I’ve often thought that Bear Grylls’ ’survival’ programs with his frequent nakedness and subby eagerness to put all sorts of eeeurgh! things in his mouth in extreme close-up while generally putting his body on display and in harm’s way are really a form of fetish porn.  Bear Grylls: Nature Gimp.

Yes, it’s true that I see porn everywhere – especially if it involves fit young chaps – but in this instance I think it’s quite deliberate.

The clincher is Gryll’s terrible acting.  It’s passionately unconvincing.  Acting so bad that almost by itself it renders what you’re watching pornography, even on the rare occasions he keeps his clothes on.  And as in porn, his bad acting is a major part of the sadistic pleasure of voyeurism.

I would describe Bear as taking the role of the bottom in gay porn but this probably isn’t accurate enough.  Bottoms in gay porn generally don’t make nearly as much noise as Bear: it would be a bit of a turn off.  No, Bear makes as much noise as women in straight porn.  Bear’s job, like female porn stars, is to act out (very, very badly) the pain, pleasure and degradation – and glamour – of being on the receiving end.  Of being ‘the bitch’.  For the male viewer.

Every time Bear the rufty-tufty ex-SAS explorer jumps naked into an ice hole or eats dung the ridiculous noise he makes lets us know that we’re watching something much kinkier than a survival programme.

But this clip in which he gives himself an enema ‘Only as a last resort’ takes everything to a whole new level.  The noise he makes as he ‘lies back and thinks of England’ should get him an Adult Video Award.  I’m sure that giving yourself an enema with seagul poo-flavoured water in a chunky plastic hose is a trifle uncomfortable, but Bear manages to make it sound like he’s being fisted by a Rhino.

Bear Grylls: Use only as a last resort – if you can’t find any proper porn.

By Mark Simpson (Originally appeared in Manner magazine)

“Do you have any HUNG mates? I want to be GANGBANGED by several DONKEY DICKS and just TOTALLY USED!  Oh, and do you have a videocam to record it all? You see, I want my first time to be really special.”

Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining, and probably I shouldn’t have Photoshopped the pic on my profile, but I seem to be hearing this kind of request more and more these days from young men online. Men who, like most of us penised people, have been watching far too much porn.

And it doesn’t seem to matter much whether the porn they’ve been watching is ‘straight’ or ‘gay’. Nor, in fact, does it seem to matter much whether they are straight or gay – tops or bottoms. It’s all the same now. When it comes to porn, all men are nymphomaniac size queens. Gargantuan, mortifying, Death-Star penises devastating tiny, defenceless chocolate starfish – in extreme, key-hole surgery close-up. (Admit it, I’m turning you on, aren’t I?)

Xtube’s ‘Most Watched’, gay or straight, is just reams and reams of unfeasibly large pee-pees ramming relentlessly, pitilessly, where the sun don’t shine and where God definitely didn’t intend.

Even if men do occasionally find themselves having to settle for something slightly less apocalyptic on the rare occasions when they actually have sex instead of the real thing – i.e. watching porn – this is what is playing in their heads when they come. It certainly is in mine.

It was Edward Albee who famously said that when we are young we use porn to substitute for sex, but when we are adults we use sex as a substitute for porn.

Of course, this maxim is laughably out of date. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, which has uploaded all men’s filthy, fetishistic thoughts, multiplied them by the power of IT, then downloaded them, no Vaseline, back into our sore, over-stretched little heads – and then uploaded them back onto Xtube, usually without password protection. In an Xtubed world there’s no substitution, or distinction any more. There is only pornsex.

In Woody Allen’s 1973 classic ‘Sleeper’ he postulated a future in which we would all have a machine called the Orgasmatron, that within seconds of using would electronically induce an orgasm. Well, we’re in the future already, and Allen turned out to be exactly right: the internet is after all the Orgasmatron, but with Windows Messenger.

But Allen was exactly wrong to think that it would take a few seconds. While the speed of the technology and bit-rates get faster and faster, we’re getting slower and slower, spending more and more time not less in the Orgasmatron. Pretty soon, we’ll all have a chip in our skulls that will mean we’re permanently logged on with a lob on. But when that happens it will just be a kind of technical elaboration of where men, gay and straight – but especially gay – are at mentally already.

