Why are the gentlemen of the popular press so interested in George Michael’s manhood? Why won’t they leave it alone? In 1998, after stalking him for years, in a painful pincer movement with Beverly Hills Police Department’s finest, they finally succeeded in catching him short in a men’s toilet. Now… Read More »I Want Your Sex: Why the Press Can’t Leave George Michael’s Manhood Alone
by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 23/07/06) “Oh, Bertie, when are you going to write your memoirs?” asks punk academic Jon Savage at a chance meeting with the author in Berlin. Berties replies: “Oh, I don’t know, Jon… what would I write, a teenage boy lost in suburbia, prostitution and… Read More »Suburbohemian Rhapsody: review of ‘Berlin Bromley’
Mark Simpson on the rise and rise of ‘American air’ (London Times Magazine, 2003) ‘This is my home, this is America!’ a canned, generic male power-ballad singer, possibly on loan from those naff Gillette commercials, warbles over the P.A. The giant on-stage video screen flashes stirring images of the American… Read More »Global Cooling: The Rise & Rise of ‘American Air’
ABC News tells us that ‘Metrosexual is out – macho is in’ It offers little evidence of this assertion other than a product-placement style interview with the editor of a glossy men’s magazine who will clearly say anything to sell his mag, including stuff like ‘the new macho is the old macho’ (since… Read More »The ‘New Macho’ – Just Older, Saggier, Daggier Metrosexuality
Just in time for the World Cup the July issue of the re-launched OUT features an essay by yours truly on the post-metrosexual pornolization of sport – or what I dub ‘sporno’. Here’s a (breathless) taster: ‘Sportsmen on this side of the Atlantic are increasingly openly acknowledging and flirting with… Read More »Sporno: where sport & porn meet & produce a spectacular money shot