Jack of Hearts

Sam Sparro: Failure Cling-Wrapped (oh and a new single The Shallow End)

2012-02-10T04:57:00.000-08:00

Jesus fuckety Christ, Sam Sparro is back again with another of his subdued comebacks and as always - fully equipped with an inbuilt self-destruct mechanism. It's actually been online for a few weeks but of course nobody noticed because it's Sam Sparro whose publicity machine is weaker than a hairspray-powered car. At this rate he’ll be ready for a Greatest Hits in another forty-six years when popular tribute acts Spam Sparrows and Stan Marrow and Mia Farrow will be touring up and down East Anglia’s end-of-pier theatres, stick-on moustaches in tow.

New single The Shallow End is a harrowingly out-of-season funky Jamiroquai number that sounds like Bob Sinclar’s World, Hold On with a few Celebrate Good Times “whoo whoos” thrown in and a sprinkling of cow bells like in The Rapture’s hit House of Jealous Lovers.

Or to put it another way. What a load of shit. LOOK:

The video is one of those low-budget disguised as intentionally arty and laidback type videos that is marginally better than your average grainy sepia bollocks that that girl you didn’t really want to come to the picnic but who came anyway makes on her iPhone whilst you’re trying to find the calorie information on a 2 litre bottle of White Ace. Irritatingly the video only goes up to 480p on quality, so, marginally better than the quality of Snake II on the Nokia 3250.

Needless to say, I don't think Nicki Minaj or M.I.A. will be losing any sleep.

The subject of sepia came up in Dylan B Jones’ Gay Times review of The Shallow End too. Dylan compared the video to Lana Del Rey's videos (which I haven't watched), calling it “a refreshing respite”, “hedonistic” and even going as far as making up a word - “festivaly” – especially for this single. You can follow Dylan on Twitter, but back to bitching about Sam Sparro...

It’s very hard to get these free-spirited kind of videos right. Someone who always gets it right is Goldfrapp. LOOK AT THIS LOVELY VIDEO THAT IS LIKE SAM SPARRO'S BUT MUCH BETTER:

Sam Sparro’s video was uploaded onto YouTube on January 31st, so nearly a fortnight ago, and has so far only had 14,600 views - How embarrassing is that? And you just know that that 14,600 views breaks down into ex-boyfriends critiquing him, his Mum sending a round-robin at work, Estelle shopping for ideas and a Harvard professor researching gay men with necks that are wider than their heads.

Last week the British Pathé film archive uploaded this video of people skating in 1923 and it has already enjoyed in excess of 130,000 views. Just saying.

Sam Sparro himself is looking quite hot in the video, sporting a contemporary take on the classic gay San Fran clone tash, but he’s no hotter than your average hot person in an average gay bar on a week night in almost any city in the world.

Why do I hate Sam Sparro so much?

I don’t know.

I don’t hate him.

It’s more frustration. It was quite exciting when Sam Sparro - a good-looking, gifted and OPENLY GAY popstar - managed to break through into the stagnant-as-a-canal-in-Daventry Top 10 with an exciting first single Black And Gold – which in itself challenged the existence of God. And then to see it all amount to nothing, because he pissed off – either because the music industry started shunning him for being openly gay, or because he cashed-in on his fame too early with a few fuck-me-I’m-famous nights-in and a few too many calorific dinners in beachfront bistros, and the next thing you know his album is on the floor in Lidl.

Sam Sparro's new music is trying to come across all “Yeah – we’re all having a fun party, life’s a party, stop giving a shit because we don’t”, but essentially it is failure gift-wrapped.

Dylan B Jones praises Sam Sparro for not pushing out generic synth-pop, but isn’t that the only thing Sam Sparro was ever good at? I say put your tequila away Sam, put your tambourine down and get back out there and fight Taio Cruz you big wimp. Fuck knows. I’ve forgotten what I’m blogging about. Sam Sparro. Yeah. Well done. Next.

Here’s Jamiroquai with Love Foolosophy. It’s simultaneously gayer than Dick Dastardly and more straight then the smell of Quavers. Gotta love it:

And if you’re still having doubts about Sam Sparro and need some final nails to drive into the coffin then may I recommend the song Cling Wrap and/or his Radio 1 Live Lounge cover of American Boy. The kind of songs you buy because you want to support an openly gay popstar and then they haunt you on iPod shuffle for the rest of your life.

Right, I’m off to Nicolas to buy my own weight in Cointreau. Have a good weekend.

Above: Pink Sparrow by EddieOVERKILL. Image at top: Press shot of Sam Sparro.

New Online Pose For Girls: The Kooky Zooey

2012-01-30T08:57:00.000-08:00

It would appear the classic and much-parodied emo pose of slapping the mascara on, holding the camera as far up in the air as possible and then glaring at the lens through your fake lashes is OVER.

The photos above are all avatars from Facebook and Twitter and took me about three minutes to source because it would appear EVERY TEENAGE GIRL in Britain is adopting this profile pic pose right now. Not quite a "duck face pose" and not quite "geek chic", I want to find out what has triggered this reent pose plague? Is it Katy Perry with gangrene? Is it Zooey Deschanel on a Claire's Accessories rampage? Is it Jordan with a C in GCSE Art? Or does one popular girl at one relatively large school start the trend and then it just spreads like a bush fire?

I appreciate that teenage girls are quite often insecure, and all sub-groups have photo trends, from the muscle-flexing boys in tracksuits to the pearly wise stares of handsome female news anchors, but I was hoping somebody could help me out in identifying what THIS trend is, in which girls tilt their head to one side, shove all their hair to the other, shove one shoulder out into the open, roll their mouth to look like the last two frankfurters in a jar and then glare their eyes in a crazy fashion (I've blacked the eyes out above but it's a sort of searchingly ironic ditzy-dumb beam).

I'm sure Shane Dawson has this on his agenda.

Follow Sunday: Five Golden Tweets from The Pope

2012-01-27T03:10:00.000-08:00

Twit-twoo, move over Jameela Jamil, the Pope is on Twitter! His [greatness/holiness/splendour(?)] has actually been on Twitter since June 2011. It's probably not actually the Pope tweeting but some gay intern at The Vatican City who was like "Look. I'm cool with all the freaky stuff you do at night, but I could do something constructive during the day too - if you unchained me from this miserichord and gave me some clothes I could do some kind of work maybe?". "What like polish our vast collection of 14th century Venetian anal beads that the world doesn't know exists?". "I was thinking more along the lines of PR and digital marketing, like maybe starting a Twitter page for us?". "We don't need PR. We're rolling on the wave of advanced PR of approximately 2,000 years, the product that we sell doesn't exist, thousands live in fear of us, millions of others pay us out of guilt that we invented, we own more pillars than there are blades of grass in a Bel Ami backdrop. Straight men get on their knees and tell us their inner most secrets and shortfallings whilst we fondle ourselves in a dress. We're a work of PR genius". "But I'm going to dispell all the bad rumours Benny. You see, all the stuff flying about the internet about raping children and". "But we..". "Yeah I know, but still". "I was going to say but we usually just cut peoples' tongues out?". (Pause) "Also, there are loads of hot teenagers on Twitter and". "It's settled then, make us a Twitter page".

Obviously I'm taking my own invented lurid speculations and then translating them into plain English from sexually-charged chokey Italian whispers.

So, here's Pop Eye Benedict 16.0 on Twitter, and he's only tweeted five times since June:

The first tweet was a promotional one with a link to the Vatican's news website starting rather presumptuously with "Dear Friends". Well, either presumptuous or cliquey. I didn't click on the link in case it default opted me into a slave prostitution programme, or even worse, a tawdry website with naff yellow section headers and stories explaining why we should hand over children in their thousands to the church.

The second tweet was a nugget or ironic hypocracy "Let us abandon once and for all the path of violence and avoid principles of evil". Ha! I love a Pope with a sense of humour. It should have said "Kids on Twitter who cry themselves to sleep each night because their local priest is sexually abusing them, next time, tell your priest to abandon once and for all the path of violence and avoid principles of evil, I've tried a round-robin email internally but it went into peoples' junk I think. Ciao boys". Too many characters.

The third tweet was an invitation that arrived in the high heat of late August: "I invite you to give a bold witness of Christian living. In this way you will give birth to new Christians and will help the Church to grow". Sounds a bit like, "Come on Catholics, you do all the work please, here in the church we're not that good at having children, no pun intended, we keep trying to get men pregnant but it doesn't work, we're starting to suspect incense causes infertility, anywayz, I'm going to a barbeque". I like the image of a "bold witness", like a creepy wide-eyed neighbour staring intently over a garden hedge.

The fourth tweet attempted quasi-science. "The universe is not the result of chance", announced Pope Eggs Benedictus, "We are invited to read something profound into it: the inexhaustible creativity of God". Of course he can't be sure of that, and anyone who thinks that they have a direct line with God, let me tell you - They Don't. I was hoping this tweet might inspire an atheist to upload a big bang theory animation onto YouTube with an Abba soundtrack, Take a chance Take a chance Take a ch-chan-chance. Or even better, Sir Ian McKellen playing God, drunkenly trying to make a universe out of clay with Laura Berry in the background shaking her head, arms folded. The universe is not a result of chance? How does The Pope know that? What if God got lucky and was like "Fuck! How did I do THAT? ROFL. I'm taking a photo of this for my Tumblr"

The fifth tweet was sent on Christmas day (poor Vatican intern, barely had time to empty his sack before he was back in the holy Twitter chamber, Sudocrem in the top draw). It said "See through the superficial glitter of this season and discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem." It's interesting how when the Pope says "season" you immediately think he's using fashion lingo not referring to horological sectors. The light imperative tone of "See through the superficial glitter of this season" sounds a bit Gok Wan doesn't it? Still, the Catholic Church know their stuff when it comes to superficial, have you ever stepped inside one of their churchs? Not an inch of gold decorum, decadence, ornate detail or unecessary fucking tat.

And so that's the Pope's Twitter. Whatever next? Nicki Minaj presenting an archaeology series? The Pope only has 31853 followers, so about 1/300th of Fearne Cotton's following. And the Pope follows nobody on Twitter, not even Stephen Fry or Goldie Hawn. What a bitch.

And to finish, here's a relevant YouTube sketch from the talented Christopher Kendall:

You can follow Chris on Twitter @Chris_Kendall_, and you can follow The Pope too - Google him if you're interested.

And then here's MY religion. Depeche Mode with their 1984 hit Master And Servant:

Elton John's Furniture Cusses Former Pop Queen and Part-Time Film-maker Madonna Ciccone. Again.

2012-01-16T12:16:00.000-08:00

Nobody likes a sore loser with a sore ass and so it is disappointing to read that Elton John's not-so-young-anymore (50 something?) toyboy David Furnish slated Madonna calling her "desperate and narcissistic" and started throwing foul language all over his Facebook page (imagine "liking" David Furnish on Facebook!) Why? Because Madonna beat Elton John at the Golden Globes giving her new Wallis Simpson movie W.E. priceless PR (as if it needs anymore what with her ability to queue-jump her ass onto any TV couch in the first world) whilst Furnish's movie-toon Gnomeo and Juliet is just days away from the bottom shelf of Asda next to Angelina Ballerina: The Anorexic Schizophrenia Years.

It's odd that Furnish chose "narcissistic" as a word to insult Madonna with, when Gnomeo and Juliet is a cartoon stuffed with cover versions of his own husband's songs (so basically his songs) and is essentially a DIY Elton John episode of Glee that sets out to establish Elton John's canon for a young audience, perhaps upon the realisation that nobody under 30 knows Elton John's music (I'm Still Standing fell flat on its face twenty years ago, Candle In The Wind is like Adele without the Barry M and a beehive, you only ever hear Crocodile Rock at alcoholic aunt's second weddings and Are You Ready For Bum Love? is hardly a floor filler).

Meanwhile Madonna is a self-confessed narcissist who has penned entire albums about her problems with getting over herself, drowning in her alter ego, realising that the pursuit of wealth is endless and hating her own mortality. And Madonna's music has stood the test of time. I thought Elton John was famous for throwing lavish parties.. well they can't be that good if there's no strip-teasing on the diving board to Like A Virgin at 4am. Madonna - a narcissist? It's like calling Naomi Campbell vain or Jo Brand fat.

Calling Madonna "desperate" too also comes across as slightly hypocritical when Furnish is a not-all-that-recognised film-maker who became famous when he married an eccentric gay pop star worth several hundred million pounds. My definition of desperate is using a swearful slinging match in the press to promote your latest children's animation. I'm not saying that David Furnish would be nothing if he hadn't fallen into bed with Elton John, but I don't think film history textbooks of the future will have all that many pages between Fellini and Godard. And whilst one can accuse Madonna of cherry-picking hot young producers to keep her music career afloat, it's not as if she hasn't got about 50 classics already tucked under her high-waist Louis belt. And it's not like Elton John is doing the same by shoe-horning Gaga into his bizarre new folk pop which somehow manages to sound more dated than pop music that is actually from the past.

Madonna's Golden Globe winning song Masterpiece may not be a show-stopper, but it's a perfectly apt song for her latest project W.E. and was written by two well-established songwriters, Julie Frost (whose credits include Beyonce's Countdown, Black Eyed Peas' Just Can't Get Enough and Germany's 2010 winning song at Eurovision Satellite) and Jimmy Harry (whose credits include Pink's Funhouse and Britney's underground gay sex soundtrack fave Touch Of My Hand) The song is simple and lulling but at the same time modestly charming and quite effective really.

Lady Gaga's involvement in Elton John's "Hello Hello" song complicates matters further as she is currently being construed in the media as Madonna's arch-nemesis. Madonna hasn't actually slated Gaga in the press in the fashion that Furnish would have us believe, in fact, Madonna responded quite cryptically and somewhat stylishly when forced to give comment on Gaga. All four adults in this blog post started out with nothing in life, but it would seem only Madonna has acquired some social conduct and (yes) even a little learnedness along the way.

If David Furnish thinks the Golden Globes "have nothing to do with merit" then he shouldn't bother to show up at them. But clearly he does, and if he had won at the weekend then I'm sure he would have heard nothing nasty from Madonna (because only Nelson Mandela and Diane Warren need awards less than Madonna) and we'd have all heard a very different story from Furnish. The Golden Globes are prestigious, watched by a wide audience and many British magazines ask their staff writers to do night-shifts in order to give the best possible live news coverage because they know that the Golden Globes always set a suit that the Oscars follow.

What is sad about this sore-loser bitching story is the damage and confusion that it could potentially thrust upon the gay community and the public's general perception of them. Elton John and David Furnish are possibly, if not deliberately, the most famous example of a gay couple in the world (I prefer the likes of David Geffen and Jeremy Lingvall myself, or Calvin Klein and Nick Gruber if they're still together).

Madonna, Lady Gaga and even Elton John have all brought pleasure, escapism and inspiration into the hearts of millions of gay men over the last 30 years (in Gaga's case 30 months (nearly)). So to see David Furnish as an expletive thorn in the side of this rose bush of iconic figures is really quite an ugly site and understandably an absolute feast for the Daily Mail.

I would like Elton John to be a respected and loved figure. He is a good songwriter, he has passed some serious milestones and he has raised some serious amounts of money for good causes. His appearance on Kate Bush's album 50 Words For Snow last year was powerful. He collects Henry Scott Tuke paintings which is great and he sang at Princess Diana's funeral. He shouldn't be wrapping himself up in these celeb cowpats and associating his name with a Gnome-based whore-out of a Shakespeare story, he should be relaxing in the Capri or going for nice healthy rambles with Alan Bennett and David Hockney, not puffing his cheeks at Madonna speeches. Love only exists between two beautiful bodies Elton and you haven't been making the most of your gym. Give in.

I haven't seen Madonna's film W.E. yet, and when I do there will be a whole lot of things to say about it on Jack of Hearts, notably the clandestine story of Jimmy Donahue - Wallis Simpson's incredibly powerful homosexual best friend who threw wild gay sex parties at his Long Island retreat, sometimes attended by the Duke himself. A biographical segment that no doubt didn't find its way into the final cut.

Still, I'm looking forward to Madonna's latest project, and I quite like the song Masterpiece, not that it's the sort of song I spend my leisure time listening to. If I was choosing a song to accompany the credits to a Wallis Simpon flick I'd have chosen this:

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson Move Into Haunted Gay Serial Killer Sex Pad Together

2012-01-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

One Direction stars Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are to co-purchase a £3million pound apartment in the former lunatic asylum Colney Hatch, according to Daily Mail reports, triggering more gay rumours amidst bitterly jealous nobodies. Personally I'm more excited by the prospect of boyband members spending money like water - usually the seeds of highly readable tragedy and tabloid despair. And even more exciting - their fantastically tasteless choice of home!

Former residents of the lunatic asylum Colney Hatch include the highly dangerous serial killer and rapist John Duffy, Jack The Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminski, and the profound and wild homosexual occultist Aleister Crowley. The building is said to be haunted by Dorothy Lawrence too, a woman who was banged up as a loony in 1925 for fighting in the First World War disguised as a man. She died in Colney Hatch in 1964 under suspicious circumstances.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the asylum (which strategically changed its name to Friern Hospital) fell into disrepair and abandon, looking not dissimilar to the house in Psychoville. Locals claimed the place to be haunted by the sounds of screams and echoes of groans from former patients who were tortured and sexually abused there, as well as daylight apparitions of contorted and malfunctioned faces in upstairs windows.

