On watching two ‘bio-streams’ about dead gay fashionistas I could have been Lee Alexander McQueen’s husband. Back in the last years of the 20th century, the now sadly deceased British designer, usually described as an ‘enfant terrible’ of the fashion world, offered to marry me. In writing. In 1998, my fax… Read More »High Stitching: The lives & loves of Lagerfeld & Balenciaga
When ageing Smiths fans like me sing along to ‘This Charming Man’, their second, breakthrough 1983 single – and the song that ruined our lives – we fondly imagine ourselves achieving some kind of crude approximation of his famous vocals, after all these years of study and devotion. Trying to… Read More »This Disarming Man: Morrissey’s Smiths Solo
On the 55th anniversary of the NYC bar riot at which everyone over 75 now claims they threw the first bottle, I thought I would post this piece about the expiration of gay bohemianism in the 1980s. More a series of not terribly well-integrated notes than essay, it was originally… Read More »1989: The Year the C20th & Gay Bohemianism Ended
I was contacted recently by Xavi Sancho of the Spanish national newspaper El Pais, who commissioned the recent profile of me, for some quotes for a major feature he was writing analysing the Taylor Swift phenomenon. Published last Sunday, here’s the Google Translate version of the standfirst: On May 29 and 30, the… Read More »‘The J.K. Rowling of Pop’
The Toy Boy’s Tale – Part II of my Liberace post. Published in 1988, Behind the Candelabra, a kiss and tell expose, credits Liberace’s much younger lover Scott Thorson on the cover of my 2013 edition, along ‘with’ (in smaller font) Alex Thorleifson – a celebrity biographer whose previous best-known work was My Life with… Read More »Thorson’s Liberace