New research from mobile phone firm T-Mobile reveals nearly a quarter of men (22 per cent) regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates, T-Mobile said in an emailed statement.

“Metrotextuality” is most widespread among 18-24 year old males with three quarters (75 per cent) regularly sealing texts with a kiss and 48 per cent admitting that the practice has become commonplace amongst their group of friends.

Nearly a quarter of this age group (23 per cent) even appreciate an “x’ in a text exchange from people that aren’t close friends.

Ever the keen/obsessive observer of masculine trends, I mentioned the phenomenon of young straight men signing off their text messages with kisses very briefly towards the end of this piece two years ago on The Sun’s attempt to queerbash footballers for holding hands (and I also mention how this old poof can’t quite bring himself to respond in kind.)

Thanks to technology and consumerism, male behaviour is changing extremely rapidly, despite what some of us might like to think of as ‘hard-wired’ and ‘immutable’ characteristics.  This recent story from Radiolab about what happened in a community of baboons in which most of the alpha males were killed off by TB, is also illuminating in this area: the surviving males, instead of fighting and spitting at one another, started grooming one another – which in baboon terms ‘would be less shocking than if they had grown wings and started to fly.’  Even more remarkable is the way in which males joining the group from outside also adopted the new non-aggressive male-grooming routine – despite growing up outside this culture in the baboon-bite-baboon world.  It suggests that even for apes a great deal of behaviour is socially mediated. And perhaps affection between male baboons can be as strong as competition.

Back in the world of the naked ape, because of the private, intimate yet long-distance nature of text messages men needn’t fear being humiliated and kept in line by the pack for daring to groom one another with xxx’s and within this discrete-indiscrete techno-ecosystem this practise has apparently become widespread. Now that it has been outed, note the baboonish response of many of the male commenters, who can’t quite choose between deriding the men who do this and denying it happens at all.  Either way, their violent response is completely impotent and far, far too late.

These ones posted below a similar article in Canada’s National Post seem to have been made by very red faced baboons indeed:

Wattowattowatto: BS! Homosexual men may do such a thing, and they may text in disproportionate numbers amongst other homosexual men. Normal men would never do such a thing. Once again, a non-story using misleading data to shock readers.

Jocko2: How gay! I don’t know why they need to invent a word like “Metrotextual,” when plain old “homosexual” will do. T-Mobile’s research that nearly 22% of men (and 75% of 18-25-year-old men!!) do this is clearly abject bull. This looks like something put out by The Onion. I smell a hoax here, bigtime!

And I smell someone panicking because they’re beginning to realise that their painfully uptight lifelong investment in homophobic ideas about masculinity might have been a complete waste of ulcers.

It isn’t just the way that men are using kisses at the end of their text messages to other men that is such a departure from expectations of ‘innately’ masculine behaviour – it’s the fact they’re sending these messages at all.  Back in the 90s baboonish stand up comedians (usually male), made a good living out of fucking awful jokes about how phones revealed the innate and strangely reassuring differences between men and women: men were monosyllabic and practical and women wouldn’t’ shut up.  Men used phones as an instrument; women used them as an end in themselves.  Now a generation of young men have grown up who wear their pretty phones as accessories they’re never seen without and are always chattering pointlessly on them.

Usually at the gym, looking in the mirror, while sitting on a piece of equipment this old poof wants to use.

Tip: Marcelo and Sisu

This month the metrosexual is fifteen.

Back in November 1994 I wrote a piece for The Independent called ‘Here come the mirror men’ prompted by a visit to an exhibition in London organised by men’s glossy GQ.  In it I claimed to have seen the future of masculinity and that it was moisturised (according to several dictionaries this article was the first sighting of the word ‘metrosexual’ in print).  I also explained the key role that glossy men’s magazines had in spreading metrosexuality:

The promotion of metrosexuality was left to the men’s style press, magazines such as The Face, GQ, Esquire, Arena and FHM, the new media which took off in the Eighties and is still growing (GQ gains 10,000 new readers every month). They filled their magazines with images of narcissistic young men sporting fashionable clothes and accessories. And they persuaded other young men to study them with a mixture of envy and desire.

Some people said unkind things. American GQ, for exampled, was popularly dubbed ‘Gay Quarterly’. Little wonder that all these magazines – with the possible exception of The Face – address their readership as if none of them was homosexual or even bisexual.

The magazine Loaded had been launched earlier that year and its hysterical heterosexuality was to provide a template for persuading unprecedented numbers of men to buy a men’s glossy that wasn’t Penthouse, without being thought a ‘poof’.

The New Lad bible ‘Loaded’, for all its features on sport, babes and sport, is (closeted) metrosexual. Just as its anti-style is a style (last month it carried a supplement for ‘no nonsense’ clothes, such as jeans and boots), it’s heterosexuality is so self-conscious, so studied, that it’s actually rather camp. New Lads, for all their burping blokeishness, are just as much in love with their own image as any metrosexual, they just haven’t come to terms yet.

Nobody likes a smart-ass, let alone a Cassandra, so I was largely ignored.  Men’s magazines and men’s vanity products did become a boom business of course but the media in the 90s remained resolutely entranced by the oxymoronic mirage of ‘New Lad’, determinedly refusing to notice that all this  ‘blokeishness’, particularly in the form of the most successful exponent of it — FHM — was narcissistic and homoerotic: the real money shot was the scads of ads for clobber and vanity products featuring expensively attractive male models.

It wasn’t until I returned to the subject in 2002 for the then popular American online magazine Salon.com (’Meet the metrosexual’), this time naming names — e.g. that David Beckham guy — that the world finally noticed what I was going on about.

Fifteen years on from the metrosexual’s birth, the men’s magazine market has clearly peaked.  A number of them have closed this year, including Arena (The Face was axed years ago), while Maxim has gone online-only. How the mighty have fallen.  Partly this is because in an online, i-Phone world magazines and the printed word in general have peaked and the recession has brought this into sharper — and, for those of us who work in the media, painful — focus.