In the 1990s the building was turned into luxury flats by some smart property stooge and rebranded as Princess Park Manor - a name which for some reason appealed to Ashley Cole who swiftly moved in.

Are Harry and Louis gay with each other?

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are moving into the flat as friends. Harry Styles is a bit of a gay poster boy following his appearances at gay bars including Britain’s flagship gay club Heaven, and because he looks like the sort of annoying bratty boy you wanted to fuck at school. However the teenager identifies as a heterosexual male and to prove the point rather vividly he has been dating hard-faced TV presenter Caroline Flack who is in her thirties. Meanwhile Louis Tomlinson’s sexuality is still in question. Gay rumours bubbled after an interview with One Direction in which each boy named their celebrity girl crush apart from him. Several bloggers and online commentors decided Louis was gay on account of having a “gay face”, "dancing like a gay" and "looking totally gay", unfounded allegations which young girl fans firmly combatted by saying "He has a girlfriend actually. We just don't know what she's called or what she looks like or how we even know this."

To confuse the matter more Harry and Louis have developed their own pseudo-ironic bromance in the young teen press, posting YouTube videos of them kissing (hilarious) and saying on Twitter how much they love each other and want to make-out with each other (SO HILARIOUS!!! BECAUSE BEING GAY IS FUCKING HILARIOUS!!! HAA HAA HAAAAAA! GAY! JUST IMAGINE! HAAAAA!!!!!) an act which no doubt acts as a source of light amusement for Harry and a heart-crushing wasp gasp of precious snatched expression for Louis.

[If you're going to joke about being gay on Twitter at least make it witty and Tweet stuff like "Hey Harry, where did you put the Anusol cream? And why have you taken the lid off my Lynx, clumped Blu-tac around the nossle and put a condom over it?" (-13 characters) ]

Does Louis and Harry's new flat have any notable suspected closet gay former residents?

The apartment that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are buying with their feel-my-pocket money was formerly the rented home of professional footballer and tabloid skid mark Ashley Cole, another man who has had his fair share of gay rumours in the mainstream centre-right press after he was caught sharing skank photos on his phone that no woman on earth would ever be interested in seeing. Rumours that emerged several months prior to that when he married a shiny item found in Will.I.Am's handbag.

What else bad happened in Louis and Harry's new home the former lunatic killer asylum?

Colney Hatch was horrendously damaged by a fire in 1903. The screams of inmates could be heard from far around as 53 inmates were burnt alive – unable to escape the building because they were either strapped into chairs, blindfolded, or kept in pitch black cells with barred-up windows. The fire was shrouded in sinister suspicion of sadism on the part of the asylum's staff when not only was the aid of local men in the neighbouring area of North Finchley refused at the gates but firemen struggled to put the fire out when it emerged that several of the water supplies had been cut off.

Why live in N11? Not exactly a plush area code...

Why any modern-day millionaire, albeit a teenage one famed for winning a feckless and fascist karaoke contest, would intentionally choose to live in Enfield is beyond anyone, let alone a haunted former lunatic asylum hell hole that was not only a mass death site but was once lived in by Ashley Cole himself. Why not live in Highgate like Gwen Stefani, or buy a garden-locked mansion with a subterranean swimming pool in Kensington like J.K.Rowling? Oh wait, because the members of One Direction can't actually write music or words and so probably earn the equivalent of a Nando's duty manager. I mean come on - trending on Twitter everyday for two years and with about seventeen official calendars and they're only worth £2-3 mill each? Even June Sarpong earns more in royalties for Series 3 of Bo Selecta.

The only good thing about living in Enfield is that there are a lot of hot boys in the nearby East Finchley area who cannot accomodate and so are desperate for sex in other peoples' places. Also, if One Direction did another show at Heaven nightclub and caught the N29 bus home then they could quite safely fall asleep as Enfield is the last stop - useful.

Where do the other One Direction recruits live?

Louis and Harry's bandmates Niall, Zayn and thingy also live in the same compound at Princess Park Lunar Rainbow Mushroom Mansions or whatever the fuck it's called now. The boys even threw an ecstatic New Year’s Eve party there last weekend for 50 friends, an image that makes the building’s lunatic asylum years seem like some kind of golden era heyday. Diana Vickers posing with a WKD bottle inbetween her tits and someone from JLS DJ'ing on Spotify springs to mind.

Oh and for the record – whilst you've caught me blogging about One Direction - Harry Styles really isn’t that attractive. The clue to realising that Harry Styles isn't very attractive is to spend two solid seconds actually looking at his face...

He looks like if Gail's less attractive son in Coronation Street bred with a damp Oreo. Zayn Malik is the only hot guy in One Direction. Zayn Malik is really hot. Niall is cute in a sort of TY limited edition/ Happy Meal toy / Ferbie / stuffed baby owl sort of way and the other two just look like any average person waiting for any average school bus on any day of the year, it's just that the television has told you to fancy them and you do what the television tells you.

FINALLY, can I just point our how bizarre it is that the five members of One Direction still share a Wikipedia page. As much as I find it funny to see them categorised beneath 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 on the One Direction Wikipedia page they have enough going on in their individual lives to be treated by Wikipedia as seperate human beings now I think...

[Can one of you A&R creeps who secretly reads my blog and contacts the magazines that I sometimes contribute to complaining to my commissioning editors because I wrote what I genuinely thought about something instead of blogging like a pointless sychophantic Pizza Express dough ball of waif-life praise.. yeah, one of YOU... Can you pass the memo on please (when you get a free moment between eating lunch al desko (whilst watching your Daisy Lowe Twitter search column) and cold-calling Easy Living) and tell someone to sort the lads in One Direction out with their own fucking Wikipedia entries? Thanks].

FINALLY FINALLY. Why are One Direction making bizarre early-noughties style banjo-y McFly type rock music? Shouldn't they be pushing out catchy dancefloor pop with an urban edge like the massively more succesful JLS?

I've forgotten what I was blogging about.

Right, I'm off to Prowler in search of a housewarming gift for Louis and Harry.

Just to help you forget the tacky Orwellian bacterial low culture of this blog post and back up on your feet again, here's an amazing moment from 30 Rock:

Reading By Kindle Light

2012-01-04T05:21:00.000-08:00

I was thrilled to receive my antique book cover style Kindle4 case this morning. Check it out! The cases are handmade in Hampshire by a family firm called Manor Bindery and they only set you back about £25.

Originally I planned to buy myself a metallic leopard print Diane Von Furstenberg Kindle cover, but she wasn't selling them in her Mayfair store, nor was she selling them in her Wimbledon store. The DVH shop assistant TOLD ME TO TRY THE NEDERLANDS and quite frankly I haven't got the time to chase Diane and her fashionable literary accesssories around the globe.

Then I discovered this Hampshire family who make beskoke antique book jackets for Kindle4 and my quest was over. They even gift-wrapped the case and sent me a beautiful hand-written note with the purchase -

They do all sorts of different book covers but I chose Bram Stoker's Dracula because it's a gorgeous silvery blue, and of course Bram Stoker was a fantastic psycho-sexual author. Dracula is just pumping with homoerotic subtexts and various explorations of same-sex fascination. As 21st century readers with the privilege of hindsight and posthumous closet-smashing we now know that Bram Stoker wrote confessional gay letters to the American poet Walt Whitman and he was also infatuated with the gay stage actor Henry Irving and the Soho underworld of the late 19th century. In fact the vampire genre, like the pirate genre, is an almost exclusively homosexual circle of texts but of course future generations will possibly forget this thanks to the bludgeoning box office of heterosessed (yet inexplicably gay) Hollywood and the likes of Kristen frying-pan-face Stewart. Still, they'll have Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With The Vampire to serve as a reminder, although even that movie was a depressingly flattened heterosessed rendition of Anne Rice's gay sex packed novel.

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah. What I love about KleverCase's Kindle covers is that you can slide your Kindle into a bookcase and disguise it as a book!

I must admit I haven't quite got into my Kindle yet. I still have a stack of retro paper books lined up to read, but I do like the fact that you can email documents to Kindles. If you write poetry or fiction and would like to email it to me on my Kindle then please do give me a shout on Twitter @jackcullenuk. I'd love to read your stuff.

KleverCases are available on http://www.manorbindery.co.uk/

No More Taxis, No More Evening Standard and Plastic Surgery: My New Year's Resolutions 2012

2012-01-03T05:44:00.000-08:00

Last January it was brought to my spinning attention that I was neglecting good friends in favour of increasingly dubious one night stands. Missed calls from former uni chums were neatly archiving themselves in my phone unnoticed whilst bed sheets were being laundered and toilet rolls replaced so rapidly in my apartment that Premier Inn looked into buying me out.

So when a boy I met in Heaven left my front door open at 3am (stealing enroute via the living room my Oyster, my phone charger, a lighter and a scarf belonging to the boy from the night before) I realised that my friends were right and so I adopted the 2011 New Year’s Resolution “STOP SLEEPING WITH TW*TS”. I wrote this blog post about twelve months ago on the subject called Bros Before Hoes.

One year on I am pleased to announce that “STOP SLEEPING WITH TW*TS” was a success. I’m still cool with one night stands, I just try to make more considered choices. Anyone like me who goes in for a bit of recreational sex is always going to make a few mistakes, like the guy who stubbed his cigarette out in an open pot of moisturiser, the guy who somehow managed to smash two wine bottles against the side of my bath tub, the guy who slung a used condom against my bookcase and the “media studies” student I met at a Little Mix PA who said “If you wanted to be a journalist why did you study English? Why didn’t you study media or journalism?” and was then sick all over my shoe rack.

But generally speaking it was a tw*t-free year. No text message plaguers, no angry women on doorsteps, no bare backing pests, no thieves and only one minor stalker. I only visited saunas three times last year - once with a curious friend who had never been, once to wash-off the grime of an East London basement party, and once to kill time before a delayed train. I took a friend with me whenever possible on my Heath walks a lot this year too in order to deter the temptations of the male gaze, taking an interest in Hampstead's fauna rather than its fornication. Finally I cut down on Twitter’s addictive Direct Message underworld of half-lies and shapeless lust.

Obviously I let my hair down on holiday, but I used a defence wall of cultured questions for vetting men such as “What’s your favourite Italian opera?” or “Who is your favourite Booker Prize winner?”

Just kidding, I was a total pop-headed slut on holiday.

But I'm happy to admit that I’m not quite there yet. It’s a work in progress.

And so since “STOP SLEEPING WITH TW*TS” is an ongoing roll-over resolution, I’m going easy on myself this year and adopting just three trivial, manageable New Year’s Resolutions for 2012:

1) Only get taxis after 2am

2) Totally ignore the Evening Standard

3) Become an expert on the history of plastic surgery

There are exceptions. For example taxis are always essential in Vauxhall no matter what time of evening, and I love the Evening Standards’ restaurant reviews.

As for the history of plastic surgery, I think it’s healthy to have a pet Mastermind subject each year and I’ve been somewhat inspired by a blue plaque not far from me dedicated to Sir Harold Gillies. Plastic surgery strikes me as a haunting field of interest and I cannot wait to buy some books on the subject. Sorry if you read this blog post thinking that I was planning on going under the surgeon's knife.

So there it is.

I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, here’s Chloe with her New Year’s Resolutions:

[Picture at top of post is an artwork by Cindy Sherman]

Fox and Flyte: Queeny Victoriana, Closet Nouveau or just Neopets for Kidults?

2011-12-30T04:06:00.000-08:00

From hot men to walk your dogs to explicit badges to pop on your satchel - Anything can be whisked into an online business these days. And who knows, it may be your oneday child's ticket to marrying a prince. My friend just introduced me to a lovely little blog called Fox and Flyte because...

"EVERYONE is talking about Fox and Flyte"

Fox and Flyte is a gorgeous fusion of online curiosity shop and fashion blog, tinged with self-consciously posh notes, equipped with its own queer fashion label offshoots, neatly squashed into a Wordpressy format and published to look like some kind of arthouse Tory manifesto.

Curated by Duncan Campbell, Haeni Kim and Luke Edward Hall, Fox and Flyte has received a nice slice of coverage along the gentler slopes of the British press. Luke designs Frida Kahlo inspired garments for Patrick Wolf occasionally, Kim cooks up exquisite gourmet treats whilst Duncan has done a splash of modelling in gay-but-not-gay-but-so-gay magazines like Another Man.

There are wooden drinks trays, candle snuffers, seafood accessories, stories from Tuscany, photos from Polo Clubs and miscellaneous snaps of Luke in mildly suggestive poses...

Fox and Flyte flirts with its readers, inviting us to taste Kim's hollandaise sauce, daring us not to be jealous of Duncan's glass-in-hand lifestyle and treating us to bizarre wealth-fantasy anecdotes like this:

"We had a go at playing lords of the manor in this splendid Queen Ann house [sic], with its panelled walls, ornate fireplaces and grand sweeping staircases. The weather outside was at points verging on the exceedingly bleak, but our trip was made all the better for it. We had the fires lit, shutters closed, and litres of red wine to keep us going through the long English November nights"

As I read deeper into Fox and Flyte's grotto of possibly-not-ironic snobbery I found something hauntingly familiar... I'd been to this place before. Was it memories from my own prep school days? Or visits to my "hold white wine by the stem, red wine by the bowl" grandparents? Or perhaps the closet - Did Fox and Flyte feel like being back in the closet again? That whole world of "If I shroud myself in enough expensive paraphernalia and wear show-stopping socks then Daddy might not realise I like boys' thumbs up my bum"? Or was it a hybrid of former interests - the Jack Wills handbook as written by David Starkey?

Then it STRUCK me. Fox and Flyte is JUST LIKE NEOPETS!

Well, elements of Neopets.

Most of you won't know what Neopets is/was. That's because I've deliberately cultivated a blog to appeal to people who are either a lot cooler than me, or who were born in the 1990s.

Neopets was a craze in the late 90s. A kids website that was like Pokemon meets Barbie. Basically, a consumerist and overtly aesthetic gaming website for little girls and gays. Basically, Fox and Flyte.

Here is Fox and Flyte's shop:

Note the proud lack of pragmatism and deliberate steering towards mainstream eccentricity.

And here is an example of a Neopets shop:

Ooh look, there's a Snazzy Moon Comb there going for only 220 Neopoints. Bargain.

Of course the curators of Fox and Flyte are an essential part of their brand. Out with the refined days of Bill Blass and Nicole Farhi, we want to see who's selling to us, we want distorted segments from their alter ego lives, we want to be TURNED ON. So here they are. Duncan, Kim and Luke concentrating hard on summoning some serious allure:

(The one on the left, definitely)

And similarly in Neopia, the equally fictitious land in which Neopets is set, it was always important for shop keepers to have a personality and act out a desired persona. Here is Nimmo. He used to run the bookshop in Neopia:

See! Once you've met Nimmo you ain't going to no Waterstones no more. Just look at his gorgeous vintage sleeveless V-neck and those Pringle of Scotland asparagus slacks.

Anyways, my 20 minutes is up. But there we have it. A gorgeous little lifestyle blog / shop (shog? blop?), and a flashback to my own childhood.
Clearly all of us are still collecting, still harbouring for the right aesthetic, still looking for a stamp of approval, still searching for answers that are never going to come.

NYE at Heaven this year looks SO SHIT - Why do they keep doing this?

2011-12-26T03:06:00.000-08:00

I was a bit baffled to see this advert in BOYZ for Heaven, Britain's flagship gay club, for their New Year's Eve party. Traditionally the club has scene acts like Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue and Madonna taking to the stage for NYE. This year? Two X-Factor drop-outs Stacey Soloman and Kitty Brucknell. And Joey from The Only Way Is Essex...

To put it another way. Two ladies who once entered a glorified karaoke contest and lost, and a man who basically lives in one of the home counties and appeared in a reality TV show, so essentially - just two women and a man, all of whom you couldn't even name this time two years ago.

Tickets for the night cost £12, which is cheap for NYE in London, but quite steep for Heaven considering I saw Sophie Ellis-Bexter for £1 there and Goldfrapp for £4 (any X-Factor fans reading - you might need to Google Goldrapp, they're pretty good, don't be scared by all the "music"). The poster also states that entry is only before midnight - I'm not sure if by entry they mean "entry to the queue" which in itself can take up to two hours because you have to join yards of unimaginative gay cattle. Anyways, "Tickets only valid until midnight" sounds like a fucking nightmare, I can already picture the door staff drama.

Stacey Solomon is billed as "Queen of the Jungle", because after X-Factor she appeared on another ITV show, one in which she sat around in a junglesque TV set for a few weeks - riveting. Meanwhile Kitty Brucknell is donned "X-Factor Diva", which literally means nothing.

