Gay Icons: Cover Me

Attitude was launched in 1994 with Boy George on the front, and its cover remains a bastion of men in pants at a time when straight titles are increasingly coy about putting scantily clad women on theirs. The diver Tom Daley appeared topless after coming out in 2014, while the rugby player Gareth Thomas posed naked and nuzzling his boyfriend a few months later. Elton John and David Furnish celebrated their wedding on it in 2005, albeit fully clothed. Even Oscar Wilde has been inducted into the Attitude covers hall of fame.

Being chosen for it has become something of a status symbol among straight stars too. Where once the title had trouble recruiting hetero celebrities, now the Attitude cover has the power to define careers as well as cultural mores. There is a certain pride in being a gay icon...

The spot has become PR gold, changing perceptions of how even people who aren’t gay see those who appear on it. Justin Timberlake, George Clooney and Tom Hardy have all done it (in a wife-beater vest, lime green shirt and silken pyjamas respectively). Ed Miliband was a pin-up in May 2014, although he only removed his tie.

“There’s a sincerity test you have to conduct, so that you don’t just become part of people’s marketing strategy,” says the cultural commentator Paul Flynn. “Some readers are against straight men with their clothes off on the cover, but the men in pants aren’t going anywhere — they sell better.” ...

The Times.

I've often argued that any journalist that uses the fatuous term 'gay icon' knows nothing about gay culture.

It's a term no gay man ever uses in conversation, just an extremely elastic media fiction.

This journalist confuses 'Has appeared on the front cover of Attitude' with being a 'gay icon'.

Needless to say it was not written by a gay man.

And that graphic is so hideously unsexy, it can only have been designed by a straight man.

PS Ben Cohen a 'gay icon' still - LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!

PPS And in another tribute to gay fuckwittery BBC News magazine have got an article about rainbow tossing flags.

Orlando: Clubs

Because it is a minority rite of passage, the unsung gay disco is a special space, furnished with magic beyond the lighting rig and the drinks specials. It is not just about learning the real name of a drag queen or who remixed what; neither is it how to politely bat off the lad with the wandering hands and invite the one you really want to wander somewhere with. The local gay disco is the place where you stop being the odd one out. It is a halfway house, a leap towards building the home that you calls you, a little but not much different from the one you came from. A home built on love.

A cracking piece by the mighty Paul Flynn on Guardian online.

Odd how rare it is to read a gay journalist defending and celebrating the scene, usually it's just slagged off.

Though this could be because so many gay journalists are joyless and uptight middle class nerds.

PS It's followed strangely by a piece by Alexis Petridis on 'how gay clubs shaped music'. Not sure what this has got to do with what happened in Orlando.

PPS Pulse more than just another gay club, USA Today.

PPPS Gay clubs: Patrons treasure a place to feel safe, be oneself - much published Associated Press wire story.

PPPPS Why it matters that it was Latin night at Pulse, Slate.

Chemsex: The Horror Story

Still working on a response to Paul Flynn's Observer feature, the latest instalment in the media's moral panic du jour.

But it's hard to get past that headline for one thing.

I know journalists rarely write their own, but really; 'addicted'?!!

A media scare word - crazed, out of control, they can't stop themselves - it is meaningless here.

And 'IT'S A HORROR STORY'!!???

Great set up, I wonder what we can expect?

A balanced dispassionate piece?

Then there's what appears to be a visual homage to a series of arrest mugshots - guilty men?

FFS.

More later, check my Twitter 4 teh LOLZ! 

Oooh that looks really scary!!!

Update: Oh, I dunno... Paul's one of the best gay journalists around, but I think he's misunderstood that many people have criticisms not so much of the documentary, Chemsex, but of the media's current hysterical obsession with this subject.

Just once I'd like to read an article about chemsex that didn't buy into that whole 'all gay men are just victims and our pleasures can only be signs of pathology and the wages of sin are death and the chemsex scene is secretly some weird suicide cult coz internalised homophobia' gay mis lit narrative.

