MARK SIMPSON.com

by Mark Simpson (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 oddly 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 a spayed fashion, the condition of the mainstream.

What happens in Chant? Very little. 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 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-dancing with himself in a dirty vest with a face as tender as it is tough - anticipating by a few years Marlon Brando’s Stanley, 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 and of the commentary on the new DVD 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 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; operations without anaesthetic which, oddly, ends up showing nothing at all. Chant’s longing is arguably 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 turns out 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 his 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 the ruling passion 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 peformance 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

I don’t blame Keane for being furious. I’m positively seething myself that no one invited me either.

‘Stars in sick orgy’ (strapline to the print version - doesn’t appear online)

Another example of how sporno is fast becoming porno - or is porno becoming sporno?

Tabloid newspapers in the UK can’t get enough of these faux-outraged ‘roasting’ stories about the ’scandal’, ‘disgrace’ and ’sickness’ of several fit young professonal footballers sharing one consenting ‘busty female fan’, simultaneously. Illustrated, if possible - as in this case - with tantalisingly blurry shots from the (no doubt dodgily acquired) home-made porno movie.

Why? It sells. The tabloid readers, male and female - but particularly male - love it. It delivers to them the realisation of the fantasy at the heart of so much sport today: the sports star as porn star. Porn that is, like team sport itself, every so slightly homoerotic. This is after all, porn involving rather more sporting pricks than groupie pussy - in this case, three or four footballing studs on one accomodating lady, and some male spectators, cheering them on and checking out the (decidedly male-rich) action.

It’s not exactly ‘gay’ - but it’s not terribly ’straight’ either.

But I wouldn’t want to suggest that these footballers were any different to most lads today. They seem quite normal to me. The footballing lads are probably recreating the ’straight’ gang-bang many-penised porn increasingly popular with young men - and which more and more features, like most hetero porn, attractive and athletic young men instead of merely a fat hairy penis attached to a fat hairy faceless fuck as in the past.

Footballers are certainly not short of enough groupies to go around - but the deluge of these tabloid ‘roasting’ stories would indicate that they often prefer to share.

And why not? If you spend all that time training and playing and showering and partying with fit mates then why shouldn’t you want to seem them in action? And film them on the job as well? Especially when they’re so keen to show off.

All things considered, it’s just as well that male bisexuality and bi-curiousness ‘doesn’t exist’.

Ooo-la-la! The 2007 Dieux du Stade calendar is upon us and it seems to be even naughtier, even saucier - and somehow even more graphic - than last year’s. How do they do that? Without actually using those rugby balls as sex toys instead of just holding them that way?

Even I - even I - hesitate to reproduce some of the more explicit locker-room snaps - so you’ll have to visit the link for the full sauce. How long before sporno becomes just porno? (Oh, give it about a fortnight at this rate.)

And when it does, what on earth are gay men going to do with all their gay porn? When (mostly) hetero athletes photographed in blatantly, provocatively, deliriously homoerotic poses for mainstream consumption is hotter than anything Falcon can come up with, isn’t it going to be like when VHS was replaced by DVD? Sporno is in danger of making gay porn - and maybe even ‘gay sex’ - hideously obsolete, at least from where I’m staring.

After all ‘gays’ so obviously don’t own ‘gay sex’ any more - if they ever did. Sporno makes it eye-poppingly, horse-frighteningly apparent it’s no longer their private-members club (’have-you-been-to-a gay-bar-before?’) property. Now professional athletes pose for photos that should really be printed on their porn-movie box-cover - or saved for their ‘private pics’ on their Gaydar profile.

Soon all that will be left of ‘gay sex’ will be fisting in Continental leather bars. Sorry, my mistake, that’s not ‘gay’ either any more. That’s just the latest Bond movie.

And, truth be told, the ‘making of’ Dieux du Stade DVD has pretty much already found the boundary between sporno and gay porno and crashed through it. Scottish rugger bugger Sean Lamont reveals himself a ‘well rounded’, talented and very versatile sporno star - whichever way you look at him.

Not to be outdone in the sporting/spurting male stakes, Australia has muscled in on the sporno industry as well with the Naked Rugby League Calendar.

