - and in 1988 were bought by The Limited Inc. who sexed it up, moved its target age down, and wrapped it n a mythical, all-American, 1950s, tanned, athletic boyishness as toothily innocent as it was knowingly tarty; in other words: ‘Weberist’ (Bruce Weber is A&F’s signature photographer). If RL is timeless High Summer Hollywood, A&F is endless Summer on Campus - plus MTV and webcams. RL is the America the world wants to go on safari with: A&F is the America that the world wants to party with.

With sales over $2B a year the A&F lifestyle has sustained unrivalled year-on-year levels of growth. A&F is catching up with RL. As if acknowledging this, RL recently opened a slightly A&F flavoured ‘Rugby’ chain of stores in the US . What’s more, the move into Europe is part of the transformation of A&F into an international luxury brand - once again threatening to tread on RL’s loafers.

For now though there’s plenty of room for both brands on the yellowbrick road of the Global High Street. Whatever they may think of America ’s actions, Dowdy Anti-Americanism isn’t, in the final reel, something that the world’s huddled masses actually want to wear. London will no doubt be a great, chest shaving, success for new Yankee imperialists A&F.

But one that will be dwarfed, I’m sure, by the shrieking, fainting, hair-pulling success of any store they open in that supposed capital of America-hating - Paris.
© Mark Simpson 2007

As BBC4 are having a New York Week, and given my recent piece dissing musicals (or at least the hairy-chested Rogers & Hammerstein variety), I thought it appropriate to post this piece from a few years back about a ‘musical’ visit to New York.

On the Town

by Mark Simpson (First appeared in Attitude, July 1998)

‘Yoo can’t stop the moo-zik/No-body can stop the moo-zik/Take the cold from snow/Tell the trees “don’t grow?/Tell the wind “don’t Blow?/’coz  it’s ee-zee-er to doo!’

I’m singing a cappella, out of tune and fighting against a Pet Shop Boys ditty whining and clattering on the PA in this tiny, pre-Stonewall retro New York fag bar with the fabulously cheesy name ‘IC Guys’, the big show-stopping, pull-out-all-the-stops-and-wear-something-glittery big finale number from Nancy Walker’s epic Village People movie ‘Can’t Stop the Music’.

I’m trying to infect my native New Yorker friend Glenn Belverio, the artist formerly known as Glennda Orgasm, with my out-of-towner enthusiasm for that 1980 box-office bomb and show why it is my cultural compass for my first visit to New York since the Eighties. 

He’s not impressed.  In fact, he’s looking at me with a textbook rendition of ‘askance’, with a side-order of wariness and concern, and says dismissively, ‘It’s just a bad movie Mark’.  I put this down to my singing, and embark on an intellectual exposition instead.

‘Look,’ I plead, trying to ignore the skinny, queeny barman-cum-go-go-dancer (I told you this place was small) who is coquettishly counting his ribs for us, ‘��?Can’t Stop the Music��? is a tour-de-force!  The “music” that “can’t be stopped” is clearly desire - something that vibrates in everyone, choreographing them to its own plan.  One that has little rhyme or reason.  The opening number alone, with it’s kooky collage of the technicoloured, steamy street-life of Manhattan - roller-skating, boom-boxing, jogging in leg-warmers or just showing off their baskets - is so exhilarating, so chaotic, so… VITAL.  Even the giddy contrast between the high camp of the big production numbers and the low-rent bathos of the terrible script is movingly apposite to…..’

‘Yeah right,’ interrupts Glenn, staring openly in disbelief at our skinny stripper who is now jiggling his bones in time to Sylvester’s ‘Mighty Real’ like something escaped from a Ghost Train ride, wearing nothing now but a thin, lascivious, slightly vengeful smile (in any other bar in New York no one would even see him; here you can’t avoid him).  Glenn finally manages to tear himself away from the Skeletor harpie, ‘Whatever.  All I can remember is that I wasn’t able to sit through that film.’

