Manchester Is Not Paris – The Alcohol Years By Carol Morley

It seems appropriate that I should be writing this review of The Alcohol Years with a slight hangover. Carol Morley’s (2000) documentary is about a hangover to beat them all. Not only did she forget some of the events of a drunken night out, the experimental film-maker managed to lose track of pretty well a whole period of her life.

The film, about her late teens/early 20s in Manchester in the 1980s, is how she reconstructed herself out of other people’s memories and accounts, 15-20 years later. Many of the people Morley interviewed (off-camera, with no indication of what she asked them) were ex-lovers. So the stories they tell on film, in a set of seemingly one-sided conversations, are infused with sexual tension, or lack of it, or jealousy, or indifference, or love, or in one or two cases possibly, with hate. As you might expect conversations with exes to be.

I first saw The Alcohol Years when it was shown late at night on channel four, not too long after it had been made. It formed a lasting impression on me, and seeing it in the cinema in 2012 brought it all flooding back. Carol Morley was at the screening I attended, and in the introductory talk she said she herself had not seen it for years. So she was remembering a film about her memories! Meta.

One or two of the ‘characters’ in the film are indeed very memorable. A man is one of the first to speak (I don’t know his name, this is not a typical ‘talking heads’ documentary. The viewer is allowed to get to know the people on film gradually, as they might a character in a fictional drama). He is (well he was in 2000) in his mid 30s I’d say. He has dark hair and wears glasses. He looks as if he has swallowed a lemon. This man is angry. He seems to be angry with Carol for daring to make the film at all. For coming back to her past, to people and places she left in a hurry, without any warning or explanation. He seems to be angry that she has dared to make a film about herself. 

Why don’t you look at the world around you? he asks accusingly. Why don’t you make a film about that? Why does this have to be about you?

I remember when I first watched the documentary, taking an instant dislike to this man. I thought he was very rude, to someone who was actually doing something that seemed brave to me. Facing up to her past. Facing her exes. But he thought Carol was cowardly, by refusing to sit infront of the camera, refusing to be the one who was interrogated. I just thought she was clever. Twelve years on, I actually found him quite funny. Because in the youtube/Big Brother/facebook world we now live in, making a film about yourself is a VERY normal thing to do. In fact, one might ask somebody why they DIDN’T. So this sour-faced man ( or maybe he isn’t sourfaced anymore, let’s hope not) was placing the film very much in a specific time. He made it historical.

And The Alcohol Years is full of history. Manchester, so much to answer for, has a rich recent history, especially around the music industry and scenes. Footage shot in the Hacienda and the GMex centre, and interviews with Manchester musos such as Pete Shelley from the Buzzcocks (who had been in love with Morley) and Dave Haslam the DJ, brought that history to life. Even in 2000 when the film was made, the Manchester I knew, the one that caused me to apply to go to university there in 1990, was already faded and worn. Now it seems like a distant memory. The scenes of dark alleyways and grimy clubs and pubs are part of a pre-regenerated Manchester. It is much lighter now, cleaner. And arguably less interesting. ‘Manchester Is Not Paris’ , the slogan on the postcard (above) that advertised the film when it first came out, was said on screen by Alan Wise, when he described going for breakfast with Morley to a local greasy spoon, ‘the morning after’. He was older than Carol, a kind of ‘sleazy’ not hugely attractive man, who served to suggest that the young Morley was not always the most discerning of ‘experimental’ film makers. But he had some great lines. I just wonder if nowadays, Manchester, like most Western cities, IS Paris. You can get cappuccinos on Deansgate much the same as you can on the Champs Elysees.

Dave Haslam, who is a bit of a local historian* of all things Manchester and music, made some pertinent observations in the film. He said that Manchester is a city that is very good at mythologising itself. And he added that Carol Morley was mythologising her own life, as well as making a film about Manchester.  He, of all the interviewees, seemed the most self-aware, and the most aware that the film would be a permanent record of something. I got the feeling listening to him, that in his sections, Dave was talking to the future. He also seemed to be talking to a fellow artist. A lot of the people in the film treated Morley like a ‘slag’, an ‘ex’, a ‘fuck up’. But Haslam seemed to have always identified in her a fellow spirit and a quite driven, creative person. I suspect he might have been the least surprised of all the interviewees,  to find out that Morley has now made her first feature-length docu-drama, Dreams Of A Life.

But the ‘slag’ reputation is also fascinating, emerging as it does from these individuals’ accounts of their memories of Carol. I distinctly remember when I first watched The Alcohol Years, wondering what it would have been like, to hear the words that these people were saying about you, to your face. Hurtful words. Years later, now I fancy myself as something of a ‘sexuality expert’, I notice a few things about their words.

One is that it wasn’t just Morley’s promiscuity that caused people some discomfort. Though one of her exes, a woman, said Carol was ‘a role model for promiscuity’ in such a damning tone that I flinched in the cinema. Her bisexuality also caused some of them problems, and especially a few of the women she spoke to.

The ‘role model’ woman asked Carol at one point how many people she’d slept with (we never got to hear the answer of course. Like I said, she’s clever). Then she corrected herself and said ‘how many men? I don’t care about the women.’  It is as if for a woman to have sex with women is ‘not really sex’. It doesn’t count. This reminded me of Mark Simpson’s work, and his comments on trysexuality. He says women are more free than men to experiment with same-sex sex. If a man does it he is labelled as ‘gay’. Simpson and I have argued about this a few times. I agree up to a point. But I think Carol Morley shows that for a woman to step out of whatever box she has been put in (whether it is ‘lesbian’ or ‘heterosexual’), it is still not accepted wholeheartedly by many. In fact, Carol Morley shows that the ‘slag’ stereotype and the ‘greedy bisexual’ stereotype are alive and well – or they were in 2000. I personally don’t think that has changed.

Has Carol Morley changed? I guess we’d have to ask her that. Though again, in the introductory talk at the screening I went to recently, she said The Alcohol Years is about how we only really exist via other people’s versions of us. So maybe I am as well placed as anyone to answer that question. My view is yes and no. On one hand of course she has changed. It is clear that she could not sustain herself in the lifestyle depicted in the film. She has grown up and moved on. But The Alcohol Years provides us with an early glimpse of what is most definitely an impressive talent. I haven’t seen Dreams of A Life yet, but all reports tell me it is excellent, and is only a continuation of and a development of the ideas and skills shown in The Alcohol Years.

So if Morley was a role model in the 80s (for promiscuity, drinking, being young) she still is one now. But a role model for honest and challenging documentary film making. Long may she continue to be so.

*thanks to Dave Haslam for the top image, which he had filed in his archives. I told you he is a historian!

Going In – By John Weir (1996)

This will kill my parents and ruin my career, but listen, I take it back: I’m not gay. I don’t mean I don’t still fall in love with guys, or that I wouldn’t be willing to go to a gay rights demonstration if I thought it would enhance someone’s civil liberties. I never said I was straight. However, for most of my adult life I’ve insisted on being thought of as a gay man, and I just want to say right now that I’m over it. Big deal, I’m homosexual. According to identity politics, however, my sexuality is all important. It sets me apart from the mainstream. Well, duh, I never felt like part of the mainstream anyway. Not when it seemed to be filled exclusively with scary straight men, and not now, either, when it’s making room for scary gay ones.

It used to be an insult to accuse a guy of acting gay. Lately, it’s discreet praise. It means he’s sensitive, really well-dressed and probably friends with someone who knows Barbara Streisand. Accepting an Oscar for his role as a dying fag in Philadelphia, Tom Hanks even managed to make homosexuality sound patriotic. ‘God bless America’, he said, weeping for dead gay men like they were Veterans of Foreign Wars. Recently, the most unlikely people to have been cashing in on queer visibility, from Robert Altman, who is planning  a screen version of playwright Tony Kushner’s homo-anthem Angels In America, to Stephen Spielberg who produced the drag extravaganza To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar as if it were an all-American family entertainment.

Homosexuality is being repackaged and resold to Americans as a traditional family value. And homosexuals are emerging as the yuppies of the 1990s. They’re the new class of urban professionals with money to spend and aggressively marketed products to choose from. Absolut vodka, Ikea, Benetton, Dewar’s, Calvin Klein, Levis 501s, Brad Pitt and Nine Inch Nails are just a few of the commodities secretly or openly aimed at upwardly-mobile, straight-acting, white-appearing gay guys and the handful of lesbians with comparable economic power. It’s not enough to say that these people are patsies to a culture that takes their money without granting them their rights. The sad fact is that homosexuals are desperate to be exploited.

If you read any of the new or newly mainstream advertising-laden gay magazines, Out  or The Advocate or Genre, or if you saw the thousands of identically clad homosexuals who flooded New York City during the June 1994 Stonewall 25 celebration, you know where the gay community is headed. It’s not moving towards legal rights. It’s not focused on mourning its dead, or insisting self-preservingly on safer sex, or on finding a cure for breast cancer or AIDS. The collective impulse of the chic lesbians and the brave young gay Republicans who captivate the media today and titillate each other is shopping.

That’s what the gay magazines are for, to target and create a consumer demographic. Their interest isn’t politics of sexuality. Indeed, they’re so worried about offending their few loyal corporate advertisers with copy that is too sexy or political that the only thing homosexual about them is their shame. They tell the world that the characteristic homosexual act is compulsive spending. Otherwise, they’re merely a cheerleading squad for anything gay or remotely gay-friendly, no matter how banal. If Melissa Etheridge burps, she gets covered in the gay press. Then there are the ‘gay leaders’ who show up on the covers of gay magazines: Roseanne. Bill Clinton. Barbara Streisand. Marky Mark. During New York’s 1995 Gay Pride week, The Advocate put New York Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on its cover, which is like putting Joseph Mengele on the front page of Hadassah magazine on Yom Kippur.

