Boyz: 1993-2006

Boyz magazine is marking its 1000th issue this week, with a look back over the last 19 years in Boyzworld.
It's fun, but a little bit frightening if like Fagburn you actually remember gay life in 1991.
I remember being given a copy of the first issue at London Pride that year and my heart sinking - it seemed like the triumph of the banalification of the British gay press.
It seemed a betrayal too - the people behind it were the people behind the then serious, political Pink Paper, and Boyz seemed like anything but.
There are two ways of judging any publication; what's it trying to do and how good is it at doing that?
David Bridle, Boyz co-founder, its first editor and now managing director, remembers the original formula he sketched out on a beermat; "We had already decided the new Boyz - originally to be called Boyz Own - would be based on the formula of succesful girl's teen magazines Just 17 and Smash Hits but aimed at gay men..."
"A male nude centrefold, an agony uncle, a Boyz doc, weekly listings for strippers and drag artistes, a gay astrologer, a weekly cartoon strip, and postal 'contact' adverts divided into fetish interests..."
When Bridle was editor Boyz did what it did badly; it wasn't sexy and fun, it was nerdy and boring.
It got good under Simon Gage, editor between 1993 and 1998.
"We just realised that if you wanted to get very serious messages across, you had to make them fun. You could say it was a pretty dark moment in our history, with Aids and a government intent on stamping us out with legislation like Clause 28, but rather than give into it, we made it fun to do the right thing. In at atmosphere of 'Gays, stop having sex!', we were very sex positive and just hammered home the 'Use a condom' message. Generally we were all about underlining what a great thing it was to be gay and never mind what the old cunts in the House of Lords were saying..."
It was in its own way quite subversive, a tradition carried on by his successor as editor, (David) Hudson, now with added Indie.
Hudson was dumped in 2006 and Bridle took over running it himself.
Bridle told Press Gazette; "Boyz has always been a young men's gay title, but we're at the stage where we need to remind ourselves what we're about. We're looking again at what an 18-year-old would want from the title."
ie Bridle wanted to make it more like a "girls' teen magazine" once more.
Ah well, it was good while it lasted.
So much of the gay press seems like cut-and-pasted press releases. Boyz at its best felt like you were reading queens writing about the things that actually excited them, or that riled them.
Both Simon Gage and Hudson could teach classes at working within and pushing against the constraints of the commercial gay press.

Tom Hardy: In, Out, In, Out, Shake It All About

Fagburn has to confess he didn't bother writing about Tom Hardy being quoted as saying he'd had gay sex with when he was younger.
Basically because I don't think a celebrity saying they've done some same-sexing is newsworthy anymore.
How wrong I was.
The "story" 'Inception hunk Tom Hardy admits: 'I've had sexual relations with men' was published in the Daily Mail on July 28th and "credited" to "Daily Mail Reporter".
"But asked if he'd ever had any sexual relations with other men, the broody actor said: 'As a boy? Of course I have. I'm an actor for ****'s sake.
'I've played with everything and everyone. I love the form and the physicality, but now that I'm in my thirties, it doesn't do it for me.
'I'm done experimenting but there's plenty of stuff in a relationship with another man, especially gay men, that I need in my life.
'A lot of gay men get my thing for shoes. I have definite feminine qualities and a lot of gay men are incredibly masculine.'
In an interview with Now magazine, the former party-boy who has battled drink, drugs and crime to turn his life around, added: 'A lot of people say I seem masculine, but I don't feel it.
'I feel intrinsically feminine. I'd love to be one of the boys but I always felt a bit on the outside.
'Maybe my masculine qualities come from overcompensating because I'm not one of the boys.'

But then last Friday it did become a story - because a denial was made.
"A source close to the rising star" told E! Online's Tom Casablanca; "It's all taken out of context. He was discussing a gay role and quotes coming from the character."
Eh?
This led Queerty - among others - to speculate;
"So either Hardy — who is engaged and planning a wedding with stunning fiance Charlotte Riley — has a tendency to quote scripts he used to work on to British reporters, or he absolutely had a hardy old time with other gents in his younger years. And now his handlers are working to erase it."
Which sounded plausible.
Today Tom Casablanca writes on E! Online
"We did a little digging around and found that the alleged interview was more than taken out of context —it was taken from an interview Hardy did two years ago:
"The Daily Mail was rehashing a 2008 article in Now magazine, which claimed to have interviewed Hardy where dropped the bisexual bomb. But Now totally ripped off Attitude magazine's 2008 cover story with Tom back when he was promoting RocknRolla. You following?
"Hardy was on the December '08 cover of Attitude, the UK's best-selling gay magazine, where he talked about playing Handsome Bob, a gay mobster in Guy Richie's flick."
Oh yes! Amazing what you find with two minutes of Googling, isn't it?
The Attitude interview is available to read on their website (you have to register, but it's free).
These are yer actual questions and answers as they appeared in Attitude;

Have you ever had any sexual relations with men?
As a boy? Of course I have. I’m an actor for fuck’s sake. I’m an artist. I’ve played with everything and everyone. But I’m not into men sexually. I love the form and the physicality but the gay sex bit does nothing for me. In the same way as a wet vagina would turn someone else into a lemon-sucking freak. To me it just doesn’t compute now I’m into my 30s and it doesn’t do it for me and I’m done experimenting.
Have you done it all?
Not all but I can imagine. We’ve all got an arsehole and I can imagine. It just doesn’t do it for me, sex with another man. But there’s plenty of stuff in a relationship with another man, especially gay men, that I need in my life. A lot of gay men get my thing for shoes. I don’t think I’m metrosexual but I’m definitely my mother’s son. I have definite feminine qualities and a lot of gay men are incredibly masculine.

So that's cleared all that up; he fooled around when he was a boy, but didn't go all the way.
Phew!
In the version of the original Daily Mail story that is online now, it makes it clear the quotes are taken from Now, but not that the quotes are two years old.
What E! Online have missed is that at the time Now magazine and Attitude were sister publications, both owned by Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell.
Interviews given to one of the titles would regularly appear in the other in whole or in part.
The Attitude interview was written by Simon Gage, who does big name "showbiz" interviews for Richard Desmond's Daily Express as well.
Gage used to edit Boyz, was deputy showbusiness editor at The Daily Express, and is a contributing editor to Attitude.
He also ran for many years Warwick Worldwide, who would place and syndicate showbusiness copy or "content".
The Now feature was credited to Clare Alexander.
So it may not be that Now "totally ripped off Attitude magazine's cover story" - the interview may have been sold on the basis that it would appear in one or more other Northern & Shell titles.
How did these old quotes end up in The Daily Mail last month?
It was a kind of "outing" - his past came back to haunt him because he's moved into the big league.
Hardy's first big role in a big Hollywood movie, Inception, is in cinemas now, and he's just announced he's playing Mad Max in the megabucks remake.
And there ain't many big Hollywood actors who admit to doing it with dudes - and Tom's arguably the first who's pretty do-able himself.
But did someone get 30 pieces of silver for tipping off the "Daily Mail Reporter" about Tom's old admission of his past indiscretions?
Hmm...