The Dangers Of Reading Mark Simpson ( @marksimpsonist )

I read Male Impersonators, Mark Simpson’s first book (1994) rather late. Too late in some ways. The havoc it might have caused had I read it during my undergraduate or postgraduate studies, and my following career in gender departments in British universities did not come to pass. But it still caused some havoc. And for that I shall remain forever grateful.

To cut a long story very short, Male Impersonators and Mark Simpson’s work in general, that I devoured in its entirety over a period of about 18 months, changed the way I think, and the way I look at the world. It enabled me, along with some other factors, to finally let go of the feminist dogma that I’d been attached to for my whole life (40 years of it). From a ‘Freudian’ perspective then, it is no wonder that I have become so attached to Simpson and his oeuvre as a result. They helped transform me (for better or worse).

I conveyed my enthusiasm for Male Impersonators in my review that I sent to Simpson in September 2011. I am pretty sure  it was that enthusiasm that persuaded him to release the book on Kindle, in December of that year. I also was moved to send the book to some publications, hoping  it might be reviewed and mentioned by people slightly less insignificant than me.

And, finally it has been reviewed, by the founder of Bookslut website, where once Simpson was interviewed about his more tarty book, Saint Morrissey. Hilariously to me, since I’ve always been a rather unassuming (no, really!)  back room girl in relation to Simpson’s work, the author focused in a note on her blog about MI, on me and my review of the book! She wrote, in an exasperated tone:

‘Okay, so this is what I want: I want, when someone changes their mind about something, for them not to go ideologically swinging to the far other side. I was reading some reviews of Mark Simpson’s Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity, and there are some of former feminists writing about it. And when I say “former” I mean “anti.” We’re talking PhDs in women’s studies who have suddenly realized men are people, too, and they are also oppressed by our patriarchal structure, and so that means we have to wipe out decades of feminist thought, because obviously the two cannot coexist.

Someone can explain to me why this is later, I have tickets to the opera tonight and I have a feeling it’s going to take a while.’

Well I’d hate to interrupt anyone’s relationship with the opera, darling, but I can answer that question in one sentence. In an email to this poor confused opera-goer I replied:

‘That is easy. It is because feminism is fuelled by misandry and a need to present men as the oppressors of women.’

But this isn’t about me (NO REALLY) this is about Male Impersonators. The review that appeared recently at The Smart Set blog was a joint review of a few books on masculinity. It reads:

‘I’ve been reading books about masculinity, the authors trying to challenge what we think of as normal. Boyhoods, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, and Mark Simpson’s Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. All three writers are queer. When I tried to find a book that challenged society’s ideas of masculinity that was written by a straight man, all I could find was a book defending men’s needs to cheat on their wives.I did find a used copy of a book called Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, which did not meet my expectation, didn’t so much challenge traditional forms of masculinity as psychoanalyze some problems men might have with women. But I kept reading it anyway, because the person who had it before me did some heartbreaking underlining. Next to the underlined passage “Out of their rage they wound others, and out of their sorrow and shame they grow more and more distant from each other,” there are two exclamation marks. Next to “A man’s experience of the primal relationship may have been so painful that he expects all relationships can only be painful. Thus his life is a dreary cycle of fearing domination by others and seeking to exploit them instead,” there is a star. “Many men are full of rage against women, and often they act it out” is underlined twice.I wonder about the man who read this book before me. I wonder what he got out of being told, “Men’s lives are as much governed by restrictive role expectations as are the lives of women.” I wonder what he then did with that information. Because it seems like the kind of book that would be read by one of the men in the 1994 essay collection Male Impersonators. In it, Simpson sits down at one point with Alan, a man who appears in a documentary from the ’90s called Sex Hunters. He’s one of a group of young men profiled in the film who decided to spend their summers living together in a sort of boy commune. They live in a caravan, drinking and carrying on, and they have a contest for who can sleep with the most women. Each sex act is one point. 

Under Saturn’s Shadow is saying something true about the expectations put on men. But the previous owner did a lot of underlining about the betrayals of mothers and the absences of fathers, and not a whole lot in the sections where the author advises men to commune with their inner femininity and give it expression. Alan, in the documentary, complains about the duties of masculinity — the providing, the sacrifice, the achieving, the marriage and fathering of children. He has decided life should be more fun, that men should have other options. If you start spending some time on the websites of men’s advocacy groups, things can quickly turn anti-women, with men calling their ex-wives bitches, railing against women’s cold hearted natures, ranting about how “the system” is stacked against them and in favor of women. Simpson says to Alan, “Many all-male communities that get together and talk about common interests, activities — whether that’s fucking or surfing — is based on a kind of exaltation, a kind of worship, of the masculine and a denigration of the feminine, whether that’s the feminine embodied in women, or whether that’s the feminine embodied in so-called ‘effeminate’ men, men who, either in terms of where they put their dicks or how they dress or cut their hair, don’t conform to that masculine ideal.”’

This passage illustrates to me exactly why feminism cannot coexist with a love for men. And it illustrates why Male Impersonators, in my grubby hands, was such a dangerous book. Because it taught me that to actually be interested in men, in how culture has produced them, and how they resist or embrace or transform their ‘masculinity’, to actually want to hear men speak with their own voices, is to ‘offend’ feminism. To threaten it so much that it has to assert its own reason for existing, in an article that is ostensibly about men and books about masculinity. These lines from the review are chilling to me:

I wonder about the man who read this book before me. I wonder what he got out of being told, “Men’s lives are as much governed by restrictive role expectations as are the lives of women.” I wonder what he then did with that information.

The author seems to be saying that men can’t be trusted to read!

In feminism the notion of consciousness raising has been prominent for decades. Based on a Marxist model of ‘false consciousness’, feminists since the 70s (probably earlier) have been encouraging women to get together and to read feminist tracts, to open their eyes and to free them from the grip of patriarchy’s lies.

But men are not supposed to raise their consciousness. Unless it involves swallowing hook line and sinker the ‘consciousness’ of feminist women. They are supposed to shut up and listen.