Finally - the night has been called - wait for it - "The Only Way Is 2012" ........ a sad reminder to us all that nobody can turn the clocks back and so we are unlikely to ever see a proper pop star in Heaven again. I don't understand why G-A-Y has subjected us now to three entire years of relentless PAs from reality TV nobodies. The gay community pioneers pop culture, so why does Heaven constantly treat us like sick-sucking thick-as-shit ITV gloats? Give Peaches a call, find Patrick Wolf - he could teach the twinks a thing or two about culture, get Grace Jones' agent on the line. Get some good DJs in the other rooms, like Busy P, Armand Van Helden or Felix Da Housecat. Get some theatrically talented hosts, not a fake-tanned git from "The Only Way Is Essex". There are local gay hosts who are amazing like Lady Imelda, Lizzy Drip and Boogaloo Stu, so why burn cash on Joey fucking Nobody?

So.....
.... as much as I'd like to go to Heaven on NYE to see an uneducated talentless man from Essex, a reality TV star singer with no album and an unsigned crackpot Gaga wannabe, not to mention listen to Jeremy Joseph rattling away at thousands of uninterested boys down a microphone, I think we're going to head to France this year for some actual fun.

Oh. Here's another of BOYZ magazine's classic double page spreads taken from the same issue. It's all about Stacey Soloman and domestic violence:

Goldfrapp Singles Collection: Yellow Halo

2011-12-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

I learnt this morning off Alasdair that Goldfrapp are to release a singles collection in February, containing two new songs including this gem below Yellow Halo. The video just fills me with envy it's so beautiful how Alison and Will have used their talents to just escape the world.

Watch the video to Yellow Halo here:

Goldfrapp's music is important to me because it helped me realise that all that matters in this life is experiencing as much as possible, taking yourself on adventures, investing in friends, and mapping out your life on instinct and feeling, not convention and tuition. Goldfrapp really capture the brevity, insignificance and sheer beauty of life, and at the same time also its longevity and ancestry.

There were a few negative whispers in the gay media's rumour wheel last year about Goldfrapp, because Alison refused to discuss her girlfriend, and so some people saw that as a self-loathing sales-calculating stunted type of coming out, a "Mike Stipe coming out", arguably worse than being in the closet. But whilst Alison may have been a bit short-fused with some journalists, treating them like tabloid sewer rats, I think people also caught hold of the wrong end of the stick. Alison isn't a celesbian. She is a person who has realised that there are no lines.

Goldfrapp's back catelogue really is a journey, and this song Yellow Halo does seem rather like an ending. Let's hope it isn't quite the end though.

Here's a piece I wrote on Goldfrapp last year in which I attempt to paraphrase rather poetically what it is that I like about each of their albums: Goldfrappuccino

Here is my review of Goldfrapp's last album Head First. Clearly I was a bit miffed by it, but I was wrong, and the record has matured magnificently. Head First is a great album.

Richard Dennen: Embarrassingly Below-Standard Gay Journalism

2011-12-04T07:06:00.000-08:00

I wanted to vomit earlier this week when a friend sent me a link to Richard Dennen’s feature for the Evening Standard on “The Gay Tribes of London”. A feature which set out to be a witty round-up of London’s key micro-scenes within the overall gay scene, but one that read like the drunken ramblings of a middle-aged road-sweeper in Capri who perhaps once visited London in 2002.

Laughably generalised, gapingly incorrect and embarrassingly crass – I worry that gay teenagers around Britain might read Dennen’s piece and think that our scene is a shambolic charm-bracelet of sour clichés. Thankfully nobody reads Dennen’s work here in London other than a handful of watchful media gays like me and the odd closet-case. In fact it must depress Dennen if he ever takes the Tube to see how people glance for a split second at his often-pointless work before hastily turning the page.

We've spent years praying that if the Evening Standard insist on using Richard Dennen then could they please ask him to change the subject from his own invented social life and shout-outs to his random flatmate. But now I think I preferred his self-obsessed faeces-esque features to this off-key "written during the advert break" drivel.

So, here is a blog post ironing out a few of the many creases in Dennen’s poorly-observed portrayal of the London gay scene. I've tried to be nice because you just know Dennen is one of those journos that relentlessly Googles himself whilst his Mum goes to the toilet in Pizza Express.

"EAST END BOYS"

Dennen’s stinky section heading “East End Boyz” says it all really. He hasn’t got the faintest idea where to find East London’s fashionista gay “tribe”. He mentions the most obvious venues, The George & Dragon, The Joiners and East Bloc, the latter he describes as “The new gay hang out” – if you’re definition of new is YEARS. East Bloc is a great club but it certainly doesn’t have a “club kids” vibe, on the contrary it is often nearly empty. The George & Dragon has a decent core of middle-aged regulars too, strong bald-headed blokes who arrive early and fill out the seating booths. Better examples of underground East London gay venues would be The Oval where BUTT magazine recently held a massive party, The Macbeth on Hoxton St which is home to Polly Sexual’s annual Tranny Olympics, and of course Dalston – which doesn’t appear anywhere in Dennen’s feature despite it being London’s third largest cluster of gay bars what with places like Dalston Superstore, Vogue Fabrics and Moustache Bar.

Dennen praises the East End saying “gays can dress how they feel without anyone batting an eye-lid”. I just pray that a provincial gay teenager doesn’t read his feature and turn up at Old Street tube’s myriad of exits wearing a fur jacket and heels. East London is quite dangerous, there is a lot of crime on the streets, violent muggings and stark scenes of poverty. I wouldn’t advise anyone to dress outlandishly in East London unless they are out with a tight group of friends, and take a coat! Yes the occasional gay boy turns up at The Joiners with Mechano on his head, and yes people look trendy but it's not exactly James St. James. Leigh Bowery's London is long gone, today East London is all statement t-shirts and overt skinniness.

Dennen cites Jonny Woo as East London’s “trannie to know”. Whilst Woo is still an institution, he was really at the height of his game nearly ten years ago in 2003 and today makes fewer and fewer appearances due to his writing and other pursuits. A better tranny to name-drop would have been Polly Sexual or Crystal Meth.

“The Lambeth Walkers”

Dennen describes Vauxhall as “the old-school gayhood of the twink and "Muscle Mary type who hit Fire, the club under the arches in Vauxhall on South Lambeth Road, because they think that's what being gay is about”. Overlooking the insulting nuances of his sentence and his almost unreadable clunky syntax, Dennen is entirely wrong. You hardly ever see twinks in Vauxhall. Twinks, incidently, look like this:

Men in Vauxhall tend to look like Francois Sagat:

Lots of muscle, not that much Mary.

Fire is an odd club for Dennen to pick out, because whilst it is obvious and well-known, it is more of an after-hours club for those who have been drinking in Soho and who jump on the 88 bus when Heaven closes.

“Land of the sauna” is a bizarre statement to attribute to Vauxhall. There is one gay sauna in Vauxhall and another near Waterloo. London has about ten gay saunas and they are evenly spread around the city, from Limehouse to Fitzrovia to Turnpike Lane. Maybe Dennen should add a bit of variety to his swimming timetable.

“Wearing checked shirts and a fair share of leather tumbling out of the leather clubs. How terribly on-trend” – Have you EVER seen someone come out of The Hoist wearing a checked shirt? No me neither. And how embarrassingly weak is it when Dennen bows down to his Evening Standard readers by throwing a “How terribly on trend” jibe. It’s just pointless and crap.

“The Two Brewers on Clapham High Street might be stronger on the older gay who likes to pretend he's young with a bit of designer stubble and an Abercrombie T-shirt” – This is rich coming from Dennen, a man whose journalism strives to create the impression that he is a young hipster (he used to have a CAP in his Evening Standard mug shot!). How does Dennen want middle-aged gay men to dress? Perhaps in tacky statement blazers and sunglasses? The Two Brewers is a fantastic gay pub visited by young, middle-aged and old men alike. I first set foot in there when I was 18 and I certainly didn’t feel too young for it, there are loads of gay kids there, Boogaloo Stu the gay scene's honorary kids TV presenter used to run a night there for fuck's sake! Also – lumping Clapham and Vauxhall together is clumsy. They’re both beneath the Thames but they’re completely different parts London.

I don’t like it how Dennen doubts the team at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern when he writes “whose organisers describe themselves as purveyors of progressive working class entertainment”. THEY ARE purveyors of progressive working class entertainment! Also, David Hoyle doesn’t receive any Arts Council funding, it was denied this year - so that's wrong too. Dennen rounds off his misjudged portrait Vauxhall with the hilarious (pass me a bucket) observation “How Establishment can you get?” – as if we should all ridicule Amy Lame for her constant community endeavours and David Hoyle’s tireless campaigning for Shelter, MenCap and the Elton John Aids Foundation.

Finally, Vauxhall isn't "old school". It attracts an older crowd but strictly speaking, and perhaps interestingly to Evening Standard commuters, it is a much younger scene than Soho, originally a deliberate alternative to Soho, hence its nickname Voho - a word which is completely absent from Dennen's piece. Molly Mogs is OLD SCHOOL, not Barcode where they play modern-to-the-minute house.

“The Camden Kids”

“The north London scene revolves around Camden where the gays are talking about music and whoever is playing later that night at KoKo or the Roundhouse...Main interests include hitting the skate parks, playing with their bands or discussing the new shades of illamasqua make-up or nail varnish”. This is completely fictitious and sounds like a personal fantasy. A skating gay tribe who hang out in Camden? The truth is North London doesn’t really have a gay scene, everyone travels into Soho or heads East. Yes, Camden has a gay-friendly vibe and is very studenty but it’s not a gay scene. The Black Cap is constantly struggling to fill its bar stools, The King William in Hampstead has been all but dispossessed by the gay community, whilst The Green in Angel doesn’t feature anywhere in Dennen’s piece, probably because lesbians drink there. In fact lesbians have been completely excluded from Dennen’s feature. A more interesting feature might be ‘Why Is London’s Lesbian Scene Being Systematically Shut Down In Front Of Our Eyes’?

“The West End Gays”

“Conversation is film and TV with arguments about Madonna or Gaga on the tip of the tongue. It is here that one can also find an unusually high number of guys who take their dogs to work”. I have no idea what Dennen is describing here, it certainly isn’t the West End. And Madonna? Nobody has uttered a word about Madonna since 2006. The West End’s gay scene is Soho, it includes G-A-Y, G-A-Y Late, Ku Bar, The Edge, Green Carnation, Lo Profile, Freedom, Escape, Village, The Admiral Duncan, Comptons, The Yard and other venues. None of them hold anyone remotely like the imagined character in Dennen’s feature. It’s as if Dennen has met one man in Soho ten years ago and is using his faded memory as a blue print for one of the world’s largest and most famous gay scenes. Shocking.

“By the weekend they've fled Soho with their other-half to the country, the dog and the wi-fi” – What the fuck is Dennen writing about? It’s just drivel stirred with the cynical leer of an ageing singleton.

Dennen cites Lady Lloyd as the tranny to know for the West End. Well, kind of, but she DJs around the entire city and has a resident slot at Mission in Leeds where she hails from.

London’s gay scene is ever-changing, galactic and complex. There are no “tribes” but merely trends and hubs of commonality. London's gay scene is interchangeable and overlapping, it is complex, which is why penning it all down in a paraphrasal feature is a task befitting for an accomplished gay writer, say Richard Gray or Alex Needham.

I just wish Dennen would use his generously given platform with the Evening Standard to write insightful, hearty features that add something to our community, rather than constantly holding up his smeared mirror to the gay community with that creepy insecure smirk of his. It's not our fault that you're gay Richard.

RELATED LINKS:

"Is There A Point To Richard Dennen?" on Drowned In Sound.
"Richard Dennen: The Worst Columnist in London" by Scott Bryan.
"Richard Dennen: The Standard's New Gay Columnist" by Caspar Aremi for SoSoGay
"Richard Dennen: The Single Worst Thing Written by Anyone Ever" by The Urban Woo
Richard Dennen's Work on the Evening Standard website

Worst Male Dating Habits: My New Blog Series with The Huff Post's Emma Gannon!

2011-12-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

I have started a collaborative blog-post series with Emma Gannon, a wonderful heterosexual female (form a cue Adam) who writes for the Huffington Post (aren't they just totally everywhere right now).

The series is called "Online Dating Gripes". We both realised, Emma and I, that we spend a lot of time ridiculing how bad so many men are when it comes to writing profiles on dating websites. I obviously use gay ones like GAYdar and GAYromeo and fitLADS. Emma prefers ethereal ones for ladies, so stuff like eHarmony, PlentyOfFish (eeew) and Naked Candlelit Dinners.

Here is a photo of what Emma Gannon looks like, as I know some of my readers have never met a woman before (she's on the right):

Emma looks a little non-plussed in that photo, and I totally know how she feels, when Z-list former girlband nothings keep harrassing journalists to have their photo taken with them. Here is Emma looking more like her usual self:

Anyway. Enough photographs of Emma. Let's get on with this new blog series "Online Dating Gripes". The first post is on Emma's blog and you can read it HERE!

(photo credit: Gene Kiegel via Homotography)

Strap It On

2011-11-17T15:32:00.000-08:00

I've no idea what 'Strap It On' is, but the female character in this billboard image reminds me of Caitlin Moran. I don't have a computer games console so I don't really know what's going on here, but it looks like a more camp version of Tekken, if that's possible.

Also - what was that music video with the guy with really large hands / white gloves. I think it was directed by Chris Cunningham or Sophie Muller?

2011-11-17T06:02:00.000-08:00

Has Cliff Richard done any acting? I think he'd be great in a biopic about lapsed Catholic police officer turned homosexual corpse rapist Dennis Nilsen...

Gay Times 400th Issue! (+ G-A-Y Late Gripe)

2011-11-11T06:17:00.000-08:00

GT400 is out – Gay Times’ 400th Issue !!!

My feature in this issue is “Best British Gay Clubs of All Time”, one of several celebratory lists in this exciting issue. I included a broad array of gay clubs in my feature, from funky dirty stop-outs like the New Penny in Leeds all the way up to the highest echelon of gay partying like TRADE (which used to be at the superclub Turnmills). The list is past as well as present you see, so I spoke to some older guys for ideas and even checked up on a few gay celebrities like Gok Wan, Alan Carr and Brendan from Coach Trip to see where they used to take their glad rags on a Friday.

Above is a photograph of Heaven in the 1980s, published here with kind permission from Gay Times. Look at all the shirts, and all that healthy and conditioned hair! The whole affair looks very village hall, no outrageous Single Ladies routines or boys scratching clumps of brick off the walls giving their Britney impressions. No it all looks very sombre and autumnal, you can just hear Kraftwerk’s keyboard riffs steadily plonking along. Although I’m sure if something off Madonna's Immaculate Collection was playing we’d see a very different image!

I do have one partial regret with my feature, however, which is the inclusion of G-A-Y Late:

I put G-A-Y Late in my list of Best Ever Gay Clubs for its solid presence and affordability, writing “In a constantly pressurised Soho, challenged by the internet and alternative London scenes, G-A-Y Late delivers consistency, reliability and lots of hot boys”.

BUT... recently I’ve heard reports of completely sober people being refused admission at G-A-Y Late on the grounds that they look too drunk, and then told to try Heaven (which weirdly is linked to G-A-Y Late so seems a bit of an inappropriate recommendation if the door staff really do believe the person to be unsuitable for entry?).

Furthermore, I recently heard a bouncer myself stood outside G-A-Y Late saying to a group of boys “You three can come in, but he can’t”. It was astonishing to watch this man playing God, trying to fork a group of young friends apart and inflict an onus of contempt onto one innocent individual - shocking. None of them looked drunk to me, they were all nicely dressed and glowing with composure, whilst some of the boys in the smoking area looked paralytic pissing against a neighbouring builders’ site. Anyway, what would that singled-out boy do – just roam around London on his own? Thankfully they had the sense to take their party elsewhere, but it did leave me wondering – how often do door staff fracture groups of friends for no apparent reason?

Besides, even if boys are drunk, is that not the point of being out in Soho at midnight and turning up at a gay dive like G-A-Y Late? We’re all adults here. I don’t want a gay scene that is overly-surveilled, high security and nouveau-puritan. Don't even get me started on toilet security staff, sorry, I mean "perfume assistants" or whatever the fuck they're fobbed off as. I'd like to see what a Tom of Finland character would do to a security guard in a gay club toilet holding out a can of cheap deodarant...

I don’t want to single G-A-Y Late out. I’m sure they do a fantastic job generally, and we’ve all had fun nights in there. The bar certainly deserves its place in my feature – simply for existing! I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but the Soho gay scene is receding? – Like, where can you go after midnight on a Friday in Soho? Three places? Four maybe? Some say it's a hush-hush knock-knock inside job type thing, but I highly doubt it. If you own a gay bar in Soho then the last thing you want is no other gay bars nearby - the choice attracts people to the area. That's the secret of Vauxhall - you never plan what to do in Vauxhall, you just turn up with your credit card and bounce around.

But yes – I wish gay clubs would just chill out a bit on the door. You’re not the Groucho or Shoreditch House, you’re four walls, cheap vodka and a Rihanna song. The men who run these joints seem to have forgotten their own youths - we're a community of lovers, not a cattleshed of idiots. Well...

So. Got all that off my chest. You can now read my feature "Best British Gay Clubs of All Time" - and marvel at just how many wonderful gay clubs there are in Britain.