‘But, but,’ I burble, disappointed that Glenn of all people - the Glenn who once told me that ‘old movies are all I have’ - isn’t with me on this one, ‘the “YMCA��? Busby Berkeley pastiche!  With the young men falling into the pool like a line of muscular dominoes!  Even more perfect when you learnt that apparently they were actually handpicked serving US Marines loaned by the US Navy who had been led to believe that this musical would be a great recruiting sergeant….’  But Glenn isn’t paying any attention.

So I try another tack.  ‘Well, my other New York reference point is “On the Town��?, 1949, starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as sailors determined to have a good time on 24hrs shore-leave in Manhattan – the energy, and sheer… SPUNK in that film is breathtaking: ‘Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk, is a wonderful town/the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down’

Glenn winces at my rendition and looks even more bored.  ‘Just because it’s got sailors in it.’ 

‘But,’ I protest, ‘Gene Kelly’s bell-bottomed thighs are historic.  An exquisitely curvaceous, “cheeky” counterpoint to the rigid phallicism of the Forties Manhattan skyline…’  But Glenn has decided I’m being ironic.

But I’m not.  Actually, like IC Guys, I’m being nostalgic.  I feel that both those films capture something about New York that has been lost; something that made New York the centre of the world in the forties and again in the seventies - before the election of a fifties film star as President in the eighties saw the West Coast eclipse the East, private spaces eclipse public ones, safe sex eclipse the dangerous variety, and shallow visual values eclipse lyrical ones.  Until that time New York – the City of cities - was synonymous with a crazy, edgy exuberance: otherwise known as ‘song and dance’ or just ‘life’.  As ‘The Sound of the City’ the opening number in Nancy’s Village People meisterwork has it:  ‘Listen to the sound of the city/Listen to the sound of my town…’. 

Even this much was clear to me as a whiny sprog visiting New York in the early seventies with my suffering parents on holiday from my home town of (Old) York, England.  The smell, the heat, the dirt, the noise, the steam escaping bafflingly from the street, the perpetual motion of six million driven souls and the giddy grandeur of the sky-scrapers.  New York was literally a city where you couldn’t crick your neck enough trying to take it all in.  Everywhere you looked, including heavenwards, there was human vanity.  In hindsight I can see that New York was the key to the Seventies: funk, disco, Kojak, punk, leg-warmers, ‘The Godfather’, bankruptcy, bisexuality, hip hop, the last gasp of liberalism and, of course, the band who changed the world or at least persuaded it to wear leather chaps more, The Village People, all had their origins here.  New York even invented the end of the seventies - AIDS.  But back then, both me and the seventies were in short trousers and it was a confusing, terrifying experience for a small-town boy, perhaps all the more so because it bore clearly and garishly the traces of something rarely seen in suburban Yorkshire.  Passion.

A quarter of a century on, I’m ready to embrace that confusion and passion - at least for a couple of days.  But New York, damnit, has gone and cleaned up its act.  As everyone knows, the drugs, the disease, the debt, the crime, the scandal and vice are all on the wane.  The Disney Corporation has been stomping all over Manhattan, flattening Times Square, biting the heads off street hustlers and scaring away more interesting monsters.  Everyone is now very sensible in New York.  Even the junkies have pension plans and gay leaders like Larry Kramer and his earthly representative Michaelangelo Signorile call for gay men to abandon the messiness of promiscuity, public sex, and shameful shags with straight men, and go for hygienic, orderly, proud gay monogamy (i.e. celibacy).

At the gay nostalgia bar, IC Guys, Glenn and I are joined by the decadent novelist and connoisseur of bohemia Bruce Benderson, Camille Paglia’s early inspiration and the author of a book advocating downward mobility called ‘Toward a New Degeneracy’.  He thinks that artists have a duty to live with the people of the streets (a duty his yen for street hustlers makes less onerous a burden than for most).  Bruce wears a placid, congenial expression, but appears to have a cheeky smile perpetually playing around his eyes.  I complain to him that Glenn is blind to the genius of ‘Can’t Stop the Music’.