But perhaps the main reason is because men’s magazines, having done what they were invented to do — metrosexualize a generation of men on the sly — aren’t needed any more.  If men have space in their hectic consumer lifestyles for a magazine at all it has to be one that doesn’t beat around the bush, or the breasts, and instead addresses their narcissism directly: hence tits-out-for-the-lads Men’s Health magazine recently became the best selling men’s magazine in the UK.  Straight men are now their own High Street Honeys.

So, having achieved what they set out to do and made bitches of us all, have the men’s glossies that remain loosened up? Now that metrosexuality has been embraced by the mainstream and become essentially ‘normal’, have men’s mags finally dropped the straight-acting act and finally come out to themselves?  Do they now dare to acknowledge that some of their readers might be gay or bisexual?  Do magazines full of images of male desirability and products promoted to make the male reader more desirable themselves now accept men’s interest in male beauty and male sensuality and — shock! horror! — even bi-curiousness?

Earlier this year (before the news emerged about sales of Men’s Health overtaking FHM) I went down to my local newsagents, cruised the men’s mags on the racks and brought a bunch of them back to mine for coffee….

LOADED

Coverline: ‘How many balloons does it take to float a dwarf’?

Covergirl: Gemma Merna

Concept: Imagine a magazine edited by Guy Ritchie, but without his taste in men or 80s American female pop singers. And even more irritating.

Metrosexual Money Shot: Not a lot.  But there is a back page ad featuring three be-suited footballers showing off their Mormon vibrators (battery-powered Gillette Fusion razors).

Buy-Curiousness: Still hysterically closeted – but if you look very closely you’ll find a gay dating ad at the back.

How to bed Mr Loaded: Tell him you shagged Liam Gallagher’s Nan.

Verdict: A parody of a parody. But somehow still not gay enough.  And its breath smells — of death.

—-

NUTS

‘Britain’s BIGGEST selling men’s weekly!’

Covergirl: Lucy Pinder

Coverline: ‘100 SEXIEST FOOTBALLER’S WIVES 2009’

Concept: Like Zoo, Nuts isn’t really a men’s style mag, more a male version of Heat magazine – with celebrity tits instead of celebrity pricks. Snickersome fare and office-friendly limp porn for those who can’t get online to download mandingo gang-bang flicks because they’re at work/too stupid/mum won’t let them.

Metrosexual Money Shot: As a sign of the times, even Nuts has a fashion and grooming double page spread – apparently because their readers insisted on it.

Buy-Curiousness: ‘Man-Love Corner’ featuring suggestive photos of footballers seemingly bumming or groping one another with captions like, ‘Feeling the pinch!’. In Nuts, anything to do with ‘man-love’ is sniggersome or terrifying. Which is fair enough. But Nuts isn’t exactly heterosexual either: its idea of red-blooded lurving is tranny-looking women pouting their bee-stung lips while reaching for each other’s silicone.

How to bed Mr Nuts: Wax off all your pubes, hang some water balloons around your neck and say you love pussy. Alternatively, buy him twelve pints.

Verdict: The letter accompanying a snap supplied by a reader of a road sign saying ‘Semenville’ sums up the slightly confused mentality of Nuts: “This has got to be the worst-named place in the entire world. I definitely wouldn’t want to live there!’  I think Adam, Plymouth, doth protest too much. I mean, if you don’t like semen, why buy a wank mag called ‘Nuts’?

—–

GQ

‘Britain’s Best-Selling Quality Men’s Magazine’

Circulation: 130,000 a month

Covergirl: Clive Owen (am I the only person that finds his face eminently slappable?)

Concept: Fashion supplement of The Spectator magazine.

Metrosexual Money shot: Ralph Lauren Polo fold-out four page ad, inside cover.

Buy-Curiousness: Although American GQ used to be known as ‘Gay Quarterly’ the UK edition of GQ is so glacially pretentious it’s often difficult to believe it’s actually alive, let alone has a sexuality.

Nonetheless, in this month’s issue lady sex columnist Rebecca Newman bravely introduces GQ readers to their prostate gland and anal beads:

‘…as you become aroused you’ll find that, rather than resisting, your backside becomes hungry and takes the first bead…. It may feel peculiar to begin with; the sensation will improve as you become accustomed to it.’

That’s what I usually tell them too! Perhaps that’s why Rebecca is very careful to state repeatedly that it’s ‘your girlfriend’ feeding your arse.

Incredibly important and well-connected GQ editor Dylan Jones meanwhile, could do with some anal beads in another orifice:

‘…as I was standing in the bar at Brown’s Hotel with Piers Morgan, having just had a gossip with David Cameron, he witters breathlessly, ‘I turned to Piers and said, “You know what? I don’t buy all this stuff about Gordon being bisexual.” We chatted away for a while, both of us recounting the old stories we’d heard, and then after about five minutes, Piers turned to me, gave me a quizzical look and said, “We’re not talking about the same Gordon are we?”

How to bed Mr GQ: Do you really want to?

Verdict: GQ probably thinks itself the most ‘grown-up’ of the men’s mags, and to be fair, it has occasionally covered gay issues (without sniggering), but since it’s generally so dull, who cares?

—-

ESQUIRE

‘THE MAGAZINE FOR MEN WHO MEAN BUSINESS’

Circulation: A not very businesslike 60,000

Covergirl: Clint Eastwood

Concept: Snobbery. Here’s editor Jeremy Langmead sniffing about how Britain’s footballers

‘…dress appallingly: they pile on the designer labels with gay abandon (Ronaldo), accessorise with far too many sparkly things (Ronaldo) and haven’t yet discovered that logos a go-go have gone out of fashion (Ronaldo).’

I rather like Ronaldo – particularly the way that his looks, talent and ability to wear whatever he wants provokes both The Sun and Esquire to call him a poof. Not bad going. (As an indication of where they’re coming from, in the same issue, Esquire’s Best Dressed Man in the World is… ‘HRH Prince of Wales’.)

Metrosexual money shot: Diesel double page spread featuring a hustler-like male model in shorts sitting in a chair with a shirtless, fat, bald, middle-aged male punter at his feet, sweating face pressed against his Diesel baseball shoes. (However much the lad was paid by Diesel, Esquire was paid much more to grovel at their feet.)

Buy-curiousness: I wasn’t looking.