And like I said, this month’s Gay Times is “GT400” - the 400th issue. It’s great to think just how long the magazine has been around, starting out at as HIM Magazine decades before I was even born. Before the internet Gay Times was the only place men could find listings of gay bars and clubs. During the outbreak of HIV Gay Times was one of the few publications that wrote accurately and helpfully on the topic amidst an ocean of tabloid scare stories, falsity and sensation. I always like to ask older gay guys when they first bought Gay Times. 9 times out of 10 they'll have a rich and colourful story about pinching it from a newsagents in Wiltshire or stashing it in a cushion cover so Mum wouldn't notice. And here we are today – still chatting, still joking, still loving, still healthy and still strong - you see people reading GT on the tube. Fantastic.

If it wasn’t for the long hard slog of Gay Times, and their decades-long battle against institutionally homophobic advertising agencies, then we would be in the position we are today – with a range of gay magazines in Britain, both the free ones packed with club promotions and the pricier ones with their articles on gay farmers and lovely selection of Topman sweaters. I'm so indebted to a long line of serious gay journalists who stamped out a firm territory so that today, in 2011, people like me have the acceptance and creative space to blabber on about any old tit-for-tat.

GT400 comes in four different covers: Lady Gaga, Sir Ian McKellan, sexy gay diver Matthew Mitcham and openly gay X-Factor contesant Joe McElddery. All of these smashing people feature in the mag too.

My favourite features in this issue are Jamie Tabberer’s interview with Paul O’Grady, and the list of “40 Best Ever Gay Songs” compiled by gay DJ duo Hits & Mrs.

BUY YOUR COPY OF GT400 HERE NOW!

JC xx

Innocent Smoothie Gay Soap Operas

2011-11-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

The Big Knit is back on!

That's right - Innocent Smoothies are back in Sainsbury's and Boots outlets wearing their adorable tiny knitted hats. 25p from each bottle goes straight to Age UK who give hot meals, blankets and company to the neglected and elderly folks in our atomicised community.

I bought three just now, selecting ones with hats that spoke to me. I really wouldn't want to inflict the rest of this blog post on anybody. it's literally me rambling for therapy on my lunch break. So please do stop reading now. The basic message of this blog post is "LOOK!" "INNOCENT SMOOTHIES!" "CHARITY!" "CUTE KNITTED HATS!" "GET SOME!" - But if you insist on reading more:

Here is a story based around the characters in the picture above:

I've named the mangoes and passion fruits smoothie Faye, inspired by Faye Dunaway as Milady de Winter in The Three Muskateers in which she thrusts her bosoms before a young Michael York. Faye lives in a quiet English village, and she spends her time sitting by the river painting in watercolours and playing pooh sticks, guarding her secret. However, this afternoon she will not be alone...

I've called the kiwis, apples and limes smoothie Michael. He is an attractive English Literature enthusiast who lives with his parents in the village rectory. Michael goes for long introspective walks along snowy river banks, pondering over a recent realisation that is very dear to him, knowledge of a natural and powerful order that remains a secret to his parents...

I've named the pomegranates, blueberries and acai smoothie Jamie. He collects football stickers and lives in the same village as Michael. He often sees Michael plodding off down the road in his wellies during the Christmas holidays as he embarks on one of his wintery walks. Today Jamie is going to come to terms with his feelings for Michael, so he pops on his orange knitted hat that his nan knitted for him and follows Michael into the woods...

I shan't reveal how the story progresses. You'll have to imagine the rest in your head. But I'll tell you this much... it ends with Faye Dunaway cooking up a hearty breakfast whilst Michael and Jamie wake up to the smell of bacon on her pull-out sofa bed. And although the boys have come a long way together in one night, are they ready to learn Faye's secret?

Now go and buy some Innocent smoothies and think-up your own cosy gay soap opera pilot.

This is possibly the worst blog post I've ever written on Jack of Hearts. I just caught up in a fluster over how adorable the little knitted hats are. And I like to imagine teenage boys courting each other in their Christmas holidays.

Whilst reading the blog post did you scroll up to remind yourself what Michael looked like? Ok phew, you're as insane as me.

You can find out more about Innocent smoothies and The Big Knit on their Facebook page here:
www.facebook.com/innocentdrinks

Meet Alan Craig: The "Gaystapo" are ruining his life apparently...

2011-11-08T04:19:00.000-08:00

What is this man Alan Craig so ANGRY about? His blog post “Confronting The Gaystapo” is just so embarrassing, especially with that awful photo of himself reclining against the side of a sofa – JESUS CHRIST it’s just awful. To think Andy Warhol died over 20 years ago, Oscar Wilde 100 and this old creep seems to think he’s the voice of convention?

My Dad told me never to trust a man with two first names, and my Mum thinks that Alan Craig’s clashing cushion covers are sickening. That’s right, I’m talking about my Mum and Dad here – because you know what – it so happens that I have a family and despite being gay, I didn’t grow on a tree like most gays, I’m the child of two people. We love each other, we’re a happy family, and we don’t argue anywhere near as much as some of our overtly Christian friends.

Both of my parents go to church (not that I'm proud of that fact), the same Church of England that Alan Craig here has made himself the self-elected spokesperson for. I don’t go to church. I left home to go to Leeds in 2006 and now I live in Hampstead and spend my Sunday mornings cuddling up in bed with a nice boy or watching E4. I lost faith in the church after a vicar wanted to wash me once during Sunday school, also I found the hymns dragged ON and ONNN and when they ditched those nice dusty hymnbooks for some tacky overhead projector – well that was the last straw. Charles Wesley didn't spend entire evenings penning his musical genius by candlelight so that we could stand in front of a wobbly pull-down screen with a little karaoke ball bouncing along the Comic fucking Sans.

I still go to church occasionally but only because I admire the architecture, music and paintings that adorn ecclesiastical buildings, many of which are the results of gay men’s handiwork over the years. And sometimes there are new gay guys in the congregation and we chat over weak lemon squash and stale biscuits at the post-service refreshments and then meet up a few days later to have sex. But generally speaking, the Church of England is a piss-stinking shambles these days. Oh how Christopher Wren would weep if he saw the broken hand-dryers and clumps of urine-soaked tissues on the floor in St. Paul’s. Sorry - I know I'm generalising here, but so is our friend Alan Craig when he compares GAY PEOPLE .... to .... NAZIS. (Incidentally, there were actually a lot of gay senior Nazis, what with Hitler shacking up with men in prison between the wars, but that's another story. Alan Craig here isn't talking about Ernst Rohm and the Pink Swastika, no, he's just being a tool).

Alan Craig is three times my age and he writes like a village idiot. His opening paragraph contains a machine-gun-like firing line of random hyperlinks, all labelled as “HERE”, “HERE”, “HERE” (he does know you can drag a hyperlink across text right ?) He comes across like some kind of frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic in an episode of Midsomer Murders.

On his deliberately belligerent and inexcusably horrid and insensitive comparison between gay rights activists and Hitler’s expansionist foreign policy, I will say only this:

The defeat of Hitler was a colossal worldwide collaborative effort. Amongst the millions who fought and died fighting against his dictatorship there were thousands of gay men, gay men who were fighting and dying for the freedom of a country that at that time didn’t even acknowledge who they were. Alan Craig’s pathetic blog post is an insult to the stolen young lives of those men. There might have been millions of other deaths too if it wasn’t for the brilliant mind of one man – Alan Turing – a homosexual who cracked the Nazis’ code, and how was he thanked? By being chemically castrated and driven into suicide.

Alan Craig praises Winston Churchill in his blogpost, holding him up as an emblem of individual thought and resistance. Of course some of Winston Churchill’s closest friends were gay, and his pal Robin Maugham (the far-too-often overlooked nephew of a less-good closet-gay playwright Somerset Maugham) even writes in his fantastic autobiography Escape The Shadows of secret meetings in which Churchill consulted homosexual friends and relations. Incidentally Robin Maugham once wrote a fantastic allegorical novel called The Sign which illustrated how “Jesus” was a political PR ploy masterminded by two gay men. Anyway, it was banned of course and now we’ve got Mel Gibson. It's a shame though as the gay Jesus sex scene is quite beautifully written. Long live Somerset and all the Maughams.

I'm trying to show you how laughably simplistic Alan Craig's blog post is. British politics, British religon, both are ram-jammed with gay contributors past and present. As much as he hates it, Alan Craig's career and entire life is nothing but a brief guest slot slid into a middling bookshelf of a gigantic gay library. If Alan Craig really believed that the gay community were like Nazis then he wouldn't publish his tacky blog post, because he'd have a knock on the door at 3 o'clock in the morning. He has written it in the safe knowledge that nobody in the gay community is going to hurt him, and ooh - he might get some traffic to his shit website - and ooh ooh ooh - win the support of some local bigoted coffin dodgers.

Meanwhile, I don’t think many seniors in the Church of England will admire Alan Craig’s lowly article, because his church is actually defined by progression and change. The Church of England is a pick-n-mix church built on populism and inability. Looking at the photo of Alan Craig’s blonde wife and daughter that he has chosen to publish on his website (a glowing portrait of his heteronormative credentials no doubt), I would hazard a guess that he has been married before and divorced, I may be wrong, but if he has then that is an example of how he himself has benefited from the Church of England’s ever-changing ways.

Like the gifted comedian Glenn Wool says – “Why do some religious people insist on making everything into a polar argument? Like you have to choose between liking gay people or liking religious people? It’s a bad line to take because we all know who we’d rather have at our dinner party – our gay friends – because the religious – well – let’s be honest, they’re FUCKING BORING”

It interests me that oddballs like Alan Craig are so keen to open up an argument between the church and the gay community. Why DOES he dislike gays so much? Is it really because of the stories in that old book of his, the Bible, that in his heart he knows is mainly all bollocks? It's strange to think how this book from the Middle East written 2,000 years ago plays such a big part in his life spent within the lonely walls of Newham Borough Council. Or is it because he doesn't like the idea of young gay people having confidence and leading their own lives?

Alan Craig has to accept the fact that gay people exist, they always have and they always will. It's sexuality. It's impermeable. Which is why it's so bizarre having a society that still persecutes people on account of their sexuality. Whereas religions, despite their many attributes, are undeniably invented in their entirety, and they come and go like gadgets. Venus anyone? Thor?

Personally I like the idea of gay teenagers being themselves, meeting others like themselves, and writing their own lives. It seems the church want something different – they’d rather a world of hush-hush, shame, suppression, darkness and dependence.

I’ll leave you on this video that writer Graham Lineham shared on his blog a little while ago:

My New Random Channel 5 Presenter Crush: Bryn Lucas - Presenter of Super Casino and Fingers Crossed Partial to a bit of Gayness

2011-11-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

Pictured above: Bryn Lucas, live presenter of Super Casino on Channel 5 - far too attractive to be presenting this kind of subterranean money-making smut, get him on Shameless and get him in the shower sharpish.

I was watching Channel 5 by mistake last night and like everytime I accidentally tune-in to the channel I ended up with a new Random Channel Five TV Personality Crush. My first ever RC5TVPC was an innocent fixation with Melinda Messenger in 2001 as she hopped up and down Fort Boyard killing paisley personal trainers from Kent with her globular knockers and blinding French seals with her titanium grin.

After Melinda there was Alex Lovell, a haplessly beautiful presenter on Brain Teaser who looked a bit like Bugs Bunny's bitch, which I watched during the school holidays at midday. Now, as a proper adult, and one who's decided to be gay, it's only late night TV that I get the chance to watch, usually with a slice of toast whilst a one-night-stand is "quickly using the bathroom", but Channel 5 still deliver - that's right, even in the dead of night their live TV studios are packed with attractive lantern-jawed men in tight-fitting silver suits.

So. Roll on THIS dude (above) who presents Super Casino, an interactive phone-in roulette show, like Red & Black but without dragged-out bollocks and plaice-faced plebs. On Super Casino all you do is watch the Roulette wheel spin whilst listening to the presenter's futile attempts at conversation whilst imagining him crouched over a laptop in his Elstree Studios hotel towelling robe when his shift is over later.

I Googled "Presenters on Super Casino" on my phone - desperate to learn more about this attractive chappy and came across this little bio - turns out he's called Bryn Lucas:

“With early dreams of being a professional footballer we’re thankful Bryn turned to acting and presenting in his early twenties. Easy on the eye, Byrn’s is described by his friends as loud and lively, with an army of brothers and sisters Bryn has a total of six siblings. Bryn adores Mexican food but you will have to go for dinner with him before he reveals his party trick, his lips are firmly stealed as not to spoil any surprise. A real softy, Ben enjoys nothing more than playing with his border colly Jamie, but don’t be fooled as he hides a darker side – he once owned a snake called Killer and fronted his own rock band”

So…there’s quite a lot to hang hope off here: “Loud and lively, a real softie”, Bryn has a dog, he is one of many siblings and he quit football for acting. Surely therefore a chance therefore that he’s gay? Also – whoever wrote this summary of Bryn has littered the passage with close pairings of suggestive words - “reveals his party tricks”, “lips – firmly”, “hides a darker side” - ???

Beneath the video there are facts about Bryn too, including this:

““He once got a warning for stealing a life size cardboard cut-out of Ginger Spice from Woolworths in Kidderminster”

One final word: FIT!

You can follow Bryn on Twitter @BrynLucas - personally I'm scared to in case it confirms my worst fears - that Bryn is massively heterosexual. Still, even if he is, there is still the possibility of a same-sex liaison - who knows - what with trying football, acting, rocking and now presenting - Bryn is clearly eager for fame and so perhaps, like so many Channel 5 presenters before him, he would widen the goal posts of his sexual appetite if it meant getting a few rungs higher.

Fuck ME this blog post has turned into a mess. I should probably finish by saying to Bryn, if you're reading this - "Hello" - and "Don't worry" - I am not going to stalk you. And then I should apologise to everyone else for this blog post. Where most would just say "He's pretty fit", whilst watching their television, I have gone and dragged the very same sentiment into about 800 words, and achieved nothing.
Right, N'night.

P.s. Yes, that IN Bryn in the shower with a dog tattoo. It's a screengrab from his promotional video on the Channel 5 website. I know.

POST SCRIPT:

Bryn got in touch with me on Twitter to confirm that he is a happy heterosexual man. Also, he doesn't Tweet much so he would rather fans found him on Facebook here.

Do's & Don'ts of Gay Posters

2011-11-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

We don't know if you've noticed but posters for gay nights are stuck in a rut of mind-numbing flesh and pointless add-ons. My friend Dylan B Jones here has picked out two from one of the free gay rags this week, and here's what we have to say:

Bad titles

“Hallosexualween” is an AWFUL name for a gay night. Hallosexual would be bad, so would Sexualween, but Hallo-Sexual-Ween. The W is so incongruous, as Dylan points out – “There is no way this can be successful”

Naked Torsos

In the centre of the poster there is ALWAYS a generic rock-hard torso – it just doesn’t sell the night to us. Like, we know what a man’s body looks like, we both have them and so do most of the men we know. Except our torsos aren’t hard shiny plastic orange ones. Basically, anyone who is attracted to a night-out on the basis of there being a man’s torso on the poster is going to look like an RAC van.

Some sort of Explosion

Microsoft Paint pyrotechnics – Ooh, that looks like an exciting night out - there are orange flames in the poster. I’d rather see a middle-aged woman lighting her cigarette off a gas hob to be honest. If you MUST have flames then be creative with it, use a Stabilo highlighter set to shade them in. You're selling culture here, not microwaveable cheese burgers.

Angel Wings

Because angels are the height of bodily perfection, and it’s like so fucking tongue-in-cheek because, you know, we’re like gay – and so really we should all be having our skin grated in hell. We think angels are an overrepresented element of the Bible when it comes to gay night flyers. We want to see more donkeys, disciples and wise men. And shepherds. Shepherds could totally be a thing.

Devils horns

Because devils are the height of carnal pleasure, and it’s like so fucking tongue-in-cheek because, you know, we’re like gay – and so we’re all being a little bit naughty what with rimming each other on our block colour IKEA sofas.

Random mention of Social Media

Like "LOOK!!! WE KNOW WHAT FACEBOOK IS!!! WE’VE GOT IT!!!" - Don't even get us started on nightclubs who Tweet...

Pointless tokens of grandeur

In the example above it’s lions. Sometimes it’s eagles. At other times it’s Corinthian pillars and embossed shields. What with being gay and all, we’re attracted to anything that is emblematic of history, power and sucking a Centurion’s feet. Really it should be backgrounds filled with MDF bookshelves, smashed bottles of Vladivar and fake tan.

Smoky backgrounds

Fair enough, dark smoky backgrounds are an accurate reflection of the stank misery that groups around the corners of most gay venues. We’re just saying what’s wrong with a countryside backdrop, or, I don’t know, pasta twirls?

We could go on, but it’s getting late.

Below is a poster of a gay night that’s getting it right:

This poster for Halloween at the Vault ticks all the boxes for us.

Firstly, it knows it’s a bit shit. And it illustrates the following:

Tacky graphics

Rather than trying to look glossy and decadent and getting it horrifically wrong with a generic torso shot of a semi-retired P.E. teacher, The Vault aim low and end high with this catastrophic cut-out of a cartoon pumpkin superimposed onto a photo they’ve probably stolen from another advert in a 2004 copy of Boyz.