Maybe Chemsex: A Horror Story would have been a more honest title for the film?

It does after all come from Tom Abell, the film's distributor, and thus Chemsex's main pusher.

David Stuart, we learn, 'provides Chemsex's voice of reason' [don't laugh], but why is he here as always treated like some charismatic cult leader, the eternally unchallenged leader of London's anti-chemsex cabal, and the beloved guru of the many journalists who are addicted to writing about it?

Fittingly, David, the Mother Teresa of Soho, takes centre-stage in the 'icons of Chemsex' photomontage ilustrating the piece.

Paul Flynn concludes by rightly bemoaning cuts in funding for groups like 56 Dean Street ('The film arrives amid a £200m health cut. Of the many people I hope get to see Chemsex, perhaps Jeremy Hunt will be among the first'), but fails to see this might be a reason David Stuart is hyping the chemsex 'endemic'. *

Night.
x

* Similarly Flynn foregrounds the article with; 'This is the first film to explore a gay subculture that’s recently found notoriety in the mainstream media after the NHS and the British Medical Journal identified it as a health priority,'

He does not mention that the co-author of the short BMJ report and its main spokesbot was Paul Willis, who works at Antidote, another London LGBT drugs service. linked to 56 Dean Street. And yes, one D. Stuart used to work there.

The statistics the BMJ report cited were usually obediently regurgitated without question in the fulsome media coverage, and often further mangled.

The Joiners' Arms: So Farewell Then...

One of London's most anarchic LGBT venues, the Joiners' Arms, ​is to close on 15th January 2015. Why? Because London needs more housing. The venue's location, in the middle of aspirational Hackney Road, screams bespoke kitchens and walnut wood roof terraces.

We've seen a huge chunk of London's gay venues close since 2008, when the recession forced us all into a downward spiral of low pay rises and increased costs of living. While some closures were down to economic reasons - they simply weren't bringing in the pounds to cover the costs - others have met the gentrification guillotine. The Shoreditch borders are widening with arms wide open to London's high earners and pushing out those that can no longer afford to stay.

One of those, sadly, is the Joiners' Arms...

Cliff Joannou on Vice.

Not sure what he means by 'anarchic' - is it a workers' co-operative?

PS But what's happening with that other happening homo joint, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern? Not Television on 9 questions the property developers won't answer.

Tom Daley: My First Time

“The trick first time if you’re scared is to get down on your hands and knees and inch towards the end. You have to look out over it.”

Our Tom is actually talking about going up on a 10 meter diving board for the first time.

He is being interviewed by Paul Flynn for My Perfect Weekend in The Times.

Though Paul, a notorious homosexual, doesn't get much chance to talk to Tom about gay stuff.

In a pleasingly democratic sign of the times, when he posted his coming-out video on YouTube last year, it did nothing to dent his cross-gender, cross-generational appeal...

After making such a swift, efficient and sweet statement about his sexuality, he’s not rushing to discuss it further. In fact he gives me a firm “don’t go there” lift of the eyebrow when I ask about messages he’s sent out across social media platforms, including holding a “Freedom to . . .” protest sign (the pop protest of the Instagram age), complaining about the amount of Commonwealth countries where homosexuality is still illegal...

Oh. 

EastEnders: Feel The Love

When Mick took his teenage son Johnny in his arms last week and delivered the sweetest, sofa-side, "it's OK son, Daddy still loves you, there's nothing bad about being gay" speech, encouraging him to come out through both of their stifled tears, the hairs on the back of my neck stood upright.

The scene echoed with the underexplored truth that dads sometimes have an easier time of their children coming out than mums. It took gay right into the heart of the family, making empathetic the character you might least expect to be – the resident tough guy. Yet there are real-life precedents here, too. Joey Barton (not far from being the Danny Dyer of football) and his frequent expressions of tenderness towards the gay uncle that raised him came to mind. The scene achieved the holy grail of soap opera. It felt real.