Streisand of course is ubiquitous. Does everyone who has ever had a homosexual impulse owe her a personal thank-you? For what? For directing George Calin to play a sissy girl faggot in The Prince Of Tides? For leaving out of the film the lesbianism that was central to the book? Homosexuals are suffering from a collective case of Stockholm Syndrome – falling in love with our tormentors. How else to explain what makes Marky Mark a gay icon, except that he looks like the guy from high school gym class who spent half his time exciting your ashamed desire, and the other half shutting your head in his locker? Self-identified gay men lament that they have no national leaders, that the community can’t ‘support’ its leadership, that the gay rights movement is too diverse and mistrusting, too ‘hurt’ to walk behind a representative figure. But I don’t know a fag who wouldn’t follow Marky Mark into a firing squad if he so much as winked.

Gay magazines still arrive in your mailbox in discreet wrapping if you request it. But it would be far more startling for your neighbours and mail carriers to learn that you subscribe to truly politically radical and sex-obsessed journals, like bulletins from the religious right. Actually, there are a lot of similarities between the gay rights movement and Christian fundamentalism. Like homosexuals, Christians are increasingly open about their practices. Like some fervent queer activists, many Christians are shrill, dogmatic, paranoiac, combative and separatist. The difference is that while Christians rally round God, homosexuals only have sex. You don’t have to look your best to win God’s love, but if you’re searching for a gay man you’d better have tits. Gay men are such a straining, susceptible horde of self-loathing, hump-happy pleasure seekers that anyone with a decent set of biceps and a smidgen of media savvy could lead them where no fascist, or televangelist, has ever gone before.

The entire gay male community seems at times to be colluding against the possibility of independent thinking. The gay rights movement, too often, is focused on theatrics rather than on discourse: we want to be entertained and flattered, not criticised. As a group, self-identified gay men are especially resistant to thinking about issues of class and race, and they steadfastly deny their sexism. The irony of gay liberation is that it has made room in the mainstream only for those white men who are already privileged, and disinclined to share their wealth. This is the charge that many Christian fundamentalists make against us: that we are a bunch of affluent men who think our homosexuality shouldn’t interfere with our God-given right to rule the world. Fundamentalists aren’t exactly strangers to feeling both martyred and entitled, of course. Maybe that’s why, in vilifying us, they’re  partly right.

There was a time in my early twenties when being gay meant everything to me. I felt like my sexuality explained my entire life. It was the missing puzzle piece which, clicked into place, finally brought the whole picture into focus. The ten years after I came out, at age twenty-three, were a very heady time. I marched in Gay Pride celebrations throughout the 1980s. I got arrested for protesting because homosexuals weren’t allowed to join New York City’s St Patrick’s Day Parade. I went to ACT UP meetings and networked with all the smartest, cutest, most energetic dykes and fags in Manhattan, and thus, I thought naively, in the world. I hooked up with Queer Nation and raided straight bars. I remember one night precisely: we went to a skinhead dive in East Village and kissed each other every fifteen minutes. There were no skinheads in the bar that night  – the bar, in fact, was nearly empty – but it was a thrilling thing to do. It felt redemptive. It felt like I was facing down everyone who had ever called me ‘faggot’ in high school and saying ‘Yeah, so?’

That part of my life was important to my self-respect. I won’t disavow the years when I wore ‘QUEER NATION’ T-shirts or pinned pink triangles to my lapel. Lately, however, I want to trade all my gay paraphernalia for a button that says ‘NOT ME’. I’m postgay, a counterqueer, the ungrateful beneficiary of the gains of gay liberation. It’s not just that I’m frustrated with the mindlessness of the gay male community, and the elitism of its leadership. I’ve decided to reject the whole category of ‘gay’. Lately, I’ve been agreeing with Gore Vidal. In his introduction to the 1963 edition of his famous 1948 homo novel The City And The Pillar, he says, ‘There is of course no such thing as a homosexual. Despite current usage, the word is an adjective describing a sexual action, not a noun describing a recognisable type’.

Theoretically, Vidal is right. Effectively, however, there is currently no more recognisable type than the self-identified, politically active, sexually predatory gay American man, the kind of guy who wants, not equality for everyone, but entitlement for himself. And big pecs. If gay men ruled America, there would be tax credits for joining a gym. This was abundantly clear to me at the New York Stonewall 25 celebration, the twenty-fifth anniversary if the uprising that inspired the gay rights movement. It was a week-long festival of pod people twirling their multi-coloured freedom rings. There were so many hairless young men in nipple-hugging white T-shirts wandering the streets, that I began to wish it was 1969 again and paddy wagons would come and take them all away.

I spent the week with my best friend, the writer David B. Feinberg, who was dying of AIDS. He was having a hard time eating. Parasites were wearing away the undulant walls of his intestines, and he couldn’t keep anything down. Wherever we went, our main concern was finding the john. As it happened, when I wasn’t with David, I was reporting a magazine article about aspiring gay male porn stars. I went from club to club with members of my community, bare-chested men in cut-off blue jeans and black combat boots. Gay liberation had made it possible for every male homosexual in America to look the same and act too beautiful to talk to. If David had come along, he would have looked around the dance floor and said, ‘cute boy, cute boy, cute boy’. But David was home shitting his beauty into the toilet, and the cute boys he might have wanted were busy trying to look like storm troopers.

In our fervour to be part of the mainstream, we are creating stereotypes about ourselves that are just as clichéd as anything the religious right might dream up. This is evident in openly gay playwright Terence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, a recent Tony Award winning Broadway hit. The play concerns some upwardly mobile, well-dressed gay white men – artists and performers and urban professionals- who spend summer weekends together at a lovely country house in Upstate New York. They swim, play tennis, make meals, serenade each other on the piano with Chopin Waltzes, sunbathe nude, lament about AIDS and finally, triumphantly, dress up in tutus and dance to Swan Lake.

The play is full of sentimental notions of gay male solidarity: all gay men, except for the ones who know about musical comedy, have beautiful bodies; they are all epicures; they love to sit outside in the sun; if they’re bitchy, it’s only because they’re wounded; if they die it’s somebody else’s fault. Their pain is cured by women’s clothing. Their desire is aroused, most fervently, by Puerto Ricans. Of course, there is an equally sentimental and misleading version of the 1990s male homosexual as an angry young queer. Picture a line of brave protestors confronting police officers in riot gear. The activists’ faces are contorted in rage. ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it’ they chant, their voices raised as one in agonised  lament.

I have been such a radical queer, and I have spent cosy weekends at some rich man’s country house, eating gourmet food and talking politics and art. It’s easy for me to spend time in both camps because they are essentially the same. Nevertheless, critics from both sides support a false distinction between them. In A Place At The Table, self-identified ‘conservative’ gay writer Bruce Bawer contrasts ‘subculture’ gays with conservative ones, ‘elegantly turned out’ gay men who go to church on Sunday. Radical queer says Bawer is self-loathing and anti-sex. But the two groups are haggling over style, not ideology. Both Bower and Queer Nation belong to the privileged upper tenth of the gay community, the class of urban artists and professionals who dictate gay politics to the rest of the country. There are no statistics to prove it of course, but if mainstream means ‘majority’, I bet the mainstream of homosexuality in America today is in the Marines.

And in the Navy. And living on public assistance in Idaho. And leaving Latin American enclaves in Los Angeles to cruise for gringos wearing beautiful sweaters in gay bars lining Santa Monica Boulevard. The mainstream of homosexuality in America today is living with Mom and Dad in a two-family house in Whitestone, Queens, acting ‘straight’ all day with friends held over from high school, but getting on homosexual phone-sex lines at night and saying things like, ‘Anybody out there like a lot of body contact?’ Mainstream homosexuals are straight guys who go to gay bars once a week on Fridays and warn their girlfriends not to ask them what they’re doing on their one night out. They are lesbians whose order of preference for sexual partners is 1) straight women, 2) bisexual men, 3) other lesbians.

Yet the gay community represented in Ikea ads, the comfy image of a couple of middle-class white guys out shopping for furniture, is the one that has been identified as the mainstream. It’s a lie. It is a lie for which radical dykes and fags are just as culpable as assimilationist lesbians and gays. The true division in the gay community is between entrenched, privileged, politically active urban and suburban trend-setters and policy makers, and the mass of people with homosexual urges who feel represented more by Reader’s Digest and Soldier of Fortune magazine than by The Advocate or Genre or 10 Percent or Frontiers or Deneuve or On Our Backs or Out. If indeed they have even heard of them.

Nothing reveals the self-absorption of the gay ruling class more patently and damningly than its response to the problems of being homosexual in the military. Radical gays, hiding behind a veneer of pacifism, are especially guilty of classism and elitism in this instance. During the 1993 debate about President Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban on gays in the military, radical queers very nearly colluded with the anti-gay politicos, like Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who organised the Congressional hearings on tolerating homosexuals in the armed forces. ‘If they’re in the military they get what they deserve’, homo radicals told me, over and over, throughout the hearings.

Knee-jerk anti-military feeling dictated the radicals’ official response. And a widespread and often petty mistrust of journalist Randy Shilts prevented the homo community from taking into account Shilts’ devastating 1993 study of gay life in the military, Conduct Unbecoming. Shilts recounts severe and repeated civil rights violations, inflicted by military brass on gays or suspected gays, most of them women and/or African-American. The practice of homo witch-hunting actually intensified during the 1980s, roughly paralleling the AIDS crisis and ruining thousands of lives. But the activist gay community largely ignored the evidence in Shilts’ book, because many gay men were still sulking over Shilts’ role in closing gay bathhouses in San Francisco in the early 1980s.