‘Oh,’ he says, matter-of-factly, ‘there is no question but that it is a MARVELLOUS movie.  Its surrealism borders on high art.  It conveys the absurdity of life very well.’ Bruce has a voice which seems to be perpetually threatening, albeit ironically, to add ‘Mary’ to the end of each sentence but never actually does.

‘I love you, Bruce,’ I say, hugging him and directing gloating looks at Glenn.  ‘But what,’ I ask, disentagling myself and studying him carefully, ‘about ‘��?On the Town?��?’

Bruce’s eyes cloud slightly, almost imperceptibly.  ‘Well now, “On the Town��? is more… difficult.  I was never much of a fan of Gene Kelly’s dancing.  I’ve always preferred the French school myself.  I have little time for that, that…’ Bruce tails off.

‘Clean-cut, large-thighed vigorous virility?’ I offer.

‘Precisely.’

‘Ah, I’m afraid I have little time for anything else,’ I confess.  ‘I wish it weren’t so.  But then, that’s what a Northern English public school education does to you.’

In an attempt to rescue me from my lack of sexual imagination, Bruce whisks me and Glenn off to one of his favourite haunts, an Upper Upper West Side Latino hustler bar: ‘One of the last, sadly.’ he laments during the long, long Yellow Cab journey.  ‘There used to be many more.  But the clean-up of Manhattan and the pillage of Times Square has banished them.’ He sighs folornly.  Inevitably, Bruce now searches for illicit, lyrical, messy sex on the Internet.  He’s just written a book about cybersex, which is only being published in French.  He researched it with a video camera atop his computer monitor.  ‘I spent weeks sitting naked in front of that computer having a whale of a time before I realised that it wasn’t only the people I was talking to on the Net who could see me.  I really should have drawn my curtains.’  (Of course, the internet has been another kind of ‘curtains’ for public sex in NY.)

As we stagger out of the cab and into the hustler bar, I mention out loud that Glenn walks like a puppet who has had two strings cut.  ‘Do I really?’ he demands of the assembled group.  Silence.  ‘Well,’ he says, resignedly, ‘I guess it must be true.  Omigod!  I walk like a puppet whose strings have been cut!  Not one but TWO!’

‘Well,’ I say, putting on my best talk show voice, ‘In our own way, we all walk like puppets who’ve had two strings cut.’

‘Oh, SHUT UP!’

In another hustler bar, a grubby little shack perched on some disused dockfront, there turns out to be rather more hustlers than punters.  Which is especially bad news on a Friday night when a working boy is hoping to pay off the subs he’s chalked up during the week.  Four of them in their skimpy shorts and press-on goatees stand in a line on the small stage facing the oval bar in the centre, go-going in their decidedly un-clean-cut Latino way.  Everyone recognises Bruce and they are clearly happy to see him; hardly surprising since he is probably single-handedly responsible for keeping this place open. 

One in particular, a short, bleached-blond number, exquisitely beautiful, hops off the stage and prowls towards us in that swishy-but-not-faggy cat-like - highly ‘musical’ - walk that Latino boys can do, something very alarming bouncing underneath his shorts, tenting them out.  He smiles easily and convincingly as he allows us to pull his waistband out far enough to get a glimpse of his salami-sized penis, which is somewhat purplish as it is tied off at the base.  ‘Oh,’ exclaims Glenn nonchalantly, ‘that’s where one of my puppet strings got to.’

We stuff some dollar bills down the boy’s waistband and he smiles even more easily and convincingly.  As he rhumba-sashays off back to his perch the back of his neck passes under my nose and I smell a sudden, all-enveloping sweetness.  I ask Bruce about this.  ‘Yes, Latino hustlers have that nutmeggy smell even when they’ve been on the streets for days,’ he explains authoritatively.  ‘Whereas white boys, well, they just have this really acrid, ammonia smell.’

‘Is it diet or temperament?’ I ask, as if we were discussing a breed of dogs.

‘Oh, I think diet has a lot to do with it,’ ventures Bruce, scanning the chorus line.  ‘But,’ he adds, ‘maybe Catholicism has something to do with it too.  The marvellous thing about Southern Catholics is that they have very poor memories.  They forget.  Which always makes the next morning so much easier.’

