Blind Date: Definitely Maybe

Since October, 8 of the 22 Guardian's blind dates featured have been gayers - which seems a bit excessive.

PS Hope you don't need telling about The Guyliner's hilarious reviews of these.

Moschino Barbie: Barbie Boy

God help us if there's a war!

PS An actual Barbie ad, pretty sure it's internet only.

The Guyliner writes...

The advert isn’t quite the watershed moment we’ve all been waiting for – the Barbie doll is a limited-edition in association with fashion house Moschino, and the little boy is styled to look like the brand’s creative director Jeremy Scott, so it’s all very tongue in cheek.

But, honestly, what I wouldn’t have given to see a a boy in an advert playing with a doll when I was that age.

It may come as zero surprise to learn I was a boy who liked to play with dolls. At playgroup, you couldn’t get me out of the Wendy house, apparently, and on the first day at primary school, I marched straight to the dressing up box at play time and put on a skirt. As a child you don’t realise the consequences of your actions or that one day you’ll be embarrassed by what you’ve done – like a really innocent version of being mortifyingly drunk and uninhibited – and nobody has taught you that you have to behave a certain way just because, so you screw it up...

The Guyliner: 15 Men You Should Never Take Home To Meet Your Mother

Taking someone home to meet your mum is a big deal, no matter how young or old you are. There’ll be men you’ll meet who you’d instantly think would be perfect mother material, and others you know are only for tonight.

And as for the ones you’re not so sure about, you can only hope that fate is on your side the day you take him home, praying he’s not one of this bunch of mum-toxic twits.

1. The Lick

On paper, this sycophant looks like the perfect guy to bring back to the family pile. He’ll compliment Mum on her hair, cooking, lovely kitchen – always a big draw – and join in on any gentle ribbing. Your mum, however, will see through this straightaway. She’s not stupid.

She’ll know that his “Ooh yummy” as he spoons more trifle into his mouth is a great big fake, and that her kitchen looks like the ape house at London Zoo at the best of times. This one’s up to something, and your mother shan’t rest until she’s worked out what it is.

And to make matters worse, when she’s figured it out, she probably won’t tell you – to teach you a lesson...

A Mother's Day special from The Guyliner - and gay comedy GOLD!!!

PS I love my Mum. x

Watch Me Date: I Can't Watch!

Alex!

As a companion to their popular – well, I like it anyway – Blind Date series, the Guardian has launched Watch Me Date, a video series that allows you a gonzo view of two people on a date.

This week, it’s gays! Oh, thank goodness. These are no ordinary gays, though – they’re intellectual and all politicky or something. Can we not just have two massive stereotypes with frosted tips and vest tops? Just once? These people do exist.

Watch the video – have some strong black coffee handy – before we unnecessarily dissect absolutely everything they have to say...

The ever-amusing Guyliner strikes again. 

Alex says David has “perfect hair”. It’s quite common on Guardian Blind Dates for hair to be talked up to a staggering degree, usually in the absence of anything else to say, but I have to say if Alex thinks David’s hair is perfect, he should come and get a shot of mine; it’ll blow his fucking mind...

David!

Guardian: Blind Date

Fagburn's comrade-in-blogs, The Guyliner, has started a new one, Impeccable Table Manners.

In which, he scoffs at the responses in Guardian Weekend's cringey Blind Date feature, so we don't have to.

Enjoy!

David Sedaris: The Men That Got Away

It was a Friday night in mid-July, around nine o'clock, and Hugh and I were at the dinner table, eating this spaghetti he makes with sausage in it. We've been together for 23 years, and for some reason I waited until this moment to ask how many people he'd slept with before we became a couple.

Hugh looked at the ceiling, which is crisscrossed with beams, and, to my great consternation, spider webs. I'm vigilant, really I am, but out in the country there's no keeping up with them.

"So?" I said.

"I'm thinking," he told me.

I used to know how many people I'd slept with. After meeting Hugh, though, I took myself off the market and the figure faded from my memory. If I were to slog through all my old diaries I could certainly retrieve it. Twenty eight?

Thirty? Do I include those early gropings? They felt significant at the time, but does it qualify as sex if you never took your clothes off, or actually touched anything with your bare hands? I wanted to ask Hugh, but he was too busy counting. "Thirty two, thirty three..."  