It’s more important to get blown by a grunt in public than it is to defend his civil rights. Fags like to fetishise marines, in part because of their mostly working-class appeal. But if somebody in the armed forces complains about how the military treats him, a lot of gay men tune out. ‘Abolish the military altogether’, radical fags say, overlooking the fact that enlisting  in the armed forces is often the most viable economic alternative for working-class young men. If you’re seventeen years old and you don’t like musical comedy, and you don’t want to move to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, and you don’t have enough money for college; and if you know that you like sweaty, male environments; and if you want to get the hell out of your small town, why not the Marines? Not every gay man in America is a chorus boy or a sensitive poet or a Harvard MBA.

Of course there were plenty of gay lawyers and Washington lobbyists who did try to help gays in the military. But they were defeated by a false sense of security. They assumed that because they were middle class white guys they would naturally get what they wanted. The gay rights movement, from radicals to conservatives, is crippled by a sense of entitlement. Sometimes I think the difference between the two factions is just a question of contrasting fashion statements. In either case, I’m no longer dressing for either party. I’m sick of gay men. The next time I see a bunch of dudes from Jersey beating on a faggot from Greenwich Village, I’m going to cheer them on. Being gay used to feel like an expression of difference, but I lost my otherness and now I want it back. I’m not gay anymore. I’m not even queer. I’d almost rather be mistaken for a registered Republican. After all, there’s no distinction anymore between conservative Republicans and self-identified homosexuals. A conservative is someone who wants to keep what he has. So is a gay man. The gay rights movement is largely helmed by white men who crave what they were promised as children, but denied as adults because of their sexuality; they want their guaranteed access to power. And they’re not necessarily interested in extending that power to you, just because you happen to like having sex, sometimes, with guys.

by John Weir (Chapter Three of Anti-Gay (1996) ed. Mark Simpson –Freedom Editions, p26-34).

ACT UP! And ‘Radical’ Gay Elitism

I have already posted about a recent photography exhibition of AIDS activism. 2012 is the 25th anniversary of the start of Act Up! the ‘radical’ queer organisation that campaigned on AIDS/HIV issues in the 80s and 90s.  Larry Kramer, who worked for Act UP! writes a quite empassioned piece in Huffpo this week. He says:

‘I’m an ungrateful sonofabitch. ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which helped save my life, is 25 years old, and I am going to be 77 years old come June, and I should be grateful, right?

It’s difficult to be grateful when the AIDS plague is worse than ever all over the world and the two organizations I helped found to stop it are, if not no more, then in such pathetic shape as to almost be no more.

It’s hard to blame these remnants of former greatness when the gay population of this country continues to be so passive, so apathetic, so shut-the-fuck-up-with-all-your-message-queen-shit…

At the height of the AIDS plague, from 1990 to 1995, when we were dying so fast we couldn’t keep up with the count, of all the gays in the United States — be it 10 million or 20 million (will we ever find out?) — no more than 5,000 of us at the most fought in ACT UP’s 100 or so chapters to save the lives of our brothers and sisters. All the rest of the 10? 20? million gays would not fight to save their own lives. I never could figure that one out. Still can’t.’

Well I might be able to help Larry figure out why the majority of non-straight people do not support ‘radical’ organisations like Act UP!(his aside that ‘will we ever find out?’ how many gays there are in America alludes to the fact many people have same-sex sex without being ‘out and proud’ gays) . I am using a chapter from Anti Gay (ed Mark Simpson), written in 1996, when Act UP! was at its height. It is by John Weir and it is quite illuminating. He writes:

‘The entire gay male community seems at times to be colluding against the possibility of independent thinking. The gay rights movement, too often, is focused on theatrics rather than on discourse: we want to be entertained and flattered, not criticised. As a group, self-identified gay men are especially resistant to thinking about issues of class and race, and they steadfastly deny their sexism. The irony of gay liberation is that it has made room in the mainstream only for those white men who are already privileged, and disinclined to share their wealth. This is the charge that many Christian fundamentalists make against us: that we are a bunch of affluent men who think our homosexuality shouldn’t interfere with our God-given right to rule the world. Fundamentalists aren’t exactly strangers to feeling both martyred and entitled, of course. Maybe that’s why, in vilifying us, they’re  partly right…

I spent the week with my best friend, the writer David B. Feinberg, who was dying of AIDS. He was having a hard time eating. Parasites were wearing away the undulant walls of his intestines, and he couldn’t keep anything down. Wherever we went, our main concern was finding the john. As it happened, when I wasn’t with David, I was reporting a magazine article about aspiring gay male porn stars. I went from club to club with members of my community, bare-chested men in cut-off blue jeans and black combat boots. Gay liberation had made it possible for every male homosexual in America to look the same and act too beautiful to talk to. If David had come along, he would have looked around the dance floor and said, ‘cute boy, cute boy, cute boy’. But David was home shitting his beauty into the toilet, and the cute boys he might have wanted were busy trying to look like storm troopers…

Both Bawer and Queer Nation belong to the privileged upper tenth of the gay community, the class of urban artists and professionals who dictate gay politics to the rest of the country. There are no statistics to prove it of course, but if mainstream means ‘majority’, I bet the mainstream of homosexuality in America today is in the Marines…

And in the Navy. And living on public assistance in Idaho. And leaving Latin American enclaves in Los Angeles to cruise for gringos wearing beautiful sweaters in gay bars lining Santa Monica Boulevard. The mainstream of homosexuality in America today is living with Mom and Dad in a two-family house in Whitestone, Queens, acting ‘straight’ all day with friends held over from high school, but getting on homosexual phone-sex lines at night and saying things like, ‘Anybody out there like a lot of body contact?’ Mainstream homosexuals are straight guys who go to gay bars once a week on Fridays and warn their girlfriends not to ask them what they’re doing on their one night out. They are lesbians whose order of preference for sexual partners is 1) straight women, 2) bisexual men, 3) other lesbians….

Yet the gay community represented in Ikea ads, the comfy image of a couple of middle-class white guys out shopping for furniture, is the one that has been identified as the mainstream. It’s a lie. It is a lie for which radical dykes and fags are just as culpable as assimilationist lesbians and gays. The true division in the gay community is between entrenched, privileged, politically active urban and suburban trend-setters and policy makers, and the mass of people with homosexual urges who feel represented more by Reader’s Digest and Soldier of Fortune magazine than by The Advocate or Genre or 10 Percent or Frontiers or Deneuve or On Our Backs or Out. If indeed they have even heard of them…

I’m not gay anymore. I’m not even queer. I’d almost rather be mistaken for a registered Republican. After all, there’s no distinction anymore between conservative Republicans and self-identified homosexuals. A conservative is someone who wants to keep what he has. So is a gay man. The gay rights movement is largely helmed by white men who crave what they were promised as children, but denied as adults because of their sexuality; they want their guaranteed access to power. And they’re not necessarily interested in extending that power to you, just because you happen to like having sex, sometimes, with guys.’

Wilhelm It Was Really Quite Something

 

This is Mark Simpson on Morrissey, his long-term lover and anti-life partner, at the Spectator Arts Blog

——————————

Because the 80s is the decade that actually ended the 19th Century – the 90s was just an after-party clean-up operation – it’s also the decade that never came to an end itself. In fact, the 80s just won’t go away.

Economy in (‘Big Bang’) recession. Tories in power. Cuts on the table. Riots on the streets. Royal weddings on the telly. The Falklands becoming a fighting issue. And my mother complaining about Morrissey. (‘I see that chap you like so much has been in the papers again. Ridiculous man! And he still can’t sing!’)

As Madonna might put it, it’s all a bit reductive.

Everyone has been enjoying moaning about Morrissey lately – just like the good old days. In case you somehow missed it, at a performance in Argentina last week, his band appeared in t-shirts printed with the charming message ‘WE HATE WILLIAM AND KATE’ (remember 80s protest t-shirts?).

Perhaps worried this might be overlooked back home, the former Smiths front-man also offered this bouquet to his Argentine fans about those bitterly contested, sparsely-populated rocks in the South Atlantic: ‘Everybody knows they belong to you’.

The Times, Mirror, Telegraph, Sun and Mail all dutifully denounced Morrissey’s big mouth.The Guardian for its part ran an earnest discussion between two music critics titled: ‘Is Morrissey a national treasure? (The answer seemed to be ‘yes – but a very naughty one.’)

Not bad for a 52-year-old crooner currently without a record contract. But then, just like that other 80s diva keen on hairspray and frilly-collared blouses, we’ll never entirely be rid of him.

The British experience of the 80s is forever dominated by two very difficult personalities. Both from the north, both unafraid to speak their mind, and both possessing a gender all of their own.

And while one was a working class militant vegetarian anarchist Sandie Shaw fan with a flair for homoerotic imagery, and the other a bossy petit bourgeois social Darwinist and devotee of General Pinochet who famously outlawed the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, both of them were radicals on a revenge trip.

But, while Margaret Thatcher owned the 80s, Steven Patrick Morrissey stole its youth. Or at least, the youth that didn’t want to be a part of Thatcher’s 80s. The Smiths were not just an ‘alternative’ band: they were the alternative that Maggie said didn’t exist.

