MARK SIMPSON.com

Ever with its middle finger on the cultural pulse, this year, Gay Shame, the Duckie collective’s artsy alternative to the pink poppered-up roller-skating jollity of Gay Pride, has this year decided to go retrosexual.

But unlike the mainstream appropriation of retrosexuality - e.g. those tiresome cloney beards all men, straight and gay, have to accessorise these days - Duckie’s, held this Saturday night at The Coronet, Elephant and Castle, South London, is being done with a rather keen sense of irony and parody.

It also sounds a hoot.

On Gay P**de night 2008 it’s time to make men pay. Collect your wad of nine bob notes on the door and spend them in the market place as Duckie turns consumers into real men.

It promises over 30 stalls that ‘test your masculinity’, including:

fighting
fucking
football

boxing
boozing
betting

Now that’s what I call a night out. And no expense has been spared, apparently:

…designer Robin Whitmore turns The Coronet into an interactive nightclub-theatre with the aesthetics of a giant fucking mini-cab office: sticky, brown, stained, a bit pongy and distinctly lacking a feminine touch.

Maybe though they could have saved Robin the trouble and stayed at the Vauxhall Tavern, Duckie’s venerably pongy venue on Saturday nights….

Hosted by Amy Lame, a panoply of stars familiar to Duckie regulars will be performing, including Justin Bond, Marisa Carnesky, Susannah Hewlett and Chris Green - all sound-tracked expertly as ever by The Readers Wifes.

If you’re thinking of having a gander and a flutter please note the dress code:

straight blokes, plumbers, fat darts players, dads, butch lesbians.
No pink, no make up, no heels, no floral patterns, no humanity

It’s not yet clear whether Guy Ritchie’s butch lesbian will allow him to attend.

James Maker, former lead singer with cult 80s Indie band Raymonde and 90s drag metal sensation RPLA, and one of Morrissey’s longest-serving friends, is writing a memoir.

And what a memoir. It has very probably the best, and unquestionably the most honest title for an autobiography ever: ‘Autofellatio’.

Maker recently posted a very short excerpt from it, recounting his first meeting with Morrissey in 1977, titled ‘Gide the Ripper’, on his MySpace webpage. Inevitably, despite the profile being set to ‘Private’ and only having two and a half authorised friends, the excerpt ended up on a Morrissey fansite in less time than it takes to read most Morrissey song titles.

Now that the excerpt is ‘out there’ Maker’s kindly given permission for it to be posted it on marksimpson.com. As you can see, Maker’s prose more than lives up to the audacious promise of his memoir’s title.

I’ve been given a privileged peek at several chapters, and can report that this memoir is simply one of the funniest, sharpest pieces of writing I’ve come across: a veritable comedy of aphorisms. A very English rock and roll memoir, with nary a wasted or ill-chosen word: Ronald Firbank meets the New York Dolls, has a sweet sherry or three and causes a scene on the night bus home. In court shoes.

But when will it be published? James says that he’s ‘broken the back’ of his Autofellatio, but wants to be entirely happy with his technique before showing it to agents….

Here’s Mr Maker in 1994 performing RPLA’s court shoe-tapping stonker ‘Absolute Queen of Pop’ (and no, it’s not about Guy Ritchie’s husband), kindly affording us a look at his agile tonsils:

And here, in Raymonde in 1988, in a nice fur hat and lippy belting out the irresistible and ineluctable ‘Destination: Breakdown’:

by Mark Simpson (Guardian CIF, Sunday January 6, 2008)

It’s official. The scientists have finally proved it. Gay men are as bad as women.

Or as the Daily Mail puts it in a somewhat unnecessarily long headline: “Gay men are as bad at navigating as women”.

The Daily Telegraph headline was a little more direct: “Women and gay men are ‘worst drivers’”. Actually, this wasn’t what the researchers into spatial learning and memory at Queen Mary’s (no, really, that’s actually their name) College claimed at all, but I say why allow the facts spoil a good headline? Or Jeremy Clarkson column? (You know it’s coming.)

What the researchers did actually claim however was that both gay men and women appear to “share the same poor sense of direction and rely on local landmarks to get around”.

That would be cottages and shoe shops, I suppose.

According to the Mail, a study of 140 straight and gay, male and female “volunteers” by Queen Mary College, London claims to have found that “gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in much the same way and shared the same weaknesses.” For South American Chardonnay and men’s buns, perhaps?

But hang on a minute. And lesbians? What are they doing lumped together with gay men and straight women? I thought that if gay men are women trapped inside men’s bodies, lesbians were supposed to be trapped inside an articulated lorry cab with their feet on the dashboard smoking roll-ups.

