MARK SIMPSON .com

The phenomenon of Manlove for the ladies, which I wrote about recently in The Times’ ‘Ideas of the Year’ in citing The Mighty Boosh snog, seems to be catching:

‘Former Buffy the Vampire star James Marsters helped fulfil one of his girlfriend’s fantasies on the set of sci-fi series Torchwood - when he locked lips with John Barrowman.

The actor plays flamboyant bisexual Captain John in the cult TV show and had to share a same sex kiss for the first time.

Marsters says, “I had never kissed a man on film before, but luckily my girlfriend was there, and she said it was always a fantasy of hers that I would kiss another man. She thought it was really hot.”‘

Torchwood was created by Russell T Davies, the writer behind the hit drama Queer As Folk set in Manchester’s gay village - a series whose success was largely down to its huge popularity with women.

Probably because it was basically: Take That Finally Get Down To It.

Speaking personally, John Barrowman is about as unsexy as you can get - even with James Marsters dressed as Adam Ant plastered all over his face.

But what do I know? It’s the ladies calling the queer shots now.

Mark Simpson on the crossover of slash into the mainstream - fashslash

‘The Year In Ideas’, The London Times (December 29, 2007)

When Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt of the hit BBC comedy The Mighty Boosh snogged on air the other week, it may have looked as if they were pandering (tongues literally in cheeks) to gay male fans. Comments on the YouTube clip [now removed of the clinch seemed to confirm this: “The hottest thing I’ve ever seen!” and “Oh sweet baby Jesus!”, being typical examples.

Until you get to: “I broked my ovaries!!” - and then you realise that most if not all the posters perving shamelessly over this man-on-man action are actually female.

Welcome to the wonderful, if sometimes slightly perplexing, world of ladies who love men loving men. Once, this scene was confined to obscure online groups of “slashers” - women who subversively outed a homoerotic subtext within the “buddy” genre for one another. So Starsky played with Hutch’s clutch and Sam felt Master Frodo’s ring.

But, as we’ve increasingly seen, virtual day-dreaming has a way of infiltrating traditional media. In a sign of the crossover of slash - fashslash if you will - that Mighty Boosh snog seems to have been directly inspired by the online frenzied feminine fantasising about this male comedy duo’s close friendship.

Meanwhile, the semi-secret reason so many, from Desperate Housewives to Coronation Street, have boy-on-boy romances now is not political correctness, but because of a growing awareness that a large segment of their (mostly female) audience rather like seeing pretty boys getting it on. This, after all, has been the implicit erotic dynamic of all those screamingly successful gay-managed, gay-flirty boybands from the Beatles to Wham to Take That.

Sometimes though, today’s ladies’ overt interest in manlove, the Queer Eye of the Straight Gal if you will, can make men rather… shy. Earlier this year, a gay bar in Melbourne had to go to court to get an order banning women. Apparently they were descending on the club en masse to ogle the canoodling men.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Read what the slashers themselves have to say about this article.