How to bed Mr Esquire: Tell him you write for GQ

Verdict: Ronaldo every time.

—-

MEN’S HEALTH

‘WORLD’S BEST-SELLING MEN’S LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE’

Covergirl: Another personal fitness trainer with either great genes or really good ‘vitamins’.

Coverline: LOSE YOUR GUT! ‘The 60 Minute 6-Pack Plan’ BIGGER ARMS!! (The same ones every month)

Concept: For the man who wants to be a covergirl.

Metrosexual money shot: Too many to mention.

Buy-curiousness: Off the scale. This month’s nipple Count: Male = 73 (two on the cover). Female = 4 (mysteriously covered in ‘superfoods’ berries and honey in this issue). One article is called: ‘How to hide your computer porn files from your girlfriend’ – yes, but what about your copy of Men’s Health?

How to bed Mr Men’s Health: You probably already have.

Verdict: The most flagrantly, fragrantly metro of the metromags but American-owned Men’s Health is still in major pissy-prissy denial about this insisting that all its pec-worshipping, calorie-counting male readers are straight, married with kids and not in the least bit vain.  Which is, frankly, really gay.

—-

FHM

‘VOTED BEST MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD’

(Until recently biggest selling most successful UK men’s monthly )

Coverline: ‘”Lesbian Vampire Killers”: The undead have never been hotter.’

Covergirl: Mischa Barton

Concept: Male vanity made easy – and normal.

Metrosexual money-shot: Fashion and grooming and bodybuilding supplements ads featuring impossibly pretty young men in various stages of undress throughout, but most noticeably the inside cover ad for United Colors of Benetton starring a blue eyed lad way prettier than Mischa.

Buy-curiousness: Wads of it. For all its ‘High Street Honeys’, FHM seems the least uptight of the mens mags when it comes to enjoying/exploiting male beauty and acknowledging it, albeit with a giggle. One photo spread (‘Train like a soldier – FHM hits the gym with real life US marine turned Generation Kill actor Rudy Reyes…’) shows an impossibly buff, shirtless chap in tight pants. ‘Alone at sea, Ellen MacArthur removed her top’, reads one of the captions (FHM’s jokiness, unlike most men’s magazines, can actually be quite funny).

Beneath some pics of him with his bubble butt in the air the copy explains that he’s performing ‘Hindu Push-Ups… or what some people sardonically call “the prison push up” on account of where your bottom goes…. It’s also a big favourite down at the gym with the US Marines.’

How to bed Mr FHM: Dress well, work out, moisturise, have a sense of humour. And do the prison push-up.

Verdict: Although FHM like most if not all the men’s mags reviewed here, still officially assumes its readers are all straight, its highly buy-curious pumped-up metro content, along with its cheeky, flirty sense of humour suggests that it’s anything but narrow.

(Full disclosure: I’m a contributer to men’s bi-annual fashion mag Arena Hommes Plus — I don’t review it here, partly because of my self-interest, and partly because it’s a men’s fashion magazine rather than a men’s general circulation magazine.  But generally speaking, as the fact that I write for it might suggest, it has no problem about ramming homosexuality down its readers’ throats.)

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Tip: DA Krolak

Mark Simpson attends an epic UFC event and finds himself turned on to the charms of ‘gay porn for straight men’

(Originally appeared in Out magazine, June 2008)

IMAGINE THE SPACE SHUTTLE taking off with a really fat customized exhaust pipe or the Visigoths sacking Ancient Rome with kicking bass tubes fitted to their 4-by-4s. Or 20,000 supercharged male orgasms. Simultaneously. And you have some idea what it sounds and feels like in Montreal’s famous Bell Centre tonight for Ultimate Fighting Championship 83, as a spunky young carrot redhead in shorts pins an auburn lad on his back with his heels somewhere around his ears. I think the technical term for this is a “full mount.” Or maybe it’s “ground and pound.”

As the chiselled and blond bad guy with the low-slung shorts (Cam Gigandet) in the recent mixed martial arts (MMA) exploitation flick Never Back Down says leeringly to the doe-eyed brunet boxer good guy (Sean Faris) new to MMA, the good news is that in this sport you can choke, kick, punch, pin, and throttle; “the bad news is that it’s gotta end with you looking like a bitch in front of everybody.” Perhaps it was bad news for him — and for the auburn lad in the ring tonight — but certainly not for the 22,000-strong overwhelmingly young-male audience for the biggest-ever UFC event.

Over 2,500 miles away in Las Vegas, “slapper” Brit boxer Joe Calzaghe is tonight defeating light heavyweight Bernard Hopkins on points. In the long-established world of boxing, there is rumoured to be an ancient and secret tradition called the “perk,” or “perquisite” — by which the losing man may be required later to literally give up what he has lost symbolically. In other words, the fucked gets…really fucked.

I don’t know how much truth there is to the “perk,” though the breathless trash talk of modern-day boxers in the run-up to a fight — “I’m gonna make you my bitch/girlfriend/punk” — certainly doesn’t discredit it. But I’m fairly certain that the “perk” doesn’t exist in the “full-contact” brave new world of mixed martial arts (MMA), an omnivorous blend of boxing, freestyle wrestling, judo, tae kwon do, kick-boxing, karate, jujitsu, and Thai boxing that is rapidly replacing boring old traditional boxing, especially among young men, as the fighting sport. The perk isn’t needed. Because in MMA you get perked in the “ring” in front of everybody. On pay-per-view TV. The “perk” is the whole perking point, man. And UFC, by far the most successful purveyor of MMA fights for the cable TV voyeur, looks remarkably like gay porn for straight men: ultimate fuck-fighting.

In the octagonal UFC cage set up over the Bell Centre ice hockey rink — octagonal perhaps because it better affords multiple viewing angles than a square boxing ring — Mac Danzig is still on his back; his sweaty, pumped, almost translucently white torso is flushed with the auburn heat that auburn skin produces when it is aroused. His panting, fetching head has been pushed up against the cage by redhead Marc Bocek’s energetic pounding, as if the cage were in fact a headboard. Bocek isn’t making love, however, or at least not the vanilla kind. He’s hammering the living daylights out of Danzig, stoking the crowd into ever-higher waves of frenzy. Although the Octagon is right in front of me, I’m watching all of this on one of the giant screens overhead: MMA is mostly a horizontal sport — one that requires multiple zoom lenses and a big TV to enjoy properly.