‘Ah yes,’ I concur.  ‘There’s nothing more off-putting than eau de regret.  Which is why I should really get into the Latin groove instead of the anglo-celtic schtick I’ve got going.  I have enough ammonia in my life to clean kitchens with.’

Glenn, who is a little worse for wear now, is pointing at one of the hustlers on stage.  ‘HE’S NO LATINO!’ he shouts.  ‘HE’S JUST SOME MUSCLE MARY FROM CHELSEA WITH AN INSTANT TAN!’  (Glenn is very proud of his own authentic Latino heritage.)

Another Bruce we’ve been expecting, the Canadian film-maker Mr LaBruce, someone who definitely isn’t in denial about his love for camp movies, finally shows up.  ‘Are you Catholic, Bruce?’ I ask him as he joins us.

‘Certainly not.  I’m of Celtic Protestant stock,’ he says proudly, but won’t allow Mr Benderson and I to sniff him.  After a quick round of drinks, we bid our farewells to Bruce #1, leaving him happy as Larry in Latinoland.  Bruce #2 then whisks Glenn and me away to another hustler bar, one which he promises will be ‘less “Night of the Iguana��?’.

On the way there Glenn bursts out laughing and points at Bruce #2 who is trotting ahead of us: ‘Well, I may walk like a vandalised puppet, but Bruce walks like she thinks she’s Jean Shrimpton in platforms on Carnaby street wearing a big floppy hat!’  (I make sure that I walk behind everyone else.)

The second hustler bar isn’t quite so Latino.  More Northern European and black, with just a smattering of Hispanic.  As I’m talking to Bruce #2, one of the black dancers walks up to him and nonchalantly flops his penis in his pocket.  Bruce tips him ten bucks.  (Well, what else can you do?).

Much, much later, over blueberry and cream cheese blintzes in some SoHo diner, Glenn tells us he has a confession to make.  He looks at us anxiously.  ‘Promise not to laugh.  OK?’

‘Confess away, my child.’

‘OK.  Here’s the thing.  My Dad was a big fan of the Village People.  He even joined the YMCA.  And bought poppers.’  Glenn grimaces at the memory.  ‘I was very worried about him for a while.  What made it worse was…’  He tails off.

‘Yes, Glenn?’

‘He was in charge of a factory making uniforms.’

Bruce and I break our promise.  Loudly.

‘Yoo can’t stop the moo-zik….’

[Update: Glenn no longer walks like a marionette that has had two strings cut - it was probably the cheap martinis he was downing that night - and is no longer in denial about liking camp movies. Remarkably, he still returns my calls.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

Mark Simpson on how Jean Genet invented the internet (Independent on Sunday, June 2003)

`I had already wondered what would become of the meeting of a handsome young guard and a handsome young criminal,” wrote Jean Genet in his 1943 debut prison novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, penned while he was himself serving a life sentence as a persistent petty criminal, one that would only end when he received a State Pardon arranged by Jean Cocteau’s lawyer. “I took delight in the following two images: a bloody and moral shock, or a sparkling embrace in a riot of spunk and panting…”.

Well, you would Jean….

But then so would the rest of us, judging by contemporary popular culture’s obsession with bloody moral shock, sticky panting and general low-life passions, whether it’s an episode of the TV prison drama Oz, movies by Guy Ritchie, rap music by Eminem, or surfing for voyeuristic thrills on the net.

Genet’s famous 1950 short Un Chant d’Amour, released by the BFI for the first time on DVD tomorrow and the only film made by this most cinematic of literary talents, seems to be a visual exploration of Our Lady’s daydream. Set in a French prison, this silent, black and white 25 minute “porno” movie intended for sale only to rich homosexual private collectors, Un Chant d’amour now looks like one of the most influential modern films ever made. Or at least, one of the most visionary.