Male Impersonators and the work of Mark Simpson ‘raised my consciousness’ to the point that I abandoned feminism altogether.So I am not surprised that a feminist reviewer reading my take on Simpson’s work, nearly missed her date with the opera to huff and puff about my audacious cheek.

And look what I have done with my reading! Well, my dear feminist/gayist middle class liberal establishment, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Confessions Of A ‘Homophobic Psycho’

This is an email I received – in reply to one from me to a few people working in the arena of gender and masculinity – a few months ago.  It is from professor Eric Anderson and as you can see it accuses me of being a ‘homophobic psycho’, a ‘wannabe academic’ with ‘mental illness’ and a ‘persecution complex’. Anderson also says I lack ‘dignity’ and ‘integrity’.

Below is screengrabs of comments by Mark Mccormack and Eric Anderson’s husband Grant Peterson, accusing me of ‘harassing gay academics’ and of ‘homophobic discourse’. These were part of a campaign by Mccormack, Anderson and Peterson to have my review of Mark Mccormack’s book on the Declining Significance Of Homophobia taken down from the website Sociological Imagination where it was published. They succeeded and it was removed.

Mccormack has also accused me on twitter of ‘harassing gay academics online’ and he tweeted his support of Paul Burston‘s  outing of me (as a ‘troll’ and a ‘bully’) back in March this year. Mccormack said:

Why am I writing about all this now? The reason is that a senior colleague of Mccormack, Professor Ian Rivers, who claims to be an ‘International authority on homophobic bullying & bystander mental health at school’ has just published an article on ‘cyber bullying’.

I left a comment underneath his post but it was not published, and the editors of the site said:

I am publishing this evidence to back up the comment I left under Rivers’ article, and to prove it is not ‘libel’ but is rather, the truth. My comment reads:
——————–

I find this article very simplistic.

I have been labelled a ‘cyber bully’ and a ‘homophobe’ including by Ian Rivers’ colleagues Mark mccormack and Eric Anderson. I was also ‘outed’ by Paul Burston a gay journalist, as a ‘troll’ and a ‘bully’.

But of course the police have not been involved at all, as in fact, I am not a bully. They just outed me because they disagree with my politics, and my criticisms of some of their work.

The police did though get involved when I received hate mail in the post I do not know who it is from.

So who is the ‘bully’ in this case? who the ‘victim’? and why was my ‘anonymity’ allowed to be taken away by Paul Burston?

Dr Elly Tams
Quiet Riot Girl
@Notorious_QRG

————————

If anyone I mention in that comment wants to argue about the truth of it, taking into account the evidence above, they are free to do so here.

The fact is, Mccormack especially is walking quite a confusing path here. His book, which I have read and reviewed, with approval from a number of academics including R Connell and K Plummer, is about declining homophobia. In his book he says homophobic ‘bullying’ is on the wane, and language is changing. People now use the term ‘gay’ to mean ‘rubbish’ often and it is rarely in a homophobic context. With that in mind, it is very odd that he and his ‘mentor’ Eric Anderson have rushed to accuse me of being homophobic and a bully of ‘gay academics’.

In his article on language, Mccormack is eager to point out that homophobia is now ‘stigmatised’ in our culture. People do not want to be seen as homophobic, it is looked down upon and challenged. So, I think he, Paul Burston, Eric Anderson and Grant Peterson are well aware that to label me as a ‘homophobe’ is to label me with a socially unacceptable trait. They know it tarnishes my name to call me such a thing. You could even argue, using Mccormack’s logic that these days, to call someone a homophobe is not dissimilar to calling someone a ‘fag’ in previous eras.

Another word that is stigmatised in our culture, that Mccormack does not mention, but that Paul Burston and others have called me is ‘troll’. When you think of a troll what do you picture? an ugly, inhuman creature? Yes, me too. Ian Rivers, in an organised  live chat on twitter recently, used the term ‘troll’ completely uncritically. For someone who is supposed to be a leading academic expert on bullying, this is worrying to me. The term ‘troll’ is used in a variety of contexts in relation to a variety of people and behaviours. One of the reasons it is a powerful insult, is the ambiguity of its meaning. On a recent programme on TV the broadcaster Richard Bacon, for example, highlighted the problem of ‘RIP trolls’ who left nasty comments on facebook tribute pages for people who had died. And yet I am also called a ‘troll’ simply for annoying some groups of people in academia and the media. This seems unfair to me.

Another issue that Professor Rivers seems unable to grasp, is that of power. A bully can only intimidate someone if they have power. In my interactions with him, Mccormack and Anderson and Peterson I don’t see how I have any power. They are established academics, two of them are professors, meaning they are high up in the hierarchy. And, more importantly they are a group. They know eachother and work together and socialise in real life. I am a lone individual and I have no status in academia, and no networks to use against my ‘enemies’ as they have to use against me. Ian recently ‘protected’ his tweets. Anderson has done this before too. As public academics trying to promote their work I think this is not a good move. I also think it is an attempt to take the ‘victim status’ as if Professor Rivers needs ‘protecting’ from someone like me.

Sometimes bullying can occur when a power dynamic at face value looks like it would go the other way. For example there is currently a case in the news of bullying of a teacher by students, which caused her to feel she had to leave the teaching profession altogether. But again I would say that those students formed a group against a lone individual. And they knew each other both on and offline, and probably knew how to use social media more expertly than the teacher. ‘Power is everywhere’ as Foucault said, and those young people had power in that situation.

I am aware that this Thursday is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO).  LGBT Groups are publicising it as a day of action. But again I find their presentation of what is in fact a complex situation, overly simplistic. I know plenty of Gay people who are actually transphobic (Julie Bindel springs to mind). Creating a day against ‘homophobia and transphobia’ seems to give all LGBT people instant ‘victim’ status, when life is not quite so clear cut. As I asked in my (unpublished) comment under Professor Rivers’ article, who is the victim in my situation? Who the aggressor?

Professor Rivers’ advice for people dealing with cyber bullies,  is to ‘block’ them. I think this is very convenient as it means if he does not want to engage with someone (e.g. me) he can label them a bully and then block them online. As I have pointed out in my 101 Wankers post, blocking is a very common way of blanking out opinions and perspectives and people you don’t like. I am blocked by over 80 people now. Have I bullied them all?

