MARK SIMPSON .com

Achilles, Alexander, Jason, Odysseus - the fabulous scrapping, rutting warriors of the Ancient World fulfil every boy’s own fantasy. Now, says Mark Simpson, Oliver Stone’s spayed movie ‘Alexander’ and the recent crop of ‘epics’ confirms that Hollywood has abolished heroes - past and present.

(Originally appeared Independent on Sunday, 19 December 2004)

For some, the entry “Double Classics” in their school timetable might have been an ominous omen. For me and my classmates however it meant 80 minutes of bliss listening to a wonderful old gent called Mr Field recount, and frequently re-enact with his walking-stick, fantastic stories of male derring-do from the Ancient World. Spellbound and wide-eyed we listened to the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, Achilles and Odysseus. So great was the pull of the past in the mouth of Mr Field that hardly anyone fidgeted or played with their chunky 1970s LED digital watches.

Of all the epic tales recounted it was that of Alexander the Great that most gripped my pubescent imagination. The story of a scrappy, muscular little blond boy from the provincial Greek state of Macedonia who took on the world and won, carving out an unprecedented empire that stretched from the Adriatic to India. The story of a boy who never quite grew up; who quite probably assassinated his father; who certainly surpassed his extraordinary achievements, establishing himself as the greatest cavalry captain who ever lived, whose tactics are still studied today. A boy who never really cared for any woman except his terrifying mother Olympias (so terrifying that once he left home, Alexander never returned); whose great and constant loves were Bucephalus, his legendary war-horse, and Hephaestion, his legendary comrade in beefy arms. What boy wouldn’t love Alexander? What boy wouldn’t want to be Alexander?

The story of Alexander the Great (356BC -323BC) is the best boy’s own story ever told -the Trojan Wars may never have happened: hence the posters for Oliver Stone’s new movie Alexander announce: “The Greatest Legend Of All Was Real”. Alexander’s is a tale of passion, adventure, really big fisticuffs, masculine camaraderie, and running away from girls. And also, drunkenness, debauchery, mass murder and madness. His 12-year tour of the known (and unknown) world, and his long list of battle honours - Thebes, Heliocarnassus, Issus, Gaugamela, Tyre, Hydaspes, to name but a few - represent dates on the greatest rock ‘n’ roll tour in history.

Alexander is the timeless, ageless hero of boyish psychosis - a romantic disease which affects all men, though admittedly some more than others (well, I was at boarding school). Boys brim with enough energy to change the world, or destroy it - it makes no difference to them. This dangerous, sexy, passionate indifference is the basis of the mixture of fear and envy that causes adults generally to treat them so badly.

Alexander’s ambition was literally global, shaping the Ancient World; his Eastern crusades ended the ancient dynasties of Persia and Egypt. Alexander effectively invented the Western idea of Empire, globalisation and stamped his face on our idea of fame and success. He wanted nothing less than the whole world to be Alexander. For a while he came shockingly close to achieving just that, boldly going where no man had gone before (another boyhood hero of mine, William Shatner, played Alexander in a TV series before landing the role of Captain James Tiberius Kirk - which he played of course, in his wonderfully limited way as Alexander again). In part, his success was due to the way he succeeded in portraying his own ambition and self-interest as being for the benefit of Macedonia, pan-Hellenism or humanity itself.

In this Alexander could be seen as the ancient template for a neo-con America; he even invaded and conquered what is today Iraq and Afghanistan - as well as Iran. But like the neo-cons he could conquer but he couldn’t or wouldn’t administrate: rebellions broke out frequently and his Empire dissolved immediately after his death; Alexander, like contemporary audiences, had a short attention span. Certainly Stone’s epic new biopic could be subtitled: “Operation Persian Freedom”: his Alexander mouths platitudes about liberating Asia; the turbaned, bearded King Darius looks oddly like Bin Laden and, after his decisive defeat at Gaugamela, he is hunted down by Alexander in the mountains.

Obviously this, in addition to the rediscovered fashionability of sword-and-sandal epics (Gladiator, Troy, King Arthur, The Last Samurai), is why Hollywood has rediscovered this chippy little man and remembered his story as the ultimate road move, the classic story of boundless boyish all-American ambition, lighting out for the territory. In addition to Oliver Stone’s effort, Baz Luhrmann is rumoured to be developing his own version, with Leonardo Di Caprio in the title role. Even The World’s Only True Catholic, Mel Gibson, is planning to make a 10 episode HBO TV series about this pagan arse-bandit who whipped the world’s butt. Suddenly, Alexander really does appear to be conquering the world again.

There is another reason why the epics are back though: they offer reassuring, if utterly fraudulent, nostrums about masculinity in an uncertain, metrosexual world. The Ancient World was a time when men were men (and boys were nervous). In fact, warrior chic has been the fashion statement of 2004. This is the same year, after all, that a US presidential election was fought largely on the basis of who would make the best warrior president - and won largely on the grounds of who saluted best on camera and looked most fetching in 1960s uniform.

And likewise, what Hollywood is really offering us in these modern epics is not hairy retrosexuality but just more metrosexual pleasures, this time in a rather gorgeous, ancient setting; models playing at being rough boys - metrowarriors. In The Last Samurai, the Tom finally grows facial hair, and renounces the unmanly military machinery of modernity for the harsh-but-tender camaraderie of Samurai life - but only to make him more glamorous; Mr Cruise’s Western otherness actually makes him the female lead of the movie. In Troy pretty boys Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom are the real beauty pageant entrants and Diane Kruger (Helen) - and the audience - sit in judgement. The fields of Ilium become not a backdrop for the glorious feats of ancient warriors, but an expensive pretext for ogling Brad Pitt’s body, and also a half-hearted attempt to make it look practical, purposeful: when in fact his flawless, untested physique is the very definition of look-don’t-touch. In Alexander Irish boy-band actor Colin Farrell, with bottle-blond hair and eyeliner, stands in for charisma and passion.