In fact, The Smiths were reviled by almost everyone at the time – Fleet Street, the BBC (they were effectively banned from daytime Radio 1), the record business (they were signed to a teeny-weeny Indie label), and indeed most of the record buying public (their singles struggled to even get into the top 20).

But they have become the heart of a decade that didn’t have one. They are now the band that everyone liked – two or three decades after the event.

Including, most famously, David Cameron, who used The Smiths and Morrissey as a Tory rebranding and detoxifying tool at least as important as those melting glaciers he went to gawp at. Declaring The Smiths his favourite group not long after gaining the leadership of the ‘Nasty Party’, he was even pictured, if memory serves me right, with a copy of Morrissey’s 2005 album Ringleader of the Tormentors on his desk.

Cameron, the former Carlton PR, was telling us that the Tories were now cool and sensitive, that they had assimilated the social and cultural anti-Thatcher reaction.

But Morrissey, whatever you may think of him, isn’t a man to be assimilated lightly. Especially by a Chipping Norton Tory.

When, in 2010, his estranged former Smiths collaborator Johnny Marr tweeted that he ‘forbade’ David Cameron from liking the Smiths, animal rights activist Morrissey endorsed him, adding:

‘David Cameron hunts and shoots and kills stags – apparently for pleasure. It was not for such people that either Meat Is Murder or The Queen Is Dead were recorded; in fact, they were made as a reaction against such violence.’

No-one can be genuinely surprised that someone who called an album The Queen is Deadis fiercely anti-Royalist. No-one can be shocked that the man who sang ‘Irish Blood English Heart’ is no fan of the remnants of the British Empire.

And let’s not forget his famous 1984 quip: ‘The sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Margaret Thatcher escaped unscathed’, or the track ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ for his 1988 album Viva Hate.

Unless, that is, they hoped that Morrissey had mellowed with age and become some sort of singing Stephen Fry with a quiff. Morrissey’s views haven’t changed. Morrissey hasn’t changed. He hasn’t grown up.

Still an adolescent curmudgeon, an otherworldly prophet from Stretford, he’s just older and thicker around the middle. He did after all promise us again and again that he wouldn’t change, couldn’t change.

It’s we, his fans, who have changed. If we’re embarrassed by his antics it may be because we’ve finally become the people we used to hate.

Mark Simpson is the author of Saint Morrissey

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/night-and-day/7714548/morrissey-hasnt-changed.thtml

Gaydream Believer: Inside The Gay Underwear Cult

This essay by Mark Simpson is an extract from Anti Gay (1996) edited by Simpson (Freedom Press)

I hope that now you’re Out, life improves for you no end. You’ve lifted the burden of secrecy and deceit and that might mean that the other problems that have plagued you will simply evaporate.

-Gay Times columnist Terry Sanderson in an open letter in the Guardian to the entertainer Michael Barrymore

I wanna be free, gay and happy!
- The Coming Out Crew

I am a homosexual in a city full of gays                                                                                  - Michel Foucault

Isn’t it just fabby to be gay? Gay is, after all, good, and everyone fortunate enough to be gay is, of course, glad – when they’re not too busy feeling proud. Which is perfectly understandable since gays, as we all know, have the best clubs, the best drugs, the best underwear shops and the best time. In fact, gays are so glad and proud that they have a big, sweaty street party every year to show the world just how glad and proud they are and what great underwear they have.

All things considered, it’s so fabby being gay, that it’s difficult to imagine what it must be like to be straight. Imagine the suffering of those poor souls who are doomed by some accident of genetics or underdevelopment of that brain lobe which regulates aesthetic potential not only to never be able really to appreciate Ab Fab or carry off wearing a silver thong, but also never to be able to come out. Imagine never being able to experience the joy of discovering your true identity and inheriting all this gladness; imagine being excluded from a world so marvellous, so welcoming, so well-presented, simply because you thought having children and living in the suburbs seemed like the thing to do.

Even worse, imagine what it would be like to prefer the same sex but to be denied the rewards  that this display of good taste so rightly entails and be forced to pass for straight. Difficult as it is to believe, this was once the universal state of affairs. This is because – horrible to relate – once upon a time there were no gays, only dreary homosexuals.

Naturally this was before that watershed moment in human history by which everything must be measured – the Stonewall Revolution. Before Stonewall, or BS, homosexuals had internalised straight values and were labouring under oppression and a false sense of guilt. They thought themselves ill or sinful or both. So, in dimly – lit, underworld – controlled basement bars, wearing cardigans in muted colours, they cried into their Martinis and looked enviously at the carefree drag queens – so strong, so colourful, so successful with straight trade. As Disco had not been invented yet, there being no gays to sniff poppers and woop it up in bell-bottoms, the pitiful homosexuals’ only solace was singing along to Judy Garland’s The Man That Got Away, and of course, Over The Rainbow.

No wonder these poor creatures would often be heard lamenting their lot, expressing shame and wishing out loud that they could be cured of their sad affliction.

However, in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, New York, all this changed. Forever. During the course of another police raid by heartless pigs unconcerned that the homos had buried poor Judy’s bones only the day before, something unheard of happened. Inspired to anger by the drag queens’ feisty show of resistance, homos revolted. An ear-ring or beer bottle brutally ripped from some fierce, befrocked lovely resisting arrest, crashed to the floor and the ancien regime of homo-shame shattered into a thousand dangerous pieces as the rioting that changed the world began.

Exhilarated by their new-found Gay Power the rioters had a revelation. It dawned on them that their sense of guilt and shame was just a trick designed to keep them out of sight and in conservative clothes. There was no longer any need to repress their desires or their undergarments, or acquiesce in the New York Police Department’s attempt to repress them.

Armed with the new-found weapon of Gay Pride they fought back, surprising and vanquishing the entire NYPD whose Irish muscle, used to yielding fag flesh, now found itself impotent against the righteous anger of these empowered pansies. That magical night all the homosexuals in New York became gay and flooded out of their basement bars, darkened piers and parks, onto the streets, peeling off their sweaters, discarding their corduroy trousers and shouting out the message for all the world to hear: Gay Is Good! The cure for their sad affliction had turned out to be not prayer, psychiatry, electro-shock or football, but Gay Pride.

That message resounded around the world. After Stonewall, or AS, homos everywhere began to discover the indisputable truth that gay is as moral, as natural, as healthy, as beautiful as they had been told homosexuality was immoral, unnatural, unhealthy and ugly. The Stonewall Revolution corrected society’s misconception about homosexuality not by turning the world upside down but by turning it the right way up: the inverts merely overturned a world that was already standing on its head.

So, in the As epoch, homosexuality, with its nasty medicinal odour, was now an increasingly redundant term. Instead, ‘homo-phobia’, a word with a nasty medicinal odour, was coined to explain the origins of the obviously mentally imbalanced idea that gay wasn’t good. While the innocent BS homosexual was the victim of pathologisation and prejudice, the guilty AS homophobe was obviously deserving of pathologisation and prejudice. It soon became apparent that since homophobia was an illness produced by ignorance, secrecy, and an aversion to wearing leather harnesses in public, the underlying cause of homophobia was a shortage of proud gays.

This was underlined by the fact that the homophobe was invariably a homosexual who wouldn’t accept his identity/duty and become gay.  In fact, it was soon recognised that any congruence of same-shaped genitals, or interest in such congruence, however casual or passing, anywhere in the world at anytime must eventually be paid for by full membership of the gay community and an account with ‘Big Boy Athletic Supplies’ or else face charges of hypocrisy and living a lie.

Gays quickly discovered another, related truth. If gay was good 0 and this was an a priori truth – then the gay life was also the good life, in every sense. So not only was being gay a real gas, and as you know, really fabby, but it was the moral thing to do. Homosexuals had been encouraged to say ‘no’ to themselves several times a day ( or at least feel guilty about not saying it). Gays, on the other hand, would learn to say ‘Yes please!’ several times before brunch.

In fact, square, trad old ‘no’ was not a word that gays had time for anymore. Once the ultimate ‘no’ had been shouted at Stonewall –‘No!’ to a world of shame, ‘No!’ to straight convention, ‘No!’ to cotton/polyester mix joxkey shorts – there was no need ever to say ‘no’ again. Moreover, ‘to your own self be true’ was the Disney-esque existential motto of gays everywhere – and since as a gay your sexuality/pleasure was you, saying ‘no’ to any form of indulgence was a denial of the truth of who you were. Abstinence was a form of mendacity at best and collaboration at worst – since saying ‘yes’ to yourself was also the gay way of continuing to say ‘not’ to straight convention, hedonism was a positive virtue and absolute duty. After Stonewall abolished guilt overnight where centuries of philosohpising had failed, the only thing to feel guilty about now was feeling guilty itself. This is how gays invented the 1970s and made the world safe for designer underwear.

Of course, the thrilling times of Stonewall are a long way behind us now. But their spirit is very much alive today. The life-transforming revelation and truth of Stonewall is repeated every time someone comes out and is baptised into the gay community. The truth shall set ye free. When one comes out, and ceases to be a private homosexual and instead becomes a public gay, the burden of deceit and false consciousness is thrown off, the sex police are vanquished and the out person demonstrates new-found whistle-blowing pride in sexuality instead of shame. It is a confessional narrative of sinner and saved. When a man comes out as gay he is coming out as what he was meant to be all along, he had found his true self, his existential soul, and rejected the sin/guilt of the previous, inauthentic, closeted self that thought baggy clothes were quite comfortable really.