If I had, surely I’d have to have been an actual psycho. Someone like  Anders Breivik had ‘power’ over innocent victims because he used violence, in his case, murder. I am not a violent person and unlike some of my detractors, I don’t even use threats. I just say things that piss people off and am sometimes rude. That does not make me a psycho!

Someone else who has in the past been called all sorts of names, such as ‘the Gay Anti Christ’ and a ‘brainy thug’ is  Mark Simpson. He has kept very quiet in this situation whereby I have been outed, not only as a ‘bully’ and a ‘troll’ and a ‘homophobe’ but also as some kind of ‘Kathy Bates Misery’ figure in relation to him and his writing. Frankly, I don’t blame him. Some of his old friends have attempted to use him in their attacks on me and I can see why he has tried to keep out of it.

But. I know that Simpson is very familiar with the kind of ‘brickbats’ thrown at me, for they are the same kinds of things which have been said about him. And, if I do have any power in this situation, as Simpson knows full well, it can only be down to my intelligence and my ability to sometimes touch a nerve.

Once, when Simpson and I were still on friendly terms, he advised me to ‘wear my brickbats like bouquets’, to stand tall and be proud of my unusual position and perspective. And now, even when that friendship is faded and lost, I am taking his advice.

The gaylords who call me a homophobe can suck my metaphorical dick.

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!

A Nice Line In Neckerchiefs – John Wayne As Metro-Icon

When did metrosexuality begin? It is an impossible question to answer. The phenomenon, that seems as natural to us now, as Gucci manbags and orange man-tans, has crept up on us.

This following exchange between masculinity ‘experts’ Mark McCormack and MetroDad Mark Simpson, shows some of the confusion about the origins of metrosexuality, and what being a ‘real man‘ might mean:

@_MarkMcCormack US much more attached to trad ideas of masculinity than the UK. They had a national nervous breakdown over metrosexuality.—
Mark Simpson (@marksimpsonist) April 01, 2012

@_MarkMcCormack He didn't have very flexible hips. But he did have a nice line in neckerchiefs.—
Mark Simpson (@marksimpsonist) April 01, 2012

I of course agree with Simpson. John Wayne did indeed have a ‘nice line in neckerchiefs’. And, however rugged and American he may have been, he, like all men film stars, ‘desired to be desired’ as much as their women counterparts. His ‘star’ quality, like Tony Curtis’ and Elvis’, meant he was a precursor to the tartymetrosexuals we know and love today. Oh, and, he also did some dancing on screen!

*

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.’

Michael Clarke and Media Metro – Panic

On the whole, the mainstream media avoids metrosexuality as a subject, and particularly the ‘m’ word itself, but somehow sports journalists are unable to avoid either for any length of time. As I have written recently at QRGHQ:

‘I spend a lot of time looking for references to metrosexuality. Often the subject matter is covered but the ‘m’ word is hardly used. In the Guardian for example, there were only 35 references to ‘metrosexual’ in the whole of 2011, the lowest number since 2004.

One place that metrosexual masculinity is really grasped, though, is in sports journalism. Partly because it has been in sports and sports ‘branding’ that metro men have really come into their own.  Sporno has meant that top sports men have been such tarts  in advertising and promotional work that the media have been unable to ignore the shift. And metrosexual icons such as Ronaldo , Henson and Becks have brought their fashion style and narcissism off the billboards and onto the pitch.’

My ‘metrosexual’ search in the media at the beginning of 2012 has thrown up an interesting curveball. Both The Guardian and The Independent newspapers so far this year have only mentioned the word ‘metrosexual’ in one article each. And both pieces have featured the Australian cricketer, and captain of the national team,  Michael Clarke. Apparently, Clarke is a metrosexual of such dedication that his ‘lifestyle’, like Beckham’s , has been the focus of quite a few column inches.

This section from the Guardian article that mentions Clarke could be describing    David Beckham himself:

‘Then Ponting lost the Ashes for the third time, broke a finger and in came the antithesis: a smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, baby-faced fellow from the metrosexual generation, with his tattoos and celebrity girlfriend, and image promotion from an early stage in his career. ‘

Now I am no cricket expert, so I don’t know the context. But it sounds like Clarke’s captaincy has not been without its problems. Journalists seem to be trying to work out why he has had difficulties. And this is where his metro identity seems to enter into their discourse. This article by Chris McGrath  in the Independent really homes in on the cricketer’s metrosexuality to the extent that someone might analyse an actual sexual orientation such as homosexuality:

‘If he discovered a cure for cancer in the morning, sorted out global warming in the afternoon, and paid off the national deficit before going to bed, someone would still mutter something about Michael Clarke just showing off.

As a cricketer, it is hard to imagine what more he might do to prise open a place in Australian hearts than score 329 not out (and take Sachin Tendulkar’s wicket) in an innings defeat of India on his home ground. Yet his critics are somehow contriving to depict even his decision to declare within a single blow of 334 runs – Bradman’s sacred Test best – as a self-serving calculation, the studied gesture of a man trying too hard.

…

Clarke had requested the team victory song by 11pm, so that he could join his glamorous partner for drinks. That was five hours after the match ended, but the newspaper that broke the story shared Katich’s disgust, disparaging the vice-captain’s eligibility to succeed Ponting: “Clarke is media-savvy, has the cool looks and the hot girlfriend, the tattoos, the slick image and flash car. Together, the package is near-perfect for the job. Yet what he doesn’t have is the man.”

The man. It is impossible to read any profile of Clarke without stumbling across one word. From its mystifying emergence, when apparently suggestive of some unhealthy Freudian obsession with trains and tunnels, “metrosexual” has become a standard epithet for those stretching traditional gender roles. Its most commonly cited prototypes are Clarke and David Beckham, who have made similarly conspicuous, self-conscious “lifestyle choices”.’

It appears then, that this article is referring to how Clarke has been criticised for being ‘distracted’ by fripperies such as his ‘glamorous girlfriend’ , his ‘tattoos’ and his ‘cool image’ rather than giving 100% to his sport. The same has been insinuated about Gavin Henson, the Welsh rugby player and metrotastic sex object. The Guardian accused Henson of letting down his side, due to

‘the distractions of Strictly Come Dancing and…. fist fights with teammates’.