The main reason for the return to the epics is this: Hollywood is emasculating the past. It isn’t raiding it, but paving it over. Telling us there never were any heroes. What other explanation could there be for foisting Pitt as Achilles and Farrell as Alexander on us in the space of a year? These stars who have risen without a trace are stars because of their bland insubstantiality not despite it. We live in a crowded world which is offended by talent, terrified by genius. The Irish pipsqueak Colin Farrell was destined to become King of the Knowing World, aka Hollywood, because he is so inoffensive. He’s the anti-Alexander. Like Robbie Williams doing an album of Frank Sinatra songs, Farrell as Alexander, or Pitt as Achilles, serves to reassure a generation that might have some dim, uneasy ancestral memory of a time before the mediatisation of everything - relax! - there were no great men and there was no era of greatness. There are just different styles, man. Masculinity is a game of dressy-uppy. Like the CGI armies of modern epics, and the digital wars of Pentagon planners, contemporary masculinity is simulation and number-crunching technology. Shock and Awe without the draft.

Hence Farrell’s Alexander isn’t haunted, or driven, paranoid, or threatening, terrifying or charismatic: his eyes are just too close together. When wearing his giant war helmet in the battle scenes his beady little eyes look blinking out like Marvin the Martian. He is utterly lost in Stone’s movie. Farrell’s face is as blank and thoughtless as the world that has made him a “star”. It’s difficult to believe that anyone would follow him to the corner shop let alone the edge of the world.

Just as I and countless other generations of boys before me worshipped Alexander, Alexander hero-worshipped Achilles. It is said he kept two items under his pillow at all times: a dagger and a copy of the Iliad. He yearned to emulate flame-capped Achilles’ achievements; in fact he far surpassed them (Farrell, by contrast, turns in a performance below even that of Pitt’s Achilles). He was terrified that his father would leave nothing left for him to achieve, and is one of the reasons why he is suspected of a hand in his assassination. Alexander wanted fame - but he wanted it for his worldly achievements not his profile. There was another reason why Alexander was fascinated by Achilles: he was interested in the story of his warrior-lover Patroclus (Homer doesn’t actually say they were lovers, but by the time of Alexander they were widely regarded as such). Patroclus was a year older than Achilles, just as Hephaestion was a year older than Alexander; Alexander must have worried that the world might think him Hephaestion’s boy.

At Ilium, Alexander and Hephaestion laid wreaths on Achilles’ tomb, stripped naked, anointed themselves with oil and ran races around the grave. Strangely, this scene didn’t make Oliver Stone’s movie. We do however hear Aristotle lecture the young Alexander on how Achilles and Patroclus were lovers and how such a friendship between men “produces virtue” and is “the basis of the city state”. But this dry history lesson on Greek patriarchy isn’t quite what the teasing tagline “Alexander was conquered only once: by Hephaestion’s thighs” might lead you to expect. In fact, we never really see Hephaestion’s thighs let alone Alexander between them. Stone hints heavily they were lovers, and uses Alexander’s life-long devotion to Hephaestion - Alexander was besides himself with grief when Hephaestion died and lay on his corpse for a day and a night - to make him more sympathetic, but can’t quite bring himself to show sex, kissing or even very much affection. By contrast, the on-screen romance between Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Ringpiece is positively pornographic.

There is only one sex scene in the film - but it is a wedding-night tryst with Roxanna, a wife that Alexander took after invading Persia (but didn’t get around to impregnating until years later, and only after Hephaestion’s demise). Alexander, by the way, was not “bisexual” in the way that publicity for the movie has carefully suggested. Stone’s Alexander is bisexual in the way that Elton John was “bisexual” in the Seventies: Stone is worried about losing his mainstream, American audience and wants to give them at least half of Alexander to identify with/desire. Of course, terms such as “heterosexual”, “homosexual” and especially “bisexual”, with its sixties ‘free love’ associations, are anachronistic and misleading in an Ancient context where the gender of a male’s partner was of much less importance than the public observance of certain rules of engagement based on age and rank (adult male citizens, for instance, were officially forbidden sexual relations with one another but encouraged to have them with unbearded teenaged youths).

Nevertheless, according to many accounts Alexander’s preference was for the same sex; and there is evidence that in regard to Hephaestion at least he disregarded the ban on sexual relations between adult males.

His mother and father were so frantically worried about the teenage Alexander’s lack of interest in ladies and what this augured for the royal line that they hired a beautiful and famously talented courtesan. The fact that his mother is recorded as pleading with him repeatedly to sleep with the courtesan suggests that this approach wasn’t very successful (and a mother’s pleading, let alone Olympias’, was likely to have been slightly counterproductive). He was to marry, more than once, but mostly for political reasons, or to satisfy demands for an heir. For most of Alexander’s life, boys were for pleasure; Hephaestion was for love; women were for heirs and alliances – and effeminates like Paris. Though, perhaps to confound our modern interpretations, or at least mine, there is evidence he took a mistress towards the end of his life.