And now that the scales have fallen down from the new convert’s eyes he is born again – not in the silly, lying, sex-negative fundamentalist sense of the word, of course, but in the new, meaningful, sex –positive gay sense. And indeed sense itself is bestowed upon the lucky soul who comes out. His whole hitherto confusing life has been  leading up to this moment – a long gestation period spent in the chrysalis of the closet. What seemed without purpose before now takes on meaning. What’s more, the other problems that have plagued him will disappear. Coming out id thus a moment of revelation and redemption: I was blind, but now I see; I was lost, but now I’m found. Just like the homos in the Stonewall Bar that night in Year Zero, from the nasty straugt-acting grub emerges a fabulous gay butterfly with wings of lycra.

Coming out is also a form of death, but a fabulous, life-affirming form of death to be sure. To be ‘reborn’ you have to destroy the wrong person that existed before. So the out person now recalls that he knew he was gay from the earliest age; before he encountered puberty, before he could walk, before the afterbirth was cold, etc etc. Early playground friendships  with members of the same sex are now seen for what they were: passionate gay attachments which no one straight could possibly have entertained. On the other hand, any encounters with, interest in, or marriage to the opposite sex is now quite rightly seen as nothing but an ill-judged attempt to satisfy one’s peers, parents, guilt, false consciousness or just sisterly feeling. You know the scenario, I thought I loved you, but really I just envied your make-up skills.

And best of all, the newly emerged out person also discovers that a sense of difference and apartness, feelings of aloneness and hollowness common to most at some time or other and exploited by all nasty religions – especially the anti-gay ones – are in fact a product of being homosexual but unable to become gay. It is surely a great consolation to know that the real reason for your sense of smallness in the universe as a child was not because you were human and frail,or separated from God, but because you were meant to dance till dawn in a Spandex all in one, surrounded by young men with mobile hips and chemical smiles, and yet were stuck in a Gap-less town in Cleveland where the only place open after 11pm was the deathburger van outside the Young Farmers Club.

And it has to be the case, doesn’t it? If coming out isn’t a coming home, then it would mean that homos were still lost souls who have to face the universe alone. And that would be a bit of a downer, really.

That sense of difference is anyway replaced by an enveloping , snuggly sense of sameness when you come out. In the gay world everything is reassuringly similar, wherever you go. Gays are better at franchising than McDonalds. Just in case you should feel homesick when travelling abroad or just around town, gay bars and clubs around the globe are playing the same musc and the patros are wearing the same jeans, haircuts and even facial expressions. In the backroom the same American porn movie is showing and men are on their knees performing the same acts they see on the screen and rapping the same rap in the same Strykerese. And wherever you go you can pick up a gay publication which is full of pictures of people just like you and exciting information on just how many other people just like you there are out there and how you can meet them. Once you’re out you need never be troubled by pesky old difference ever again.

An inconvenient sense of insignificance and humdrumness is also eradicated when you come out. When you come out you are midwife and mother to your own birth. Nature and heterosexuality have no claim on you anymore as you become a godlike creature of culture. By heroically refusing to allow contact between penis and vagina the gay man refuses to accept his mortality and the ignominy of driving space –mobiles (even if reproduction occurs, as a result of some drunken accident or some sober design of turkey basters).

Straights, on the other hand, are doomed to be the mere vassals of nature and Pampers shareholders. Their bodies are used in a cruel and mercenary way merely to mix genes together, to pass the new gene line on to the next generation and to pay school fees.  Gays, meanwhile, use each other’s bodies in a tender and beautiful way to mix together aftershaves and pass on new fashion lines to the next generation.

In this sense, gays, contrary to their perception by many straights as the embodiment of immoral ‘animal lust’, are actually a brand of holy celibates. Yes, some may be very promiscuous, but only with other men, a choice of partner which – until the appearance of AIDS – was a form of sexual activity with absolutely no consequences (unless you count increased expenditure on Crisco and Kleenex).

But perhaps the most marvellous thing of all about coming out is that you leave psychoanalysis behind as something for uptight straights. When a man makes the transition from homosexual to gay, he is choosing light over dark, truth over falsehood, reason over superstition, rationality over convention, expression over repression, Calvin Klein over Hanes; he is emerging from the twilight world into the sunlit uplands of life where everyone has a great tan-line. The homosexual who walks out of his stuffy closet and into the open arms of the gay community is in fact conducting a walking cure instead of a talking cure, one which renders all further analysis, or even thought, completely redundant.

Everything is now, by definition, out in the open. The gay man knows who he is, what he is, what he wants and where to find it at a ten per cent discount. There are no longer any conflicts to be told, any mysteries to unravel or any dreams to be interpreted. Nothing needs to be unlocked because this has already been done by opening the closet door – Eros has been liberated, inhibition vanquished. After the gay man’s debut on the world stage as a fully formed person with fully formed needs and fully formed pectorals, everything is exactly as it appears to be. The gay man is, in fact, the very embodiment of enlightened common sense, full rationality and great grooming. And there is absolutely no truth in the scurrilous idea put around by anti-gay people and those, like Camille Paglia, who are No Friends of The Gay Community, that this is why homosexuals were more interesting to talk to, or, for that matter, read.

When you consider all the advantages of coming out, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that it is a pity that it happens only once in your life.

Which is why the Pride Parade was invented. At Pride, everyone can come out year after year. And they can do this en masse – just like the original Stonewall Rioters. Everyone has the chance to feel like they are changing the world, and, even more importantly, to try and draw as much attention to themselves as possible. So on the June anniversary of Year Zero, gays in big cities parade through town, hold hands, kiss and embrace, and blow whistles, while the fetishists in their ranks display theor paraphernalia, drag queens flaunt their stuff, male strippers flex and pose on floats sponsored by sexual lubricant companies, and young men in their underwear noisily relive and dramatise the excitement and the liberation of their own coming out, vanquishing any counter-revolutionary thoughts they might be entertaining about the muted anti-climax that may actually have followed this curtain-raiser.

And there are many reasons to feel proud at Pride. You are proud to prefer the same sex, proud to be open about it, proud of your floats and freedom flags, proud to be there feeling proud and especially proud of your cycling shorts three sizes too small. It’s quite dizzying, really. No wonder many people describe it as a ‘near religious experience’. It’s a wonder that proud gay hearts don’t burst with pride on such a proud day. The straight world can only look on in bitter frustration, realising that in spite of their best efforts, they haven’t succeeded in making gays hung up about their sexuality.

As a measure of how successful and how popular gay is, every year the parades get bigger, the floats fluffier and the male strippers beefier and oilier. In case we don’t notice this, the gay press helpfully points this out – along with the cast –iron prediction that this year the parade will be so big, fluffy and oily that the straights won’t be able to ignore it, like they somehow managed to last year (not counting, that is, those couple of photos of drag queens whose lives and choice of heels were obviously being validated because a camera was pointing in their direction).

And knowing that the numbers are growing each year is gratifying news. It tells us that we are on the road to victory, that we must have right on our side, and, best of all, that we are fashionable.  But perhaps the most encouraging thing about the rising attendance figures is that they bring ever closer the realisation of the greatest gay dream of all: to turn the whole world into a gay disco! After all, Pride is nothing if it isn’t a vast gay day-club; a discotheque after the lights have come on but no one wants to go home.

Understandably, the Coming of the Kingdom of Kylie is something that most gays can hardly wait for. A world of free love and shirtless men with their hands in the air showing you their shaved armpits is something really to look forward to. Just think of the money saved on taxi fares for a start. And what better image could there be of freedom and love than the gay disco? With just a teensy-weensy bit of help from mind-altering substances, the gay disco is the place where you can experience the most intense sense of well being, belonging and happiness, not to mention some really interesting convesations about life, the universe and how difficult it is to get hold of good shit these days and how the tab you took last weekend turned the whites of your eyes yellow.

But this magic is not something gays want to keep for themselves. Gays are so unselfish, so giving and so concerned about the rest of the world that they devoutly want to extend this dry-ice Nirvana to everyone else, just so long as they’re cute and under thirty-five. And by one of those strange coincidences which makes you realise that Dame Fate is actually a fag hag herself, staights under thirty-five, lured by techno, house, and lycra cotton mix underwear, are the exactly the same ones who are queuing up outside  the gay disco wanting a piece of Utopia plus strobe lights. Everyone cool now wants to dream the gay dream, or at least stay up all night dancing to their records.

So gays, you see, really have reached the other side of the rainbow that Judy sang about. Now that we’re out of the closet and not living in Kansas or Cleveland anymore we don’t need to cry into our Martinis. In fact, such behaviour is not to be tolerated at all, being as I is just a sign that you haven’t really ‘come to terms’ yet or that you are just some terrible self-hating throwback. Any unhappiness is clearly the result ofstraight oppression, self-oppression or your dealer not having the right contacts.

Besides, we have everything you could ask for, and if, by some strange delusion, you feel you’re missing something in your life, thoughtful niche marketeers will think of it for you. The gay press, courtesy of kind telephone sex operators and their lovely sex-positive ads featuring buffed men in some really stunning underwear, is free and never stops telling us how marvellous we and the products aimed at us are. Gay pressure groups tell us we are adorable victims who deserve special protection and sympathy, while market researchers tell us we are adorable consumers who deserve special targeting. Really big stars like Shirley Maclaine and Liza Minelli love us. Madonna wants to be one of us. The younger generation wants to dance with us. And, God bless their bikini lines, Bob ‘n’ Rob Jackson pParis and their parakeets are role-modelling for us.

