Mark Simpson on director John Hughes’ pristine legacy (Arena Hommes Plus, Winter 2009) So here’s the pitch: A Hollywood teen movie in which nothing happens. All day. In a school library. Introduced by a pretentious quote from David Bowie’s ‘Changes’. No? OK, how about this: A boy bunks off High… Read More »Don’t Mess With the Bull Young Man, You’ll Get the Horns
A decade ago the ban on lesbians and gays serving in the UK military was lifted. This summer Mark Simpson attended the first gay night on a UK garrison. For purely professional reasons. No, really. (Also published on Out.com) There isn’t at first glance much that appears terribly gay about Catterick Garrison. Home… Read More »Catterick Garrison Goes Gay
The father of the metrosexual on the father of the homosexual, and the birth of the ‘-sexual’ era (Out, September 2009) As you may have noticed, the out-and-proud modern gay, born amidst protest, shouting and flying bottles outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969, is now forty years old. But you may… Read More »The Homosexual is 140 – And Showing His Age
A column of mine on Out.com, ‘Men At Play in Afgrabistan’, gallantly defends the freedom of the derided (and now dismissed) security guards at the US embassy to get naked with one another and eat potato chips from each other’s butts in their spare time – even if they’re out… Read More »Homoerotic Horseplay – Not Gay Just Guy
This month’s Outfeatures a column by yours truly, called ‘In Defense of Jerry Lewis‘, explaining how my childhood love for early Lewis made me the man I am today — and why his anarchic comedy partnership with Dean Martin in the ‘repressed’ 1950s was a kind of queer punk rock… Read More »Lewis & Martin’s 50’s Love Makes Today’s Bromance Look Like Bromide