Alexander disdained a chance to inspect Paris’ famous lyre, dismissing it as having been used for “adulterous ditties such as captivate and bewitch the hearts of women.” But, he added, “I would gladly see that of Achilles, which he used to sing the glorious deeds of brave men.” This early example of the public school mentality seems to us now like a kind of queeny misogyny, and perhaps it was, but the fearsome queeniness of hyper-masculinity, a queeniness that literally subjected the world (arguably not once, but three times: under Alexander, under the Romans and under the Brits). Alexander’s father Philip may have invented the modern state with his innovation of a standing army, but it was his Empire homo son who proved to be his most potent martial innovation of all.

According to some, possibly mischievous accounts, Macedonia - even by Greek standards - sounds like a giant, jumping, open all hours Ancient leather bar. In fact, the Greeks were scandalised by the “barbaric” and “beastly” behaviour of the Macedonians. Sniffy Greek sources complain that the members of Philip’s court were selected for their prowess at drinking, gambling, or sexual debauchery. “Some of them used to shave their bodies and make them smooth although they were men, and others actually practised lewdness with each other although bearded… Nearly every man in the Greek or barbarian world of a lecherous, loathsome, or ruffianly character flocked to Macedonia.” Actually, Macedonia was the kind of place that most leather queens would be terrified by.

Needless to say, it scares the bejesus out of Hollywood. In Stone’s film (financed mostly by German money), we get occasional, almost subliminal flashes of the real, raucous nature of Macedonian masculinity, with warriors and their boys glimpsed in the background almost necking each other. But despite these hints, the pre-Christian, barracks erotics of Macedonia ultimately defeats Stone precisely because it is too masculine, too pagan. Stone is a liberal Judeo-Christian pussy. Stone the macho director of films about macho men in which women are very thin on the ground wimps out in Alexander. Macedonian masculinity is just too… masculine. But then, this is the contradiction of all these metrowarrior epics: the Ancient World is just too ancient and rough and real and beastly and male - and, well, Ancient - for contemporary America.

So the warrior sodomy of Alexander is turned into something modern and harmless, something simulated: Queer Eye for the Macedonian Guy, as one critic dubbed it. In addition to the creepily spayed relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion, which is presented as a kind of contemporary gay marriage (sexless, boring, respectable), there’s a strong smell of Sixties unisex androgyny, like rancid jossticks: Stone has Hephaestion portrayed by the spoilt-girlish Jared Leto, complete with hippy-chick wig, plastered in eyeliner applied by Dusty Springfield. The masculine side of male love is as taboo today as the effeminate side is popular.

There is a strange kind of poetic irony here: after all, in JFK Stone told us that his virile Irish Catholic hero Kennedy was punked by the hissing conspiracies of New Orleans fags. Here Alexander and its director are punked by Stone’s own fear of masculine homosexuality.

But there is, admittedly, a lot to be afraid of. An entire season of Jerry Springer couldn’t come close to one evening’s male jealousies, passions and intrigues in Macedonia. Although Stone makes much of Philip’s assassination he draws a veil over the details. The assassin, one of his bodyguards, was a spurned lover called Pausanias. Noted for his youthful beauty, he had been usurped in the royal bedchamber by another attractive young soldier. Pausanias denounced Philip’s new lover as a male tart and “whore”. The boy then proved his virility and virtue by saving Philip’s life in battle, at the cost of his own. His brother and friends then, as you do, drugged Pausanias and gang raped him before handing him on to their grooms and muleteers who also raped him and then gave him a good beating as thanks. For political reasons Philip refused to punish the wrongdoers and restore Pausanias’s honour. Olympias and Alexander probably then used Pausanias’ fury as an instrument for removing daddy and gaining power. Alexander became king and Emperor of the World because his father was murdered by a neglected male lover. Warrior sodomy is a terrifying, fearsome-fearless thing - don’t mess!

It’s tempting to see this current obsession with the Ancient World as a function of our search for new pagan lights in a chaotic, darkened, post-Christian, post-ideological world in which Posh and Becks have replaced the Holy Family. Tempting, but probably mistaken. None of these films have any gods – except the pathetically democratic, earthbound ones: the celebs that star in them. Real worship, whether of heroes or gods is definitely not on offer. It’s just too messy and dangerous for our safe, sterile, simulated modern lives. Boys today don’t worship or want to be Alexander or Achilles, who both regarded themselves as sons of gods. They want to be Colin or Brad. Or their stylist. Although it is difficult for someone like me to accept, maybe this isn’t all bad. After all, as we’ve seen in present-day Mesopotamia, there really isn’t much room in the world for Empire building these days.

Besides, we’re all too busy playing with our digital watches to care about warrior virtues.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Mark Simpson on how protests over male make-up are just fake-tanned hypocrisy (Guardian CIF, 13 August, 2008)

Oh, the gnashing and wailing of (bleached) teeth and pulling of (gelled) hair recently in some sections of the UK press over male make-up after UK High Street Superdrug’s launched a new line of male cosmetics! The way some commentators went on, you’d think that instead of selling concealer, ‘manscara’, and ‘guyliner’, Superdrug were actually selling home castration kits.

Rather clenched articles by male journos in liberal metropolitan newspapers such as the Guardian and The Times decrying the trend reminded me, in a mealy-mouthed way, of the uglier farm boys in the North Yorks market town where I live who call prettier lads ‘faggots’ for wearing make-up (though the farm boys mean the word more affectionately).

The fuss wasn’t so much about cosmetics being used by men - we’ve been here many, many times before over the last few years, and what men today don’t use moisturiser/conditioner/mousse/teeth whitening toothpaste/fake tan/eye gel - or Immac for Men? Especially farm boys and journos. No, male make-up brought out some in a rash because it’s out-of-the-bathroom-closet male cosmetics. Shameless metrosexuality. Metrosexuality without hypocrisy or apology. Metrosexuality that literally gets in your face.