I put that particular Guardian piece down to a clear case of metro-envy. However Chris McGrath seems more conflicted. On one hand he comes across as pretty metrophobic. In trying to understand Clarke’s critics he writes:

‘Perhaps they see proven prowess in arenas of masculine endeavour as a sufficient guarantee of virility to indulge securely in all this effete shopping and consuming and preening. From proletarian beginnings, both trace a further lineage to the urban chic of ages past. The dandy had too much ironic detachment for sport, but would share with these athletes a love of display that subverts traditional masculinity. Where the male has been aggressive and desirous, the metrosexual instead becomes a passive idol, himself to be admired and desired. Enough to make any self-respecting Bloke queasy.

The syndrome has evolved in sport as in broader society. Jim Palmer, a great baseball pitcher of the 1970s, posed in jockey shorts. Dennis Rodman proved as comfortable wearing a wedding dress as green hair, albeit he exculpated himself this week by announcing his intention to start a topless women’s basketball team. As the most aesthetically gorgeous of sports, however, cricket has a particular tradition of narcissism.

In fact, come to think of it, doesn’t the Australia game have a rather more obvious metrosexual? In his weird metamorphosis under the spell of Liz Hurley, Shane Warne is slowly morphing from surfer slob into an unnerving mutation of Cecil Beaton. Yet he can do no wrong, even as Clarke can do no right.’

The journalist then, calls metrosexuality a ‘syndrome’ and says it would make ‘any self-respecting Bloke queasy’. However, on the other hand, he seems slightly affronted that whilst Clarke is failing to really win hearts and minds, another flaming metrosexual, Shane Warne, can ‘do no wrong’ (in Australia I assume. As Warney has had plenty of stick in the British media lately).  Note how McGrath, like many journalists have done, suggests that Warne’s metrosexual ‘morphing’ occurred ‘under the spell of Liz Hurley ‘.

So McGrath goes on to attempt to ‘defend’ Clarke and place him in Australia’s hall of cricketing fame. He writes:

‘It’s all very odd. With an average of 62 in 17 Test innings as captain, you would think Australian pragmatists might pardon Clarke his perceived heterodoxies. Instead they agonise pathetically about his image. They were appalled by his admission that he sobbed on the sofa with his father after losing his Test place in 2005. Some may even have been mischievously gratified that his Herculean deeds this week were played out against swathes of pink, from the stands to the stumps (in support of the Jane McGrath cancer foundation). Yet here is a man who sacrificed the joyous freedom of his game in the cause of a team in decline; who is proving a most adept captain, not least in respectful rehabilitation of Ponting.

Doubtless those who have booed him to the crease reckon his girlfriends look just too good in lingerie; that his declaration was just too artful.

… Clarke willingly eschewed the chance to become only the 11th man in Test history to set its highest score. The third was Tip Foster, whose debut 287 in 1903 remained an SCG record until this week. When you see he died in 1914, at 36, you assume he must have been a senseless victim of the trenches. In fact, he had acute diabetes.

He could not be cured; nor could Jane McGrath, nor could Gary Ablett. And their different tragedies may make the observations above seem deplorably frivolous. But surely their loss also commands due perspective on the glories of Clarke – a man who is determined to explore his full capacity, not just as a cricketer, but as a human being. Beaton had some famous counsel that might have been written for “Pup”, though Foster and others taken prematurely would also see its merit, seeing how brief our time can be. “Be daring, be different, be impractical,” Beaton urged. “Be anything that will assert imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”

I find these paragraphs a little confusing. But I can’t help but come to the conclusion that the journalist is saying that Clarke (whose nickname is ‘pup’) ‘suffers’ from metrosexuality, which he compares to a previous great Oz cricketer suffering, and dying, from diabetes! It reads to me like an old-fashioned pathological, if sympathetic, discussion of homosexuality.

In quoting Beaton, and saying ‘be anything that will assert imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary’, McGrath seems to be championing Clarke’s ‘unusual’ metrosexual persona. However, as Simpson has told us in his book Metrosexy (2011):

‘At the end of the first decade of the Twenty First Century, metrosexuality, the male desire to be desired – by everyone, including and sometimes especially by other men – once regarded as pathological, perverted and definitely something to keep to yourself, is so commonplace as to be almost ‘normal’. Perhaps even – eek! – ordinary.’

So again McGrath is ‘pathologising’ Clarke’s metrosexuality as unusual when in fact he is no different from most men his age.

Now I know sport has an element of machismo written into its rules. And, I think McGrath is right when he says that some sportsmen are able to ‘get away with’ being uber metrosexual, because they can compensate for it with their ‘virile’ ‘masculine’ sporting prowess.

However, Clarke doesn’t seem to be ‘getting away with it’ here. And even his defender is being pretty metrophobic in describing his ‘lifestyle’ as a ‘syndrome’ and even comparing it to a disease.

Australia is also known for being quite macho, but, as Mark Simpson has written, is actually one of the most metrosexual countries in the world. In a piece about Australian beer marketed at real men he wrote:

‘Traditional beer manufacturers have been hit hard by metrosexuality, especially in Australia which, for all its Crocodile Dundee image abroad, is one of the most metrosexualised countries on the planet.  Australian men no longer just drink ‘beer’ (‘Pint please, mate’ ‘What kind?’ ‘What kind?? Do I look like a pooftah!?’) – and instead actually have tastes and preferences.  Even if they still drink beer – and not many young men do – they havestandards.  How lah-dee-dah. Even worse, they no longer spend all their disposable income on ‘beer’, but lots of other consumer products, including of course clothes, gym membership and vanity products.’

Sadly I don’t know enough about Michael Clarke and Australian cricket or Australian media, to know if this ‘damning with faint praise’ article is a typical view of the sportsman.