It’s well known that Chant d’amour influenced underground film and Queer Cinema directors such as Derek Jarman and Todd Haynes. However, the impact of Chant - and of the Genet sensibility it’s soaked in - goes much further and deeper, and is rather more, shall we say, perverse. In a twist that would no doubt have revolted him, Genet’s marginal sensibility, his outsider love for hoodlums, drag queens and low-life - and most of all, his passion for sweet-and-tender murderous hooligans - has become, albeit in spayed fashion, normal.

What happens in Chant? Very little - in fact, absolutely bugger-all by the standards of contemporary porn. Boredom and frustration reigns - and so does the desperate, itchy-but-lyrical eroticism that comes with seclusion, for both the imprisoned and the imprisoner. A listless prison guard happens to notice a bouquet of flowers being swung from a cell window, the neighbouring prisoner’s hand, extended between the bars, repeatedly trying and failing to catch it. He investigates, peering through spy-holes and witnesses one male prisoner after another masturbating in different fashions, some dancing frantically, some languorous on their bunks, some standing, some washing. Aroused, either by the scenes or the sadistic thrill of his powerful position, the warden grabs and rubs his own packet. Nearly half a century before everyone had a peephole in their bedrooms called the internet, Genet had envisioned a webcam, Big Brother world of alone-ness and voyeurism, mass separation and observation, tedium and fascination.

We see an older prisoner knocking on the wall, which is tattooed with graffiti and a huge phallus, trying to attract the attention of his younger neighbour who is seen jazz-waltzing with himself in a dirty vest with a face as tender as it is tough - anticipating by a few years Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, and by several decades the face that Colin Farrell wishes he had. The lad, as lads must, seems uninterested and continues jazz-waltzing with himself, caressing the tattoo on his shoulder. The older man, understandably, works himself into a frenzy, hugging and licking the wall, pressing his genitals against it. Finally he lights a cigarette, inserts a straw through a tiny hole, and blows smoke through it into the next cell. The boy studiously ignores this flirtation. The older prisoner withdraws, stubs out the cigarette. And begins the whole process again.

This time, as the straw probes, the lad responds, kneels at the wall close-eyed and open mouthed and receives the billowing white smoke, in what Jane Giles, author of Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and Cinema has described as “one of the most erotic scenes in cinema”. But it is the tattooed, impassive wall itself and its tight, unyielding hole that is the real star. Genet knows that romance - and even desire itself - is only really possible when it’s impossible (and is perhaps why the visual longing of Chant seems to anticipate so much advertising that puts the commodity - the jeans, the DVD player etc - in place of the wall). The only “sex” we see in Chant is very brief, shadowy glimpses of masturbation - and the erotic reveries of the prisoners and the guard, in the form of oddly chaste tableaux of longed-for but never realised clinches.

Although ostensibly made to excite 1950s homosexuals, Chant has nothing in common with contemporary gay porn which is all about brightly lit consummation; telephoto-lensed operations without anaesthetic which, oddly, end up showing nothing at all. Chant’s endless longing is arguably much more “obscene”. Even as recently as 1989 the film was banned by Hull City Council for being, in their own confused yet perhaps not so confused words, both “boring” and “shocking”.  (Which also happens to be a pretty good description of the condition of contemporary culture.)

None of the participants in this “gay film” were actors. Nor were any of them homosexual. Lucien Senemaud who played the young convict, was a lover of Genet, but he was also married (his wife didn’t seem to mind the relationship, especially after Genet bought them a house). The older prisoner was played by a Tunisian Montmarte baker and pimp with a family of eight children. In fact, the only true actor in Chant is the erect penis briefly glimpsed striking the wall - reportedly a stunt double belonging to a professional performer.

Authenticity was paramount for Genet, who, unlike most contemporary low- life merchants, was himself the real deal: an orphan raised by the French State who spent most of the first 40 years of his life in homes, borstals and prisons. Guy Ritchie, on the other hand, the “geezer” director who made a great play of the fact that many of the men in his lovingly-shot hoodlum movies were not actors but “real tough guys”, spent most of his youth in public schools and baronial homes. Nonetheless, a spayed version of Genet’s worship of beautiful bastards has become one of the ruling passions of contemporary culture.

