On trying to love the flashy, gnashy, piano basher This will shock you, but Liberace was not my cup of peculiar. Frankly, I found his persona slightly repellent as a kid in the 1970s. Maybe it was just rejection of my inner fabulousness, but he reminded me of a sexless,… Read More »Even Liberace’s Smile
Set in an upmarket West London health club with ‘central heating and wall-to-wall fitted carpets’, this captivating Pathe newsreel time capsule from 1966 reveals an era when sportswear hasn’t been invented yet – so the guys are doing their exercises on the absorbent-looking shag in their undercrackers and vests. Or… Read More »The Keep Fit Craze
How Luhrmann’s ‘Elvis’ biopic undresses your mind Twenty-two years ago, when this now heavily skid-marked millennium was still brand, spanking new, I went to see a restored, remastered version of the classic 1970 rockumentary Elvis: That’s The Way It Is, about Mr Presley’s return to live performance in Vegas. I swooned,… Read More »Elvis: The Fully Clothed Striptease Artist
My (highly attenuated) attention was recently directed to an LWT doc from 1981 available on YouTube . It compares the pre-war, pre-gay world of ‘sisters’ (‘musical’ friends you didn’t want to fuck) and ‘trade’ (‘normal’ working class ‘real’ men you really did), with the post-Stonewall, butched-up, Marlborough Man world of… Read More »Back to the Future: Escaping Sexology
by Mark Simpson We don’t really do subtexts in the see-through, digital 21st Century. Sextexts, definitely. Subtweets, possibly. Subtexts, not so much. Who has the time? Who can even be bothered with having a subconscious? Subtexts are so analogue. Perhaps this is why Toby Kebbell who plays Messala in the… Read More »Get Hur! How Gay Subtexts Became Ancient History