But I do know that in the UK at least, where these two articles appeared, sports media can’t ignore the great big pink elephant in the room that is metrosexual sportsmen‘s ‘passive’ ‘narcissistic’ display. However once they have acknowledged it, they find it incredibly hard to accept. Because men’s changing behaviours and  feminised attributes, to some macho media types, just isn’t cricket.

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

Death of the Author, death of the writer, death of the reader

‘The book must break up so as to resemble the ever increasing

number of extreme situations. It must break up to resemble the

flashes of holograms. It must roll around itself like the snake on

the mountains of the heavens. It must fade away as it is being

read. It must laugh in its sleep. It must turn in its grave.’

~ Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

I’ve had a couple of interactions recently, with Remittance Girl, the talented erotica author, relating to Barthes and The Death Of The Author. I smiled to myself as RG suggested I hadn’t understood Barthes and really need to go back and re-read him. Well I never stop reading Roland. And one thing I am certain about from my readings, is that he’d welcome debate over the intentions and meanings of his words. ‘Death of The Author’ signifies at the very least, an openining up of dialogue about writing and what it achieves (or doesn’t).

http://networkedblogs.com/saym9?a=share&ref=nf

http://networkedblogs.com/saym9?a=share&ref=nf

Below is my chapter from my novella, Scribbling on Foucault’s walls, that takes Barthes’ Death of the Author and uses it for my own purposes:

Death of the author, by Roland Barthes[i]

Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

Michel Foucault is slipping away…

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.

A disconnection occurs; his voice loses its origin; the author enters into his own death

French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.

Baudelaire is dead. Van Gogh is dead. Tchaikovsky is dead. Barthes is dead. Foucault is dead.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.

Foucault’s daughter’s only power is to mix writings…

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the reader’s rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Foucault’s Daughter will let herself be fooled no longer. Her life must be at the cost of the death of her father. The death of the author. The reader is the writer. The Reader is The Critic. The reader  is the Subject. The reader is the Lover. The reader is the Killer.The reader is the reader. The reader. The reader. The reader.

___________________________

In the introduction to one of her recent posts, Remittance Girl wrote:

‘Academia puts a high value on the ability to read critically; to deny the text our heart and view it with an analytical, objective mind. From the early of the 20th Century onwards, we have made a practice of withholding our commitment to the narrative lure novel and called it an intellectual virtue. The subtext here is that really ‘bright’ people don’t suspend disbelief when they read. So it’s hardly surprising that literary theorists have, for the most part, looked down on the readers of genre fiction – especially romance – and it’s hardly surprising that they find little value in reading them. If they could ever drop their ultimately jaded eye and fully indulge in a well-written piece of erotic romance, what they’d find was that Barthes was not entirely correct in his assessment on the death of the author.’

And in the comments during our discussion she said:

‘The death of the author concerned meaning making. Not an inability to recognize whether something is science fiction or romance.’

I disagree with what I understand her to be suggesting. It seems to me as if RG is separating ‘erotica’ or romance writers from ‘academics’ and placing the former as somehow superior when it comes to getting meaning out of writing. Apart from the fact that RG is both an erotica writer and an academic, working in Higher education and studying for a Phd, she misses some important points. One is that ‘literary theory’ itself is not really in fine form, and the study of literature has changed and dissolved, so many students do modules in English alongside other subjects – media, history, journalism, cultural studies. The ‘purist’ literary theorists are few and far between.

Another point she seems to be making, that literary theory that ‘deconstructs’ texts, does not allow for beauty and romance. I think the opposite is true. In reading Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse for example, I was blown away by the sensuality and ‘romance’ of his writing. I fell in love with Barthes, and in a way ( a melancholic one) with love, all over again on reading that book.

I am also currently reading Baudrillard and I find that for all his bluster about ‘the end of meaning’ he too writes with a sincerity and a beauty that I find mesmerising.

I think these two French thinkers were bang on the money when they declared the death of the author and the dissolution of meaning. But I don’t think they were celebrating this situation so much as lamenting it, or trying to accept something they themselves found hard to grasp and to understand. I think if Baudrillard and Barthes were to come back now, and to see us arguing over the meanings of their words, on blogs, on facebook, on twitter, they’d nod their heads and say, ‘I told you so’. But they’d also be stunned at just how far their predictions had come true.

Maybe erotica romance is one place where people retreat from this incoherent, fragmented world and try and restore some order in the chaos. But I prefer to embrace the inevitable uncertainty, and to find some kind of ‘romance’ there.

How have representations of sex become so banal, so unthreatening, so uncritical? Because the body and sexuality are liberated as signs and only as signs. Through the sign-system, Baudrillard contends, ‘sexuality itself is diverted from its explosive finality’ and transformed into ‘promotional eroticism’ or ‘operational sexuality’.

“Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality” by William Paulett

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[i] http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm

Nothing Like A Dame – David Bowie And Bisexual Chic

All Rock and Roll is Homosexual ~ Manic Street Preachers

The heterosexual rock fan idolises his star, and pays for his success because he believes that only a star can get fucked and still look the world in the face. Like a mirror surrounded by glitter, the rock idol reflects the fascinated light of the homoerotic libido that his audience project onto him.  The cult of the gay superstar is the reverse side of the two-faced attitude that heterosexuals have towards homosexuality. Their more customary face is immediate disdain and disparagement for the queer who stands at the crossroads of life and dares to smile at them in the underground.

~Mario Miele on David Bowie

As Miele has suggested, rock and roll, as part of capitalism, can be characterised as part of the process of repressive sublimation that immediately resublimates desire whilst rechannelling it to a consumerist outlet. This is why ‘the heterosexual rock fan idolises his star, and pays for his success’.

While this analysis is true, it is also untrue. Like the queer, rock and roll stands at the crossroads of life – or at least tries its damndest to – facing both towards ‘repressive sublimation’ and dissidence, dissidence of a kind that can cause enormous instability, threatening, so it would seem, to ‘queer the nation’.

The leading edge of rock and roll must always be searching for the faultline of sexuality, the cusp of gender,  where the connections between the two are most fraught and thus most dynamic and most productive. In order to be able to channel desire into consumerism, rock and roll capitalism has first to locate the richest sources of desire, the most untrammelled and polymorphous  longing in young people. This requires a continuous probing and testing of boundaries to discover just where these flaws and fissures can be located.

