My (highly attenuated) attention was recently directed to an LWT doc from 1981 available on YouTube . It compares the pre-war, pre-gay world of ‘sisters’ (‘musical’ friends you didn’t want to fuck) and ‘trade’ (‘normal’ working class ‘real’ men you really did), with the post-Stonewall, butched-up, Marlborough Man world of… Read More »Back to the Future: Escaping Sexology
Mark Simpson totally relates to the author’s 1970s childhood war-fetish, but has to draw the line at Ernest Hemingway. (Independent on Sunday, 31 March 2002) Robert Twigger is a man who wins awards. The jacket of Being a Man… In The Lousy Modern World boasts of the Newdigate Prize for… Read More »Slit-Trenches & Eternal Comradeship
Saw Hue & Cry t’other night on the tellybox for the first time since I was a nipper. This recently digitally restored kid-oriented Ealing Comedy presents as its climax a London-wide mobilisation of boys (and a few tom-boys) for a ‘big adventure’ – beating up baddies that the police had… Read More »Bomb-Damaged London & Its Bomb-Damaged Kids
On the strangely passionate – and enduring – adulation for the ‘Roman Genius’ (Independent on Sunday, 29 June 2003) ‘I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind a door and made her mine,’ wrote Mussolini recalling one of his teenage ‘wooings’. ‘She got up weeping and… Read More »You’re the Top! You’re Mussolini!