When all is said and done, the only thing to feel sorry about, apart, of course from the fact that the Olympic Commission hasn’t yet accepted the Wet Jockstrap Contest as a sport, is AIDS. But even then sadness isn’t what you should be feeling, except during those touching candlelit vigils. Instead you should be feeling angry at drug companies/the Government/Western medicine/The CIA/straights for letting it happen and pride at the heroic way gays have responded to it , and dismissing as patently homophobic and therefore not  worth discussing, the suggestion that AIDS might not have been a gay plague in the West, that gays might not have had to respond to it so heroically without the ghettoism and hedonism of the gay seventies and the gay identity itself.

After having discovered at Stonewall the Truth that gay is always good and having been set free by that discovery, at last seeing and showing things  as they really are, gays have indeed changed the world and the shape of men’s briefs forever.No wonder we feel so proud of our achievements. Isn’t it fabby to be gay?

——————————————–

By Mark Simpson, From Anti Gay (1996) edited by Mark Simpson (Freedom Press)

Some subsequent articles relating to this chapter (I am going to write a follow-up piece so this is here for my ref as much as anything):

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/04/17/sporno/gay for pay

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/07/30/straights-go-gay/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/06/11/the-end-of-heterosexuality-as-weve-known-it/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/10/18/put-a-ring-on-it/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2006/05/04/the-trouble-with-men-mark-simpson-on-simon-fanshawes-the-trouble-with-gay-men/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2009/04/28/bisexuals-musto-be-gay/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2006/04/26/curiouser-and-curiouser-the-strange-disappearance-of-male-bisexuality/

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/peter-g-tatchell/sex-future-beyond-gay-and-straight_b_1195017.html

Dirty, Pretty Things – Mark Simpson on Suede

Forget 1970′s revivalism and androgyny, polymorphous perversity is what the 1990s are dressing up for, and Suede are the most ‘bestial’ outfit going. Breathlessly awaited for over a year in what must be the most hyperventilated press anticipation ever, their eponymous debut album is, alas, all that was hoped for and more.

Suede, the unnatural offspring of Bowie and Morrissey, present us with a haughty lopsided smile induced by crap drugs and cheap cider; spoilt, sullen faces that peer awkwardly from under irritating long fringes and demand everything: proudly narcissistic babies that need your love – all of it.

If pop has been reborn then it has been born degenerate in a decadent nation. Suede take you on a tour that celebrates the squalor and despair that is Britain.  In a wasted landscape of the burnt out grandiose pretensions of the Thatcher revolution, sex and excitement are to be got where and when you can; in Suede country meat, violence, drugs, dogs are all equally valid sources of pleasure, of escapist passion. The songs – ‘Animal Lover’ and ‘Animal Nitrate’ – and the lyrics – ‘she’s got a big black dog in her’ turn the very quintessence of homely Englishness, the domestic pet, foaming and slavering onto the suburban dream.  In the amyl prostrate world of Suede, rough trade ‘jumps on your bones’, semen and poppers mix on your shiny nylon sheets, in the squat next door kids ‘chase the dragon’, and down the road up on the common girls fuck with men in cars, engines still running , ‘exhaust in their hair’.

Lead singer Brett caterwauls like a depraved Terry Hall over driven guitars about a glorious grubbiness of the soul for which grunge was just a (bad) dress rehearsal. And unlike Morrissey, who was strangely wholesome in the fever of his hypochondria, Brett and his swinish friends are incurably louche in their sickly, sibilant sounds.

Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators (1994)

Now out on Kindle: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Male-Impersonators-Performing-Masculinity-ebook/dp/B006K5ZMNE/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325335566&sr=1-4

Also By Simpson On Suede: http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/11/02/the-persueders-mark-simpson-rubs-suede-the-wrong-way/

From Poppers To Paninis: How ‘Gay’ History Has Been Rewritten

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/11/gay-rights-civil-partnerships

According to Aaron Hicklin, editor in chief of Glossy Gay Magazine OUT, 2011 has been a good year to be gay.

Once I read that standfirst I didn’t really feel like going any further. The ‘gay is good’ and ‘good is gay’ message has been rammed down our throats for decades now, and Mark Simpson and colleagues carefully pulled it apart 15 years ago, in Simpson’s edited 1996 collection Anti Gay.

But I have read the whole article now, and it was as bad as I expected.

After celebrating the achievements of gay activists and individuals, such as gay marriage, the repeal of DADT, and the positive representation of gay relationships on TV, Hicklin produced this paragraph from hell:

‘Looking back it’s clear that this dramatic metamorphosis, from poppers to paninis, represented a broader shift in gay culture, or – if you believe the commentator Andrew Sullivan – the “inexorable evolution” towards the end of gay culture itself. Sullivan may have been overly optimistic in a 2005 article that he wrote for The New Republic, welcoming the receding differences between gay and straight, but he was the first to fully articulate the assimilation of gay identity into the mainstream. A year later, when I became editor of Out, it seemed pertinent to ask what function a gay magazine would serve in a world that, if not yet post-gay, seemed to be heading that way.’

Where to start? Well how about with Hicklin’s assertion that Andrew Sullivan, cuddly  gay bear American conservative  ’was the first to fully articulate the assimilation of gay identity into the mainstream [in 2005]‘?

I have just finished reading Mark Simpson’s 2002 Sex Terror, and it includes an article entitled The New Naff which was originally penned in UK Gay magazine Attitude in 1999. In that piece he wrote:

‘You see, ‘gay’ is now the new naff. The lifestyle -ism and makeover mania which gays largely pioneered, and with which they seduced the straights, has become as dominant and as dull and dreary as the Old Naff once was’.

In other words, thanks to the gayification of culture we may indeed have gone from poppers to paninis, but that is not good, in some ways it’s very very bad.

 Simpson and Sullivan have both appeared in books together, and have quoted each other (with varying degrees of (dis)approval) over the years. And Mark Simpson has been a regularcontributor to OUT magazine itself for a long time. So ignoring him and his contribution to this discussion of ‘the end of gay’ can only be a deliberate oversight on the part of the Gay Magazine editor.

But my anger at this ommission is not merely to do with my respect for Mark Simpson’s role in conceptualising ‘gay’ culture and its problems, or the notion that we are moving into a ‘post-gay’ world.  It is partly due to the way the author of the article, along with many gay writers, journalists and academics, is rewriting history. Not just ‘gay’ history but, as Foucault has termed it: The History Of Sexuality.

Funnily enough, it was in OUT magazine, under the editorship of Mr Hicklin, in 2009, that Mark Simpson wrote about this history, the one that Hicklin et al are now rewriting in their own image. In his piece marking the 14oth anniversary of The Homosexual he wrote:

‘As you may have noticed, the out-and-proud modern gay, born amidst protest, shouting and flying bottles outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969, is now forty years old. But you may be less aware that this year is also the 140th birthday of a much more discreet and distinguished (if pathologized and sometimes pitiful) figure that Stonewall is often seen as making obsolete: the homosexual‘.

And that’s the problem with this Guardian article for me. It is erasing the ‘homosexual’ from the history books, and turning the history of (homo)sexuality, into the history of Gay.

In 2007, Simpson developed his thesis about the gayification of everything, to include how ‘homosexual’ sexual habits have been adopted by heterosexual people, now that the proscription of homosexuality is no longer enforced legally or socially. In other words, straights have gone gay. And, in this sense at least, he is less pessimistic as the merging of sexual behaviours has enabled some freedoms.

But this discourse of Gay marriage, the end of DADT, the appearance of gay characters on Glee, the ubiquity of paninis and cappucinos, are all part of a ‘homogenisation’ of  sexual identity and lifestyle into this big gloopy gay mass. And, though this has actually happened, it does not describe ALL the people and all the sexualities that continue to exist today, if it describes any of them. For ‘gay’ is the culture, the commodification of homosexual identities, it’s not the actual people (apart from Graham Norton). So, whilst Hicklin is right we are moving into a ‘post-gay’ world, he is spinning it through a ‘gay’ perspective, and in doing so, missing out a lot of people and a lot of viewpoints.

In his gay article, Hicklin talks a lot about bullying of ‘gay teens’. He says ‘ life as a gay teenager can still be incomprehensibly lonely. ‘ But it’s not just ‘gay’ teens who are bullied as I have said here at Graunwatch before. Life as a teenager can still be incomprehensibly lonely. Hell, LIFE can be incomprehensibly lonely.

Take this young man in America, a rapper  who is heterosexual but happens to like wearing colourful tights and lipstick. He is not a ‘gay teen’ but he gets teased and ridiculed for being ‘different’.

The history of people falling outside the ‘norms’ of sexual behaviour and gender identity is not ‘gay’. The photos in the OUT feature mentioned by Hicklin, on their list of top 100 influential gay figures, includes Andre Pejic and Chaz Bono. Pejic is an androgynous model, Bono a trans man who is engaged to a woman. THEY ARE NOT GAY!

I’m heterosexual (I think). I don’t feel I have the right to say that this Gay assimilation is oppressing me, per se. But I do get annoyed when teh gayz take role models/icons who we can all relate to and identify with, for their own gay hall of fame. And, I am astounded that more ‘queer’ people are not up in arms about their erasure from the history books and the contemporary narratives of ‘gay’. Maybe they’ve given up and given in. It’s certainly a relentless, subsuming machine.

But it’s wrong.

Hicklin also ‘gayed out’ television and popular culture. He wrote:

‘Visibility begets change. Reality TV, for all its questionable ethics, has brought real gay people into the living rooms of America; in 2009, the most popular of those shows, Simon Cowell’s American Idol, was seen as a bellwether of changing attitudes as a young gay contestant, Adam Lambert, in eyeliner and glitter, advanced to the final. Lambert’s flamboyance conflicted with the show’s notorious reluctance to field openly gay contestants: he seemed to be telling us he was gay without spelling it out (until after the finale), and the subsequent conversation in the media, and online, showed how far we had come.’