Crowded text with underwear

Where Hallosexualween went wrong with fire graphics, The Vault succeeds by filling the page with unnecessary details and revealing the models tepid underwear.

No sense of composition

Much better than a centred image where everything is layered and flowing-forth with a sense of movement, we much prefer random things clumped around each other demonstrating a sexily absent grasp of composition. Basically – as village hall jumble-sale as possible please. The more your poster looks well put together, the less it looks like you’ll find real sex there.

Honest puns that do their job

Whilst “Hallowsexualween” sounds like the results of a group discussion in the smoking area out the back of a more provincial branch of Nandos, the Vault poster has winning puns almost as if the proprietor has sat their gran down on a Sunday and asked her to put her Take-A-Break hat on. “Night of the Giving Head” is genius, and “Cock Zombie” is so blunt and stupid it would take Saatchi & Saatchi two decades to come up with something that good.

Back of the magazine

Whereas G-A-Y and KU Bar always hog the front page slots at the start of Boyz, we’re much more interested by the less touristy club nights who can only afford page 78, almost as if they’ve had to have a whip round and start a Just Give page to put their hapless ideas on the map.

So, that’s enough for now on the Do’s & Don’ts of gay club night posters.

DISCLAIMER:

We’d like to point out that we’ve been to both The Yard and The Vault and that they’re both great venues – so if you’re new to London check them out. The Yard offers refined balcony views across fake fabric flames and as promised – a yard. Go there to meet drunk city boys splashing their cash on Coronas and Burton-winter-coat-flavoured cocks. The Vault is a sex club, one of London’s few, in fact possibly the only one in central London, not including the changing rooms in Topman or bushes behind the American ambassadors house in Regent's Park.

This blog post does not reflect the views of Gay Times.

I’m off to bed now.

Dylan is off to research a potential book called ‘What Was Jodie Clutching Last Night?’ Here below you can see her clutching a J cloth. Perhaps she's bringing her own range out, we can't keep up.

Adam Lambert: How Come I Can't Name, Hum or Hint at One Song by You?

2011-10-21T04:56:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we were sitting in the garden enjoying some gin and discussing Colonel Gaddafi’s son and how he was basically once my neighbour (according to my friend Sam, Colonel Gaddafi’s son used to live around the corner from me, but according to Hamish he lived much nearer to Jonathon Ross, but according to a boy that Hamish slept with he lived in hiding in the basement of the derelict Heath House which was by far the most exciting idea but unlikely as we all know Colonel Gaddafi’s son was hardly a stowaway, he hired Beyoncé to sing at his birthday party for fuck sake. Or was that Mugabe’s son? There really should be a section in Hello! for all this, it's almost as if someone doesn't want us to know that dictators' families spend the summer season soaking up West End shows and dining in Jamie's Italian in safe-as-houses London, and so we reached an agreement that the late Colonel Gaddafi’s son once lived in North London somewhere) because the Evening Standard said so.

Then the conversation moved briefly onto erotic cushion covers by Trademark and then SUDDENLY Emma starts talking about this openly gay pop star that she likes who is like “Meatloaf meets P!nk” (I swear a lobbyist pays Emma to drop these topics into conversations with gay men)

“Sorry, go back” I say, trying to breed Meatloaf with P!nk in my tired head. “Who are you talking about?”

“Adam Lambert”

“Adam...?” says Hamish, frowning.

“Lambert!” says Emma, ignoring the cloud of indelible cynicism slowly grouping in the air around the four of us.

I look at Sam who looks at Hamish. “Yeah I think we saw him at Heaven once?”

“I didn’t see him at Heaven once” I say immediately. But I did, and I do know who he is, obviously. It’s just I’ve forgotten because nobody EVER plays his songs (does he even have songs?).

“Oh. Did you go with Sam?” asks Hamish.

“You ALL know who Adam Lambert is” says Emma, tears welling realising she’s backed the wrong horse this time..

“Maybe” allows Hamish, fiddling with his cuff.

“He’s been on BOYZ magazine!” cries Emma.

“Well!” claps Sam. “That narrows it down to ANY MAN who has EVER sung a song or taken their shirt off in the last two decades” [I should point out here that we always read BOYZ and adore it]

And so out comes the laptop onto the garden table and there goes “Adam Lambert” into the Google search bar and up pops his evil camp face.

“Turns out only 3 of his 8 singles actually charted in the UK and he’s never had a number one ANYWHERE” says Hamish, suddenly interested.

“Which is quite embarrassing when you think about it - even Diana Vickers can wrangle a number 1 these days” I say, still hating her since she got to fuck George Craig.

“If you’re a gay pop star in studded shoulders pads and the British aren’t buying your records then who the fuck will?” says Sam, right as ever.

“Guys I think you’re all being mean” says Emma. “You’re all gay, you should be supporting him, it’s tough enough already with psychos in America leaving him hateful comments all the time”

So we made it a task for the day to make ourselves more aware of Adam Lambert’s pop efforts and get to know his songs, because it’s about the music right and the bigger message?

Here are the three songs by Adam Lambert that have made it across the Atlantic to England:

No Boundaries:

A shaky song that sounds like Evanescence ten years ago. Whereas stars like Beyonce know how far to take a preachy Baptist sound (Smash Into You and Halo), Adam Lambert’s team take it toooo far. The lyrics are painfully simplified - “With every step you climb another mountain”. Sick in my mouth.

For Your Entertainment:

If only. This one is straight out of a musical episode of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. It’s as if Womanizer had an interlude written by car park attendants on Prozac and you were listening to it through a bag.

Disappointingly Adam’s dancing is nauseatingly static. He sort of lunges himself up and down like a steam engine and whenever the opportunity for a literal dance move pops up – that opportunity is SEIZED with all the imagination of Anusol. It’s all a bit Peter Kay. The clothes aren’t great either, like, asymmetrical studs. It’s as if Fisherprice abducted Patrick Wolf and forced him to design a clothes range, and here is his deliberately feigned result.

Whataya Want From Me:

In his third real song Whataya Want From Me Adam ups his game a bit musically, “Ooh” said Hamish, and this video has enjoyed over 23 million views on YouTube, dizzy figures that Shania Twain or Jennifer Paige can only dream of. It’s a bit Foo Fighters this song, which is a MASSIVE compliment heading Adam Lambert’s way. He looks like Dawn French playing Julian Clary though, which could be a compliment if Adam Lambert was a Barcelonan street act.

Talk about being a gay role model, this video is MISERABLE, Adam Lambert just sits around on empty sofas or sits in bed WITH ALL OF HIS CLOTHES ON, brooding over the song’s recipient who is presumably someone who didn’t reciprocate the Flame button on Gaydar. I’m not saying gay pop stars have to dress like Red Indians and clap for their dinner but let’s not convince youngsters that all we do is cry against IKEA book cases and wait for terminal illness to take its toll. Compared to The Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and Soft Cell this is a hefty step backwards.

It is clear from the YouTube comments on Adam Lambert’s channel that he has a sizeable fan base, in all senses. Sadly a lot of the comments follow this damp line of gay rights rhetoric, stuff like “Look people. He’s gay – so get over it Girlz – he Ain’t EVER gonna marry you because he’s a GAY MAN and we LOVE Adam forever and his hair is BETTER than Bieber’s” – that kind of gay message, written by girls who in four years time will be suing Claire’s Accessories because they got their tit stuck in a hand dryer, the type of girls who sort their Haribo into colour piles whilst their toenails dry because they’re allergic to yellow.

SO. Adam Lambert. Who knew icing your face in mascara, wearing two rings on each finger and wingeing about life’s difficulties could get you a Number 4 hit in Finland? Oh actually, his boyfriend is a Finnish TV presenter, my bad.

To some Adam Lambert is a role model, an openly gay pop star who gay kids can identify with because – no wait – he was BORN IN 1982? He turns THIRTY soon? Holy shit, do his fans' parents know this?

To me, Adam Lambert looks like a dancer from a budget cruise line’s repertory theatre group, his songs are either dull ballads or lacklustre pop scrapings and anyone who dons him “one of the few openly gay pop stars” is insulting the plethora of ignored talent that is, has, and will always be out there.

If anything, Adam Lambert is a role model to young gays because he demonstrates the fact that the gay card isn’t enough in the world of pop, and that’s the way it should be. You have to be good at what you do too.

So, well done Adam Lambert, I’m sure there’s a bunch of people out there who need you, but I’ll stick to my Peaches getting-ready playlist and Patrick Wolf evenings, thanks.

* * *

Sam just read this blog post whilst I walked away for a minute and he added the following paragraph:

BASICALLY this blog post boils down to me wanting to say the following: “Look at MEE I live in Hampstead and I don’t give a shit about Adam Lambert and I want to say he’s fat but know better coz I is a gay journo.”

!!!

JESUS CHRIST SAM! You’ve effortlessly paraphrased my entire post down to 140 characters exactly. There should be a website for this kind of succinct genius...

“Oh my God, have I just written a perfect Tweet?!!” says Sam, who is an engineer, trying to suppress an orgasm of cocksure glee.

“Not really because you haven’t left any room for a link”

“Oh”

We still don’t know anything about Adam Lambert, and I can’t even recall the three songs that we just watched at least three times each. Perhaps the problem is us.

So I met Mat from The Special Ks...

2011-10-20T07:29:00.000-07:00

This tall guy with cool hair was at last night’s Firetrap party and I REALLY recognised him from somewhere, not in a 'shagged-him-last-winter' way or a 'looks-like-a-minor-celebrity way', but in a slightly haunting way like perhaps he was in my swimming class in 1993 and I subsconsciously recognised him?

After watching him out of the corner of my eye a bit too much the lady I was officially chatting to had to tell me to stop staring, I get really bothered by familiar face conundrums. Thankfully though an hour or so later I was walking up the stairs between the smoking area and the bar and said boy was blocking my way. As he turned I snatched the oppurtunity to do that whole quizzical ‘Do I know you?’ thing (where you're privately PRAYING they're not a complete tit, or you know them because you broke their parents' Grayson Perry vase at an after-party once).

Turns out he’s called Mat and we actually went to boarding school together. It's quite unusual to meet someone from the same boarding school and not be 100% sure who they are, because boarding school is such an intense and close-knit ennvironment, it's like having several hundred fathers, brothers and children.

We worked out that the reason we didn’t properly know each other was probably due to a combination of the following:

a) We were in rival boys houses
b) We are two years apart
c) He left aged 16
d) He spent most of his time playing his guitar in his dorm
e) He has asymmetrical hair now and a trendy coat. I have yellow hair and have grown by about three feet since school.

ANYWAY. We had a nice little chat about London, sex, Sunday Girl and the monotony of fashion parties*, and Mat told me he's in band called The Special Ks. Here’s their single Crystal Fields:

And here’s a sexy little acoustic version in which Mat shows a lot of ARM:

So. A standard Wednesday night really - got drunk, saw Diana Vickers sitting on her own stirring a drink somewhere, made a prat out of myself in front of my editor, sucked rum out of a hollowed-out coconut shell and met a boy in a band. But with a twist, as this time weirdly the boy went to the same school as me AND his band are actually worth listening to.

Fingers crossed the Special Ks will make it big time. You heard it here first bitch.

- - -

*My friend who goes by the alias Shirley Not just texted me having read this blog post saying " 'the monotony of fashion parties?' - you're Jack Cullen not Peaches Geldof"

Fernando Torres Tent Pole

2011-10-20T03:06:00.000-07:00

I noticed a nice guest appearance from Fernando Torres' willy today on the back of the Metro newspaper. I'm assuming it's a flacid penis and not a hand? Experience tells me those silky shorts don't have pockets because I remember stuffing condoms into my socks at a football-themed sex party in Italy once.

Torres is an odd one in the hot footballer charts. He's clearly a piece of twinky football man candy, yet he hasn't sought recognition from the fashion industry particularly, courted the paparazzi or acquired a gay fanbase in the way that David Beckham and Christiano Ronaldo have. I think Torres is just one of those hot footballers that straight men have a soft spot for, they don't fancy him or anything gay like that, but if they were cell mates and times got tough then, you know, the goal posts might be widened a little and Fernando's rosy face would get to know the pillow quite well whilst his oily tax-fraud dorm pal clutches onto those long blond locks.

Presumably he dyes his hair blond, because he's supposed to be a Spaniard right?

Other stories in today's Metro included:

- A publicity stunt conducted by Monster Slippers
- A girl was crushed to death in a Northampton nightclub (an unlikely place for such an occurence - I wouldn't have thought more than six people go out on a Wednesday night in Northampton?)
- Westlife are breaking up (this better not mean the gay one is going to inflict us all with a solo career attempt)
- There's something on television later

Naked In Earl's Court: A Night in the Life of Pete Maciejowski (Curator of The Homosocial)

2011-10-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

At the very end of last month I spent the night with Pete Maciejowski, interviewing him for Gay Times. We spent the evening drinking white wine and gin on his Earl’s Court balcony, discussing a wide range of adult topics, until we both passed out and the next day interrupted us.

Pete Maciejowski is the star of the 2012 BUTT calendar, as well as the poster boy for some of Amsterdam’s biggest gay nights. Most recently he has been featured in an exhibition in Berlin. When he's not busy he holds intimate evenings of male indulgence, evenings at which sometimes he takes photos and at other times he simply sits in a chair wearing a mask and pouring more drinks.

My interview with Pete isn’t yet published, alas it is sitting in my iTunes library like a symphony of sordid soirées, but you can view a preview piece on my Gay Times blog, and you can take a look at a couple of snaps on Pete’s site The Homosocial (including a rare photo of ME! (before you get too excited, it's not naked but simply of me storming down an urban path)).

SO. Here are your links you sexy chicken face Jack of Hearts readers:

Gay Times: Spending the night with Pete Maciejowski

and...

The Interview… And The Antics!

Finally... you can follow Pete on Twitter @TheHomosocial

Above: a snap that Pete took of me collapsing onto the steps of his Earl's Court pad.

The image at the very top of this blog post is taken from Pete Maciejowski's site The Homosocial.

Photographs of Cromer

2011-10-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

I recently enjoyed a solo writing holiday in Cromer, Norfolk, and wanted to share a few photographs and observations here on Jack of Hearts. I'll be writing up a piece for Gay Times shortly about where to stay, eat, and what to do - so keep a look out for that.

I chose Cromer because I wanted a coastal break, but not somewhere with too much noise or distractions (i.e. Brighton or Bournemouth), but somewhere that wasn't too far to travel from London. Cromer was perfect with its sleepy second-hand book shops, tea rooms and faded Victorian grandeur. The people in Cromer were lovely too, and the sea air was a great change to the grimy musk of London. It takes 3 hours to get there on the train, with return tickets costing about £45 last minute.

A sunken pill box on the beach walking towards Runton. The coastline here has receded a lot so this box would have once been a little more inland. It's strange to imagine a band of Norfolk lads inside, only a few decades ago, keeping watch for a Nazi invasion. This photo was taken at about 2pm. By 4pm the tide had completely covered it.

Anastasia's is Cromer's only nightclub. It's a basement club built into the depths of the sea defense wall and it is only open at the weekend. Locals call it 'The Pits', and usually give it a miss preferring to travel into nearby Norwich if they fancy a boogie.

Nautical themed light displays line the upper coastal paths around Cromer. This particular design is a shrimp. A bit creepy if you ask me. Very Studio Ghibli.

Part of the upper coastal path at night. It's really dramatic with the rolling waves to the right, and as your eyes adjust to the darkness - the Norfolk coastline stretching out for miles.

This photo from the 1870s shows a very similar seafront to the Cromer that is there today. This collier ship was bringing coal in from Sunderland. Children used to play around the stern at low tide and look for a dropped pieces of coal which they would hide in their clothing and take back to their grateful parents. The introduction of railways to Norfolk brought about the end of this business.
The Hotel de Paris is the most famous hotel in Cromer, once visited by Oscar Wilde, the place was built by Lord Suffield. Stephen Fry once did a stint there as a waiter too, no doubt chasing the footsteps of his idol. Sadly it's nearly impossible to stay at the Hotel de Paris as they have a handcuff deal with a coach tour company (and so the place is packed with pensioners). I popped into to ask about the stained glass images of Cromer in their restaurant windows, the man on reception told me they knew nothing about them and all historical items had been sent to head office. I can't imagine where or what their head office is?!

The Red Lion just a few yards along the seafront is much better, over 150 years old, offering great sea views and kitted out with free internet and an honesty box minibar, the staff at The Red Lion are great fun and the social atmosphere downstairs in the evenings is a comfort amidst the otherwise silence of Cromer. Visit: http://www.redlion-cromer.co.uk

If you Google "Cromer Gay Scene" then all you get is a few notes on Squirt.Org mentioning this public toilet on the seafront, next to Dunes Arcade (just a little way along from the pier front). I went along to check out what was going down. Nothing.

During my stay the Pavilion theatre on the pier had a Raymond Froggatt show on. £17 seemed a bit steep for someone I've never ever heard of. A Wikipedia paddle taught me that he was a singer in the 60s and has written hits for The Dave Clark 5 and Cliff Richard. A lot of pensioners turned up to watch him.