Dyer and actor Sam Strike, playing son Johnny, delivered an exceptional, impulsive, physical reading of the ties that bond father and son, no matter what. You could feel the love in the house. EastEnders has been struggling to find its pre-drum-roll climaxes for some time now, and lost a sizeable audience chunk because of it. The Carters have set themselves up to deliver those big, unifying Eastenders moments the show needs before the credits roll.

A predictably perspicacious piece by the mighty Paul Flynn for The Guardian on how that EastEnders' "coming out scene was a touching return to form".

Sorry for obsessing over Danny Dyer's rectum (tweet) before, Fagburn forgot to say he thought this was fantastic TV.

I cried like a little gurl.

It had a slightly improbable premise - Johnny's sexuality had never been raised before? Really? - but made for great, almost Greek, drama.

And it was made all the more emotionally potent and socially significant as it aired in the wake of Tom Daley coming out.

Really - no blow.
The line; "So you're the one we should have called Nancy", destroyed me with its loving paternal embrace. 

Danny Dyer - my new/old hero - was astonishing, and Sam Strike's Johnny is supercute and laddishly cool - this is far from insignificant if you're a gay teen looking for self-validation.

Let's hope Johnny doesn't get exiled to university and sticks around the Square for more top drama, fun and homo high jinx.

EastEnders: I Don't Believe I'm 'Earing This!

Danny Dyer has already been caught causing trouble outside of Albert Square, as he retaliated on social media to viewers complaints around the latest twist in the EastEnders plot.

Friday night's episode showed Danny Dyer's character Mick Carter, listening to his son Johnny, played by Sam Strike, break the news that he is gay.

But while the storyline was largely praised by EastEnders viewers, a minority took to Twitter to complain that the plot was a 'disgrace' and 'wrong'. 

Danny, 36, retaliated to the negative feedback by tweeting his followers a graphic picture diagram suggesting exactly where insulters should place their opinions.

He captioned the shot: 'Here's a little message for some of the homophobic p****s who are tweeting me........happy new year.'

However, despite reports that BBC chiefs were upset with Danny's reaction to the insults he received, an EastEnders spokesperson denied the claims.

The spokesperson told MailOnline: 'The storyline has been largely positively received. Out of the eight million viewers that tuned into the episode, we only received two complaints.'

Mail Online.

As you can see, in true Mail-style, the headline - Danny Dyer in trouble with BBC chiefs over graphic Twitter retaliation - is not backed up by anything in the story. 

Well done!

And The Sun: Oh no they're not!

For posterior's sake Danny's "controversial" tweet appears below in full...

Here's a little message for some of the homophobic pricks who are tweeting me........happy new year. pic.twitter.com/0tiHPU2x01
— Danny Dyer (@MrDDyer) January 3, 2014

PS Congratulations to Gay Star News who are so prudish and dull and boring, that when writing about the tweet by "Cockney actor Danny Dyer", couldn't even use the popular phrase "shove it up your arse".

Or indeed, "rectum".

