A couple of ‘now’ and ‘then’ images selected for me by my chum Steve Zeeland from Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy’s veritable treasure trove of photo archives of the male form, which includes all kinds images of fleeting, winsome, youthful masculine beauty from the last hundred years – now looked at with… Read More »Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy’s Lost Boys
By Mark Simpson (Guardian, 20 October, 2008) ‘What other culture could have produced someone like Ernest Hemingway,’ waspish bisexual American exile Gore Vidal once asked of America’s favourite so-butch-he’s-camp writer, ‘and not seen the joke?’. The answer, was, of course, that only a culture that couldn’t see the joke could… Read More »Little Britain Touches Up Uncle Sam
Timing is everything for an actor, and Newman’s curtain-call, coming as it does amidst meltdown on Wall Street and panic on Capitol Hill, and at the end of a decade defined by the twin disasters of 9-11 and Iraq, is nothing if not dramatic. The myriad obituaries and tributes to… Read More »Paul Newman the American Dream-Boy is Dead
Mark Simpson goes on a top secret mission to the bottom of the garden I never had an Action Man (G.I. Joe to Americans). He was for sissies. I only garrisoned my bedroom with tiny non-moving, non-camp Airfix soldiers I’d painted myself. Naturally, this didn’t stop me playing endlessly with… Read More »Action Man – On Land, On Sea & Legs in the Air
The makers of BBC2’s The Tudors, know which side their Irish buns are buttered. They recently announced that Jonathan Rhys-Meyer’s Henry will not be allowed to get fat in the third series, currently in production. In case anyone’s interested, the actual, historical Henry VIII became a big porker in later… Read More »A Right Royal Rent Boy – The Tartiness of The Tudors