Bocek pauses for a moment to grab his partner/adversary by his hips, almost tenderly, and drag him backward while still kneeling between his legs, not wanting to break contact and negotiate that tricky “re-entry.” It isn’t, though, out of consideration for his chum’s cricked neck. He’s worried that Danzig will use the cage to get up off the canvas — and then get him in the “bitch” position. MMA is all about fighting for top. (Or maybe for extremely truculent bottom.)

Unfortunately for Bocek, Danzig succeeds in breaking away anyway, jumps to his feet, and deftly, impersonally, brings up his knee and smashes it against Bocek’s left eyebrow, which provokes another roar of excitement from the crowd and opens up a very nasty laceration that spills hot blood everywhere, streaming into his eye, across his face, down his chin, and splatters across his lily-white chest — and all over his opponent. MMA is definitely not safe sex. The ref pauses the fight to examine Bocek’s eye. If the blood is preventing him from seeing, the fight will be declared in Danzig’s favor.

Turning to my beautifully produced glossy fight program, which includes full-page colour images of the topless young fighters arranged opposite one another and their vital statistics, I learn that Danzig is 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds, 28, and a Cleveland native. His feisty opponent, Bocek, from Woodbridge, Canada, is 26, and is also 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds. As someone who has a thing for redheads and short-asses, I’d say they are well matched.

The ref continues the match — and why not? Blood looks good on TV. There are only a few seconds left of the third and final round (UFC fights only go to a maximum three rounds at five minutes each — about the average length of a porn scene). Bocek, despite the turned tables and his pasting and what must be deathly tiredness, is still putting up an astonishing fight. Danzig scores a take-down almost immediately and moves, as they say in MMA, “directly to the mount.” Bocek “gives up his back” to try to save his ruined face from further punishment but is then caught in a “rear-naked choke” by Danzig’s powerful, fatally inviting arms. He “taps out” (submits) at 3 minutes, 48 seconds.

I don’t know about Bocek, but these were some of the longest 3 minutes, 48 seconds of my life. I’m aroused and inspired and exhausted and confused. For my money, Bocek won that fight — morally speaking. Which of course means that he lost very badly. His face is roadkill. He is really fucked. But he displayed that quality you hear people talk about reverently in MMA: heart.

Despite the gore, MMA is generally safer than boxing — there are fewer fatalities and brain-damage is less common. Because the fight is “full-contact,” the head doesn’t take all the violence. When it does, though, it’s pretty gruesome. Yet amid all the mayhem, there is a touching tenderness to MMA. Not because it looks to my twisted, queer eye like very rough sex — but because of that “heart” business. After a bout is over, most fighters hug each other in a pseudo-post-coital embrace that re-enacts the warlike hug earlier, only this time it’s a hug of warm brotherhood.

There is another huge, manly Gallic roar. The arena’s giant screen is now tuned to the locker room; a rangy young blond skinhead fighter has peeled his shirt off, revealing a well-oiled fleshly fighting machine. The light behind him and his piercing blue eyes gazing into the camera, not to mention the low position of the locker-room cam, give him the cast of a demigod. It’s Georges “Rush” St.-Pierre, the handsome, stylish 26-year-old local Montreal boy who tonight is hoping to seize back his UFC Welterweight belt from Matt “the Terror” Serra, 33, the no-nonsense Long Island master of Brazilian jujitsu who dispossessed him of it last year with what some people said was a lucky punch.

We’ve only been watching the hors d’oeuvre. All this blood has just been so much foreplay.

***

“STOP LOOKING LADIES!” some funny guy in the audience shouts. It’s the weigh-in, a day earlier. Ed “Short Fuse” Herman, another 20-something boy-next-door red-headed fighter, from Vancouver, Wash., is naked on the stage under the spotlight, a towel held up by two lieutenants to shield his “short fuse.” Funnily enough, it’s mostly men rather than ladies doing the looking here in this packed auditorium. Though some are perhaps doing more looking than others: From where I’m seated at the side, I manage to catch a glimpse of Ed’s white butt as he bends over to slip off his briefs (a day later he will fight in shorts cheekily advertising ‘CONDOM DEPOT’ – across his butt).

Several guys have had to take their underpants off — to cheers. I can’t help but wonder whether the UFC officials, for showbiz’s sake, pretend some of these guys are closer to the weight limit than they are.

UFC knows all about showbiz. According to Forbes magazine, its pay-per-view shows have drawn well over 2 million viewers, most of them male and ages 18 to 49. Formidably shrewd, motor-mouthed former boxing promoter Dana White hosts The Ultimate Fighter, UFC’s hit PPV series on Spike (a men-only Big Brother with grappling gloves), which has taken MMA, essentially a semi-organized barroom brawl in the ’90s, cleaned it up, introduced some rules — including no stomping, no spitting, no throat strikes, no punches to the back of the head, and “no groin attacks of any kind” — and made it into a hot, multiangle, high-impact PPV commodity.

Described memorably by John McCain in 1998 as “human cockfighting,” and under threat of a total ban, MMA has become a different, more saleable, less relentlessly violent kind of “cockfighting” in the nurturing hands of the UFC — so much so that McCain himself recently relented: “The sport has grown up.” As a measure of just how grown up, UFC — for which casino owners the Fertitta brothers paid $2 million in 2001 — is today valued at roughly $1 billion. Cultural respectability has arrived too in the form of a recently published $2,500 MMA art book titled Octagon with a foreword by man-loving straight playwright David Mamet, who wrote and directed the MMA-themed movie Redbelt. MMA is also coming to major-network TV: CBS recently announced plans to air four MMA fights (non-UFC) annually — despite the disapproval of CBS chairman Sumner Redstone. “I’m a lover, not a fighter,” he said, perhaps missing the way UFC brings loving and fighting spectacularly together.