Donna Summer: Our Love

There's been some strange comfort in how much coverage there's been about Donna Summer and her death since yesterday.
And, for someone who was rarely taken seriously by critics in her 70s heyday, much of it pleasingly placing her as a pivotal figure in popular music.
(Though I've lost count of how many tributes I've heard from Paul Gambaccini...)
Just about every story and obit said she was very popular with The Gays, and then mentioned the controversy over that alleged "Aids is God's punishment" comment.
I think it's sad how this myth, and it is a myth, became such a big part of her story - it would look odd if an obituary didn't mention it - and despite her endless refutations and a high profile libel case.
The two best articles I've read by twelve inches or more both came from The Guardian.
Here's a beautiful piece by Alex Needham on her game-changing records and the power of her music; "charged with feelings of liberation, a pre-Aids world of pansexual freedom and adventure... her best records still pulsate with that spirit, the lifeforce of pop itself."
And here's Paul Flynn on Donna Summer as the "the accidental gay icon".
(I read it soon after it went online and many of the readers' comments brought up that Aids comment, often assuming it was true. Grrr...).
I know what Paul means, and agree - though I don't think it was completely accidental.
Interviewing Giorgio Moroder some years ago he told me during the Casablanca days rather a lot of the people they worked with were gay.
Casablanca's rarely given credit as a gay-friendly and pioneering gay-savvy label.
Giorgio told me he was too naive to notice they'd queered up the sleeve of his Nights In White Satin album, by adding a K to the title, and getting Giorgio shot for the cover photo in what looks like a gay sauna surrounded by some... knights in white satin.
KISS may have built Casablanca's city on Rock 'n' Roll, but their manager, Bill Aucoin, was gay - and I bet it was him who told those four nice Jewish boys to turn up the camp to 11.
As for Casablanca's other really big act, Village People, what need I say?
Though yes, they were often coded - and their bizarro film, Can't Stop The Music (often blamed for bankrupting the label) had them playing themselves laughably straight.
Casablanca also put out two of Disco's boldest singles, The Ritchie Family's Cruising The Streets and Skatt Brothers' Walk The Night.
And then there was Patrick Juvet and Paul Jabara - the latter wrote No More Tears (Enough Is Enough and It's Raining Men - and they signed Dusty and ruddy Cher!
But anyway I'm wibbling away.
As I said, these are two great pieces.
Donna Summer deserved writing about her as good as these.

Update: There's more! Jon Savage and Ewan Pearson on How I Feel Love Changed Pop. Wow.

Antony Cotton: A Reply To Mr Brian Sewell

"Meanwhile, Brian Sewell continues to think there's a single person who gives a flying fuck what he thinks.
"The irony of him talking about LGBT people in Coronation Street. This coming from the biggest, spineless Mary Ellen in town. What a tit.
"For the record - without a gay man there would be no Coronation Street. End. Of. Story.
"Without gay people there would THE dullest film, fashion, television, literature, ENTERTAINMENT. The world's lives would worse without us.
"Enough with the naff, ridiculous, archaic, bigoted anger toward a community that forms such an important and essential part of society
"Some people are gay, for fuck's sake, get over it. Young people couldnt care less. Enough is enough."

Antony Cotton - "Actor. Barmaid. Factory Worker." - tweets his thoughts about Brian Sewell's bizarre Daily Mail tirade about all The Gays in Coronation Street via Twitter.
Brava, Mr Cotton. Brava!
As the younger someone is the more likely they are to like The Gays, Fagburn say "Keep Coronation Street well before the watershed - and rationally show it during Kids' TV!"
Or - conversely - why not start a channel just for old cunts like Brian Sewell?

Update: And another smashing reply, by Paul Flynn in The Guardian Online; Is Manchester the Sodom of the north? Well yes, a bit. Sorry. Brian Sewell's anti-gay diatribe shows how little he knows about Coronation Street - or Canal Street, for that matter


Update 2: No wait, there's more. On the Comment pages of The Guardian on Thursday, Charlie Condou - ie Marcus Dent on The Street - detailing Brian Sewell's stunning ignorance; We're Not Too Gay For Telly.
Kudos to Antony, Paul, Charlie and The Guardian.

George Michael Watch: Bonkers As A Box Of Gay Budgies?

"I'm looking to work with gay and gay-friendly artists. It will be a gay collective with some songs sung by myself and some songs by unknown gay artists.
"I have a serious problem with the fact that every time I made a big mistake, I definitely felt I was letting young gay people down because of the homophobia that was thrown at me and the wording of that homophobia.
"My next album will seek to correct the damage I inadvertently caused by making myself so newsworthy and, because I am so high-profile, leaving no room for young kids to protect themselves from that language. I have plans to do this to help gay children. We're notoriously bad as a community in helping children, because we don't have our own children."