This paragraph illustrates one of my criticisms of the piece – how it erases anyone who isn’t ‘Gay’ with a capital G from the history of ‘gay’ sexuality. Bisexual people are very familiar with being ignored and denied by gay narratives. As Mark Simpson has written about, it’s not just straight society that believes bisexual men, and it is usually men, don’t exist. According to many gay commentators, you must be either Gay, Straight Or Lying.

And,  I have already mentioned how Hicklin has lumped in trans people (eg Chaz Bono) and gender-non-conforming people (eg Andre Pejic) with the ‘gay’ identity.

But there is another group of people being erased from this story, a very large, very buff, very tarty group: metrosexuals.

Mark Simpson has tried to explain till he’s blue in the face, how it is metrosexuality – men’s desire to be desired in consumer culture – that has furthered the acceptance of gay identities and homosexual behaviours in our culture.

In his important 2010 article, The End Of Heterosexuality As We’ve Known It, he wrote

‘Of course young men in the US are much more accepting of homosexuality – because so many of them are now way gaythemselves.  It’s not really an issue of ‘tolerance’ or ‘acceptance’ of ‘otherness’ at all.  It’s about self-interest – quite literally.  About men being less down on the gays because they’re less hard on themselves now – in fact, rather sweet instead.  It’s about men in general not being so quick to renounce and condemn their own ‘unmanly’ desires or narcissism – or project it into ‘faggots’.’

Hicklin also said in his Big Gay Article:

‘It was also a reminder of how critical popular entertainment has been in challenging attitudes, and it remains the single most compelling argument for the annual Out 100, a photo portfolio of 100 gay men, women and transgender people from all walks of life who live their lives openly and without compromise. Few are household names, but that’s partly the point. The androgynous Australian model, Andrej Pejic, who met the Queen in October wearing a vintage Versace pencil skirt is as much part of the unfolding gay narrative as the social secretary of the White House (and first gay man to hold the position), or Gareth Thomas, one of the most capped Welsh rugby union players in history. Collectively they represent the vitality and diversity of the gay community.’

But Aaron Hicklin’s catalogue of gay people taking over popular culture, or at least becoming more represented within it, just does not make any sense without an understanding of how popular culture, including advertising, pop music, film and television, has transformed the representation of masculinities as a whole, and in doing so has transformed masculinity itself.

Again as Simpson has been telling us over, and over, popular culture has been the breeding ground for metrosexuality, which has resulted in greater acceptance, not only of gay identities, but also of gender-non-conforming behaviours amongst all men.

In relation to Blue’s participation in the Eurovision song contest, Simpson wrote:

‘Boy bands played an important role in the spread of metrosexuality, with Take That most famously evangelising the male desire to be desired in the 1990s, turning a generation on to the charms of pierced nipples, leather harnesses and eager male sex-objectification. None of Take That were, despite the many rumours, gay. But Take That as a band were very gay indeed. Their gay manager took the gay male love of the male body and sold it to millions of teen girls – and boys. All that baby oil helped loosen up ideas about masculinity.’

So, ironically, in his attempt to document the end of marginalisation of gay people, Hicklin has managed to marginalise all men in contemporary culture, as well as erasing the work of Mark Simpson, our leading expert in masculinities working today.

Well done Aaron. Stay classy Gays!

Deconstructing Dana

Dana International – Mark Simpson interviews the Israeli Eurovision star. From Sex Terror (2002)

‘It’s very hard for a man to admit it. They think that if they are attracted to me that they are homosexual. How come! I am representing all that homosexuals don’t like! They don’t like make-up, they don’t like dresses. How can I attract a homosexual?’

Very easily, is the answer that occurs to me, lying on a queen-sized bed barely a goosepimple from the gorgeous man-made lady that rendered the Eurovision song contest redundant, Richard breathless, Judy jealous, and orthodox Jews apopleptic. Dana International –despite a name that sounds like an Irish airport – is very, very sexy.

She’s tranny tall – her legs pour over the edge of the bed – and elegantly pointy: all elbows, shoulders, and ruby red fingernails. Her black hair is spiky too, in a relaxed, cool kind of way. A kind of Jewish Siouxsie Soux, more camp than goth.

This distillation of diva-ness, whose Eurovision winner, a tribute to strong women, was itself called ‘Diva’, seems a bit bored with the subject. ‘When I grew up in the seventies there were no strong women celebrated in pop songs. So I was determined to change that. But, you know, I don’t like titles. For me,  everyone is the same. There are exceptional  women, but they are women, they are not angel dust – they laugh and they cry like everyone else. It’s the same with ‘transexual’.

Dana’s back onto territory she’s more interested in. Herself. ‘Think of me as a cow. Think of me as a chicken.  I don’t care what people think I am, so long as they are attracted to me (she crosses and uncrosses her legs). What is a transsexual? It’s a word. Do you know how many men made passes at me in the street today? They see a beautiful girl. I say to them one word: ‘transexual’. Do I not look attractive anymore? Do I grow two heads? No!’

______________

MS: In a way, a transsexual is the ultimate symbol of sex…

Dana: Yes, that’s the problem. Just sex.

MS: Do you have a boyfriend?

Dana: I’ve had several. But I can tell you that it is not a problem of the man. Human beings don’t fall in love with a pretty face. Love is very wide. Everyone can love everyone. If you have an attractive personality and you know how to make your boyfriend fall in love with you, you’ll be successful. But most transsexuals are too preoccupied with the way they look. They think, Why doesn’t he love me? I’ll have my nose fixed and then he’ll love me!  Or I’ll buy a Versace dress. Then he’ll  be at my feet.’ They don’t understand that you have to work very hard on your personality.

MS: Yes, you clearly have. But do you have a partner at the moment?

Dana: [Dana goes quiet, dropping her feisty lecturing tone. For a moment].  No I don’t. I used to. Three years ago, the love of my life. He said in a newspaper interview: ‘Fuck all the Israelis – I don’t care what they think. She’s more of a woman than all the women I met before put together’. He told me, ‘I didn’t want to fall in love with you, I just wanted a lay’. But one date led to another. Before we knew it we were a couple.

MS: How did it end?

Dana: He was very brave, but his family abandoned him. He still wanted to marry me but I felt stranded. I loved him very much but I couldn’t spend too much time with him – I need my freedom. I want to do what I want to do every minute of my life and once you are connected to another person you have commitment. He wanted me to give up my pop career, live a normal life, have a normal job. In the beginning it was great, but he met me before I became famous.

MS: Do you think it’s possible to combine love with fame?

Dana:  No, no, no, never. [she shakes her head]. Not even for a natural born woman. The other party is always jealous or unhappy. If you were a magician and you said to me, ‘you will be poor, ugly and unknown but you will still have a man and you will love him for the rest of your life’ I would say yes, do it, I agree. Human beings are only 100% happy when they are in love.

MS: But it never lasts, does it?

Dana: And I’ll tell you why, Mark. You can’t be 100% happy all the time. You have to be unhappy sometimes to appreciate being happy.

MS: So it sounds as if your offer to trade fame, fortune  and beauty for eternal love is quite a safe one to make…

Dana: I said ‘if you were a magician…’

MS: Are effegies of you still being burned at the stake in Israel?

Dana: you have to understand Mark, that the orthodox, intolerant people, the bigots who say I am mad and sick and sinful are in the minority in Israel. They are loud, but in a minority. If you go to Tel Aviv you will discover that everyone is very open and tolerant. And tolerance and understanding are extremely important of course.

MS: Why do you still refer to yourself as gay?

Dana: Why not, this is the family I come from. They understand how I feel. They are not always questioning me. They know what it is to be attracted to men.

MS:  I asked because I wondered if your homosexuality is still ‘active’. I know a male to female transsexual who is now finding herself attracted to other women…

Dana: [Dana sits up suddenly shaking her head and banging her hands on the bedcover] . This is very crazy, this kind of thing! I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT! I don’t like it. But… [she catches herself] I respect it because it’s their own life. .. but it doesn’t sound logical to me! Maybe their changing sex was a mistake. You go through all this trouble to have relationships with men, and then you want to have relationships with WOMEN?

MS: But perhaps it isn’t so illogical. After all, they’re simply remaining attracted to the same sex.

Dana: No I cannot understand why I transsexual would want to sleep with a woman. It’s MADNESS!

MS: Forgive me for saying so, Dana, but you sound a little intolerant…

Dana: But I cannot understand it! If you cut off your penis and afterwards you want to sleep with a… Ah! I know why! You want to know the answer Mark? THEY ARE NOT ATTRACTED TO WOMEN! They want to prove that they are women. If a lesbian is attracted to you it means that you could never be a man. Lesbians are totally feminine!

MS: Perhaps you have different kinds of lesbians in Israel. But it sounds as though you’re saying thatyour gender is about who your’re attracted to, not who you are.

Dana: No, I have never felt comfortable as a man, never felt comfortable in a man’s clothes. It is something in your genes, maybe. When you are born a soul combines with you and your soul is feminine. A transsexual is a feminine soul in a man’s body. People suggest that it is a choice but if you are not attracted to women what can you do – what can you take? There is no cure.

____________

Except a career in pop music.

In the taxi home the driver was very chatty. When he found out who I’d been interviewing his first question was, ‘Would you give ‘er one then, mate?’

‘Oh yeah, definitely’ I said.

‘Yeah, I would, too, mate. Fit bird’.