These two adult men were on the promenade every day playing with a remote controlled car. It was kind of sweet.

Cromer Lighthouse. It used to be operated by an all-female staff. You can hire the place for holidays.

Cromer enjoys a wonderful twilight period, during October between 4.30 and 7. The light is magnificent and the sky is very imposing, especially from the pier where you are effectively out at sea.
It never fails to stun and sadden me just how many boys fought and died in the World Wars. This memorial is for a tiny, tiny village called Runton, and yet look how many young men were killed horribly abroad. Some families lost five men, whilst others lost men in both wars. Terrible.

Surfing and body boarding is a popular pastime in Cromer. It's quite a common sight to see boys sprinting down from the north of the town in their wet suits with boards under arm in order to catch the waves in time. Elderly folk stand and watch from the promenade with faint admiring smiles. It's great to see the town's teenagers making the most of Cromer's mercurial seascape.

This boy was body boarding when his board's lead came loose. He ran up to the promenade and asked if he could borrow a key to prize it back together. I thought he was going to yap at me for taking photos. Always happy to help.

I was a little scared to see a newsagent so solidly affiliated with the Daily Mail, so neat and tidy, and to double up as a tearoom! However, I popped in for a cup of tea and the local Norfolk girls who worked there were lovely and good fun to chat to.

A range of sun loungers for sale next to a Methodist church. Perfect.

I went back to check the Cromer Gay Scene come 8pm. Still nothing.

A pair of fisherman's thigh-high leather sea boots. Despite their weight adding to the risk of drowning, these huge leather items were popular in the fishing community for centuries. I rather like them. Also - that stuffed crab is an example of the type you see crawling around on the beach in Cromer. Terrifying. And to think those boys dart about barefoot with their body boards!

A sign left by ITV announcing that they were filming in the area. I straightened my hair especially but didn't see any camera crews. Alas my big Hollywood break will have to wait.

So there we have it. Some photographs from Cromer.

Gay Podcast (with Adam Roberts and Dan Scratcher)... my voice on the internet.

2011-10-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

Hello hello. Above you see a photo of Adam Roberts who writes a blog called Skeletor's Armpit. I recently starred as a gay guinea pig on his podcast Skeletor's Mouthpiece. Read on!

I've admired Adam's writing for a while (despite how much he discusses the irregularities of his own genitals). I was thrilled therefore to discover that Adam has started a podcast with his friend Dan Scratcher, recorded from his very retromania / Stockholm Syndrome style bedroom in the thickets of Hertfordshire.

Adam and Dan's voices compliment each other. Dan's - a soothing and reassuring tone that spills with stability and hearty strength. Adam's - a really quite scary boombox of a voice that conjures the boys at the back of a GCSE physics classroom with its loose-canon wisecracks and sexually obsessive incisions.

When he invited me to travel to Hertfordshire to be a contributing guest I leapt at the oppurtunity - not only could I then report back to my friends on Adam's intriguing bedroom, but I would have a chance to see Hertford, a lifelong dream now realised:

These are four images I took in Hertford on my phone.

1) A newsagent called 'Gay's Newsagent'.

2) A book at the top of Hertford's non-fiction chart called "Abel Smith School by Dorothy Abel Smith"

3) A solicitor's office 'Duffield Harrison Solicitors' which looks as if the staff have been eaten by triffids.

4) Some radioactive berries in Adam's garden.

There were also some really odd looking people on Grindr around Hertford, but I wouldn't be so insensitive as to broadcast someone's Grindr profile.

I had great fun chilling at chez Adam, drinking tea and building bonfires in the garden. There were also some very covetable ceramic ornaments in the house of angered parrots, and vintage photographs of long-dead school classes.

In the podcast we discuss gay porn, Grindr, gay nazis, red-headed women, predatory gays, sexual positions, cottaging, foreskins, Thailand and other fragile topics.

YOU CAN LISTEN HERE:

http://skeletorsmouthpiece.podomatic.com/entry/2011-10-02T16_34_35-07_00

Let me know what you think/thought, on Twitter @JackCullenUK

"Is Your Son Gay?" - Jack Cullen puts the Silly iPhone App to the Test

2011-09-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

So there's a new gay uproar in the media - "Is Your Son Gay?" - an iPhone App which asks 20 questions to establish whether your son is gay.

I'm not going to get angry and start announcing things like "Sexuality is Fluid", "Straight Boys Can Dance Too" or "Shoving your dick inside a man's arse has nothing to do with Cyndi Lauper's tour dates". Because we all know this. Gay people know that there are gay plummers, gay farmers, gay footballers and gay soldiers. We know this because we hear about, interact with and have sex with these men. Whereas at the more ignorant end of heterosexuarrrrl culture those unfortunate souls only get to see the shop window of gay culture the most visible gay people, the gay people that TV execs give a platform to, the gay equivalents to Marlon Brando or James Dean. Oh no wait.

In London we are exposed to gay personalities like this who straight men couldn't put a name to:

And in Britain we also have plenty of dry gays out there, men who in America would probably have just kept a low profile and added a roomy extension to their closet, gay men like this:
The truth is, I personally believe that there is a "gay gene", and it's not an all-controlling one, but more of a genetic oppurtunity, that some of us have and some of us don't. And although some people will have a very strong streak of the gay gene, more often it will be there kind of casually amongst the rest of the genetic make-up and it will require exposure to a certain set of human conditions or experiences to give that gene a chance to flower (in search of a better word).

So perhaps an "Is My Son Gay?" application could work, IN THE FUTURE, if it was much more intelligently written at a time when we are ready to admit more to ourselves as a civilization.

Put it this way. Let's say straight people are orange, and gay people are pink. You are born with three colours in your palette, and your life experience gives you another two. Now, to end up pink you're going to need to start out with red as one of your three colours. If you start out with blue, green and brown then you're never going to be pink. Yet even if you start out with red in your palette, you still need to come across white at some stage in order to be pink. One or two people are born with pink already there. Some people will live their whole life pretending they don't have a particular colour, whilst others will pretend that they do have a particular colour. Ultimately, all humans are capable of acting like anything, and none of us will ever truly know ourselves anyway.

So yes, there clearly are gay traits. Many of them have been forced upon us by being a counterculture and have simply congenialised over time. Gay men never decided that public toilets looked like a good place to have sex, it was because gay sex - ridiculously - used to be a crime.

But this particular app is all bollocks. There are as many gay men who drink beer and fart in bed as there are straight men who pluck their eyebrows and splash out their favourite musical theatre tunes on the piano.

Rather than sign a petition trying to obliterate this "Is Your Son Gay?" App. I think the real remedy or antedote is for gay men to actually answer the 20 questions in hindsight. Here are my answers to the 20 questions, and as you'll see, more often than not my answer was the opposite to the App's psyche, yet it was still quite gay, in a way that the lame App is too simple to identify:

IS YOUR SON GAY? Case Study: Jack Cullen

Before he was born, did you wish for a girl?

My parents would have been happy either way. My Dad told me that if I was a girl he hoped to name me Megan or Alice. My Mum told me she knew somehow that she was going to have a boy, and she liked the name Jack because she saw it as clean slate that I could make anything out of.

Has he ever been in a fight?

If my parents had this ‘Is Your Son Gay?’ iPhone App then they would probably click NO here, because they never saw me in a fight. But the answer is actually Yes. I used to fight a lot with a boy at my child minder’s after primary school called Robert. Once I got into a fight aged ten which ended in both of my knees being cut open and knotted with gravel. At school fights broke out quite frequently between the boys, usually good old-fashioned hitting but occasionally a bit of naked towel whipping and water fights on hot summer evenings. If anything, surely fights help to develop homoerotic thought patterns no? As Paul Foot says - "If a man is too scared to dabble in homosexuality, he will simply find another man and hit him"

Does he read the sports page in the newspaper?

Yes! I always read the sports pages. The men are fucking hot in them! On the other hand one of my bestfriends Ben is straight and he loves flicking through celebrity glossies.

Is his best friend a girl?

No, it was a boy, and I was in love with him.

Does he like team sports?

I didn’t particularly like team sports, but that’s because I’m an individually competitive person and don’t like my fate to rest in the hands of others. As an adult I like team projects. Are gay men supposed to be isolated? I would argue on the contrary that gay men if anything are more likely to crave social interation, communication and connectivity. Perhaps one day when we learn more about the gay gene we'll learn that gay men have a particular leaning towards business, politics, discussion and teamwork. Who knows.

Is he modest?

Not now, no, I can be quite the show off. But if my parents downloaded this App when I was younger then they would have said Yes, because I was shy and spent a lot of time reading in the garden or drawing pictures of elaborate medieval costumes and castles with an autistic amount of windows and battlements. Presumably this App thinks being immodest means being gay – flambuoyant and attention-seeking etc. But actually it was reading that opened up my mind to alternative ways of leading one's life. I imagine the gay execs at the top of Google, Facebook and Apple were quite modest and quiet at school too, whereas Brad Pitt was probably a right little tart.

Is he a fan of divas (Madonna, Britney Spears)?

Yes, my mum brought me up on Madonna, Grace Jones and Cher. But these women were also sex icons to straight men. So I don’t see how this question really works? Did every boy with a Debbie Harry photo on his wall turn out gay? I don’t think so. I loved Britney Spears and was bang on target market when Hit Me Baby One More Time came out. But so many boys masturbated about her too so....

Does he spend a long time in the bathroom?

No, I’ve always been quick at showering, and I prefer cold showers. Nowadays working in dirty London and attending media type events I’ve become a lot more vain and do spend time on my hair and more money on my appearance than I can sensibly afford. But this was a result of my career path. I’ve had sex with plenty of gay men who couldn’t be more primative when it comes to pampering. In fact I forced guys to wash their armpits and feet before getting into bed before.

Does he have piercings in his tongue, nose or ears?

No. Lots of gay men do though, and so do lots of straight guys? I prefer clip-ons for my ears, you know, like giant amethyst seahorses and elaborate clusters of pearls. Just kidding. I once stapled my peck though, Jackass was all the rage bacl then.

Do you wonder about your son's sexual orientation?

Yes my parents do wonder about my sexual orientation, I think it interests them and they’ve both admitted to being attracted to beautiful people of their own gender in their own formative years.

Are you divorced?

My parents are divorced, yes. They never really should have got married, they were more guys that met at a party at uni than lifelong partners. I think about a third of British couples divorce. And of course all of their sons turn out gay. If only. Jeez that would be good. I’d spend my spare time honey-trapping hot guys’ Dads.

Does he like musical comedies?

Fuck no! Unless you count The Wicker Man? In fact I was pretty obsessed with big tits. Melinda Messenger on Fort Boyard, Faye Dunaway in the Three Muskateers and Britt Eckland in The Wicker Man. I know a lot of gay guys who were infatuated with Pamela Anderson.

Has he ever introduced you to a girlfriend?

I introduced my parents to several girlfriends as a young lad. I suppose that would convince the iPhone App ‘Is Your Son Gay?’ that no I’m not. Actually it’s more likely that some gay boys will get a girlfriend out of fear as a front. Sadly some forget to snap out of it and consequently waste a woman’s entire life so that neither are ever truly loved. TRAGIC.

Is his father a very authoritarian person?

No. Would that make me a gay boy if he was? My Dad would get cross like anyone’s but he didn’t have a regime or anything. This is a hopeless question if the App is aimed at parents because an overly authoritarian father probably wouldn't identify as being one anyway.

Within your family, is the father absent at all?

No he was there alright, watering the plants and eating all the snacks.

During his childhood, was he timid or discreet?

Sometimes. Usually not. I’m a very open person. In fact being an open person pays my rent.

Does he have a complicated relationship with his father?

No. I should probably ring him more often than once a month when I’m walking to fetch more wine from the shop or waiting in a cash machine queue.

Does he take a long time to do his hair?

No, as a child I had a short gay choir boy cut that was easy to manage.

Does he like to dress well: is he very careful when choosing his outfits and selecting brands?

No, my parents had me in a jump suit until I was five. Then I had this weird phase of wearing army camouflage. Then I wore baggy khakis and shit awful t-shirts for about six years. And now I wear hoodies, jackets and jeans.

Does he like football?

What – you mean like these guys below, London's gay football team The Titans? No, I don't like football, but only because I went to an expensive school that emphatically condemned the sport.

So there we have it. "Is Your Song Gay?" - If my parents had this iPhone App, or indeed, a remote interest in iPhone technology, then it would probably would have told them NO, I'm a little heterosexual Jackie.

I think the App should be kept going but have a Question 21 which is "Why are you filling this shitty questionnaire in instead of talking to your own son you moronic self-absorbed parent? Was parenting not for you in the first place? Did you breed out of tragic social convention? Well I seriously hope your gay son learns from your pathetic worrying and raises his children to be his lifelong friends"

Boogaloo Stu Interview

2011-08-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

Last month I wrote a piece for Gay Times about one of my favourite scenesters Boogaloo Stu. I was lucky enough to interview the Boog prior to the piece, perched on some metal barrels in the basement kitchens of KU Bar, whilst topless men unpacked the dishwashers, he was in full make-up and show gear leaning against a stock pile of bendy straws. So, for mega Boogaloo Stu fans, here is the typed-up transcript of that quite surreal and wonderful conversation in which the Boog tells all:

JC: You’ve been on the scene a long time. How did it all begin for you?

Stu: I’ve been doing cabaret in clubs for twenty years. I studied textiles in Brighton. I enjoyed college but I always knew that I wasn’t going to do what I studied, I was already DJ’ing and putting on nights. My early look was an absolute dog’s dinner, not to say it isn’t still a dog’s dinner. I’ve always made my own outfits and enjoyed dressing up, I’d get on the knitting machine as a youngster and turn trousers upside down and hack up old dresses and stuff like that.

JC: So fashion was your first pursuit?

Stu: Yes, out of college I set up a knitwear business called Stuart Alexander Knitwear, I was selling in ‘Sign of the Times’ which was a really cool shop in 1992 on Kensington High Street [part of the fashion superstore Hyper Hyper opposite Kensington Market]. The owner Fiona Cartledge was this really cool inspirational figure who gave students their first chance in the industry. Over two years the label had grown and I needed outworkers to knit for me. I made a capsule collection and took it to New York in a bin bag, I don't know how I had the audacity to do that, but I literally rang up the owner of Barneys and asked to see the knitwear buyer, and then turned up and just poured all my knitwear out on to the floor and the buyer was like ‘OMG I really like these’, she put in a huge order, Mariah Carey and Kylie bought pieces, my stuff was in American Vogue and Italian Glamour.

JC: Wow, so why did you stop?

Stu: Well I was fresh out of college with no money, Barneys didn’t pay me for nine months, I didn’t have a backer and I realised that I couldn’t cope. It could have been the biggest thing, Julien MacDonald even helped me to put the collection together, but I suddenly had this gut feeling that I didn’t want to go ahead with it all, fashion was making me sick, I didn’t like most of the people or the general vibe and the idea of working a year ahead wasn’t right for me. I didn’t want to become entangled in fashion’s never-ending cycle. With clubs I got paid in cash on the night and so that had a lot more appeal to what was now becoming a young Boogaloo Stu!

JC: So who inspired the Boog?

Stu: Well the golden era of pop for me was 1982, lots of great albums came out at that time. ABC ‘The Lexicon of Love’, Associates’ ‘Sulk’, Scritti Politti ‘Cupid & Psyche 85’, they all generally came out ‘82 to ‘85. But they’re bands as opposed to stand-out iconic people. I thought the whole Boy George, Pete Burns, Marilyn and Divine scene was incredible but I didn’t like their music at all. Top of the Pops was basically overrun by drag queens, but it was “he’s Marilyn” not “she”. Debbie Harry inspired me, people who built an iconic look for themselves and kept it alive for a long time.

JC: People have compared your look to various kids TV creations. You do an adult variant on kids’ games in your show too. Are you inspired by children’s television or has children’s television plagiarised you? There are certainly a lot of gays in that industry who will have seen your set.

Stu: People have compared me to Cartoons and LazyTown but I’ve never seen them. I’ve had the quiff for fifteen years now, it’s my trademark and if I changed it now people would think I’m weird. I’m pleased that I’m compared to male characters though. People say I have an Elvis thing going on but look at me – there’s actually very little Elvis going on!

JC: Do you think you take the piss out of gay people with your act? I’ve noticed quite a defiant mocking look in your eyes when you’re chatting to boys on stage.

Stu: I try not to let my games be humiliating for people but the fact that they’ve volunteered means usually they’re up for it, but sometimes it can get a bit uncomfortable so I won’t push it. Still, the point about volunteering is important, I don’t make a boy do anything on stage, they do it of their own accord.

JC: So do you see yourself as removed from the gay scene? Are you part of a niche scene or a particular circle of artists?

Stu: Not really. I dip a toe into the Duckie scene, Amy Lamé and the Barbican scene, but those guys are all arts funded because what they do has a high art edge, whereas I’m just about fun. I think David Hoyle is amazing, but I don’t do what he does. I’m not driven to make an artistic statement with myself, or to hone myself into something that could make a lot of money.

JC: Are you scared of mass exposure?