There is a lot of passionate hero worship in the world of MMA, not so much homoerotic as hero-erotic — or herotic. Straight male fans and fighters themselves will enthuse with shining eyes about “my idol”, in a way that in most other contexts would be considered much too ‘gay’ to keep a straight face.  But perhaps that’s not so surprising, since MMA owes a lot to those notorious warrior homos, the ancient Greeks. Although today’s MMA came to us via Brazilian jujitsu (alas, not conducted in Speedos, as the name may suggest), many consider it the modern version of pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling that was the basis of combat training for Greek soldiers and an original Olympic sport. With lethal purity, pankration had two primary rules: no eye-gouging or biting. Fingers were often snapped off. Sometimes death or unconsciousness was the only form of submission (rather like this year’s Democratic primaries).

MMA’s younger fans are not likely to acknowledge their sport’s homoerotic heritage. For most of these young men, many of them blue-collar and swooningly in love with masculinity, gay means unmanly and passive and emasculated – and therefore major turn-off. MMA is gay porn for straight men because its violence not only justifies the intimate, protracted, eye-popping physicality of the sport but also preserves its virility — the very thing that gets many of its fans hot. These fighters can’t be fags — look how fucking tough they are, dude! It’s a bit like how in gay porn “real” tops never bottom — for the sake of the bottoms watching.

Sometimes the MMA fighter really is homo — like professional MMA fighter Shad Smith, who was recently profiled in The New York Times. From a tough blue-collar background, Smith was desperate to hide his sexuality at first. “I was petrified because I didn’t want anyone to find out,” he told the Times. “And I would try to be the toughest person around. That way no one would suspect. No one would ever say it. No one would think it.” Doubtless there are quite a few Shad Smiths who became very good, very determined, very motivated scrappers because they weren’t escaping to college or opening a hairdressing salon.

The tough-guy image is something of an illusion — if an entrancing and convincing one. Surprisingly often, fighters turn out to be sensitive, introspective loners — “fags” who aren’t actually fags — such as Mac Danzig, the beefy auburn-haired killer who is in fact a vegan and whose main pastime, when he isn’t turning another lad’s face into tenderloin, is nature photography. That’s also the story of Georges St.-Pierre, a bullied slight boy at school who turned to MMA for salvation, who with his tight, wiry body, immaculately groomed presentation and designer clothes looks rather metro. As one observer put it: “He’s the kind of flash Europunk you might think you could wipe the floor with if you came across him in a bar, but you’d be very, very wrong.”

Likewise you might expect a fight between Serra and St.-Pierre to be billed as good ol’ USA versus Frenchy “fag,” but you’d be wrong. Because GSP — to give St.-Pierre his brand name — is generally considered to be an exceptional fighter, genuinely excellent in several disciplines, or maybe because this is such a visual medium, he has begun to look like the David Beckham of UFC, albeit one who actually reads books and is, heaven forfend!, interested in philosophy (that’s the French for you). His photogenic face and body and his workouts have been splashed across countless health and fitness magazines.

His opponent, Matt Serra, may be breezily unpretentious and resemble an unpainted fire hydrant, but he is definitely no idiot: “I think they look at Georges as the Crest poster boy with the sparkle in his teeth, the looks, the physique, the body and the athleticism…the real version of what Van Damme was doing,” he’s said. “And then comes me — the Joe Pesci–style ‘Heyooo!’ But it’s cool, man. I’m down with it. I fit in those shoes real well. I’m just looking forward to having another good fight.”

When he turns up for his weigh-in, a relentless tidal wave of boos greets him. An Italian-American pocket battleship at 5 foot 6, Serra weighs in at 169.5 pounds; he appears indifferent to the roiling sea of hatred around him. The booing doesn’t stop when the host offers him the microphone, and whatever he says is completely drowned out. So he offers the crowd two fingers, meaning “two times” and V for victory – and, perhaps, “fuck you.”

Ecstatic cheers greet his challenger St.-Pierre, who’s taller by four inches but in stature by several feet. St.-Pierre fluidly strips down to his tasteful and tastily filled-out black underwear and also weighs in at 169.5 pounds. Offered the mike, he graciously tells the crowd they shouldn’t hate Serra and that “I don’t fight with angerrr – I fight with my ‘eart.” The two men pose for the cameras in a fighting stance and then they hug, GSP kissing Serra’s huge neck.

There was no trash talk in the quieter surroundings of the press conference the day before. The fighters had been polite, respectful, even friendly. “C’mon, I’ve got nothing against the French,” protested Serra when the journalists dug up some “Frenchy” quotes from the past. St.-Pierre, for his part, was touchingly open. “I am nervous and scared to fail but that’s normal,” he admitted. “I ‘ave butterflies. but I ‘ave to make the butterflies fly in formation.”

***

“AAAYYYYYYYYAYYYYEAAAAAAA-AAHHAAAARGH!!!”

The Bell Centre outdoes itself as Georges St.-Pierre, surrounded by his lieutenants, makes his way to the stage in a natty red jujitsu jacket. Climbing into the Octagon, he peels off his silky, tight black T-shirt, and then his baggy trousers come off, revealing tight black trunks with just a white fleur-de-lis on the side of his firm right buttock. It matches the arty tattoo on the back of his steely calf.

Cheers turn to boos. Matt Serra has arrived in a baggy black T-shirt with big white lettering: BUY GUNS SELL GUNS – GUNSAMERICA.COM. The stats on the big screen make difficult reading for Serra: GSP is taller and younger and has a longer reach. Worse, he is more popular and better-looking and has nicer pants. He’s the favourite in every way.

The bell rings, and they touch gloves. In a flash St.-Pierre has Serra on the canvas. All that frustration, regret, resolve, training — and heart — have exploded. All over Serra. To tire him out, St.-Pierre lets him get up, keeping him within range of his own fists but out of Serra’s. Then he takes him down again. St.-Pierre’s purposeful, ominous shoulders rise up like medieval armour, like Joan of Arc seriously narked.

End of round 1. Serra’s eye is swelling up badly. He looks beaten already.

Round 2. Plucky Serra tries a kick.  St.-Pierre catches it and takes Serra down. After Serra stands up again, St.-Pierre lets fly a barrage of punches. Serra is too groggy to parry them. St.-Pierre — part panther, part lethal ballet dancer — comes in for the kill, easily taking his opponent down again. Serra offers his back, and St.-Pierre knees him repeatedly, athletically in the ribs in a manner which somehow manages to be as passionate as it is impersonal.

