‘Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!’ – Lord Henry Wooton, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde I WANT TO TALK about Andrew McCarthy’s eyes. And what became of them. He never quite had classic Hollywood lead looks: his face was sensitive boy-next-doorish; a… Read More »The Early Supper Club – Andrew McCarthy’s doc Brats
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
The thwarted daddy-love – and missing mommy – behind the pump-action hero I’m not a Sylvester Stallone fan. In fact, I couldn’t bear him back in the day. I spent much of the eighties sniffily ignoring his smash-hit movies and hence missed him single-handedly re-fighting the Vietnam War, with big… Read More »Home Stallone
The steamy private life of the seismically successful Cinemascope stud How tall was Rock Hudson? The answer seems to be ‘it depends’. Wikipedia and others give his height as 6’4”, which seems to be his ‘official’, ‘studio’ height. But some sources give his height as 6’51/2”, and in the 1959 screwball,… Read More »Rock (of Gibraltar on the) Hudson