Stu: I’m not scared of mass exposure but my problem is I have so many ideas that I’m always too busy thinking about the next idea to actually push one through properly. On television often you need to stick to one thing to make it work.

JC: But your look has stayed the same for fifteen years?

Stu: Yes but you know I think my look has become very unfashionable! I never go with trends, in fact, my belief is as a lover of fashion that the only way to be in fashion is to be totally out of fashion and have nothing to do with it. People who buy into fashion are quite shallow and pointless people really, there’s not a huge amount of individuality on the receiving end, people talk about individuality but very few people have it. Vivienne Westwood has it. Maybe I’m coming back into fashion again, I’ve not idea. But I’ll still look the same in twenty years.

JC: So let’s talk about your home life. You still commute from Brighton is that right? Is Brighton your favourite gay scene?

Stu: I drive to London yes and then back to Brighton, which is why I don’t drink when I’m working. I don’t go out in Brighton anymore though, I live in Hove actually. I never went to gay venues as a kid, I’ve worked in them my whole life and I have been known to end up in Legends once every two years but it takes a really spectacular event for me to be out somewhere like, um, Legends (cackles). As I went straight from school in Scotland down to Brighton for college I never engaged with the gay scene up in Scotland either. I was into cabaret so that took me to straight venues. A lot of my friends were gay and so I never felt the need to go off to a gay club, but my friendship group was really liberal too so everyone would snog everyone, sometimes the boys would end up with boys, sometimes they’d end up with girls. I miss those days.

JC: I didn’t know you were Scottish. Your voice is quite eloquent and English?

Stu: I lost my accent in Brighton I think, I lived with a girl in Bristol for two years and her impact on my accent is still there. I’ve lived in Yorkshire and also New York, my voice just imitates my surroundings a little bit. I always liked talking very properly at school though, it used to annoy the other kids!

JC: So are you a celebrity in Perth?

Stu: Good God no, they don’t know I exist! Which is probably for the better.

JC: So what’s your place in Hove like?

Stu: My flat is really minimal, it’s somewhere between Boogaloo Stu and stark. I don’t have a walk-in wardrobe, although I have an area for clothes that you sort of have to walk into! A guy came round yesterday who’s making some pots for my terrace, and I had some new greeting cards lying around with swear words all over them and I could see him looking at them, but I don’t care, my flat is my space.

JC: Is there a Mrs Boogaloo Stu?

Stu: (Quietly, batting eyelids) Yes there is. I first saw him at one of my shows in the late 90s, and I remembered his face. Then years later I met him through a mutual friend by chance annd we’ve been together for almost five years now.

JC: Do your family like the Boog?

Stu: My family are fine with Boogaloo Stu, at least if they don’t like it they haven’t told me! One year at my birthday party I turned up driving a huge mobile platform shoe and they went with it!

JC: Is there a downside to your profession?

Stu: It can damage your social life, working every night, coming home at five in the morning and then starting again. I’ve never felt alone though.

JC: And sometimes you must have hecklers and tough crowds?

Stu: Well, sometimes if an audience is resistant then that just adds to the challenge. Boys turn up at KU Bar with no idea that I’ll be coming onstage in the middle of the night, so I have to win them over and show them that it’s worth watching. You see their faces sometimes like ‘Who is this person? Why has the music stopped?’

JC: Yet half the crowd are there to see you specifically. They all know your catchphrases! In fact, can you remind me what they are?

Stu: My catchphrases? Well there’s “What’s Up Motherfuckers?”, “Good evening Lesbians & Genatalia” or any variation on Lesbians & Genatalia. I have “I swear to God someone’s trying to fuck me in the ass” and a buzzer-in phrase during games. And then there’s “Milk Milk, Lemonade, Round The Corner Chocolate’s Made” which is internationally famous. And also “Are your teeth from Homebase?” – I can’t explain that one, I just think it sounds great.

JC: Something I’ve not mentioned yet is your music. You actually produce and perform pop music as well as hosting and DJ’ing?

Stu: Yes. My music suffers a little bit because of my persona as a comedic host. I’ve stopped doing live concerts of my pop music because it jarred a bit with my following, they want to watch me doing nonsense and silliness, so my more serious pop music is just for listening to now. I was finding it impossible to sing without pulling stupid faces too. I think I’m going to release an album under a different name actually, we’ll see if anybody notices it’s me!

JC: Have you done any film work?

Stu: People always say I should, and I’d like to yes. I did some Eurovision presenting for the BBC once which was exciting, and I’m really comfortable with presenting on television. I surprised the BBC producer because I went through everything in about an hour and he’d booked the studio for the whole day, it just came naturally to me. But then everyone wanted the free lunch so we had to pretend to be working still until at least midday. I’ve pitched ideas to various production companies but TV presenters aren’t that theatrical right now are they, again – I’m grossly unfashionable!

JC: You’re not. You’re fantastic. Perhaps you’re one of those people like Patrick Wolf that should be in the mainstream based on their talents alone, but execs are too square to take the risk, even though it could be the best decision of their career?

Stu: It’s funny you mention Patrick Wolf. I used to see Patrick a lot at a WigOut which was a night I DJ’d at years ago. I remember one night his friend Matthew made this big circle of space in the crowd so that Patrick could dance, and he was wearing like this false hunchback with fake blood around his mouth and was doing a lunatic kind of dance. My DJ look at the time was quite sultry though so I’d just act totally unimpressed, but he looked incredible and I’ve admired his work for a long time actually. He knows one of my friends Gwendolyn, she’s in one of his videos, and she does live poetry readings. She’s incredible, like this amazing amazing woman. She’s 6 foot 5 which makes it hard for her to find acting work, but brilliant people like Patrick Wolf see beyond that. She is an example of someone who just has too much talent to ignore.

[End of Tape]

http://www.boogaloostu.com

“Fuck a Duck! Fuck a Duck!” - It’s Celebrity Big Brother FIVE style

2011-08-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

They’re not even celebrities, Pamela Anderson is nowhere to be seen and Brian Dowling looks like a lonely pub quiz master, but at least there’s one saving grace for FIVE - 'Big Brother’s Bit on The Side' with the lovely Emma Willis.

We’re crowded around a TV set in Belsize Park tuned into Channel 5, it’s the 21st century’s equivalent of listening to Radio Caroline under a duvet. What’s happened on this bizarre televisual programming service since the Spice Girls cut its ribbon in the 90s? Has anybody watched Channel 5 since that day? Apart from the odd serial killer bio in the middle of the night, one of those cheaply made Wikipedia bash-outs where they slowly zoom in on a rapist’s monobrow whilst thumping the bass keys of a piano as you humbly nibble at some cheese on toast.. Apart from that and low quality footage of nocturnal car chases, no.

So Brian Dowling pops up on the screen, plodding out the Bond-esque revolving-blade iris of a Big Brother stage set. Brian's voice is too booming, too Homebase instore radio, there’s no variety in volume, no tone, and it’s very very autocue. But let’s give Brian a chance, it’s his first go at professionalism after all and he’s presenting in the footsteps of a demi-god, the TV decathlete Davina McCall.

Roll in the first CBB contestant, Kerry Katona, Jade Goodie’s successor but lacking in positive energy, an abrasive and really quite boring character in the soap opera of British celebrity but a woman who refuses to budge. Like limescale on an unloved gravestone Kerry Katona by default belongs in the tabloids now and we just have to open our mouths and take a bite of the turd. She’s got rid of the drab feel-sorry-for-me-please hair and opted for something quite animalistic, quite Robyn, quite queer, but she looks more like Julie Walters in a Shane Meadows musical. And she can’t walk in heels. Really can’t. I could do better than that in my mum’s at the age of six.

Then comes Tara Reid who’s obviously short of work, and horrifyingly - she can’t speak. Drugs? Nerves? Surgery? Ultra Violet? Twitter explodes with confusion and finally settles on one point - it’s fucking scary. We’re so used to Tara as this two dimensional Maxim pin-up, pushing her air-brushed breasts out of an ivory corset, that it’s strange to see her walking around, to be reminded that she’s actually a living organism. And if she can’t talk at least she can walk. Massive heels, no problem. Tara Reid’s no face of Iceland, she knows how to make an entrance. Brian makes another boo boo by mentioning her recent marriage and you can almost hear the deflation of adolescent boners around Britain. Rather than remind us of Tara’s cinematic achievements, like Cruel Intentions or The Big Lebowski, the focus is stupidly on her minor friendship with Paris Hilton, and we find ourselves unwillingly comparing these shoddy contestants against real towering celebrities.

Next up is Darren Somebody. A tubby egotistical PR personality who talks about himself in the third person and seems to think he invented the concept of media. It’s that awkward notion where someone who has worked behind the scenes in an industry reveals that all along what they’ve really wanted is to be the face of it. But he’s not famous is he, nobody knows who he is, and the crowd’s unanimous booing reflects this, steamy civilians' breathe in the cold night air shaping a giant “W H O ?”. Embarrassing.

Then Sally Bercow arrives and it’s a welcome change. Refreshingly she knows how to dress nicely and present herself. Even better - she can talk audibly and she has a classy hairstyle. Liberal Britain, intelligent viewers and the post-Davina die-hards all place their bets on this one, but as history tells us - the demure contestants never win.

Then there’s a male model who looks like a pissed-off window-cleaner. Another housemate who isn’t a celebrity. They don’t even show us any of his shoots, just their own little Channel 5 shoot in which he does that silly double denim trend from last year. “Pose for the cameras” yells Brian, “this’ll be easy for you, Ooh he’s really getting into it now!”, but he wasn’t, he looked quite gormless really, it was just another moment where Brian clinged to the autocue completely irregardless of what was happening around him, a moment where Davina would have just linked arms and rolled with it. Actually you could sense Davina taking a quiet sip of her wine in the Home Counties at that moment, unsure whether to feel smug or slightly saddened, slowly crushing a Dorito against the roof of her mouth.

And the show finishes, immediately sweeping into its spin-off ‘Big Brothers Bit on the Side’.
This show, the replacement for Big Brother’s Big Mouth, is impressively svelte. Emma Willis is clearly a professional, instantly at ease she knows how to hold an audience and is ready to catch anything that is thrown at her, be it a sticky question, a clever one-liner or a bag of flour, even when heavily pregnant. Alex Reid proves himself to be a good quality panelist, displaying elegant self-control and taking the program seriously. And then they brought Lauren Harries on, an incredible personality who we really don’t see enough of on television these days, so bravo to FIVE for that journo-pleasing touch.

Whether Celebrity Big Brother will hold our attention for its duration remains to be seen. Of course some of the cheaper women’s magazines can’t afford not to write about it, but the show may suffer due to lack of engaging celebrities. Jedward are the biggest stars, which itself says a lot, but they’re still better in small doses. Kerry Katona is more interesting on the page than on the screen and what’s left - a bunch of people who are either uninterestingly obscure or unable to speak? There’s Lucian from Corrie and there’s that girl from TOWIE, and no doubt they’ll be married before Remembrance Day, but really the show needs more young contestants.

SO. Channel 5 has a big show on its bill now. What they need to do though is stuff the schedule with other good stuff before and after each BB episode. And that doesn’t mean OK!TV with Jeff Brazier, that doesn’t mean irreverent celebrity shows staffed entirely by former Big Brother contestants. FIVE needs to think of something original, something truly enjoyable, something addictive and sexy - and they needs to get it on air quick. FIVE needs a signature show, a Big Breakfast, a Deal or No Deal, an Apprentice, anything - otherwise Big Brother will very quickly become nothing more than an overly-prepared party that everyone left too early. For now Britain has lifted its embargo on FIVE, we’ve dragged our mouses and selected Maybe. Now let’s see if Channel 5 has what it takes for us to click Attending.

Alex Reid Interview in the Gay Times Sex Issue (September 2011)

2011-08-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

So, I trust you've all read the new issue of Gay Times with my first cover interview? I spent the afternoon with theatrical cagefighter Alex Reid, known to many as Katie Price's ex husband. Alex was a real charmer, a very affectionate person and I was quite taken by him. Still, that's not to say I went lightly on the questions - we talked in depth about his transvestite persona Roxanne, about his past encounters with the gay community and homosexual propositions, about men of power who try to take advantage and of course about his new calling - acting.

You can follow Alex Reid on Twitter @Only1AlexReid, he said he'd tweet me when the interview was published (wasn't allowed to talk about it beforehand, as it's his first cover feature with a Gay Magazine and the last time he was scheduled to appear on a gay mag it all went up the shitter for legal reasons). Anyway, never never did tweet me, and I don't exactly want to beg. And there was I hoping we'd be going down stunners in Limehouse in our hold-up tights together. My signed polaroid will have to suffice.

Also in the Sex Issue by me, two big features:

The Death of Cottaging: A piece exploring the cottaging scene in Britain today, taking a look at the history of cottaging, political struggles that the cottaging community have faced, and also a top tips guide for any first-timers (although remember - it is actually illegal to have sex in a public toilet)

The Grindr Diet: Or as I call it, "7 Grindr Shags in 7 Days". That's right, I used the sensational smartphone App to hook up with a different person each night for a whole week. It got messy. There's a teaser piece for this feature on my Gay Times blog called Grindrs Keepers, so take a look at that.

So, there you have it! Let me know what you think when you've had a read.

You can buy a copy of this Gay Times issue, even when it's no longer on the shelves, through the Prowler store here. And you can purchase a digital version through Pocket Mags here.

Nicola Roberts Needs More Than a Lucky Day

2011-08-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

Abrupt endings, sarcastic side glances, reticently sung phrases that are almost inhales, it’s a strange personal brand that Nicola Roberts has gone for. It's an image that marries the knowledge and exhaustion of London Fashion Week with the syrupy naivety of a little girl playing at home with her dollies.

I like this new second single Lucky Day, it’s timely and it’s fun. Nicola looks great in that dress, a sort of kinky Henry Holland / Laura Ashley hybrid. The song itself, written by Dragonette, is summery and catchy even. There are various quirks like the "Woah ~ Woah ~ Woah ~ Woah ~" that will no doubt be celebrated in certain corners of the pop palace and she takes a few vocal risks which is refreshing, like going "Ooh-um-um..... OWW!"

I enjoyed Stephen Agnew’s video for the song which shows off Nicola prancing around New York making Microsoft Multimedia effects with her arms and turning mundane objects into explosions of psychedelic Microsoft Paint colours. If they'd gone one step further and introduced an ironic use of Word Art then the Grammy would have been theirs. It’s witty, it's colourful and it brings out the too-cool-for-you trademark of Nicola’s personality. In fact it almost makes a light joke of her self-elected importance. Mind you, it’s hauntingly similar to Ray Kay’s LA-based video for I Wish, a 2009 single by the tragically overlooked pop duo Mini Viva:

But there’s something missing here. There’s something empty about Nicola Roberts' solo career. And as much as we adore her and want her to succeed, the public aren’t really buying her records either.

Beat Of My Drum was loud and defiant with its echoing electro touches and (glossing over the irritating fact that it checks in audaciously at under three minutes in length) we all welcomed it into our Twitter feeds. But nobody actually bought it. The song charted at #27 - a cavernous and cold chart position that Girls Aloud never once had the embarrassment of experiencing.

One can't help but feel the other members of Girls Aloud moved on, they grew up, they became women, and then the Pied Piper's rock shut tightly closed, leaving poor Nicola behind - stuck inside an empty music video forever. It's almost sadistic. Nicola Roberts as a kind of Roald Dahl antagonist. The Girl Who Couldn't Sing Loud Enough. The Girl Who Never Grew Up, perhaps illustrated by Marilyn Manson.

Nicola Roberts is portrayed as the underdog of Girls Aloud, the pale one, the red head, the tough-skinned hanger-onner. One has visions. Nicola rummaging frantically through her make-up bag for her favourite lip gloss whilst the house around her burns. Nicola's heel stuck in a manhole cover on the harbour's edge as the ship leaves, Cheryl casually smashing the champagne bottle against the bow as the horn blows.

The gay community cling onto this vibe like a fortified limpet, but as history shows, we eventually have to let go of false hope. Siobhan Donaghey - Emma Bunton - Michelle Williams - Rachel Stevens, it’s that sad sad list of CD spines in your bedroom at your mum’s house that for some reason boys you bring home are magnetically drawn towards. They begin to ironically list aloud those cursed names whilst sipping their first glass of wine. And it is there, in your IKEA Benno tower, under the small-talk scrutiny of endless one-night-stands that Nicola Roberts's name will finally rest... unless... she gets some fucking welly.

It takes more than a designer dress to make a Roisin Murphy. It takes more than a knowing smile to make a Lily Allen. It takes more than an unconventional pin-up face to make a Robyn. These are the acts Nicola aspires to stand alongside, surely?

If so – we need more of her. Watch the Lucky Day video again. She’s very good at singing I, I, I phrases and Me, Me, Me bits, but when she says “You’re the one that I want” – there’s nothing there. When Robyn sings “And now – it’s gonna be me and you” – Her face fills with deadly sincerity, you can almost taste the blood in her heart.

Lucky Day is a good pop song. And I think Nicola looks cool in it. My concerns only stem from the fact I want her to make it, and sadly I’m still unconvinced that she has what it takes.