As Foucault has observed, sexuality is not a ‘natural fact’ but instead something that has to be manufactured and should be seen as ‘the set of effects, produced in bodies, behaviours and social relations, by a certain deployment deriving from a complex political technology’. This ‘deployment’ always attempts to demonstrate that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ proceed from male and female and in this way heterosexualise desire, making it depend on sex and gender.

Rock and Roll as part of capitalism is part of that ‘complex political technology’ that attempts but fails to heterosexualise desire; sites of power can also be sites of resistance. In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that since gender norms are impossible to embody, they become the ‘stylised repition of acts’ – Foucault’s ‘effects produced in bodies’. Thus ‘the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitray relation between such acts… that exposes the phantasmic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. At its leading edge, in order to have any credibility with and appeal to young people, rock and roll has to appropriate images and acts that are unstable and expose the ‘arbitrary nature of gender performance, revel in the ‘phantasmic’ nature of identity and thus cause some disturbing feedback in the transmission of the ‘complex political technology’.

Eventually, of course, they stabilise (e.g. Heavy Metal), but that is also the moment when they go out of fashion- i.e. lose their power over (hip) young people. To be effective, rock and roll has to appeal to ‘the kids’ desperation to escape the mortifying squareness of heterosexism, a route out of the crusing sex/gender Scylla and Charybdis that await them on their voyage into adulthood.

As the political technology changes, as it always does, so rock and roll has to renegotiate its relationship to it, trying to ensure that it remains not completely within it, always keeping its outsider edge, and trying to elaborate the idea that masculine and feminine do not always proceed from male and female. So when the ‘feminine’ glamour of 1970s androgyny turned into football favourites Sweet, sharp rock and roll abandoned it and took up instead the outsider/hustler offensiveness and ripped jeans of punk; when that became the Boomtown Rats, ‘feminine’ glamour came back in the form of the New Romantics and the Blitz look, and when eyeliner became blokish again it was time for the obscenity of Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Thus rock and roll becomes a faultline itself. Like the now-defunct street drag queen which it has replaced, vibrant rock and roll is itself both an abdication of power and an incitement to rebellion, drawing attention to the performative nature of gender and saying Bondage! Up Yours! (X Ray Specs).

And, like drag, rock and roll is fascinated with trash, with those things that society has labelled worthless and discarded.  It is a process against the technology of power which assigns all value and which young people feel descending upon them as their teen years tick away: the ‘grid’ which will mark their position  and measure out their potential  precisely, counting out their years all the way to the grave, differentiating desire and separating them from one another and their bodies. Thus to be totally worthless in the adult scheme of things (punk) is a resolution to evade entrapment.

If the phrase ‘all rock and roll is homosexual’ means anything it is that young people and homosexuals are all outsiders, criminals waiting for their sentence to be passed but doing their best to make a run for it. The difference is, of course that the straight rock fan/star wants rebellion but not damnation.

It seemed to be the one taboo that everyone was too afraid to break. I thought- well, if there’s one thing that’s going to put me on the edge, this is it. Long hair didn’t mean much anymore. So I thought- right. Let’s really go into the gay lifestlye and see what that’s about and see how people relate to me. If they can. ~ David Bowie,  Arena (Spring 1993)

Rock and roll, with its ceaselss turnover of images of gender revolt, from the foppish quiffs of the 1950s to the scandalous long hair of the 1960s, fromt he faggoty fashion of the Beatles’ collarless suits to the Cage Aux Folles wardrobe of winged lame outfits of the 1970s, knows very well that the signs of sexual identity and ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are as unfixed as the desires of its audience.

What rock and roll shows, in its ravenous appropriation of revolt, is the way in which these signifiers have no referents, that there is, ultimately, no substance to what they are meant to signify. If the signs of deviance turn out to be not so deviant after all, this is both a victory for the status quo and a defeat: if there is no substance to the signs of deviance then there can be no substance to the signs it refuses.

So, by the early 1970s, long hair, once the touchstone of revolt for men, ‘didn’t mean very much anymore’. And Bowie decides to associate himself directly with the deviance long hair had hinted at but not embraced: sexual deviance (other than heterosexual promiscuity). But it is something that he ‘goes into’: he does not become part of it: he refuses damnation.

Bowie’s famous announcement to melody maker in 1972 that he was ‘bisexual’ and enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothing was part of his going into; a kind of sexual tourism: ‘let’s see what this is about’. His bisexuality was a physical expression of the two-faced aspect of rock and roll itself, neither completely inside nor completely outside the ‘complex political technology’; it was ‘just’ more dressing up (and interestingly, his penchant for women’s clothes actually marked him apart from most gay men at the time, who by then were beginning their process of resolute masculinisation).

Hope on the part of many gays that he was going to be the ‘gay Elvis’ was understandable if rather naive. Miele’s ‘gay superstar’ may reflect his audience’s homoerotic libido but the irony is that this is more often done by the star who is not gay. The world does not need a ‘gay Elvis’ , for the original, with his black leather suit, pomaded pompadour, come-fuck-me eyes and radiant narcissism, was quite queer enough.

Bowie came to regret his bisexual statement because it was not taken as ‘facing both ways’; in a homophobic society ‘bisexual’ can never be balanced: any confessed deviation tends to collapse that deviation altogether (this is why ‘bisexual’ is not an identity taken on by the vast majority of men who are bisexual in behaviour: they regard themselves as straight men who happen to have sex with other men).

But it is instructive of the fraught position that rock and roll occupies in our culture that even the ‘gay superstar’ who left his androgyny and platform shoes behind and reinvented himself as a ‘lad in a suit’ int he 1980s, still struggles to escape the embrace of squareness. So in 1993 when Bowie tells Arena that he no longer considers himself bisexual he is nevertheless careful to avoid using the word ‘straight’ to describe himself.

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From Male Impersonators (1994) by Mark Simpson – now out on Kindle

Transcribed by QRG in honour of the release of  ’lost’ footage of Bowie on TOTP in  1973, performing his hit, Jean Genie.