I put down my fork. "You're not finished yet?"

"Shhh," he said. "You're making me lose track."

It shouldn't have surprised me. When you look like Hugh, all you have to do is leave the house and people will approach you, especially gay men, the dogs. His handsomeness was never my own personal opinion, rather, like the roundness of the Earth, something society generally agrees upon. Without my face to use as bait, I had to work a lot harder than he did. There are times, I'll admit it, when I had to beg. That said, some of Hugh's earlier choices seemed poorly thought out to me, especially once Aids came along.  

"Thirty five... thirty six."

Every man ticked off on his fingers was someone I'd been compared to at one point or another, not overtly – he's anything but cruel – but surely it happened. Someone kissed better than me. Someone had more stamina, a more seductive voice. I'm confident enough to compete against a dozen of his exes, but he was moving on to the population of a small town.

"Thirty eight, thirty nine…"

By what miracle had neither of us contacted Aids? How had we gotten away? I don't just mean later, when people knew to be safe, but back in the days when it didn't have a name and no one understood how it spread. One of the men Hugh had lived with – a professor he had in his first year of college – had died of it in the late 80s, and surely there were others, on both my side and his. Yet for some reason we'd escaped, had prospered, even. Now, here we were, the shadows lengthening, our spaghetti growing cold as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it.

Whore.

David Sedaris, pictured with Hugh Hamrick, from a selection of celeb recollections, The One That Got Away in Guardian Weekend.

PS Meet David Sedaris is currently on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra. Yowsah!

The Guardian has a "best of Blind Date" magazine today. Not got it yet, but I imagine it's pages and pages of this. pic.twitter.com/zD7UcoAPxx
— The Guyliner (@theguyliner) August 23, 2014

Graham Norton: Notes On Camp

Does he think of himself as camp? “Yeah.”

Has he always been? “Yes. But I didn’t always see myself as that. It’s a much harder thing to accept than being gay. Gay is easy. Being camp is difficult in that it comes with judgment all round. That moment when you realise that you are quite fey and quite camp, it’s a difficult one because these are not qualities that are admired by anybody. As you move forward you can own it and camp it up to the hilt or you can try and tone it down.”

When he started doing stand-up he played up to it. Norton remembers seeing a programme where young gay men in Brighton criticised him for not being a very good role model. “Bless these boys, they were so camp and it broke my heart because I kind of thought, 'I was you’. And in a way it’s about self-loathing, the dislike of campness. Because actually the people who dislike it are normally quite camp. And it’s sad that every gay personal ad is all 'straight-acting’. That’s a weird thing for a sexuality to be based on. Something else.”

Graham Norton profiled in the Telegraph.

Compare and contrast to self-styled "masc" gay and all-purpose pouty right-wing shitbag, Michael Lucas writing recently...

Russians love Johnny Weir. He’s their kind of gay: Liberace of the ice. He’s the “fabulous” gay, the mascot, the gay who knows his place and stays in it. (Weir waited until publishing a memoir in 2011 to admit that he was gay at all, which everyone already knew.) The Russians don’t mind token flamers like Weir; what scares them are everyday people who happen to be gay. They’re scared of homosexuality becoming normal, not staying outrageous like Weir.

Oh Michael, who wants to be "normal", if it means being boring and annoying like you?

PS Seriously thinking about starting a new Twitter account, From The Gay Media Message Boards... 

Just seen on Queerty; "WTF so many feminine creatures? Gay=/=woman".

Huffington Post: Lame Voices

Huffington Post launched a new section Monday, Gay Voices.
Thus far it's been disappointingly dull, predictable and worthy.
And boy, do they need an editor.
Most idiotic article; 'Where Are The Gay Nobel Prize Winners?'
Oh do fuck off.
The one glimmer of hope is their (British) contributor The Guyliner.
Here's something he wrote earlier for the Huff; Sorry, 'Straight-Acting' Boys, But Gay Stereotypes Exist Despite You... Get Over It.
I'm quite the fan - and really hope they don't limit him to a Gaydar Dates From Hell column.
He's way better than that.