George Michael, speaking at a press conference.
Due to the magic of shorthand there's an alternative quote here.
"I have a really serious problem with the fact that when I brought myself down, I felt I was letting young gay kids down. My behaviour meant these kids suffered abuse and the homophobic language that is legal in this country."

• 'George Michael's sense that he's let young gay people down is misplaced: no apology is needed' Paul Flynn, The Guardian

Elizabeth Taylor: 1932-2011

Any friend of Tito's was a friend of mine...

• Usually if you read the words "gay icon" all it means is that the person who wrote them is an idiot who doesn't know what they're talking about. Because of Liz's friendship and support of queens from Monty Clift to Michael Jackson, and her genuinely pioneering work to remove the stigma of HIV/Aids, this was a rare instance when it was actually appropriate: Elizabeth Taylor: A New Gay Icon - Paul Flynn, The Guardian; Statement from THT; John Waters remembers Taylor in The Baltimore Sun; Helen Rumbelow in The Times announced 'Elizabeth Taylor Was a 'Patron Saint' For Gays'.
What are "gays", please?

Velvet Rage: We Hate Ourselves And We Want To Die

There's an interesting piece in The Observer today by Paul Flynn and Matthew Todd.
A sub at The Observer has done it a disservice by giving it the cliched and inappropriate headline; 'Pride and Prejudice For Gay Men'.
It's about a book by Alan Down called The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World.
Apparently, this book; "...is becoming a touchstone in gay culture just as Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin was in the 30s, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story in the 60s [Eh? It was published in 1982 - Fagburn] and Larry Kramer's Faggots in the 70s. But The Velvet Rage is not fiction..."
Fagburn thinks that over-hype is a fiction, but go on...
"It addresses the myth of gay pride and, after three decades of post-Aids concentration on gay men's physical health, turns inward to their mental wellbeing."
Which is hardly novel.
"Its snappy title is slipping, sometimes ironically, into the gay lexicon. Man orders fifth pint at the bar: "It's OK, it's just my velvet rage." Boyfriend finds partner trawling through the thousands of profiles on sex-on-demand website Gaydar: "But it's my velvet rage."
Umm, no, now you're just making stuff up.
"Downs coined the phrase to refer to a very specific anger he encountered in his gay patients – whether it was manifested in drug abuse, promiscuity or alcoholism – and whose roots, the book argues, are found in childhood shame and parental rejection. "Velvet rage is the deep and abiding anger that results from growing up in an environment when I learn that who I am as a gay person is unacceptable, perhaps even unlovable," he explains. "This anger pushes me at times to overcompensate and try to earn love and acceptance by being more, better, beautiful, more sexy – in short, to become something I believe will make me more acceptable and loved."
Hmmm...
Fagburn often wishes he was better, more beautiful, more sexy, acceptable and loved - who doesn't?
And I agree I do have a very specific anger that I like to blame on my childhood, and Daddy not loving me and all that.
And I know i'm unlovable.
So what's new?
40 years on, Fagburn thinks these lines from The Boys In The Band still ring painfully true;
"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse."
"If only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…”
I really don't think we've moved on that much, so I agree with the book's general premise; their point, I guess, is that this has endured.
But again, none of this is new; show me a gay magazine from the last 20 or 40 years that doesn't have an article about gay misery, our unjoy.
It's a lie and a stupid cliche to pretend that the gay press - for all its faults - is "happy-clappy".
Trusting Paul Flynn and Matthew Todd's judgment - I admire them both - I have ordered the book from Amazon.
As it is a self-help book, it will probably end up in a pile with all the other self-help books, near all the ones promising that I can; 'Learn Spanish The Easy Way'.
I still can't count up to five.