The Starman Has Landed by Mark Simpson (2010) also about Bowie:

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/06/29/the-starman-has-landed-bowie-and-his-glam-love-children/

Last Of The Gang To Die

In a compelling article by Mark Simpson from 2009, the discoverer of metrosexuality interviews the infamous American thinker, Gore Vidal. I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that encounter – the two men share a way with words not often found in contemporary culture. But Simpson’s interview is quite humble, as he plays the loyal fan to Vidal’s towering ‘star’:

‘Clad only in his wit – and an armour-plated ego – Mr Vidal has, during his long and prolific career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, (failed) politician, commentator, movie special guest-star, (gleeful) gadfly, and America’s (highly unauthorised) biographer, taken on The Land of the Free’s finest literary warriors, who had no word for ‘why’ or ‘because’, but plenty for ‘faggot’ and ‘pinko’. Vidal broke the balls – and outlasted – tiresomely macho brawlers like Norman Mailer: he compared ‘The Prisoner of Sex’ to ‘three days of menstrual flow”; later, when he was knocked to the ground by Mailer, he retorted, still on the floor: ‘Words fail Norman Mailer yet again’.’

Simpson doesn’t name Vidal as an ‘intellectual’ as such, but the portrait he paints of the writer is definitely one of an old-school intellect, from a previous era where ideas mattered more than facebook profiles. His description of Gore Vidal, particularly his appreciation of how provocative Vidal has been, reminds me of a book I am currently reading about the Jamaican ‘intellectual’, Stuart Hall. Hall was instrumental in establishing the discipline of cultural studies, in the 1960s and 70s, the discipline that Simpson, inspite of himself, practises. This passage includes a definition of the intellectual taken from Edward Said’s lectures and subsequent book on the subject (1993, 1994).

‘Stuart Hall is the pre-eminent figure in Cultural Studies today. Nobody else enjoys the same prestige. This derives as much from his charisma as from his writings. Hall’s leadership of the influential Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in the 1970s, and his oratorical role as a public intellectual, contributed immensely to the ascent of Cultural Studies. I do not mean this to be taken as a slight on the published work. On the contrary, I hold that there are contributions in Hall’s writings that are seminal for the study of popular culture. Yet as Hall would surely be the first to acknowledge, he can hardly be classed as an original theorist. His forte is to synthesize, clarify, popularise and sometimes to provoke.

These are qualities of elucidation. In his refreshing book on intellctuals, Edward Said defends the Socratic ideal of the intellectual as the unparalleled agent of independent social criticism in civil society (1994:17). On this reading, the job of the intellectual is to aggravate cliche, combat dogma and delineate a space that does not answer to power.  In as much as this is so, Said identifies the intellectual as an agent who intervenes in the public sphere, expressing issues of public conscience, injustice and the misuse of power. Said, in fact, rejects the traditional conservative ideal of the intellectual as the avatar of taste, hygenienically insulated from the public by virtue of superior knowledge and greater cultural capital. For Said, the independent intellectual is the highest form of public man, ready to enunciate truths and perspectives which, when circumstances demand, disturb convention and intimdate power.’

I like this definition of an intellectual, maybe, in part, because I see aspects of myself in it. Particularly how I am (I think) ‘ready to enunciate truths and perspectives which, when circumstances demand, disturb convention and intimdate power’. Mark Simpson of course, is, or was, in his ‘heyday’, this kind of intellectual too. His first book (1994), now re-released on Kindle, Male Impersonators is an example of the ‘elucidation’ and ‘synthesis’ that characterises Stuart Hall’s work. Simpson’s treatment and excavation of Freud in the book, to uncover the homosexual subtexts in contemporary masculinities is nothing if not ‘disturbing’ of convention and ‘intimidating’ to the repressed power of straight men.

One of Mark Simpson’s  most provocative works, Anti Gay (1996), was a defiant up yours to the gay establishment, one that caused him to be ostracised from mainstream gay culture and mainstream media. The book led to indignation, and anger, and some delightfully quotable reviews:

MARK SIMPSON… IMBUES THE BOOK WITH THE VAPID APPEAL OF A COMPASSIONLESS MARGARET THATCHER’ – City Life

‘SIMPSON IS FAR TOO MUCH A MAVERICK AND TOO ACERBIC’ – Diva

‘MARK SIMPSON… COMES ACROSS AS UNACCOUNTABLY SMUG’ – The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review

TO TRADITIONAL GAY FUNDAMENTALISTS MARK SIMPSON IS THE ANTI-CHRIST’ – Vogue

‘ There is no unified body of non-heterosexuals to represent. There are only factions or fashions that are either followed or ignored – which is why the media’s portrayal of a community split into gay and anti-gay supporters in the wake of Mark Simpson’s collection of essays is a joke. I almost hate to agree with anything Simpson has to say, but there is some truth in this reduction of the press to a listings service. All a person or thing need be is gay or considered gay, regardless of merit or interest, and it will get published. As John Weir protests, ‘if Melissa Etheridge burps, she gets covered.’- On and Off The Scene BY Jessamy Harvey (London Review of Books 1996)

‘The overwhelming (and I have to say repulsive) cynicism of the editor of this volume, Mark Simpson, is quite frightening coming from one so young. If he’s this dyspeptic now, I hate to think what he’ll be like when he’s fifty.’ -Terry Anderson, Pink Triangle 1997 http://www.pinktriangle.org.uk/glh/164/simpson.html

In my own experience of being an advocate for Simpson’s work, I often get a lot of the flak that is really aimed at him – from academics, journalists and gay activists. For these days the ‘elucidation’ of Simpson’s theories is something I am more actively involved in than he is himself. But they are still just as ‘incendiary’ as ever. And it is that provocation that I admire so much in him and his ideas.

The problem, from my perspective, is that this form of agent provocateur intellectual is falling from grace, and being swamped by the ‘discourse’ of the internet, including facebook, twitter, tumblr and youtube. The very idea of ‘ideas’ itself seems outmoded in this fight for attention and ‘likes’ or ‘reblogs’. I maintain my version of the ‘intellectual’ as a kind of memorial to it. Death at the Mall is partly so called because it identifies the ‘death’ of all things I hold dear in the age of looking and shopping. An age that Simpson, ironically, being such an old-fashioned intellectual, has analysed with insight and accuracy  like nobody else. Maybe whilst Gore Vidal is still on this earth we can maintain some vestiges of an ‘intellectual’ identity remaining, but once he’s gone I think it will be well and truly O.V.E.R.