Perhaps the only surprising thing about this venture into out-of-the-closet sporno by Aussies is that it took them so long. After all, Australia is the country that brought us the Speedo and the Lifesaver, as well as Aussie Rules Football (I know it gets hot in Oz but really, is there any excuse for those skimpy, skimpy shorts and sleeveless tight vests other than showing off and generally being a tart?). Australia is also the country remember, with it’s extremely powerful, innovative sports media, that practically invented the drooling, extremely profitable commodification of the sporting male body and perhaps for that very reason is a global leader in metrosexuality.

So they must be extremely hacked off that they were outdone in the sporno stakes by the bleedin’ French. And also that Sean Lamont’s arse is even rounder and more inviting than the best barbied buttocks they can come up with (compare and contrast Scotland’s divinely geodesmic bum-cheeks with Australia’s March).

Lovely and eager to please as they are, the Oz sporno stars are though going to have to be a little less coy and show a little more in the way of vital assets if they want to keep up with Dieux du Stade. This shouldn’t be a problem: in my experience Australian men are anything but shy in real life - or reality TV. But then, perhaps Jamie Brooksby’s famous ‘metrosexual knob’ is the reason the Australian Rugby League pin-ups are hiding their tackle. Thanks to Jamie, Australian males are now held to very stretching standards indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sean Lamont however clearly isn’t worried. And who can blame him?

While beefy British rugby players may be lining up to tart themselves out to the public in French calendars, our home-grown sporno lags behind that of both France and Australia.

However, Nike’s use/exploitation of the England Rugby Squad in it’s advertising campaign for its tres gay stretchy top ‘Nike Pro’ is very encouraging indeed. Note how the muscled, glowering hunks have been photographed from a kneeling position - i.e. packet-level - lit from above, the better to show off their shoulders and pecs, as any gay porn director will tell you. The rugger gods themselves look down masterfully at the supplicant rugby fan, like Jeff Stryker at the greedy bottom servicing him. Perhaps the ‘Pro’ part of ‘Nike Pro’ stands for something other than ‘Professional’.

‘England’s secret weapon’, despite those baggy shorts, is not so secret after all. It’s spornographically obvious.

Now, if you think that, once again, my perverted, overheated brain is polluting with a filthy imputation to something as pure and unstained as England’s rugby shorts well, you’d probably be right.

But this doesn’t actually mean I’m wrong. Not just because advertising is, of course, never pure or unstained, but because of these eye-popping, shorts-straining pictures of what appears to be of a giant orange blow-up doll of Josh Lewsey (second from the right in the ‘Secret Weapon’ ad above - or one with the least secret packet and best six-pack) outside Twickenham Rugby Ground. And no, I didn’t take them myself: they appeared on the England Rugby Union official website.

Now we seem to be not just kneeling but grovelling on the floor gazing straight up at Josh’s powerful naked thighs and straight at his impressive (less baggy) packet. Plus he seems to have, very kindly, taken off his skin-tight Nike lycra top and is instead just wearing his skin-tight skin.

Naturally, it wasn’t officially a blow-up doll. As part of their campaign in the UK Nike commissioned a giant ‘bronze’ (plastic) statue of Josh Lewsey.

Much as I’d be happy to grovel for Josh, my favourite image however is this slightly less submissive perspectived one, snapped half-way through Josh’s bronze ‘erection’. Not only does he look more Greek, more Apollonian, it also looks as if he’s engaging in one of those charming post-match locker-room rugby games.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salon vs Details - James Collard of The London Times speaks to the (gay) Salon.com editor about his decision to spike the original story - two years before it became a huge international scandal, and a major feature in Details magazine. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A nd I sho uld knw .

[Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, 1999

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

 

You might think that it was Italy’s greater ball-skills or stamina or team-spirit that won them the World Cup in the final against France last night.

But you’d be wrong.

Cleary, indubitably - as the pictures ’explicitly’ show - what won it for the Italians was not so much their sporting spirt as their sporno spirit. 

Earlier this year some players from the Italian team recruited Dolce & Gabbana (or was it the other way around?) to produce a spornographic fashion shoot of them all oiled up and ready for action in the locker-room.  In hindsight we can see that the world was theirs for the asking/at their feet (etc. etc.) from that moment on.

Sporno, the post-metrosexual porno aesthetic that sports and advertising are using to sell us the male body is, well, irresistible.  Even for the French - who were, let’s face it, a much uglier bunch.  First Portugal defeat England because Ronaldo is tartier than Becks and swoonier than Rooney, then Italy defeat France because the punters would much rather celebrate with them in the locker-room than the French. 