The general life-sentence of solitary confinement depicted in Chant is not something that Genet felt great sorrow over. In his last TV interview in 1985, a year before he died, an heroic performance of scornful arrogance, he was asked by his earnest young interviewer, “Do you always feel apart - alone?”

“Yes,” he replied, matter of fact. “I’m apart now. You’re over there, I’m over here.”

“Does this not distress you?”

“Not at all. What would be distressing would be if there were no distance between me and you!”

In Chant, it’s only as the guard is walking away from the prison that the flowers swung between the windows are finally caught. But the guard, with his back to the prison, doesn’t see it

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

You can view the film and read a thoughtful review of it’s ‘gestures’ by John Calendo at the thinking onanist’s website Nightcharm

The February issue of Out carries a feature called ‘Speedophobia’ in which ‘Mark Simpson undresses the tortured relationship between American men and their swimwear’:

‘You may think them practical and sexy and iconic. You may consider them the single most perfect and pithy item of clothing ever designed for the male body. You may consider them the only thing to wear on the beach. You might even consider yourself slightly overdressed in them. But if you do, it’s probably because you’re gay. Or foreign. Speedos, otherwise known as “banana hammocks”, “marble bags”, “noodle benders”, and “budgie smugglers” are apparently as un-American as Borat’s body thong.

Speedos on a nongay beach are the surest way to earn yourself angry stares, abuse, and plenty of room for your beach towel. As a result, Speedos have in the United States become a badge of gay pride and exclusion—as overt homophobia declines, rampantly overt Speedophobia is bringing U.S. gays and Brazilians together, huddling together at the far end of the beach in their Lycra.’

Read about America’s ‘phalliban’ and general fear and loathing of snugly, briefly packaged male genitalia in full at Out.com

A doc on C4 last night called ‘Erotomania’, the third in a trio of programmes about ‘maniacs’ - the other two were ‘Egomania’ and ‘Pyromania’ - examined, in a gratifyingly voyeuristic fashion, the ‘delusional romantic preoccupation with a stranger’ often ‘of a higher social status’ that defines the erotomaniac.

The piece below (’Love thy neighbour’) seems a pretty clear-cut erotomaniacal self-diagnosis.

Problem is, I also find the other manias, ego- and pyro-, strangely attractive too.

Is there a word for someone so peculiar, so greedy, so shameless, they see themselves in everything? However pitiful? However anti-social? However pathological?

Oh, yes. I remember now. It’s called a ‘writer’.

Love Thy Neighbour

by Mark Simpson (Originally appeared in Attitude, 1998)

Relationships are difficult things to maintain in this day and age. Especially in the metropolis, where everyone’s too busy with their own life to find the time to share it with someone else.

But not for me. I’ve been successfully seeing someone for years. We recently had our tenth anniversary. And you know, I feel so proud of Us and so superior to those sad singlies out there who just can’t get it together. We have the perfect relationship. We never row. We give each other space. We don’t get jealous or possessive. We don’t ask too many questions. In fact, you could say that we live our own lives. And yet we always look to one another when one of us feels lonely or a bit blue.

The secret of our success? Well, apart from the fact that we’re obviously just much luckier, happier, less dysfunctional people than most, I think it has something to do with the fact that, like a lot of modern couple we don’t live together, and aren’t always round each other’s flats, even though we’re just a stone’s throw apart.

Or maybe it’s something to do with the fact that we don’t know one another’s names. Or that we’ve never spoken. Or that we’ve never had sex. Or that we’ve never actually met.

The man in my life is my neighbour.

Looking back, it’s easy to see now that we were meant for one another. We have so much in common! For instance: we have the same postcode and we shop at the same newsagent. Spooky, eh? But the real clincher, the incontrovertible evidence that we were meant to share our lives is that he lives directly across the road from me on the same floor.