Most metro cosmetics until now have been about enhancing male beauty behind closed doors, leaving at least a notional amount of discreet deniability that saves everyone’s sensibilities: ‘Oh, no, I don’t use product: I just wake up looking like a million dollars’. Maintaining, however laughably, the fiction that male attractiveness, unlike the female variety, is entirely unselfconscious and unaffected. Like metrosexuality, male make up smudges consoling stereotypes about what is ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘normal’ and ‘freaky’. It outs the masculine need to feel pretty. After all, once they’re given permission, men who prefer the ladies are probably more likely to be interested in make-up than the kind who prefer men - which is why some of them protest so much. They know that if they give in to their urges they’ll look like Louis XIV.

Besides, the future is already made-up. While ageing journalists raged against the abomination of male make-up in the (dying) print media, the pretty, pumped, usually half-naked young male celeb wannabes on Big Brother were regularly flaunting foundation, eyeliner and black nail varnish, just like their Emo heroes. Meanwhile at the Olympics in Beijing the 14 year old Brit diver Tom Daley was showing off a fake tan so dark it looked like foundation.

The arrival of male make-up on the British High Street shows that in the age of metrosexuality nothing that women do or use to be beautiful can be considered off limits to men. In a post-feminist, mediated world, today’s young males aren’t going to allow the ‘fairer sex’ any unfair advantages - including being able to look fabulous after the morning after a heavy night out. Or being the only ones that can leave their face on someone’s pillow.

© Mark Simpson 2008

by Mark Simpson, The Times, 28 July, 2008

Next week the V&A opens an exhibition called Fashion v Sport, profiling the relationship between the sports and fashion industries - a relationship that seems to be flourishing despite the habit of many of today’s sportsmen and women of wearing less and less.

Recently the New York Daily News ran a spread of photos showing rugby players from the New Zealand and South African national sides playing a match, starkers, on a windswept New Zealand beach. Disappointingly, it turned out that the players showing us their tackle were not in fact Boks and All Blacks, but local amateurs taking part in a beery annual “Naked Rugby” event.

But who can blame the media for getting over-excited? After all, last year the Rugby World Cup was advertised with posters on the Tube of snogging, scrumming rugby players. And then there are footballers such as Freddie Ljungberg and David Beckham spreadeagled across the side of buses.

Almost everywhere you look, sports, advertising and fashion seem to have jumped into bed to produce a spornographic money shot. Sports stars have become sporno stars. How did this happen? What does it mean? And where can I get hold of a pair of those pants?

Ironically, the only unconvincing aspect of the snogging scrum campaign was the relative unattractiveness of the faux rugby players compared to the pumped, shaved perfection of the real thing. The Parisian team produce an arty soft-porn calendar, called Dieux du Stade, featuring lovingly photographed nude players soaping each other up in the showers - or playing naked rugby on the beach. A great success. It sells like, well, hot rugby players.

In the run-up to the last football World Cup the fashion label Dolce & Gabbana commissioned the photographer Mariano Vivanco to snap members of the Italian team all oiled up and ready for us in the changing rooms, wearing very skimpy - and stretchy - D&G briefs. The results were splashed across prime advertising sites. In hindsight, the world was grovelling at the Italians’ feet from that moment on. The Spanish winners of Euro 2008 have yet to pose glistening in thongs, but with studs such as Fernando Torres and Iker Casillas in their stable it can only be a matter of time.

To get our attention in an age of broadband jadedeness, men’s fashion advertising has to promise us nothing less than an immaculately groomed, waxed and pumped group session in the showers.

And if this sporno looks a bit gay, that’s probably because it’s meant to. Partly because it made you look, partly because gay men are a loyal niche market and also taste-formers - especially when it comes to consuming the male body (Mr Dolce and Mr Gabbana are themselves famously gay).

It’s also partly because it seems to turn on the ladies in the same way that girl-on-girl action does their boyfriends. For an athlete nowadays, having a big gay following no longer necessarily means looking over his shoulder worriedly, but instead turning round and winking playfully.

Both Beckham and Ljungberg have posed in gay magazines, the beefy former England rugby ace and married father of two Ben Cohen has brought out a nude calendar marketed at gay men and talks about “embracing my gay fans”. Some, such as Becks and Welsh rugby glamour-boy Gavin Henson, have even argued over them. “I think I have lost a lot of my gay fans to Gavin,” Beckham once said. “It is a shame, as I really love them.”

Being equal-opportunity flirts, today’s sporno stars want to turn everyone on. Sportsmen, like porn stars, are by definition show-offs. Besides, it also means more money, more power, more endorsements, more kudos.

Fashion is more than happy to indulge them. Athletes represent everything that is desirable today: youth, vigour, success, health, fitness, looks, fame - and also the sweaty shorthand for all these things: sex. What’s more, as highly paid “pros”, their bodies are already what all men’s bodies are supposed to be these days: hot commodities. If athletes with hundreds of thousands of fans - gay and straight - are willing to tart themselves up this way, why bother with silly, skinny male models?

Naturally, all the sporno stars flirting with gayness are officially heterosexual. Team sports are still not the best place to openly bat for the other side, not least because it might cost you one of those lucrative gay-looking sporno endorsement deals. Virility is still considered to be officially hetero. (This holds true even in gay porn - where many stars are, like sporno stars, only “gay for pay”.)