Is it humanly possible, I wonder, to summon up more energy/time/bodily fluids/eye-strain than we are already doing? Can ‘sex’ continue to bear the weight, heft, length and girth of our ever more penetrating gaze. Or will sex just decide to stay in and wash its hair instead, thanks for asking?

It’s almost as if we want to wear sex out. Use it up. Overexpose it. Leave it gaping, slack and flapping in the wind. Perhaps I underestimate the ingenious power of the male psyche – and also the suppleness of the human sphincter. We’ve all seen those Xtube clips of men taking ever-bigger traffic cones up their arses – over and over again. Maybe in ten years time they’ll be sitting on the London Gherkin. Who knows what’s possible with an early start, enough determination and really good poppers?

Or maybe the only way forwards is backwards. Maybe we will decide that when everything is permitted, and where you’ve literally seen everything, there’s no point in actually doing any of it. Maybe in a world of e-jadedness, repression will make a comeback. A clampdown, if you will. As the director John Waters once said, ‘Every day I get down on my knees every day and thank God I’m a Catholic, because it means I have really great sex!’

One of the truly wonderful things about repression is that you don’t need much friction to bring you off. A mobile phone set to ‘silent’ can do the trick, as opposed by the nuclear-powered jack-hammers required by today’s young men.

I suspect though that most blokes probably won’t find the idea of the His Holiness looking over their shoulder while they’re wanking online terribly appealing.

Unless, of course, the Pope has a REALLY BIG COCK – and some DONKEY HUNG Cardinal mates.

The teenage Tom of Finland’s gay fantasies from the 1940s of muscle-bound men have come to define a mainstream view of masculinity, says Mark Simpson (The London Times, Nov 2008)

The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a well-thumbed, seventh-hand issue of Fiesta, a top-shelf favourite of schoolboys in the 1970s. The image, buried at the back, was in a small ad for more “specialised” publications, probably missed by most of my schoolchums who had thumbed the issue before me. But it jumped out at me like an outsized erection.

It depicted a pair of muscular butch young men with big chins and broad grins grabbing each other’s bubble butts and straining packets while winking at the reader. I immediately rushed out to the post office to buy as many postal orders as my pocket money would allow.

Although I was sorely disappointed with the ‘Biker Boy’ lame leather gay fetish magazine with no Tom of Finland drawings that eventually turned up, I have spent much of my adult life and a fortune on gym membership trying to recreate that Tom of Finland image that I glimpsed as a teen.

I needn’t have bothered, however, because as it turned out the whole world was going to become a Tom of Finland drawing. His sensualised, cartoonish über-male body and its endless potential for pleasure and pleasuring have become as common as, well, shameless hussies. Think of the rugby player Austin Healey pulsating on BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing in tight pants and a sleeveless top. Or all those footballers keen to strip off and show us their assets on the sides of buses.

The notes for artist retrospectives usually make extravagant claims, and those for a major retrospective of Tom of Finland in Liverpool, part of that city’s annual Homotopia queer culture festival, make some very extravagant ones indeed: “Tom had an effect on global culture unmatched by that of virtually any other artist,” we are told. But for once, there’s something to this hyperbole, despite the artistic merit of his work being very debatable.

Tom was born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland, in 1920 and his work is literally the masturbatory fantasies of a lonely young homosexual Finnish boy – he began drawing in his locked bedroom in the 1940s, pencil in one hand, penis in the other. His fetishised, overobserved, long-distance gay appropriation of masculinity has in a mediated, long-distance world become… masculinity.

It’s often said that Tom’s greatest achievement was in drawing gay men who were masculine, happy and proud at a time when they were supposed to be effeminate, neurotic and shameful. This is certainly the reason why so many gay men are Tom devotees, wittingly or not. Today’s gay porn is merely filthy footnotes to Tom, endlessly replaying the narrative of “regular guys” with very irregular-sized penises and pectorals having spontaneous, shameless sex at the drop of a monkey wrench.  (And it’s entirely apt that one of the sponsors of this retrospective is Gaydar, the gay ‘dating’ site where gay men post Tom-ish pictures of themselves looking for other Tom-ish men to have Tom-ish sex with.)

