David Hockney: The War Against The Curtain Sniffers

Nice buns.

He waves his cigarette at me. “Do you smoke?” he asks, as if challenging me to a duel. I find myself apologising for having stopped, and he looks at me with a disappointment bordering on contempt – though he seems slightly pacified when I ask for a whisky.

“Bohemia was against the suburbs, and now the suburbs have taken over,” he says. “I mean, the anti-smoking thing is all anti-bohemia. Bohemia is gone now. When people say, well wasn’t it amazing saying you were gay in 1960, I point out, well, I lived in bohemia, and bohemia is a tolerant place. You can’t have a smoke-free bohemia. You can’t have a drug-free bohemia. You can’t have a drink-free bohemia. Now they’re all worried about their fucking curtains, sniffing curtains for tobacco and stuff like that.”

Does he think gay life has become more conservative in recent years? “Yes. I suppose it’s that they want to be ordinary – they want to fit in. Well, I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care about fitting in. Everywhere is so conservative.”

Would he have ever wanted to marry a man? “No, no, no,” he says with utter distaste. Would he have wanted children? “No,” he says, with equal conviction...

Great words from a great profile of the great man by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian.

The young David knew two things from an early age: that he wanted to be an artist and that he liked boys...

If you ask me, gay life hasn't become significantly more conservative, despite the best efforts of so much of the gay media to get gay men to conform to a hetero norm; work, consume, marry, breed, get rich, get off Grindr, stop taking drugs blah blah blah...

PS Though some gaybores clearly don't need to have this thrust upon them, see these Pink News reader comments. Maybe they was born that way?

Update: I'm delighted that David Hockney thinks gay men have become boring - Artist David Hockney says today's gay men have become boring and just want to fit in. There's no bigger sign that they are winning the battle for equality, says Cristo Foufas. Telegraph online. FFS.

Louis Walsh: Trial By Tabloid

"People knew it was untrue, but they still put it on the front page. They tried to ruin me. They are just vile people. Nasty people. The funny thing is they have an anti-bullying campaign in the Irish Sun at the moment. It's the most ironic thing.
"You know the real story. It ruined me. I'll never get over it, I'll be quite honest with you. I'm wary of everyone now, of everything I say, everyone I meet, always looking over my shoulder – I was never like this before. It was the worst thing that happened to me. All I have in this business is my name, and I would have lost everything. People would have said there's no smoke without fire."

Louis Walsh interviewed by Simon Hattenstone for The Guardian, talking about being accused of molesting a man in a toilet last year.
Yet another false allegation of sexual assault made against a public figure.
Walsh is currently suing The Irish Sun.
Hattenstone also asked the question no-one ever does.

Walsh is open about everything but his private life. It's not that he's uptight about it, there's just something rather old-fashioned about him. I ask if he's gay. Ach, who cares, he says. "My sexuality is irrelevant. Next question."

Though several tabloids appeared to give the "gay sex attack claims" story so much prominence as it was an underhand way of outing Louis Walsh.
You may also want to compare and contrast the tabloids' current outrage over "trial by Twitter", with this example of trial by tabloids.

Michael Jackson: The Life Of A (Not Gay) Icon

Most of all, Gest sets out to prove categorically that Jackson was a heterosexual. He was 100% man, he tells us. Not to put too fine point on it, he says, Michael loved women. Loved them. As a young man, he had his "bones jumped" by a legendary actress, who shall remain nameless, and when officers investigated his house they founds stacks of straight porn – big women, little women, medium women, you name it, Michael fantasised about them. No, there was not a scintilla of gayness in him. Got it.

Hilarious piece by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian.
David Gest is also deffo not a gayer. Got that?

Michael Jackson: The Life of an Icon is now available on DVD and Blu-ray!

Alan Bennett: Yes, Again!

Lovely interview with Alan Bennett by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian - one of the best I've ever read with him.
A lot of it centres around how much Bennett has changed since coming out fully in Untold Stories in 2005.
Despite saying his life view is "not cheerful", he seems quite contented now, and it seems to have affected his work as well.
Hattenstone - but of course - ends by saying he's a national treasure, half-joking I guess.
'Great, I say, perhaps we'll stop thinking of you as a national treasure now, and more as a dirty old man. His thin lips part and he laughs that totally joyous laugh again. "Hahahahaha! "Well, that's good. Yes, dirty old man. I don't mind that. No. Quite happy with that."
Bless.