But as you read on it dawns what this sophisticated psychological test was really assessing. “The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University.”

Ah, so they played computer games. Not very good computer games, by the sound of it:

In one, the Morris Water Maze (MWM) test, volunteers were placed in a “virtual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find hidden submerged platform … The other task, the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), involved finding “rewards” by exploring eight “arms” radiating out from a circular central junction. Four arms contained a reward and four did not, and participants had to avoid traversing an arm more than once.

Well, maybe it’s because I’m gay and dizzy, but you’ve lost me already. I want to log on and hunt for meaningless sex for hours via my scores of online profiles. You can keep your rather tedious reject Xbox game.

There may well be generalised differences between men and women when it comes to driving or other spatial based activities, such as computer games (men seem to play them rather more than women, though often with straight men this appears to be a way of getting away from women). And these may well have some relationship to sexual orientation, though what we mean by sexual orientation is a question in itself - after all, bisexuals are not mentioned in this survey. But it doesn’t appear that this study has shown it - instead it has merely shown up some cultural prejudices (e.g. that Telegraph “worst drivers” misleading headline).

Even the findings of this study appear to confirm gay men’s role as confusers of assumptions about gender. The leader of the Queen Mary team is quoted as saying: ‘”Gay people appear to show a “mosaic” of performance, parts of which are male-like and other parts of which are female-like”‘. So in other words, gay men watch porn, leave toilet seats up but also do a spot of dusting.

Perhaps though the disoriented gay men in the study weren’t gay men at all, but pissed-up fruit flies escaped from another scientific study published this week, which claimed to show that alcohol produces “homosexual tendencies” in male fruit flies. The researchers claimed the amorousness the flies showed one another after repeated exposure to alcohol is a model for how alcohol lessens inhibitions in humans.

I suspect this is one claim that isn’t terribly controversial.

—————

It has been pointed out to me since this piece appeared that Dr Quazi Rahman, the man behind the study which claimed to have ‘discovered’ similarities between gay men and women’s brains, is the author of a book called ‘Born Gay’. If only snarky commentators like me could learn to be as objective as psychobiologists.

Brains! Give me gay brains! The global media has been moaning this week, arms outstretched and flailing, sightless eyes staring fixedly ahead.

You can hardly have missed this story.

We’ve been here several times before, most recently with the story about ‘gay drivers being as bad as women’, but the press clearly can’t get enough of this kind of ‘gay science’. Especially when it appears to confirm the popular, consoling and time-honoured view of gay men as women’s souls trapped in men’s bodies.

The only intelligent piece I’ve read on this story was by Mark Liberman, kindly forwarded to me by my friend David Halperin. It debunks the headlines about ‘gay brains’ rather, er, brainily.

It’s also worth pointing out that, as is usually with this kind of brain research, these differences - if they exist rather than being an artefact of sampling - have not been shown to be innate. The brain is ‘plastic’ and the differences in size could have been in effect ‘learned’, or be the product of behaviour and not t’other way around. That’s to say, shopping for shoes and salad with gal pals might increase the part of your brain that ‘processes emotion and language’. If this rather important proviso was mentioned in the news reports at all, it was right at the end.

And of course, you only have to think for less than a minute about the claim that gay men and straight women have the ’same brains’, especially when it comes to the area that ‘processes emotion’, to see a major flaw with this apparently ‘common sense’ finding. I mean, how many hetero women - or lesbians - have the same attitude towards emotion-free sex that gay men have?

Far more significant than the findings of the research was the way it was reported. As Liberman points out, none of the stories headlined with ‘Lesbian brains are the same as straight male brains’. Almost all of them were a variant of ‘Gay male brains the same as heterosexual women’s brains’

To be fair, most of the research in this area isn’t terribly interested in lesbians either. That’s because the problem that needs to be explained from a biological determinist point of view, is human males who don’t impregnate women - which is what ‘male’ means to such people - and instead, in their view, try to impregnate other men, or be impregnated by them. Women, on the other hand, only exist to be impregnated from a biological determinist point of view, so their ‘orientation’ is utterly irrelevant.

Which should tell you all you need to know about biological determinism.