But there’s no denying how dramatically attitudes towards the sporting male body have changed as a result of sport’s collision with the world of fashion and celebrity. Sporting male heroes now adopt sex-object poses on the side of buses that were once seen as girly, slutty or homosexual. Or, what was once much the same taboo in the male mind: passive.

As one outraged, middle-aged - and rather plain looking - BBC sports presenter thundered recently in The Sun about Beckham’s Armani-clad giant package: “You’ve got money, status, respect and fame - and then someone says: ‘Armani want you to do a picture wearing tight white pants with your legs as wide open as England’s defence.’ Why would you say yes?” Actually, in a spornographic age, the question should really be: why on earth would you say no?

The Fashion v Sport exhibition runs from Aug 5 to Jan 4. The catalogue, edited by Ligaya Salazar, and featuring an essay on Sporno by Simpson, on is published by V&A Books at £19.99.

“Ere, Ron, The Sun’s just texted me. They want to know if you’ve got any smaller shorts.”

Britain’s best-selling newspaper The Sun has been working itself into a confused lather about our metrosexual footballers, again. Like me, it just can’t leave them alone.

In a long, hand-wringing - and graphically illustrated - article spread over the centre pages last Friday headlined ‘Preen Team’ they ask ‘What the hell is going on with our footballers?’

Led by the Premier League’s arch-metrosexual Cristiano Ronaldo, football has this summer gone camper than a row of tents.

This week Ronaldo continued his holiday tour by hanging out in a pair of tight silver shorts in LA - and had the world’s gay men coming over all funny.

Er no, it had The Sun coming over all funny. For much of the summer, The Sun has been stalking Portuguese Ronaldo, the best footballer in the UK and also one of the best looking, who is currently convalescing after an injury (hence the unflattering blue footwear), trying to exploit his current unpopularity - the result of his plans to leave Manchester United for Real Madrid, and his failure to keep them, like his hot oiled bod, under wraps.

Like a jealous, spurned suitor, The Sun (along with most of the Brit tabloids) has been bitching and beating him up over his dark (Portuguese) tan, his shorts, his good looks - and his lack of apology for them. And trying to imply he is girly and, what is the same thing in their book, homo.

And who can blame him for wanting to leave the UK, where the biggest paper behaves like a school-ground bully with sexual identity issues? They’ve even published pictures of him smiling at a mate (who appears to be his brother), telling us that he’s cruising him. And I thought I had bumsex on the brain.

In a familiar trick, they’ve given space to the editor of ‘Britain’s best-selling gay magazine’ to gush about what a ‘gay idol’ Ronaldo is. Otherwise known as guilt by association. At the same time as proving they’re ‘not homophobic’ because they let the king of poofs have his say.

Friday’s article goes one step further and seems to blame Ronaldo for making an entire generation of footballers gay. I know he has nice legs, but I doubt even those pins have that kind of power.

But a perfectly-waxed chest and budgie smuggling shorts are just the tip of the iceberg.

A sun investigation has found the manbag and grooming obsession is rife among our highly-paid stars.

As you may have suspected, it turns out that this ‘investigation’ is just another excuse for lots of pics of young footballers without much on. An excuse even smaller than Ron’s silver shorts. Not that I’m complaining, mind.

Though I can’t help but poke fun at The Sun’s hissy list of the metrosexual offences of our footie aces:

Chelsea ace Frank Lampard refused to go anywhere this summer without his salmon pink vest and matching shorts.

(Which we’ve Photoshopped to make look even pinker and gayer, just as we’ve done with Ronaldo’s tan to make him look even darker and even more of a girly dago.)

He has also been lugging around wife Elen Rives’ fuchsia handbag.

I think it suits Fabulous Frankie and he should nick it off her.

Italian World Cup winner Fabio Cannavaro actually SHAVED his mate’s chest and armpits on the deck of their holiday yacht this week in a show of shameless male bonding.

Actually SHAVED his mate’s chest and armpits? No! Well, I never. The shamelessness of it!

And Liverpool and Spain striker Fernando Torres spent most of last month by the pool with an Alice band in his hair while leafing through lifestyle magazines.

You can bet he wasn’t reading The Sun.

Ah, for the days of football when men were men and soap was never scented - or dropped. Right on cue The Sun wheels out 1970s footballer Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris, to whinge about how in his day he got paid ten bob a week, cut his own hair with garden shears, ate gravel, and beat up poofs on sight (or so you’d be forgiven for thinking). Interesting that the Sun didn’t ask retired ‘hardman’ Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock back to play this role, after he failed to deliver the poof-baiting goods in a recent previous Sun article bemoaning the gayness of today’s football.

How The Sun loves to keep coming back to this theme of metro V retro, pretending of course to be on the side of retrosexuality against, well, homosexuality. Partly this is because it imagines that retrosexuality is synonymous with ‘working class’ - traditionally the majority of this tab’s readership - because The Sun is now edited by expensively educated types who are faking it. By posing as champions of ‘Chopper’ Harris they present themselves as connected to that stoic proletarian tradition they actually have nothing to do with, and today’s consumerist, sensual, closetted metro Sun is a million fake-tanned miles from.

I suspect readers under the age of 30 that they know they desperately need to attract if they are to have any future at all, let alone continue to sell millions every day, are mostly turned off by this confused and conflicted metrophobic bullying from The Sun, however jokey it’s presented as being. Especially those from a working class background. Why? Because they will probably see it as directed against them. When repeatedly adopting this kind of cor, strewth, look at the pooftahs footballers are today! tone, The Sun just sounds like their nightmare fat dad.