The ref stops the match, and it’s all over: technical knockout. Canada has won. Montreal has beaten Long Island. The butterflies flew in formation. Terrifying formation. And judging by the noise from the crowd, the entire world and its dad have just climaxed.

A grinning St.-Pierre executes a winning somersault. The crowd chants, “FUCK YOU, SERRA! FUCK YOU, SERRA!” He has been fucked. He was fucked. He is fucked. He is without any doubt whatsoever the fuckee. But he exhibits no resentment. The warriors embrace warmly, another kiss from GSP to that huge, now sweaty neck. Serra holds St.-Pierre’s arm up for the crowd, then hoists him on his shoulder, carrying him for a few staggering steps.

If MMA is gay porn for straight men, then tonight a part of me wonders whether, for all its spilled blood and mashed faces, it isn’t the better kind.

After all, no one could seriously accuse gay porn of having “heart.”

Copyright Mark Simpson 2009

Mark Simpson on John Hughes’ legacy

(Arena Hommes Plus, Winter 2009)

So here’s the pitch:  A Hollywood teen movie in which nothing happens.  All day. In a school library. Introduced by a pretentious quote from David Bowie’s ‘Changes’.  Or how about this: A boy bunks off High School to take his friends to mooch around an art gallery, to the strains of something especially delicate by The Smiths.

What do you mean you’ll call me?  Don’t you want to invest your millions in these sure-fire hits??

When the director John Hughes died this August, aged 59. much was made of how ‘influential’ he has been for today’s generation of movie-makers.  But it’s difficult to conceive of almost any of his classic mid-80s teen films, which included Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being made in Hollywood today.  Unless you re-wrote them to include slo-mo amputations.

John Hughes movies had great scripts, they had great characters, winsome, quirky actors: all these years later young Molly Ringwald with her red hair and angsty complexion still looks to me like the prettiest, loveliest girlfriend I never had (while Emilio Estevez looks a lot like a lot of the boys I have had – at least in my mind’s eye). Hughes movies had feelings, they had intelligence, they had heart – all of which tend to get in the way of films being made today. They also had a view of the world that, while often-times wise-crackingly cynical — ‘Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?’ — wasn’t afraid to be lyrical: ‘Life moves pretty fast.  You don’t stop to look around, you could miss it.’

Just like, in other words, the best British pop music, with which Hughes peppered his films liberally.  In fact his work, although celebrated now, often by a forty-something crowd crying over their spilt youth, looks like fragments of a lost America.  A much better one than the one we ended up with – with much superior taste in pop music.

Precisely because of their humanity and wit, Many of Hughes’ movies are as startling twenty years on as the Union Jack on the back of Ferris Bueller’s bedroom door, the posters on his walls for Blancmange and Cabaret Voltaire – and a glam Bryan Ferry puckering up over his bed. Matthew Broderick’s intoxicating mixture of all-American, unblinking, huckstering confidence and very Anglo, coquettish flamboyance is inconceivable in a lead Hollywood actor in a teen movie today.  It would be loudly dismissed as ‘TOO GAY!’.

The famous parade scene where he jumps on a parade float and mimes to a 1961 recording of fey Wayne Newton crooning ‘Danke Schoen’ like a Vegas Marlene Dietrich, and then to the Beatles’ deliriously, adenoidally sexy ‘Twist and Shout’ (from the previous Britpop invasion of John Hughes’ own youth) and everyone in Hughes’ hometown of Chicago, black and white, male and female, young and old, falls in love with him, is nothing less than a dreamy pop cultural epiphany.

It was a false one, however.  The future, as we now know, belonged not to sentimental, art-loving, anglophile, androgynous Ferris in a stolen red 1961 250GT Ferrari Spyder (which apparently, and quite appropriately, was actually a glass fibre fake with a British MG sports car underneath), but to ruthless career-planner and Reaganite Republican Maverick in an all-American F-14 Grumman Tomcat: Top Gun and Tom Cruise were launched into the stratosphere by steam catapult the previous year, in 1985 – the  same year as The Breakfast Club were chewing their fingernails and wondering, oh-so-deliciously, what they were going to do with their fucked-up lives.

Despite success with the warm adult comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), which once again spoke of a better, kinder America than the one that actually happened, one full of belly-laughs rather than today’s comedy cringe, snobbery and sadism, Hughes Hollywood career didn’t quite make it into the 90s, never recovering from the frightening success of annoying kiddie comedy Home Alone in 1990, for which he wrote the script.  He later left Hollywood and became a farmer.  Growing things for people to eat was the perfect riposte to today’s terminally toxic movie business.

As Ferris in his dressing gown put it, raising a quizzical eyebrow at us: ‘You’re still here??  It’s over!  Go home!’

© Mark Simpson 2009

Tip: Donald K

That said, I’ve frequently found his work to be insufferably gayist.  Edmund is a five star, old school gay chauvinist – so literally fucking proud to be gay and so obsessed with ‘coming out’ (and attacking those that refuse to join his party) that sometimes I just want to slap him.

Which is why I laughed out loud when frail old Gore Vidal, veteran dissenter from the orthodoxies of sexual identity politics, recently reached out of his wheelchair and did just that, repeatedly, in The London Times.  Asked about White’s fictionalised portrayal of Vidal’s letter-writing relationship with the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh in the play ‘Terre Haute’, The Gore lambasted White for portraying him as ‘another queen’, only writing about how ‘being a fag is the greatest thing on Earth’ and – in a fantastic phrase that will stay with White forever, like an immortal red handprint on the side of his face  – ‘vulgar fag-ism’.

Probably it was the ‘vulgar’ part that stung White most (his prose, especially the earlier efforts, sometimes looks as if it’s been fisted by a thesaurus) and provoked the bitchy response in an interview in Salon this week (‘Edmund White comes out swinging’).  Ed describes Gore as a ‘nasty, awful man’, claims sorrowfully to have tried to help him in the past by inviting him to dinner to introduce him to ‘cute boys’, very kindly reminds us of his great age, the fact that he’s wheelchair-bound, his alcoholism, his loss a few years ago of his life-long companion, practically spelling it out for us in a campy stage whisper: Bitter. Old. Queen.