Gays who hope that this kind of research will deliver them from the ‘it’s a choice’ religious right and ‘it’s unnatural’ homophobes are possibly jumping out of the moralist frying pan into the eugenic fire. Of course, they wouldn’t be the first. Magnus Hirschfeld (and also Karl Ulrichs) the ‘father’ of the modern gay rights movement believed that homosexual men were women’s souls trapped inside men’s bodies. Homosexuals should not be persecuted and criminalised, in Hirschfeld’s view, because they couldn’t help themselves, and, more to the point, as women trapped inside men’s bodies, they weren’t really homosexual at all - they were congenitally confused heterosexuals with a hormonal imbalance. When they had sex with another male they were trying, in their own ‘crippled’ way, to be faithful to their heterosexual impulses.

Then along came the Nazis, who largely agreed with Hirschfeld about crippled, congenital homosexuals not being real men, but had a rather different view about what this meant - i.e. degeneracy - and, of course, what to do about this. Which, in additin to concentration camps, included operating on them to find the causes of their heriditary weakness, and injecting them with massive quantities of male hormones (though the latter of course is something they pay good money for these days).

Back to the possibly eugenic future: In the real world, as opposed to the one of psychobiology, gay and straight men are more and more difficult to tell apart, both in terms of appearance, behaviour and even sexual practises. So I look forwards to the research into which part of the brain is responsible for straight men spending most of their sexual lives masturbating to online porn, or why so many of them favour anal or oral sex when confronted with an actual female - predelictions which, from a biological determinist point of view, aren’t really so different from homosexuality.

Human sexuality is far more perverse and cunning and kinky than poor square old biological determinists can ever accept, because for them heterosexuality is necessarilly the same thing as reproduction which is the same thing as sex. When much of human culture has been very energetically devoted to making sure that these things aren’t the same.

In a sense, homosexuality represents one of the crowning (over-) achievements of that energy. And perhaps that’s the very reason there remains such an intense, curious, and sometimes murderous, ambivalence about it - as shown by the countless and continuing attempts to explain it away.

The ‘accidental’ removal of one beefy male contestant’s pants by another beefy male contestant in the new UK Gladiators series has caused some excitement. 

Now, as you know, I’m all for fit men pulling each other’s pants off, but this leaves me rather cold.  Partly because the shorts on Sky One’s new porno Gladiators are so skimpy in the first place that it’s not so easy to spot the difference between ‘on’ and ‘off’ - save when they’re off they look even more like be-thonged Chippendales.  But mostly because this accident was so carefully choreographed.

Note the handy close-up of some out of work actress in the audience screaming at the sight of a male buttock as if she’d just discovered her G-spot. 

Give it a few weeks and they’ll have these guys wrestling naked in a pool of KY ‘accidentally’ left on the arena floor.

(When that happens I’ll pretend to be jaded then as well - but inside I’ll be screaming louder than the actress.)

Tip: Donald K

That shameless hussy show Big Brother will soon be spread-eagled across our screens again.  The puddle-deep fame factory and test-tube celembryo hatchery starts it’s Summer-long domination of the TV schedules next week.

I have no intention of watching it - like most, I had my BB fling years ago and wish it would stop trying to woo me back.  But I do have a slight curiousity about who the contestants are this year.  Why?  Because they might have been my housemates this Summer. They might have been people I was arguing with over crumbs in the margarine, bitching with about other housemates, or pretending to have sex with under a duvet.

If only I wasn’t so precious.  Or was a bit more of a masochist.

Late last year I received an email via this blog from Endemol, the makers of BB, trying to persuade me to ‘audition’ for BB 9.

I inititally dismissed it out of hand, of course.  But then I actually thought about it for a while - if only because I was trying to make sense of it.  Why me?  Am I so obviously mad and desperate and unknown?

I quickly stopped asking myself those questions… and began to think practical instead.  Yes, the whole notion of appearing on BB filled me with horror and terror, but perhaps I was just being snobbish, and cutting off my own snooty nose to spite my face. 

Was there any way, for instance, that I could make something nice and vulgar like money out of it? 

But then I realised that the only way you make money out of BB, aside from winning - which, along with surviving more than a couple of weeks would be completely out of the question for Nasty Mark - is through tabloid interviews and provincial club appearances.

Somehow, I don’t think tabloid readers or clubgoers anywhere are going to get very excited over me.

I very briefly thought about the ‘inside the belly of the beast’ pop-cultural angle, but realised that the so-called serious press wouldn’t really be interested in that either.  They’d just want wordy, hypocritical pieces about the girl with the big knockers who kept fellating bottles.

Besides, imagine agreeing to a BB audition and being rejected?