Or me.

Intentionally or not, this time the space given to the editor of Attitude to twitter about fashion and male freedom and footballers showing the way makes that gay mag sound much more in tune with younger Sun readers than The Sun itself.

Tip: Dave Harley

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

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

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

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

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

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

An ad for Braun in Germany.

I have nothing to say.

Mmmmm. Retrosexual masculinity. Served in a rocks glass. Effortless. Unselfconscious. Dated.

It tastes just like your… dad.

Unlike you, of course. You moisturize. Go to the gym. Watch what you eat. Fret about whether you’re worthy of love. Worry about what masculinity actually means. And taste of tea-tree oil and lavender.

If only we could bring those days back: days when you could operate heavy machinery and speedboats pissed out of your mind. When no one thought you might be homo. When the only magazines you bought were Angling Times and Penthouse. When women couldn’t keep their hands off you even though you had no dress sense, smelt bad and your hair was full of lard.

And when toned, topless, tweaking 1970s hustlers checked themselves out in rest room mirrors while waiting for their next married punter. (Yes, that picture caught my eye too.)

Canadan Club: for the the man who, like most men today, is on the outside looking in. Aching to be sold back by advertising the very thing that advertising has deprived him of. How many of the men reading this ad today even speak to their dad, or know what he drinks?

As I have pointed out before, it’s a measure of how self-conscious and mediated masculinity is now that ‘real guys’ whatever they were/are now just another annoying fad. Faux retro.

On the rocks.

Tip: Fresca Davis

Contenders, ready! Gladiators, ready! Cross-Your-Heart male bra, ready!

It’s back. This weekend that naff 90s Saturday Night family entertainment staple Gladiators returns to British TV - though this time on sattelite and cable only.

A few, possibly superfluous, observations:

It looks a lot kinkier. It looks, in fact, like a suburban fetish party. Rather ‘dark’, with a lot of leather and rubber and a lot of porno pouting - and that’s just the guys.

The most popular male Gladiator, ‘Spartan’, wears a skirt.

Some of the men also seem to be wearing bras. It’s difficult not to wonder they’re a bit lacking in the tit department but have good abs, so they gave them something to cover up their saggy breasts or over-large nipples.

Or maybe, along with the skirt, it is just more evidence that the male body is now as packaged and fetishised, not to mention scrutinized, as the female variety - at least on Prime Time TV.

Actually, on the basis of the new Gladiators, you could argue that women are now held up to less exacting standards. The men are showing more flesh than the ladies - and their flesh is much more spectacular. Spartan’s abs aren’t really terribly useful, but they do look fantastic, so let’s have him hanging by his arms while the camera zooms in on them.

Either way, the Gladiators, male and female, with the exception of pigtailed Battleaxe who looks like she might actually be able to handle herself in a pub fight, seem less like super-heroes than a bunch of tarts.

But then, tarting’s what we want these days. Especially on family shows like Gladiators.

It’s a measure of how mainstream metrosexuality is now, how ‘normal’ it’s become, that even naff old Gladiators has been metrosexed up - ‘for all the family’. The original series was of course also a form of lycra-clad voyeurism, but with a It’s a Knockout/PE-teacher heartiness as fig-leaf. New Gladiators, on the other hand, like the brave/terrifying new metrosexual world we’re living in, isn’t the least bit shy and doesn’t need fig-leafs. Instead, we’re given skimpier outfits and flickering, lustful, wicked flames licking around their perfect bodies.

Sometimes the effect though can be very confusing. Atlas (left), with that long blond hair and sly wink he does on the website, looks less like Charles Atlas, than a cross between Popeye, Jessica Rabbit and Dick Emery. It used to be said that female bodybuilders looked like men in wigs - but looking at Atlas I can’t work out who or what is wearing the wig. Transexy time again.

Perhaps inevitably the trailer for the new series includes a pastiche of the hit 2000 film Gladiator, set in the Coliseum. Gladiators were slaves, commodities of worked-out human flesh that were bought and sold and pitted against one another in a life and death struggle by Roman showbiz at the point of a sword. Now though it’s done at the point of a TV contract. Who says civilization doesn’t advance?

Perhaps I’m reading too much in again, but to my eye this adds a layer of irony to the inclusion of several black Gladiators - in an attempt to update the format to reflect multi-racial Britain. Or perhaps simply to make it look more ‘exotic’ and saleable.

The muscliest gladiators meanwhile seem even musclier. Atlas and Destroyer look more impossibly massive than the big Gladiators of the Nineties series, such as Hunter and Wolf. The bar has, literally, been raised. Their shoulders in particular are vast - perhaps because since the 90s, partly down to the original Gladiators series, we’ve all got a personal fitness trainer - or are related to one. So they have to be EVEN BIGGER.

Or perhaps it’s because we’ve all got widescreen TVs now.

Somehow I don’t think it terribly likely the steroid ‘epidemic’ that drug agencies have warned is rampaging amongst young men today because they want a desirable body like the ones they see in the media will abate anytime soon.

Email interview with Mark Simpson by Sarah Walters of Manchester Evening News (unedited version) pegged to his appearance as the bad fairy at this year’s Queer Up North Festival

SW: Sexuality has been part and parcel of your life and writings - how has reaction changed to the topic of sexuality since you started writing? Is there a culture of openness now, or still prudishness?