 Originally Published in Attitude (1998)

____________

Relevant essays by Simpson:

Transexy Time:

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2008/03/25/transexy-time/

The Zombie Media’s Hunger for Gay Brains

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2008/06/20/the-zombie-medias-hunger-for-gay-brains/

Death Goes To The Disco: Guest Post by @How_Upsetting

The ‘death of pop music’ has been declared a number of times now. Most notably, for DATM, by Mark Simpson. In 2010 he thought Lady Gaga was the only thing that could save pop from its inevitable demise:

‘Until last year I thought pop was a completely spent force.  Oh, there were some nice bands around with nice tunes and some nice haircuts, but pop as a total art form was pooped.  Along with pop culture.  It was just another Facebook app’.

But by the time Gaga released Born This Way Simpson had changed his mind even about her, and decided pop was well and truly O.V.E.R.

In the light of that I found this recent piece by Philip (@How_Upsetting) http://howupsetting.tumblr.com very interesting, and a good piece in the jigsaw narrative of Pop’s Last Gasp:

‘http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/album-olly-murs-in-case-you-didnt-know-epic-6267459.html

This is of note purely for this:

‘It’s the erosion of true character – especially vocal character – in favour of spurious “personality” that may be talent-show telly’s most damaging effect on pop’.

Yes yes and yes. I said to the MANMYTHLEGEND wotyougot the other day that, the way pop is these days, artists like Madonna and Prince would never become hugely popular because they never had ‘reality show’ personalities. Witness the hysterically overblown response to Lady Gaga hugging some reality show contestant she had met (at best) hours before. Once we revelled in our pop stars being slightly alien creatures, now we fawn over their insincere interactions with ‘the plebs’.

X Factor and its ilk are hugely depressing circles that most people never seem to cotton onto. The contestents in the shows have to fit into very defined and digestible boxes. Anyone stepping outwith these boxes is completely crucified. People with passable-to-very good voices and inoffensive personalities – Olly Murrs, Rebecca Ferguson, Marcus whateverhissurname is, Little Mix – are lauded out of all proportion to their abilities. Yet every year the same complaints will be made that most of the contestants are boring, as if the above response is disconnected and of no relevance.

Being old enough to have been around when X Factor began, I remember distinctly that it started as a response to ‘Pop Idol’ being a ‘singing competition’. In interviews Simon Cowell would mention people like Madonna and David Bowie as artists who would never do well on a ‘Pop Idol’ format. That’s where the name came from – the idea was that they would find pop stars with ‘the x factor’ – that indefinable quality that makes a technically mediocre singer like Madonna one of the greatest pop stars in history above hundreds of accomplished wailers. This purpose was quickly forgotten and now I hear people who work for record labels praising the fact that people like Marcus and Little Mix are ‘blank slates’ waiting on managers, producers and songwriters to do whatever they want with. Someone with a strong sense of their artistic identity such as Matt Cardle or Misha B (whether you like their music or not) finds that it counts against them. ‘Pop music’ becomes about what sells, and what sells is a chirpy personality saying inoffensive things and singing catchy songs which fall into an ever diminishing range (electro-pop, sub-Winehouse r&b, MOR balladeering).

Of course, it’s hugely relevant that the vast majority of people who watch and vote for these shows are not big music listeners, if they are music listeners at all. There is no sense of pop music as something that can be profound, something that has real value. It is treated as plastic entertainment, a degrading approach which would be pounced upon were it to be verbalised. Indeed, I gathered from a ferocious response on Twitter that one of the contestants on X Factor last week said that they didn’t like pop music. The people treating such a statement with scorn would do well to think about what ‘respect’ X Factor actually has for pop music in the first place. It has none.’

Azis and The Post-Metrosexual Gaze

Who is Azis?

For a start he is a gift to someone like me, looking for ways to describe and analyse this phenomenon of masculinity that has swept across the globe in recent years. He’s a David Beckham. A Daniel Craig. A Mikey Sorrentino.

Azis is a metrosexy icon.

According to a slightly sneering, touchingly homoanxious  New York Times article, Azis, a star in his own country of Bulgaria, performs  ’Chalga, a form of Bulgarian folk-pop that combines Roma, Turk and Bulgarian folk strings and brass with electro beats and over-the-top lyrics. ‘

He has also ‘been heavily involved with Euroroma, his country’s socially liberal Roma’s rights party, and was recently voted the 21st greatest Bulgarian of all time.’

Thanks to some smart scouts (@Bangpound and @Balkaniafanzine), I have now seen quite a few Azis videos.

Wow.

The still at the top is from ‘Gadna Poroda’ which translates roughly as ‘nasty breed’. It features some very buff built, metrosexy  men. The picture beneath is from the video of ‘Hop’. It is basically a gay sauna scene, with Azis in the centre of the frame, naked and self-loving.

Obviously, the homoerotics are unavoidable, in yer face, OTT eurotrashtastic. So it’s not really surprising the white middle class respectable types at NYT have picked up on them, saying Azis ‘is also known for simulating sex with men onstage’. It’s also not surprising the gay press have noticed Azis, with the queerty website declaring: ‘you cannot handle the heat of the Azis bathhouse’!

However the homoeroticism of Azis and his imagery are also quite complex, and extremely contemporary, possibly even futuristic.

Bangpound, on seeing one of the videos commented:

One of the great features of Azis music videos is his gaze… am I shopping for him or is he shopping for me? t.co/8cZF3cfv—
Benjamin Doherty (@bangpound) November 18, 2011

This sums up Azis for me. He is taking the gaze and turning it round, twisting and moulding it so we don’t know who is looking at whom, who is ‘shopping’ for whom, who is a desiring subject, who is an object of desire. That’s what ‘metrosexuality’ is!

Three aspects of this confection of looking and being-looked-at-ness stand out for me in particular.

One is how playful, how childlike Azis is. He may sport an Eddie Izzard style beard, and rock some Ru Paul style dresses, but he is cavorting and flirting with the camera, with us, like a toddler. The photo (a mock-up of a Maxim magazine cover made by http://balkania-fanzine.com/blog/) shows Azis naked and covered in soap suds, his tongue sticking out from his lips. He could be a gurgling baby at bath time. There are no ‘phallic’ objects in this picture as we often see in metro photos of men, keen to remind us ‘I am still a man’ despite their passive feminine displays. Azis has no armour of masculinity to hide behind. He is pure unadulterated Slut.

I can’t help but be reminded of Uncle Sigmund and his theory of polymorphous perversity:

‘Freud theorized that humans are born with unfocused sexual libidinal drives, deriving sexual pleasure from any part of the body. The objects and modes of sexual satisfaction are multifarious, directed at every object that might provide pleasure. Polymorphous perverse sexuality continues from infancy through about age five, progressing through three distinct developmental stages: the oral stage, anal stage, and phallic stage. Only in subsequent developmental stages do children learn to constrain sexual drives to socially accepted norms, culminating in adult heterosexual behavior focused on the genitals and reproduction’.

Of course, I am reminded of Mark Simpson too, who I am sure would have a LOT to say about Azis. And he would say it better than me. Though he is a pop star and not a sportsman, and – refreshingly from my point of view- does not have a typical, buff, tits and abs metrosexual body, Azis for me embodies Simpson’s theories of sporno.

Read this passage from Simpson’s original article on Sporno. I have swapped the word ‘sporno’ for ‘Azis’ every time it appears and I think you will see what I mean:

‘In an Azis age it’s no longer enough for the male body to be presented to us by consumerism as merely attractive, or desiring to be desired, as it was in the early days of nakedly narcissistic male metrosexuality. This masculine coquettish-ness, pleasing as it is, no longer offers an intense enough image. Or provokes enough lust. It’s just not very shocking or arousing any more. In fact, it’s just too… normal. To get our attention these days the Azis body has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped gang-bang in the showers.

But of course, because this is Azis and not actual pornography, it remains just that: a promise…the homoprovocative nature of Azis is much less easy to overlook than it was in metrosexuality, which could pretend when it wanted to that it was ‘straight’ and something entirely for the ladies. Where metrosexual imagery stole slyly from soft gay porn, Azis blatantly references hard gay porn’.

Homoprovocative. Hard Gay Porn. Gang bang. Azis is sporno. Azis is post-metrosexual.

The third thing I notice about Azis is just how ‘knowing’ he seems about the metrosexual ‘way of looking’. In video, Gadna Poroda for example,  we are treated to lingering, lascivious shots of some fit (but bigger built than many US/UK models) metroboys in tight bright lycra. But Azis is also in the frame, looking (and touching) too. It is as if we are encouraged to see these beauties through his eyes. He actually reminds me to some degree of Mr MetroDaddy Simpson himself. Azis and Simpson both present a ‘queer eye’ on the metrosexual guy. In their company, we cannot ignore or deny the homoerotics of metrosexuality. And why would we? They make it look so good.

I don’t know much about Bulgaria as a place or a culture. But from what I have seen, and from what I have seen of metrosexuality emerging (or rather erupting) from other countries that don’t fit the American/Western European mould, I get a sense that the transformation of masculinities has been quite sudden. It could even be that in some places, the culture has gone from a ‘pre-gay’ to a ‘post-gay’ environment, with none of that boring white middle class gayist ‘hegemony’ in between. I don’t know for sure. But it’s an idea.

At the end of their article on Azis the NYT say he is ‘challenging not just musical conventions, but just about every traditional notion of masculinity.’ Their tone is snide as far as I can tell, but I think the same sentence can be said as a celebratory statement. Because the destruction of traditional notions of masculinity is my favourite aspect of the metrosexual revolution. Viva Azis!