So I replied to Endemol:

‘Whilst it’s always nice to be asked, I think I’ll have to turn down your offer because:

a) I don’t do telly for free (terribly old-fashioned, I know, but that’s me)

b) Although I do have prison fantasies, they don’t usually involve Davina McCall’

After yesterday’s disastrous Nantwich by-election defeat for Gordon Brown by David Cameron’s resurgent, re-branded, made-over, moisturised Tories, which came hard on the heels of the drubbing the Brown One received a few weeks ago in the English local council elections, the media - and a substantial part of the Labour Party itself - is now baying for his head.

I hate to say I told you so.

But I told you so.

Twenty months ago, in the dying days of Tony’s Premiership, when the media was getting all excited about Leader-in-Waiting Brown and giving rave reviews to his dreadful speech to the 2006 Labour Party Conference - and dissing Cameron - I predicted that His Brown-ness couldn’t win the next election:

The delivery of his speech yesterday was full of visual proof of this. I have no idea what Brown is like in the flesh, but on telly - i.e. the real world - Brown looks like a loser. Dead, hooded eyes which offer no contact with the audience or the camera, choreographed but strangely ill-timed, clawing hand movements and weird goldfish-like gulps at the end of each line. After nine years of Tony’s glamorous drag queen charisma, he looks like a particularly deluded punter auditioning for X-Factor while Simon Cowell pulls faces.

Brown may well, as he says, ‘relish’ the opportunity to ‘take on Cameron’, but Cameron looks increasingly likely to simply sweep him aside. After a couple of years of Brown-ness the electorate will stampede to elect the smooth, moisturised, green-ish manipulator Cameron, someone who knows exactly what we want to hear and how to coo those sweet nothings in our ears. By then he’ll be seen as Tony Blair without Iraq. Tony Blair without the TUC. Tony Blair without the haggard face.

Tony Blair without Gordon Brown.

Of course, Brown has been rather unlucky of late. But then, politicians are supposed to make their own luck. Or at least tell us stories we want to hear - and want to believe. Brown has proved singularly, catastrophically unable to do this. And it was staggeringly, appallingly obvious all along. True, things could perk up for Brown before the General Election in a year or so.

But I don’t think it very likely. Do you?

The Times of London’s cartoonist, like most cartoonists and journalists, has been strangely unable to produce anything even vaguely critical of the Senator from Illinois, while going to Hating Town in Hate Week on the Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton.

But today he - and it is a he, a white he - finally managed to actually produce an unflattering portrait of Barack Obama:

The only unflattering part of it though is that white ‘bitch’ - who is, apparently, just unsightly pus. But then this represents an upgrade: a couple of weeks ago in the London Times she was a corpse.

I wonder though whether that angry ‘zit’ doesn’t also represent the liberal media class’ view of the white working class, the people who keep handing Hillary huge victories and Obama stinging defeats, and whom the media and the Obama camp (which are in fact, and in class, pretty much the same thing) keep trying to squeeze out of the news and out of respectable society by dismissing them as ‘ignorant’ and ‘racist’ and ‘bitter’.

Trouble is, without this unsightly pus, without this throbbing zit on the handsome face of polite liberal well-heeled metropolitan society, no Democratic victory in November is even imaginable.

Speaking of unimaginable, as with The London Times’ wish-fulfillment image of Hillary face-down with an American state in her back, it’s inconceivable that this cartoon could be reversed and Obama the black man portrayed as a angry zit on white Hillary Clinton’s face.

I mean, that would be racist, wouldn’t it?.

This weekend Communist Cuba held a large government-backed rally against homophobia, the first of its kind in that country, presided over by Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela.

“This is a very important moment for us, the men and women of Cuba, because for the first time we can gather in this way and speak profoundly and with scientific basis about these topics,” said Mariela Castro, director of Cuba’s Center for Sexual Education.

Cuba’s metrosexual revolution, the modernisation - perestroika even - of attitudes towards sexuality and gender after decades of stagnation and embargo, seems to be picking up speed after hirsute, retrosexualist revolutionary Fidel Castro’s official departure from the scene (in a tracksuit).

I’m sure Mariela is sincere in her motivation and goals, however it should be pointed out that this new, enlightened approach is also a rather good, relatively inexpensive way of ‘rebranding’ Cuba after years of bad press. Being nice to gays is after all one of the ways in which all sorts of out-of-touch and oppressive institutions such as the British Army, the BBC, The New York Times, and even the Guardian have attempted to update their fusty, daggy image in the past decade.

As part of the new drive to change attitudes, Brokeback Mountain was also aired on prime-time Cuban TV over the weekend.

Which just goes to remind us that all revolutions have downsides.

An ad for Braun in Germany.

I have nothing to say.