MS: Things have certainly changed. I doubt that the MEN of 20 years ago, would have interviewed me. If anything, it would have organised a campaign against my visit. Frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed them.
To some extent, homosexuality was dirty and sniggersome back then because sex was. Homosex is, symbolically speaking, sex for sex’s sake - not for Mothercare’s or the Pope’s. This of course is why the pop music kids listened to in the 80s was full of queerness: Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and that band called The Smiths.

Nowadays of course, everything has gone pop - especially Manchester - and sex is everywhere. Except perhaps in sex itself. I sometimes wonder whether, in a world full of broadband porn - and that’s just the TV schedules - whether there’s any point in actually having sex any more. Unless you’re doing it in front of a webcam or in the Big Brother House.

As a result of all this, and the cultural crossover of gayness - most famously exemplified by the metrosexual - queerness ain’t so queer any more. Maybe that’s why some of today’s favourite TV queers such as Graham Norton, tend to be reassuringly penis-less creatures from the 1970s.

But then, penised homosexuality can be very scary. And I should know.

Young people seem increasingly more open-minded about discovering and challenging their sexuality. Is being bi-/metro-sexual the new black?

It certainly looks like the future is ‘bi-curious’ and ‘open-minded’. Or at least that’s what it says on its online profile.

I think we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of ‘sexuality’ - that 19th Century pseudo-science that divided the world up into ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. ‘Sexuality’ is being replaced by sensuality - or at least, more omnivorous tastes.

I mean, what is ‘straight’ nowadays? Sex outside marriage and Biblically-sanctified orifices has become almost compulsory. Now that women go out and get drunk rather than stay at home waiting for Prince Charming, men can now have ‘gay’ - no baby, no strings, no fee, no gag-reflex - sex with women. Often in club toilets. In this metrosexual world of straight gayness, dogging has replaced cottaging, swinging parties and ‘roastings’ have replaced a quiet night in the Dog and Duck, and fashionable female bisexuality has replaced synchronized swimming.

True, the lads are trailing the lasses somewhat in the sexual experimentation department - though if you promise not to tell anyone they generally catch up very quickly.

For QUN, you’re taking part in the big Debate on May 10, which is always a huge draw - last year was a sell out. What are the hot topics in queer politics you’re expecting to field?

I’m afraid I’ve no idea what the hot topics in queer politics are. Hopefully I’ll be asked to comment on the new Gladiators’ abs and David Beckham’s Armani-wrapped lunch-box.

I understand that you’ll be taking a devil’s advocate line on the point/necessity of festivals like Queer Up North and speaking out ‘against’ them on May 24. Anti-gay debate (in particular against gay stereotypes) is something you’ve written about previously - what’s your beef with QUN?

Well, I don’t really have that much of a beef with QUN, especially since they’re putting me up in a boutique hotel for the weekend. And full marks to them for addressing this subject at all.

My argument is that with the queering of the mainstream, there really isn’t such a thing as ‘queer culture’ any more - at least, not in the sense of something distinct and fragile that needs special protection or encouragement. Once upon a time, young queers would have to run away from Darlington to the queer metropoli of Manchester or London if they wanted some ‘queer culture’ - or just to be able to come out without losing their front teeth. This is clearly no longer necessarily the case. Many can come out at home, watch soaps with gay storylines - like Shameless - and log-on to look for love or sex. Or go to ‘gay night’ at the local nitespot. Queer culture was largely a product of queer communities. Queer assimilation and crossover means that those communities are increasingly obsolete.

Has Manchester as a city played a particular role in promoting (or, perhaps distorting) gay culture and liberalising opinions about sexuality?

I don’t think there’s a city anywhere that’s done more to queer the world than Manchester. Home of Coronation Street, Take That, Queer As Folk, Man U’s metrosexual ‘Spice Boys’, Shameless and The Smiths. Thanks to Manchester, it’s not just queer up north anymore.

Manchester itself seems to have been transformed from the desolate post-industrial landscape I knew in 1983 when I lived here briefly, to a city fit for hairdressers. And today’s footballers.

Mark Simpson shines a light on The Rolling Stones’ smart stupidity

‘I refer to certain objects of no use to farmers,” said Judge Block, speaking at the Horsham Ploughing and Agricultural Society’s annual dinner in 1967 (a wild affair, no doubt). “I may say they are of no use to man or beast, unless they are otherwise dealt with by being ground very small to surface roads or being cut down in size for other uses. I refer to the stones. I looked up what Shakespeare had to say about these things, and in Julius Caesar I found, ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things.’”

Judge Block had presided over Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ first but certainly not last drugs court case that summer. Perhaps because of his apposite surname, he was right in his judgement about the Stones but so wrong in his sentence and valuation of them that he will always be remembered as a silly old git.

It’s one of the conundrums of the Rolling Stones that it is impossible to work out whether their lack of anything much to say is their greatest strength or the greatest weakness. Certainly their intellectual and emotional anomie has helped them stay unfeasibly cool for most of the last four decades, especially in the last few years. It’s as if the insolent, senseless things ground and cut down not just blockish judges but the entire culture to size and turned it into merely a royal road for their bandwagoning career. Watching footage of them from the mid-Sixties today the most shocking thing about them is how modern they look; how much the world around them has changed and how little they have.

Hence one of the more charming aspects of Mark Paytress’s The Rolling Stones Off the Record (Omnibus), a chronological history of the Stones in the form of a collection of quotes by and about the band from the early Sixties to the early Noughties, is that “the unprecedented, incontestable, inexhaustible purveyors of spontaneous combustion The Rollin’ Stones” (as an early small ad in Melody Maker described them) themselves are, on paper, rather tedious. Even in their rebellious heyday of the Sixties, in which they became the definitive rock ‘n’ roll band and also, as a careless afterthought, invented glam, punk and pop promos, they appear surprisingly lacking in insight or interest either in their own phenomenon or the world they have forced to fellate them - and who thanks them for the privilege.