But apparently this isn’t enough.  He also tells us that Vidal is a ‘complete lunatic’ and that ’it doesn’t bother me what he says about me.’  Yes, dear, but if it doesn’t, why go on so? And on, and on….

‘I don’t know what he’s famous for anywhere, really, because I think those historical novels are complete works of taxidermy. Nobody can read those. “Myra Breckinridge” was funny but light. The essays are what everybody defends — but a friend of mine who did a volume of the best essays of the 20th century said they’re all so topical that they’ve all aged terribly. I don’t know where his work is.’

Ed, sweetie, even if everything that you and your terribly important literary friends have to say about that ‘nasty awful man’ were true, bitter old alcoholic crippled Gore would still be ten times the writer you are.

And, oh, about 100 times the man.

A decade ago the ban on lesbians and gays serving in the UK military was lifted.  This summer Mark Simpson attended the first gay night on a UK garrison.  For purely professional reasons.  No, really.

There isn’t at first glance much that appears terribly gay about Catterick Garrison.

Home to the largest UK Army base in the world, with c. 15,000 men and women based here, Catterick Garrison as the name suggests, owes its existence entirely to the British Army – whose favourite colour is khaki. Located off the A1 just before Scotch Corner in the far north of North Yorkshire, ‘Camp’ as Catterick Garrison is known locally – usually without irony – is mostly a utilitarian collection of barracks blocks, Nissan huts, barbed wire fences, and MoD housing, with a dilapidated main parade boasting a Spar, a couple of laundrettes and several takeaways.

A Tesco Superstore did arrive here a few years ago, but they don’t carry much in the way of their Finest range. Imagine Middlesbrough (about a 50 minute drive away), take away the culture, add lots of bracing fresh air and combat trousers and you’ve got Catterick Garrison. Little wonder it was the setting for Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s unrelentingly bleak (and not very funny) 2004 sit-com ‘Catterick’.

But tonight at Louis, a no-frills nightclub nestling amongst the lines of neatly parked khaki green Army trucks, Catterick Garrison is also the setting for the first regular, and probably first ever, gay night on a British Army garrison: ‘It’s Catterick GAYrison!!!’ announces the poster on the wall of the place where local single and not-so-single ladies usually go to meet drunken squaddies (‘It’s a parachute club,’ one soldier told me, ‘’coz you’re guaranteed a jump!’). But tonight a different kind of meat market is promised: ‘Uniform Optional!’ saucily declares the rubric on the poster, next to a sketch of a muscular young squaddie dancing and grinning with his top off. Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts who first suggested the location for Catterick Camp because of its tranquillity and distance from urban enervations must be spinning in his orderly grave.

‘I didn’t like Camp at all when I first moved here a couple of years ago,’ says Lisa, 32, a sunny-natured out lesbian lass from Blackburn serving in the Army as a medic, drinking Strongbow at the bar. ‘The countryside’s nice, but Camp itself is a bit isolated. And the nearest gay pub is a long, long drive away.’ She loves the idea of a gay night in Catterick. ‘It’s just what we need. Plus this place is just around the corner from me and I can stagger home! Until this came along there was nothing in the way of socialising for lesbian and gay service personnel here.’

When Lisa joined up twelve years ago homosexuality (and bisexuality) was still banned in the UK Forces: ‘they still asked if you’d had any same-sex experiences and I had to lie.’  The ban was formally lifted in 2000 after four former service personnel, drummed out for being gay, won their case against the MoD for discrimination in the European Court of Human Rights ten years ago this autumn.

In the Nineties the idea of a gay night on a UK garrison would have been unthinkable – instead military investigators were known to hang around civilian gay pubs in places like Aldershot and Portsmouth taking photos of those coming in and out. But that was then. Last year the Army joined Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Campaign, and this Summer Soldier magazine featured an out gay male squaddie on the cover for the first time. Interviewed inside, Trooper James Wharton, 22, of the Royal Household Cavalry claimed that he had had little or no trouble with his sexuality from other soldiers: ‘I came out to the Army before I told my parents, so that say a lot for the Armed Forces.’

Lisa is grateful for the 21st Century equal opps approach of the Army: she lives in married quarters with her civilian girlfriend whom she civilly-partnered last year – with a Guard of Honour: ‘6 out of the 8 were gay’.  Attitudes didn’t change overnight, however. ‘In 2004 I was posted to Germany and when they found out I was a lesbian they moved me away from the other nurses and onto my own corridor. I put my foot down and they finally moved me back, but they didn’t like it. It’s this thing of, “she’ll be looking at me in the showers!”.

Lisa thinks this kind of anxiety is the still a problem for many gay and bi males in the Army. ‘I know quite a few gay squaddies, and most of them aren’t out because they’re worried about being bullied and also the backs-against-the-wall-lads! mentality. It’s definitely different for gay men in the Army, especially in front-line units like the ones based in Catterick. The macho thing kicks in’.

Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been able to find any out gay male squaddies here tonight. Instead about thirty local gays and lesbians and their straight friends, and two charmingly tipsy young off-duty (they’ve left their wigs at home) drag queens from Darlington, Lucy-Licious and Gina Tonic: ‘We came to pull a squaddie,’ says Lucy, aka Josh, ‘everyone loves a soldier don’t they, dear? But when,’ he asks, looking around eagerly, are they turning up?’ Well, quite.

At pub-chucking out time mine and the drag queens’ prayers are answered. Sort of.  A large party of drunken squaddies turn up. But they’re all straight – officially, at least.  Scots Guardsmen celebrating their return from exercise in Canada and determined to continue their evening at the only nightclub in town. They’re not put off by Louis being ‘gay’ tonight.  The burliest, Steve, 32, a married soldier with two kids, has served 12 years and welcomes a gay night in Catterick. ‘It’s about time, if you ask me. Catterick really needs this. It had to happen. This is the modern world, isn’t it? I mean, my wife was living with a woman for four years before she married me’.