It’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us as desirable, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of metrosexuality.  This doesn’t proffer an intense enough image.  It’s not shocking or arousing enough any more.  In fact, it’s just too… normal.  Now the male body has to promise us an (immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped) gang-bang in the showers.

Though of course, because this is sporno and not actual pornography, it remains just that: a promise.  Advertising offers us not just a fetish of the spo/urting male body but also of his… underwear.  Commodity fetishism is usually the name of the sporno game, just as it was for metrosexuality.  However, the homoprovocative nature of sporno is much less easy to disavow than it was in metrosexuality. 

I mean, just look at the pictures.

One of the especially peculiar - and frustrating - effects of a spornographic world however is that more and more men at the gym tend to wear their underwear or trunks in the showers .

Which seems to me to be really dirty. 

 

 

‘If a picture can paint a thousand words then why can’t I paint Roo?’

Someone today kindly emailed me this picture of Ronaldo ‘making up’ with Manchester United team-mate Roo after the World Cup hissy fit.  I’m not sure whether the old cliche is always true but spornographic images are always more eloquent - or just hotter - than words.  Certainly it renders yesterday’s posting somewhat redundant. 

And it makes me warm all over to think that Ronaldo can put that big, pouting, ref-pestering Portugese gob of his to a useful, pacifying purpose (defusing the boner Roo had to pick with him without getting split in two).  I only wish the apology were a little more explicit.  Not to mention convincing. 

But, alas, even Photoshop has its limits.  This amusing example of homemade sporno currently overheating tens of thousands of Inbox’s around the world does at least prove something: when it comes to young sporting bucks, I’m definitely not the only one with a dirty mind.

 

Does England and Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney (in the white) read Out on the sly, perhaps hidden inside a copy of Zoo?  He seems to be taking ‘Sporno’ to new extremes.

British tabloid The Sun claims today that bit-of-rough Roo has confided in ‘talks with pals’ ‘over breakfast’ that ‘pretty boy’ Manchester United team mate Christiano Ronaldo has finally tormented the scouse scallyboy too much.  I know how he feels.

A frustrated Wayne is now supposedly vowing to ‘split him in two’ next time they meet in the locker rooms of Old Trafford.

The Sun describes Christiano as a ‘slippery winker’ – so it sounds as if he’ll be ready for Roo.

Either way, I sincerely hope one of them remembers to switch their camphones on.  This historic encounter should be recorded for, erm, posteriority. 

(And in case you think my report is slanted and fantastical, you should have a look at The Sun’s.)
 

 

 

Just in time for the World Cup the July issue of the re-launched OUT (now edited by Aaron Hicklin) features an essay by yours truly on the post-metrosexual pornolization of sport - or what I dub ’sporno’.  Here’s a (breathless) taster:

‘Sportsmen on this side of the Atlantic are increasingly openly acknowledging and flirting with their gay fans, a la David Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg (the man who actually looks the way Beckham thinks he looks). Both these thoroughbreds have posed for spreads in gay magazines and both have welcomed the attention of gay fans because they “have great taste.â€?  More than this, they and a whole new generation of young bucks, from twinky soccer players like Manchester United’s Alan Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo, to rougher prospects like Chelsea’s Joe Cole and AC Milan’s Kaka, keen to emulate their success, are actively pursuing sex-object status in a post-metrosexual, increasingly pornolized world. 

In other words: they’re not just sports stars, but sporno stars’

And if you think sporno is just a faggy Euro phenomenon, then think again:

‘Why are Euro soccer stars Beckham and Freddie Ljunberg household names in the US, a country which has generally less interest in soccer than socialism? Because these sporno stars— athletic young hustlers who are happy to be ogled barely dressed on Times Square billboards and in Vanity Fair—advertise a willingness to put out, or at least get it out, to get ahead that is about as all-American as you can get. 

‘Ljunberg’s Calvin Klein clad basket of giant Swedish meatballs is the dish everyone wants to dine on and he seems more than happy to feed us (god bless ‘im).  Or try a nice cool, creamy Beckham, recently hired as the new face off the long-running Got Milk? campaign. Want to grow up to be a sporno star? Make sure you drink your milk!’

The July issue of OUT - like the male sporting body - is on sale now.

You can read the full article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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