Stephen Fry: What She Said

Oh bottoms!
It seems Stephen Fry has said something stupid.
Which means it's open season on Stephen.
The "National Treasure" has become an overnight pariah.
Welcome to Hate Week.
Columnists have been queueing up to say something stupid about Stephen back.
Yesterday Stephen Fry tweeted; "So some fucking paper misquotes a humorous interview I gave, which itself misquoted me and now I'm the Antichrist. I give up... Bye bye."
He seems to have meant it - today his Twitter account is "no longer in service".
A big queeny hissy fit?
Or another nervous breakdown and a moonlit flit to France, or worse?
Paul Flynn, the (very good) journalist who interviewed Fry for Attitude, says Fry was not misquoted.
Going back and looking at the interview in Attitude makes things none the clearer.
Fry is talking about gay teenage gay crushes, and crashes right into the stuff about womens' sexuality, but so sharply it looks like there are a few lines missing.
"I get an enormous amount of mail from young gay people who are in love with people in their school. 'How do I tell them? If I do tell them, will they beat me up? I think they maybe know?' It's so touching and sweet but also one must never underestimate the overmastering power of the emotion they feel. It consumes them. Those things are not to be sniffed or laughed at. They do consume you. I think most straight men feel they disgust women. They find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are. For good reason. If women liked sex as much as men there would be straight cruising areas..."
You know the rest.
But how on Jupiter did Stephen Fry get there from there - a spectacular leap of the imagination about the nature of desire?
Whatever, please note, he was making an almost banal point; men - straight or gay - are more interested in sex than women, they're more sexually driven.
Is there any debate about this as a generality?
Stephen Fry does have some odd views about sex - and for many years was celibate as he seemed rather disgusted by it himself.
Or by himself.
But can we keep to what he actually said in the Attitude interview, please?
He did not say; "Women don't really like sex" - as it was put in the headline to The Observer article that began this perfect shitstorm.
Its author, Polly Vernon, editorialised a prophecy; "the remarks... are likely to be roundly dismissed by those who have embraced the idea of women's ability to have unemotional, uncommitted sex as an empowered lifestyle choice."
And then she found two writers to do just that.
Susie Orbach told Vernon; "Why would he believe that women could be so disgusted by men?"
He didn't - Fry said; "I think most straight men feel they disgust women."
Fagburn presumes he meant not because men are inherently disgusting, but because men have very dirty minds.
The Telegraph today quoted Germaine Greer; "Stephen Fry is clearly under a delusion that he is an authority on female sexuality. Well, if he thinks that women are not interested in genital encounters with total strangers then he is absolutely right. But to conclude that we are therefore uninterested in sex is madness."
This was a constant riff, with a distinct whiff of homophobia in the way Fry's sexuality was constantly referred to; "What does he know - he's gay?"
"Stephen Fry offering up his views on female sexuality is a bit like Wayne Rooney spouting forth on Aristotle..." (Bryony Gordon).
Though straight commentators felt free to pronounce forth about gay sex - or "homosexual intercourse" (Laurie Penny, The Guardian)
We were told it is "bad, filthy, grubby, disgusting and dislocated from the emotions." (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent)
But Stephen Fry didn't say women were "uninterested" in sex, just not as interested as men.
By Chinese whispers, this was even twisted into 'Stephen Fry: Women Hate Sex'.
This is why it all really blew up, Fry was painted as colluding in the denial of all female sexuality, and of female sexual pleasure; viz Germaine Greer's now famous phrase "The Female Eunuch".
Or worse, that he hated women; a collective slur on gay men every bit as offensive as the above.
In The Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown declared; 'Fry's misogynistic view is of women as evil temptresses'.
But by what warped logic is what he said misogynistic?
And how can you accuse him of thinking women are "temptresses" if you say he said they don't like sex?
And moreover how the fuck can you justify claiming he thinks women are "evil" - an incredibly low blow.
Alibah-Brown set about demolishing a "national treasure" - her words - with (anti?) gay abandon.
She even fell back on a variation of that old bigot's standby; "Some of my best friends are..."
"Most of my good gay friends truly like femininity. But I have known some phobic ones too..."
But what has he said that was "phobic"?
Slightly silly, yes - but he probably meant it to be.
Offensive? Clearly it was, if only to those who wanted to be offended.
But there simply was no misogyny in what he actually said.