Steve thinks that being gay in his regiment isn’t a problem. ‘There are four gay lads in my regiment,’ he explains, ‘and they don’t get any hassle.’ But, I suggest, maybe just four gay squaddies in a 600 strong regiment might suggest that most still don’t feel able to come out? ‘Attitudes have changed a lot, especially with the younger people. But a lot of old school people don’t like it one bit. And my Regiment tends to be very traditional.  We didn’t have any black squaddies until about ten years ago.  Now we have black officers.  I think things will change a lot on the gay front once the older generation retire.’

Chris, a  local gay civvie lad in his early twenties has parents who are both ex-Army.  ‘They’re very old-fashioned in their outlook,’ he says.  ‘They were in the Army when homosexuality was illegal and don’t like me being gay at all.  But they have to put up with it!’  Does he know any gay squaddies?  ‘One or two, but most of the ones I’ve met have been drunken horny straight ones,’ he says, laughing.

Speaking of drunken straight squaddies, one of them is now dancing and twirling with Gina Tonic on the dance floor to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’. Steve comes over; grinning he says: ‘Like I said, Mark, attitudes really are changing!’

A little later, the same dancing squaddie walks past and puts his hand on the shoulder of another soldier I’m talking to. It’s a friendly gesture that would mean nothing any other night at Louis (when it’s not entirely unusual for drunken straight squaddies to snog, grope and pretend to hump one another on the dance-floor). But the soldier I’m talking to looks like he’s been electrocuted, whips around and shouts: ‘’Ere!  You’ve got the wrong guy mate, I’m straight!” He points emphatically to a wedding ring on his finger. The dancing squaddie then protests, briefly, his own heterosexuality, pointing to a ring on his finger. Bruised egos suitably salved, they shake hands, grinning and slapping each other on the back.

The organiser of Louis gay night, Dave Parker, 36, a Durham lad with what I can only describe as cheeky eyes, is gay himself, and has lived in Catterick Camp for ten years. ‘I just thought it was about time we had a gay night,’ he says.  ‘Plus it will help to change attitudes as well as provide a place for gay Army people and locals to socialise. The feedback I’ve had has all been positive. Though I’ve heard that one or two have been complaining about ‘bloody poofs’ – but’ he laughs, ‘not to my face!’

Some might say that he’s set himself something of a challenge. ‘It’s a shame there were only a few lesbians and no gay male squaddies tonight,’ he admits, ‘but it will take a while for a gay night in Catterick to take off.’ Yes, it probably will. Dave has high hopes for next month though: everyone will be back from leave, and he’s booked a male stripper. ‘From Down South. Wigan, I think it was,’ he says with a wink.

‘Mind,’ he adds, ‘I should have booked one of the local Army PTi’s instead. They’d probably have done it just for some free drinks. They love putting on a show, some of them. And god knows they use the tanning salon enough!’

So there you have it. Catterick Garrison. Gayer than you think.

Gay night at Louis Bar, Kitchener Road, Catterick Garrison, North Yorkshire.  Second Tues every month, 8pm till late.)

Update: The male stripper from Wigan went down a treat. Since this first night back in August there have been two more gay nights in Catterick, each busier than the last. There have even been reported sightings of one or two gay squaddies.

‘”I’M TRY-SEXUAL: JORDAN’S MAN SAYS “I’LL TRY ANYTHING ONCE!’”’ was the shocking headline for the two page spread. The piece, cobbled together from interviews with ex-friends, and some snaps of him in drag with his mates – obviously for a lad’s night out – did its best to keep the (now old) tranny story going, further undermine his masculinity and suggest that he’s even worse than a tranny – he’s probably a poof! After all, any bloke who says he’s a ‘try-sexual’, even one who doesn’t wear women’s clothes, is obviously a bender….

So far, so NOTW. It is, after all, a famously narrow-minded newspaper catering to people who don’t get much.

But rather confusingly, the front of the NOTW glossy magazine inside the very same edition that mocked and ridiculed Reid for his cross-dressing and daring to step outside prescribed gender roles featured TV celeb Myleene Klaas shaving her face on the front page, the with the come-on coverline: ‘MYLEENE MANS UP! – Tough talking and too feisty even for Cowell. Yes, this girls got balls.’ Inside she poses for a glamorous photo shoot in a suit and a side-parting.

Klaas doesn’t describe herself as ‘try-sexual’ in the interview (though she does talk about comparing ‘boob sizes’ with female friends in toilet cubicles), but if she did it would probably have been presented in the same yay! good on ya! girl power!! fashion as her ballsiness. ‘Try-sexuality’ when undertaken by women now seems, even in the NOTW, to be both a measure of both female empowerment and also their new assertive sexuality.  It tends to enhance their femininity rather than bringing it into (fatal) question.

But when men try to join in the experimentation and step outside gendered sex roles themselves, by for instance cross-dressing or expressing an interest in same-sex fantasy, the opposite appears to be true, at least in the public sphere.  They are merely deviant, ‘gay’ or ‘sad’ – and instantly shorn of their masculinity. A joke.  Even cage fighters. Attitudes towards male bi-curiousness show that for men being ‘half gay’ is tantamount to being ‘half-pregnant’.

This new double standard for male and female sexual behaviour which in contrast to the old ’stud/slut’ one, penalises men rather than women was documented earlier this year by Canadian sociologists, who found that men were expected to be up for sex all the time – but only very straight sex. Women were allowed much more latitude in both whether they actually wanted to have sex – and what kind of sex they wanted to have.

This double standard is endemic in the UK, as is painfully evident in the recent case of the barmy woman boxer (also Canadian) found guilty of a violent and unprovoked attack on a couple of drunken squaddies at a disco for kissing and dancing with one another and ‘pretending to be gay’ screaming ‘THIS SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED IN THE BRITISH ARMY!’.

Despite being a violent foreign criminal on the run from the law for assaulting British soldiers (from behind) – and moreover a woman who stepped outside of gender stereotypes herself – she was feted by the British popular press as some kind of have-a-go a heroine.

Why? Well, partly because she was quite ‘tasty’ (in the sense of ‘not looking like a dyke’), but mostly because she was punishing men for daring to break the gender rules themselves.

21st century trysexuality is, you see, just for girls.