Elise Moore, blogger, ex-playwright and self-identified ‘intellectual’, is less pessimistic than me.

I wrote previously about how I like her blog because it is such a clear example of someby ‘clinging on for dear life, as Leonardo de Caprio clung onto that iceberg in Titanic, to the idea that blogging, and intellectual discourse are not completely and utterly dead in the frozen water’.

She describes the shifting context in which ‘intellectuals’ operate, but rather than saying the postmodern world is killing them, she seems to think they are adapting to the new conditions:

‘ To write and to be an intellectual was once, recently, to craft a persona that had nothing in common with one’s mundane private self; that was, perhaps, precisely an escape from it; to craft a self that was smarter, sharper, more elegant and eloquent. I dearly love all of these critics as much for their personas – or their variations on the critic-persona they bequeathed to us – as for their prose and ideas, but it seems to me that as a medium, the blog is far too informal to support such persona-building, which requires an absolute separation between public and private self. ..

Can you picture Sontag with a blog? In a blogging world we could never have had a Sontag or a Trilling; they would have had to democratically puncture their elitist personas. And that would have been a shame. But we did have them, issuing from the world of 20^th century literary journalism; and now we have a different model, which, while no doubt throwing up its own celebrities (and more of them), may never allow for the level of intellectual celebrity of the great 20^th century American critics, simply because there are too many of us. But there’s nothing wrong with changing the face of intellectual inquiry en masse.’

Ms Moore’s blog profile consists of a quote from Oscar Wilde, which shows she is identifying herself, not as a public, combative intellectual, but as a more introspective ‘artistic’ critic and intellectual:

“That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.” Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”. But I read this with the necessary ‘scepticism’ that accompanies any reading of Wilde. As the image above shows, his belief that ‘life is too important to be taken seriously!’ means he was always satirising life, ideas, and most of all himself.

The fact The Autobiography Of  A Soul has few readers, and up until recently (when I abandoned it due to ‘intellectual’ differences with Ms Moore) only one regular commenter, I think it is fair to say that her romantic view of the intellectual critic as artist, is passe. That’s not a specific criticism of her, for, as I said above, the whole concept of the ‘intellectual’ is old hat now, in tumblr generation. So to be arguing over the finer points of which model of the intellectual is superior really is missing the point.

If something cannot be expressed as an internet meme, it probably can’t be expressed at all. As I have written before,  ’ ‘ONLY JOKING!’ could be the subtitle of any ‘serious’ article or statement made by anyone. If nothing means anything, nobody has to mean what they say. Right?’

In fact,  ’seriousness’ itself has been parodied by the meme army much more succinctly than Wilde or Simpson could ever do:

Simpson, despite his own ‘seriousness’ as a theorist and a writer, has also critiqued the ‘seriousness’ of some intellectual figures. In a lovely piece about Susan Sontag and her final book before she died, Where The Stress Falls, Simpson wrote:

‘But, just like the ‘vulgar’ Paglia, Sontag made her reputation in part by lending cultural capital to things which were not at the time considered worth it, such as camp, cinema and Roland Barthes in her now classic 1966 collection Against Interpretation. In fact, it was Sontag’s interest in that silly Frenchy which arguably set her up, giving her the edge on her (long forgotten) rivals. She was one of the main conduits by which Barthes’s obsession with taking superficiality seriously reached Anglo academe and became intensely fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, and in many ways prepared the way for the post-modernism and irony which is such anathema to  Sontag today.

As Oscar Wilde once put it: “A moralist is someone who lectures on the vices of which he has grown bored.” In a preface to a new edition of Against Interpretation, included here, she makes a moving public confession: “What I didn’t understand… was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete.”’

The mention of Barthes is relevant to Death at the Mall, not least because I have named Simpson himself ‘a Roland Barthes for the iphone generation’. And my advocacy of his work could be compared to Sontag’s of Barthes. But my quest seems much more hopeless than Sontag’s, partly of course, because I am no Susan Sontag. But also because the 21st century, despite it showing both Barthes and Simpson’s ‘predictions’ to have come true, has no time for cultural theorists. My Barthes is bound to remain unappreciated.

Sadly, Simpson’s awareness of the end of the intellectual, and the impossibility of ‘serious’ intellect being taken seriously in the 21st century, seems also to contribute to a certain lassitude of late on his part. And, though it pains me to say it, my investigation into his work is possibly going to be a retrospective.

I’m reminded here of Morrissey for some reason, and Simpson’s only book-length investigation into a single artist or writer. I think Morrissey and Simpson have something in common, in that their work is often quite light of touch, and, like Wilde’s who they both admire, full of ‘satire’ and playfulness. But really, they take life, ideas, and themselves, incredibly seriously indeed. The chapter in Saint Morrissey (my favourite as it happens), that gives away Simpson’s (and Morrissey’s) sincerity and seriousness for me, is the one where he considers Morrissey’s relationship to northern literature and film, in particular the work of the late great Shelagh Delaney.

When Delaney died in November 2011 Simpson re-released his chapter from Saint Morrissey, Dump her on the doorstep, girl. He also wrote a sincere goodbye to the playwright and inspiration to his ‘hero’.

Delaney has left us, Vidal is clinging on, as if to spite us all, Morrissey is beginning to resemble a kind of belligerent lounge singer, living in LA and doing comeback tours and box set compilations. But one thing is for certain, the ‘intellectual’ is if not completely deceased, well on the way to breathing his last serious breath.

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Refs: Rojek, C (2003) Key Contemporary Thinkers: Stuart Hall Polity

Said, E (1994) Representations of The Intellectual Vintage

Simpson, M (1994) Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity Cassell

Simpson, M (1996) Anti Gay Continuum International

Simpson, M (2004) Saint Morrissey

Sontag, S Where The Stress Falls