Our relationship wouldn’t be possible if we lived in a working-class neighbourhood. Common people have these anti-social things called curtains in their windows. They treasure their privacy. It makes them feel middle class and semi-detached. Middle class people, on the other hand, like to feel aristocratic and landed, or at least a bit bohemian. They let their windows stare arrogantly and unblinking because they want to affect disinterest in the opinion of the world, and don’t want to acknowledge that there might be other people living within voyeuristic distance of them, even when they’re training zoom lenses on their neighbours’ bedrooms themselves.

It took me a while to learn this class fact of British window life. When I first moved into this neighbourhood I used to draw my curtains, twitching them the way I’d been brought up to when I wanted to spy on the neighbours. If I was actually caught at the window staring at someone—like, for instance, my silent movie boyfriend across the road—I’d duck beneath the sill and then crawl out of the living room on all fours. Or I’d suddenly pretend to be trying to remove a minute mark on the window pane with my fingernail. But no longer. I’ve become naturalised upper middle class. I had my curtains removed and I stare at my neighbours in broad daylight, scratching my balls while they stare back picking their noses.

I only really have eyes for one neighbour, my see-through sweetheart directly opposite. Thanks to a happy combination of topography and sociology we have shared each other’s lives for the past decade. We’ve witnessed each other’s triumphs and traducements. We’ve redecorated at least three times. We’ve seen our middles thicken and our hair thin. We’ve eaten pizza in front of the telly together in our underwear.

And never a bad word—or in fact a word of any kind—exchanged. Although we’ve passed in the street many many times we’ve never actually met. This being London, I don’t think we’ve even looked one another in the eyes. The moment we see one another coming we become very interested in the pavement design or stoically fix our eyes on the middle-distance and walk quickly past holding our breath. In other words, we managed to incorporate some of the fun games into our relationship most people only get to play after they split up.

But yes, sometimes it hurts having to deny our love in this way. Sometimes I want to speak to him, to ask him his name, his star-sign, what kind of music he likes and why he bought that sofa. But I realise that it would be a mistake. Our love is conditional upon never knowing the answers to these questions. Even acknowledging that we know one another would be social disaster. Not least because if we ever spoke we’d have to put up curtains.

And then of course I have to think of his situation. He’s not ready to tell the world about Us. I think his family would find it hard to accept our relationship. And I suspect his girlfriend wouldn’t understand it either. People can be very narrow-minded and traditional, even in London. There’s so much prejudice directed at the love that dare not draw the curtains. People think that just because there’s a couple of panes of glass and a major road between you your relationship is somehow invalid, or not quite ‘normal’.

And before you accuse me of being a doormat here, let me just say that we both need our freedom: he has his girls and I have my boys. But when all’s said and done, we both know that these people we do hum-drum, silly things with, like talk and touch, will come and go and that it is mute, chaste Us that endures. (And besides, we both like to watch, if you know what I mean).

Anyway, I don’t fancy the guy. Please. Just because you spend ten years staring at someone in their living room doesn’t mean you find them attractive. Ask any ordinary, non-window mediated couple. Our relationship isn’t about sex; it’s about mutual respect, genuine admiration and a deeply shared fear of commitment.

Oh, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t tried flirting with others from my window, like a buzz-cut Rapunzel. I’ve even tried to catch the eye of TV game show presenter Les Dennis, who also lives on the other side of the road. But it isn’t the same. It doesn’t feel so special. Millions of others can watch him through glass in their living rooms and never get to speak to him. Plus, he’s a couple of doors down and I can’t see much of his flat.

Then there’s the guy with the odd floppy haircut and the beanpole body. For years I watched him come and go, fringe waving from side to side like one of those car-wash brushes after they stop spinning, and thought, ‘Oh, he’s a bit of a Bernard Butler clone.’ Then, one day, I saw him with a guitar case and realised that he actually was Bernard Butler. Which explained those anti-social shutters on his windows. Only a pop star would stoop to such a thing.

So I stick with my pane pal across the way. If only because I see more of him than anyone else. But I have to say, I don’t approve of his new girlfriend. She looks the kind that shops at Ikea.

In the blinds department.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007