Like judge Block, the squarest bit-players in the narrative of the Stones have the most interesting and prescient things to say here. Michael Jagger’s headmaster at Dartford Grammar wrote a school report in 1960 which turned out to be a prophecy of what was in store for us all for the next 40 years: “Jagger is a lad of good general character though he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something… he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing and Music.” Sir Michael Jagger would persist into the 21st century in his musical camping, social climbing and sexual canoeing.

You can’t get much squarer than mothers, and Mrs Eva Jagger knew a thing or two about her son: “He was a very adventurous boy when he was younger, but then later he became interested in money. It always struck us as odd. Money doesn’t usually interest little boys, but it did Mike. He didn’t want to be a pilot or an engine driver - he wanted a lot of money!” (Michael studied accountancy at the LSE until he hit on another, much better, way of getting his hands on lots of dough.)

Refreshingly, mothers don’t have much invested in feeding the rock ‘n’ roll myth. Mrs Doris Richards: “With six aunts he [Keith was a bit spoiled… He was a bit of a mother’s boy really. When he started school, he used to get panic-stricken if I wasn’t there waiting for him when they all came out.” When Keith claims that “rock ‘n’ roll got me into being one of the boys. Before that I just got me ass kicked all over the place,” Doris hilariously corrects him: “Actually, he was too sensitive to be a Ted.”

Mrs Kathleen Perks (mother of Bill Wyman): “I can’t remember him ever losing his temper. We found out later that when something annoyed Bill, he would go up to his bedroom and read the Bible. He was closely connected with our local church, and a member of the choir for 10 years.”

Sometimes prescience can border on tragicomedy. Miss Louisa Jones, mother of Brian Jones: “When he was 12 Brian joined the school orchestra and learned clarinet… one thing he really excelled at was diving, although he wasn’t particularly interested in swimming itself.” Jones was to drown in his own swimming pool in 1969 shortly after leaving the group, disillusioned.

Brian Jones was the nearest thing the Stones had to an intellectual, which of course was why he had to go. Like Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, he was the band’s founder, ideologue and bad conscience. In 1964 he offered the Evening Standard an extremely sharp analysis of why the Stones provoked “gibbering rage” among so many adult males: “They seem to have a sort of personal anxiety because we are getting away with something they never dared to do. It’s a sexual, personal, vain thing. They’d always been taught that being masculine meant looking clean, cropped and ugly.”

The Stones’ UK TV debut provoked a bulging mailbag: “The whole lot of you should be given a good bath,” wrote one apoplectic viewer, “then all that hair should be cut off. I’m not against pop music when it’s sung by a nice clean boy like Cliff Richard, but you are a disgrace. Your filthy appearance is likely to corrupt teenagers all over the country.” This assessment proved to be entirely correct.

Jones had a clear understanding of the cultural importance of the Stones and the revolution - inversion, in fact - of social values they represented. “Our real followers have moved on with us - some of those we like most are the hippies in NY, but nearly all of them think like us and are questioning some of the basic immoralities which are tolerated in present-day society: the war in Vietnam, persecution of homosexuals, illegality of abortion and drug taking. All these things are immoral. We are making our own statement - they are making more intellectual ones.” Guess who lasted longer?

Marianne Faithfull offers the most interesting emotional insight: “The day I was introduced to them I thought to myself, ‘What a shame.’ I didn’t feel a thing except sorrow for the Stones.” Of course, this proved near-fatal for Marianne who was sucked into their senseless, sensual world. (According to Tom Driberg, W H Auden sidled up to Marianne Faithfull and blurted: “When you’re smuggling drugs, d’you pack them up your arse?”)

Mick Jagger offstage has not really been able to articulate the spellbinding, Satanic personality that could be seen onstage; he is no Morrisseyan wit. He certainly had his moments though. In 1964, when the Stones appeared on Dean Martin’s TV show, Hollywood Palace, Martin sent them up with some cheap scripted gags: “Their hair is not that long. It’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows…”. Jagger retorted: “It’s nice to have you on our show, Mr Martin.”

He has denied however that he feels any disappointment that he isn’t regarded as an intellectual. “It’s very nice to be just a body,” he said in 1978. “I feel like a stripper when I go on stage. I have a great sympathy for girls that are sex objects. There’s nothing more sleazy than an old stripper!”

Certainly it’s a cunning strategy. Asked how he had managed to do the same Mick Jagger act for so many years: “It’s a very English approach. We were brought up to believe that everything you do is a joke, that you’re only an amateur and you don’t ever claim to be any good at it. And that if you do get success, it’s only by luck.” A shrewd formula for surviving British resentment.

Hence his impatience with seriousness. On the Falklands War: “It’s really none of my business.” On The Smiths’ album Meat is Murder going straight to No 1: “I’m not sure I wanna hear a whole album about meat.” On his abandoned biography: “It was just boring trying to remember everything. It was just… ‘Euchhh’.” Arguably Jagger’s most famous and telling line is the one delivered to a protesting East London petrol station attendant in the early hours of the morning: “We’ll piss anywhere, man.”

But the last word should be left to Keith Richards, original punk rocker and probably the “real” Stone: “We certainly didn’t wanna be rock ‘n’ roll stars. That was just too tacky.”

(Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 21 September 2003)

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008