However, the out-and-proud gay biker look – identity even – that Tom perfected after seeing Marlon Brando in The Wild One (Brando was a Tom drawing in 3D) and which became so popular in the pre-Aids 1970s and early 1980s, reaching its peak with the climactic success of the Liverpool band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, has become a cliché – see, for example, the tangoing, mustachioed leather men in the Blue Oyster basement bar in Police Academy – and few if any young gay men today aspire to it.

But when you look at Tom’s drawings in this retrospective, which features 25 of his works in the basement (predictably) of the Contemporary Urban Centre in Liverpool, it becomes apparent that his achievement goes much further than just making gay men feel good about themselves or love the snugness of leather harnesses. Tom, who worked as an illustrator in the Finnish advertising business until the early 1970s, when he became a full-time gay propagandist, sold the male body as a pleased, pleasuring and pleasured thing several decades before Calvin Klein thought of it. In the middle of the 20th century, Tom was effectively sketching the blueprint of 21st-century man. And boy, was he blue.

Before Tom no one drew men like he did, making them such unabashed sex objects and sex subjects, giving them such exaggerated male secondary – and primary! – sexual characteristics: big chins, strong jaws, full lips. Masculinity, and virility end up looking so… nurturing. Buxom. Busty. Tom’s men have round firm breasts, saucer-like aureolas and nipples you can adjust your thermostat with. One (from 1962) struts down the street, biceps bulging, chest literally bursting out of his shirt, and dressing very much to the left: no wonder he’s being followed. His saucy curvaciousness a testament to the way in which aestheticised hyper-masculinity is oddly androgyne. And while Tom’s men may have had their tits out for the lads, the kind of Tom-ish male body he helped to invent is nowadays getting them out for lads and lasses, gay or straight, online or in real time.

Likewise Tom’s drawings also reveal the male derrière as a sexual organ: not just in some of the more hardcore examples, but the way that Tom-ish buttocks are so spherical, so inviting. One of the most striking and prescient sketches, from 1981, is also one of the tamest: a row of bedenimed male bubble butts sticking out at a bar – awaiting perhaps the attentions of the hugely powerful Abercrombie & Fitch photographer Bruce Weber (a big Tom fan), or perhaps the vaselined, wide-angled lens of a Levi’s commercial.

Tom’s big break came in the 1950s from Physique Pictorial, an underground, semi-legal gay American fanzine disguised as a straight men’s bodybuilding magazine, which frequently put Tom’s men on the cover. Half a century later, and 17 years after his death in 1991, the world is inverted: flesh-and-blood men who look like Tom’s drawings appear on the cover of bestselling corporate mags such as Men’s Health. Flick one open, and you’ll find it full of advice on how straight men can turn themselves into something Tom-ish.

Tom of Finland is at the Contemporary Urban Centre, Greenland St, Liverpool 1 (0151-708 3510; http://www.homotopia.net), until Nov 30.

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

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:

‘…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. Lots of 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 panicked 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.’ Understandably, the authorities hastily 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.

Though some gays seem unwilling to be as pragmatic or tolerant as the 1960s Royal Navy. They seem, like Rechy, to want to press-gang any man who touches another man’s penis into the gay identity.  Or, as a fallback position: ‘bisexual’ – in the sense of ‘nearly-gay’.

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. And of course a certain amount of scepticism is understandable, advisable even. And Dink himself told me that he thought that quite a few of his models were probably ‘bi-curious’, and that ironically, appearing in his videos for cash was for them a ’safe’ way of exploring this.

But what is remarkable is just how religiously certain Rechy et al are that these chaps can’t be straight.  None of them.

My sense however, as someone who has actually met some of them – and performed with them – is that many if not 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. Besides, if you really do think that having sex with another male means you de facto can’t be straight, then you are effectively saying that any and all male-on-male sex automatically consigns you into a separate, abnormal species of male.

Alas, male-on-male sex 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, ‘cock fun’ 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 seems to know exactly how), looks like a fulfilment of the fantasy of much of 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 Salon.com editor Kerry Lauerman about his decision to spike Simpson’s original piece because it was deemed ‘too risque’ for Salon – two years before the Active Duty scandal became a major international story – and a major feature in Details magazine. [link removed as page no longer active.

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.

After all, 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 admittedly, 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 it’s 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 in surgical gloves.  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 like FHM and Maxim 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 2008

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.