Even being a hesistant too-cool-for-you popstar is difficult. Sophie Ellis-Bextor does the whole “can barely be bothered to be a pop star” shtick, and even she struggles to flog records these days. In 2011 a sense of realism has come back to pop, we want to see our idols sweating.

Nicola’s Twitter page is so icy it looks more like a Bond Street boutique than the virtual home of a flowering solo artist. Where most artist’s Twitter pages have an interesting image of the host star, Nicola has opted for a bold monogram “NR”, as if to say “Look - she’s here. She made it through. Acknowledge her”, but at the same time it’s too impersonal, too clinical, scared to fully commit itself to anything too musical. It's too forgettable. It's too Woah ~ Woah ~ Woah ~ Woah *lightly throws arms in air - then let's them fall tiredly*.

Imperial Fanbase

2011-08-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

I just read this passive agressive article on the work of Bret Easton Ellis by an American writer called Teddy Wayne, after a fellow Londoner retweeted the link. I really struggled to grasp what Wayne's issue with Ellis is.

So... Teddy...

Evidently you have read all of Bret Easton Ellis' books, and one suspects very much enjoyed them, so are you deliberately missing the point of Bret Easton Ellis? I can see how some writers feel intimidated by Bret Easton Ellis, his work is so seemingly simple and yet totally inimitable. BEE has found a literary throne room for himself, and so many male writers have envied it since, yet nobody seems to be able to beat him at his own game (although Nick McDonnell came close). Journalists always strive to shove BEE into a list, you do it yourself, "Donna Tartt, Johnathan Lethem", uncomfortable with accepting the fact that actually he's a very successful stand-alone author whose contemporary influences aren't really from within literature at all.

You attack Ellis for labouring over his author shot for the cover flap of Imperial Bedrooms, criticising it for being a melange of "fiction and reality". Yes. OBVIOUSLY. Do you remember Stephen King's shot with the tarantula crawling over his knuckles? Or Danielle Steele standing in a ball gown the size of the Taj Mahal ? Have you seen Lord Byron dressed as an exotic orientalist? People quite often attack authors who are placed on a pedestal like popstars, forgetting that popular writers have been around just as long as egotistical music artists or famous actors. BEE is interested in aesthetics and visual identity. He even metions Cindy Sherman in Imperial Bedrooms.

You suggest Imperial Bedrooms is little more than a re-treading of old ground. I found that Imperial Bedrooms built upon some of BEE's pet themes whilst also explored new territories. He captured the psyche of the older man brilliantly, the ageing process and the fearful realisation that a highly succesful career still isn't enough to rival those who were born with everything.

I don't think BEE's books are about a "system" either, that he is "exposing". To say that he is exposing a certain social circuit, an underground drug-fuelled movement that is the secret driving force behind Hollywood, is to oversimplify his books. Nobody has control in Imperial Bedrooms, all of the characters, even Rip, are riddled with their own insecurities. If Less Than Zero was about finding a way out then Imperial Bedrooms is about the moment that the ivy finally wraps itself right around the tree and hope is dead.

Homosexuality is another major theme of BEE's work. I don't know how gay you are Teddy, but I assumed from your piece that you're straight? BEE is amused, disgusted, baffled, horrified and delighted by how much Hollywood indulges and resides within the closet, but unlike some gay writers who mindlessly wave the rainbow flag, he likes to challenge gay culture and poke a finger in its belly. There is an incredibly complex binary between remorse and envy in BEE's work in relation to same-sex relations. I think heterosexual men miss some of the more subtle mirroring and documentation of underground gay culture present in BEE's work, and more generally speaking, the potential perils and pitfalls of the homosexual psyche that he nails so accurately and with what has become his own brand of American understatement.

You write how BEE's characters are unrealistic and too distanced from "the average middle-class overweight American who rarely leaves his home state". This is surely quite a ridiculous argument to try and shape, that writers must represent and be just like their readers?

BEE writes about beautiful, young, rich, hollow Americans not because it's all he knows, but because it's what he's interested in. In places his writing is the adult application and superimposing of wild sexual imagery, violence and wealth fantasies onto a backdrop of idealised imaginings from his own adolescence, young male beauty and the American dream. It's like observing a beautiful glass blowing process, and then smashing the results with a hammer. And, clearly, it's a formula that really works, a formula that people want more of, and a formula with room to expand.

When you write "he rapes and beats them" in reference to the end of Imperial Bedrooms, I feel you hide in your own fictitious interpretation of the book and shy away from the truth behind Imperial Bedrooms here. He doesn't just rape them, he forcefully fists them. He describes the beauty of the boy, he emphasises his youth, he adds overly heterosexual details, mentions a contract with Abercrombie & Fitch, and then talks a bit about the boy's lofty ambitions and dreams of becoming an actor. And then he shoves the protagonist's fist right into that boy's ass until he screams, with a suggestion of permanent injury. Then the other escort, the girl, sits in the garden and welcomes Satan into her soul.

Old territory being covered? Or readers' heads being buried?

Anyhow. Teddy. I'm sure you adore Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm convinced your piece was more about lightly promoting your own work and raising your own profile, and there's nothing wrong with that.

A few snap shots of the Cologne gay scene.

2011-07-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

Above: Bottles of "Mumu juice" which the gay bar Mumu in Cologne serves! It tastes like medicine.

Above: A bizarre minstrel figurine holding promotional flyers for a gay party. This is by the reception at Sauna Babylon.

Above: The outdoor pool at Sauna Babylon. This was taken near to 6 in the morning, hence the strange light quality. It is also raining.

Above: Some gay boys in Cologne with my friend Sina.

Above: eXCorner Bar in Cologne, where they stand on the seats and sing 'schlager' songs.

Gay Book Shop in Frankfurt, Germany

2011-07-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

I went on a little exploration of the Frankfurt scene this afternoon, whilst my designated driver took a nap at the hotel. I was thrilled to discover a specialist book shop called Oskahh Vilde:

The proprietress was this lovely lady. She told me off lightly for dragging my flip flops across her recently mopped floor. She said this whilst sitting next to a pile of novels about a teacher who smears faeces all over his students' backs, but I didn't point this out.

The shop had an impressive array of DIVA magazines. DIVA is very popular amongst German gay girls. I'm not sure what Mathilde is, but she should perhaps ask DIVA for some design and formatting tips.

Oscar Wilde also have an impressive array of Gay Times back issues. It would appear Aiden Grimshaw has been fingered a lot whilst Matt Smith is a bit bent:

In the second-hand English section I was interested to find 'The LEATHER CONTEST Guide'. It informs the reader how to arrange a leather contest, how to attract entrants, how to organise the judging criteria and accommodate guests' luggage. I must look up the writer Guy Baldwin upon my return home.

ON BOY LOVE:

Whilst browsing the other magazines I noticed one called 'KOINOS: Features on Boys, since 1993'. The magazine contained (mildly erotic) photographs of boys, as if a man had taken a minibus of boys to a lakeside and made them re-enact Tuke's works, interspersed with essays and articles about man/boy relationships. It was 13€ and despite its apparent rarity and oddity I didn't buy it because I found it a bit too freaky, and also out of respect I guess for the boys photographed inside, who are probably in their thirties now and possibly don't recall the editorial shoot.

I think it's important that men who have feelings about boys (that have most likely come about due to a problem or insecurity in their own childhood) are allowed to discuss them, so that they can hopefully come to the realisation and conclusion that it is wrong to interfere with a young person's psyche and personal space whilst they're developing. The age of consent is 16 in the UK, and personally as a 23-year-old I usually find even 19-year-olds shockingly young looking (and annoying)! Still, it interests me that publications like this exist. After all, suppression of discussion and thought will only create dangerously deep-routed obsessions and desires.

The Oscar Wilde bookshop has its own website here: http://www.oscar-wilde.de/

I will be writing about the Frankfurt gay scene on my Gay Times blog soon, so keep an eye out.

Who will play Rebekah Brooks in her biopic?

2011-07-17T13:27:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt I went to Wapping again...

The days are counting down, surely, until work begins on the movie of Rebekah Brooks’ life. The gripping story of a foxy red-haired damsel from Daresbury who did a brief stint in a Bourbon factory in Paris before climbing the rocky ranks of the British media, from writing the odd piece about a garden fete for the Warrington Guardian to becoming editor of The Sun, Chief Executive of News International, and a niche sex icon. Then came the sensational downfall as it emerged in the leftwing press just how good at selling newspapers she really was. In June 2011 her Wikipedia page was getting about one hundred visitors a day, by mid-July her page was enjoying over one hundred thousand. How will she respond to this surge of attention, notoriety and fame? Do a Cheryl and go blond? Have a sex change and release a pop album, perhaps under the stage name Dana News International? Or will she fall in love with an expenses scandal politician in prison?

There lies a Blockbuster, ‘Rebekah’, coming to a rip-off VUE near you...

But who would be best suited to play this ruthless phone-tapping siren of raw talent?

ONE: Nicole Kidman

Red-carpet resident Nicole Kidman comes from the same part of the world as Rupert Murdoch, the man who invented Rebekah Brooks. Nicole has plenty of experience in playing strong onscreen heroines with a splash of villainy and with pearly but not-quite teary eyes. It is an unknown fact that often Rebekah Brooks would burst out of her Sun office, wielding a bottle of gin, reeking of Chanel and yell in a dodgy French accent “I LOVE TO DAAAANCE!”

TWO: Tracy-Ann Oberman

Tracy-Ann rose to fame with her role as the hairdresser-turned-pub-landlady-turned-killer Chrissie in EastEnders. She was born just a few days before Rebekah Brooks. When Tracy turned 21, Jason Donovan was in the Number 1 slot with ‘Too Many Broken Hearts’, when Rebekah Turned 21, Kylie was in the Number 1 slot with ‘Hand On Your Heart’. A coincidence? Unlikely.

THREE: Julianne Moore

If they’re a gay icon and they’ve got red hair, traditionally the part should go to dear Julianne. But is Rebekah Brooks a gay icon?

FOUR: Nicola Roberts

Nicola Roberts is currently enjoying limited success going solo with her less than three minute long single ‘Beat Of My Drum’. Could the lead role in Rebekah be her next career step into a post Girls Aloud world?

FIVE: Jenny McAlpine

Jenny plays the much-loved crazy chick Fizz on Corrie, but she’s made other notable appearances on TV, like in Vernon Kay’s All Stars Family Fortunes. Could she take her lovely bubbly acting talents and focus them on depicting the dark knife-edge of British media?

SIX: Cher

We’ve all known Cher is a competent actress since The Witches of Eastwick, no doubt she’d scrub up as a brilliant witch of Fleet Street. She’s still acting too, appearing alongside Christina Aguilera last year in Burlesque. One wonders if Cher’s hit Turn Back Time is on Rebekah’s current iPod playlist. News International have given the singer’s plastic surgery a lot of column inches, could this be her chance to get one back at them by playing Rebekah Brooks in a lace corset across the back of a car seat in Warrington circa 1986?

SEVEN: Rupert Grint

Now that the Harry Potter franchise has finally ended one would assume Rupert is looking for a new ginger role on the big screen. Jude Law, Guy Pierce and Eddie Murphy have all cashed-in with a splash of onscreen drag. It might be time for Rupert to start growing those auburn locks.

EIGHT: Sigourney Weaver

A good candidate, the casting director of Rebekah would be a fool not to drop Sigourney a message on Facebook. Her steely gaze would be perfect for playing the face that launched a thousand police enquiries.

NINE: Susan Sarandon

Again, another strong actress who knows how to mix sauciness and sincerity whilst seeming like a victim and a villain at the same time. Thelma & Louise is an all-time classic, could Rebekah & Rupert be her next?

TEN: Charlie Dimmock

Surely there are comparisons to be drawn between media and horticulture. Constantly digging, turning shit over, planting seeds and all the time looking for a new scoop of dirt. It’s about time Dimmock took off her gardening gloves and did something with her life, perhaps Rebekah is her calling.

Britain's Next Top (Gay Porn) Model

2011-06-21T08:55:00.000-07:00

Want to be a gay porn star? One of Britain’s leading labels Euroboy are starting a nationwide search for their next star!

The winner gets £200 (which is just enough to buy a pair of shiny jeans in Zara and a meal for two with wine in Zizzis)

And:

A leading role in a new Euroboy film (a bit like making a DVD of treasured holiday memories, but only it involves you having bum sex with a stranger and will be available for purchase in sex shops so that OAPs can get off over it and your old school mates can bag a copy for shits and giggles)

AND:

They will be signed up to Kiss Lads (an adult model agency who specialise in natural looking twinks and who supply models to numerous gay porn shoots in Britain)

AND, saving the best till last:

The winner will feature in the erotic pages of Gay Times (admittedly quite near the back of the mag, in the pages that most magazines fill with novelty ringtone adverts, but an action-packed set of pages nevertheless with a 3:1 ratio of cocks to words).

NOW, before you think I’m against the idea of Euroboy’s Next Top Model, I’m not. If you’re confident being naked, see sex as a leisure pursuit and see the Andy Warhol side of life, then go for it! Let your hair down, drop your pants and start shooting. Just make sure you know what you’re signing up for that’s all.

I’ve met the owners of Kiss Lads before on an assignment for Gay Times, and they’re a lovely gay couple in the West Midlands who are kind and supportive towards all of their models. Unlike some guys in the business the men behind Kiss Lads aren’t creepy, they never touch the models and they’re fun to hang out with. I even interviewed their youngest model Anthony Adams, who turned eighteen just weeks before his first film, and he was having a whale of a time.

Being an adult movie model can also be a fun way to meet other boys like you, especially if you live in a provincial and disconnected area, as the agency will cover your travel costs and put you up in a hotel room with the other boys during shoots, like a kinky school trip basically.

There’s not a lot of money in British gay porn, but if you’re a favourite amongst casting directors you could earn upto £6000 a year, and that would only be for about 28 days work across the year.

BUT REMEMBER, porn is for life, not just for pocket money. Even with the option of “buying yourself out” later on in life, you’ll never be able to fully know if you’ve drawn in all the copies of your DVDs. Featuring in a porn film could come back to haunt you, depending what your future ambitions are.

Still, we’re moving into a period of transparency, acceptability, and sexual laissez-faire. Being a porn star is nothing to be ashamed of and it can even be a springboard for success and oppurtunities in other fields, in the film industry, in the tourism industry, and the media in general.

My philosophy is let your hair down and have some fun.

TO ENTER:

See the Gay Times blog post here for more information, or just email a photo of yourself with proof of ID and basic stats to euroboy@millivres.co.uk You have to be over 18 obviously, although I suspect the winner won't be too much older than that, given that Kiss Lads mainly have models aged 19-22.

Chav Lads: Why does the gay industry fetishize the working class?

2011-06-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

Stoke Newington literary festival was buzzing last month as the Guardian’s Suzanne Moore and the Independent’s Johann Hari made an appearance to discuss Owen Jones’ radical new book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. Moore argued that the chav phenomena was possibly on its way out, whilst Hari made the point that all minority groups have a tendency to define themselves into subgroups, including gay men who increasingly say things like “I’m not an annoying camp gay man, I’m alright, I’m one of the better gay men”

It was interesting that Hari brought gay culture into the debate on “chavs” and the demonization of the working class, because one of the gay community’s biggest fictitious indulgences is the chav aesthetic and it’s about time somebody looked into this.

It may come as a surprise to those of you who don’t swim in the deep end of gay pop culture, but dating sites like Fitlads are full of gay men who have chav fetishes, to the point that middle-class lawyers dress up and photograph themselves smoking topless in tracksuit bottoms with backwardly tipped caps. Phrases like “36 year-old scally lad lookin’ to top dirty rude boys” are common-place.

Of course “genuine chavs”, or more rather, victims of chav-tagging don’t actually identify as a chav, they’re not self-proclaimed “scallies”, and so the whole affair is a farcical façade. They're all fakers, modern-day minstrels mimicking our nation's poorest. Ironically, this particular brand of gay men who consider themselves “straight-acting” are actually just harlequins taking on a gritty role that is arguably more theatrical than the set of a drag queen.

There are dozens of chav-themed gay club nights across Britain, too many to name, but a quick Google search shows that London has its own basement night called ‘Scally Ladz’, as well as ‘tracksuit only’ sauna parties and chav events in Vauxhall.There is chav attire and merchandise in Soho fashion stores: not only bling and caps but DVDs like “Dirty Chavs Innit”, the synopsis of which begins “Randy foul-mouthed lads straight off the estate”, and subscription sites like British Boy, Gay Scally Porn and Scally Studs specialise in fanciful sex scenes where skinny white boys crowd around wearing neck chains and white Puma socks, sex scenes that always seem to take place behind bus shelters or in undecorated bedrooms.

Last month for GT (Gay Times) I interviewed a gay porn director who told me “It’s not just here, the main demand lies in America where they don’t actually know the word ‘chav’ but they’re becoming obsessed with that English look – skinny pale boys who act rough” So there is a market for chavs now, not as a consumer group, but as a product in itself. And the trend is global. In France there is a North African gay erotica scene, whilst in Germany one can even find gay nights based around the theme of Turkish immigrants. Indeed, it would seem the gay community has a brilliant inbuilt survival mechanism that can take any social problem and turn it into a party, but in the case of ‘chavs’ has it delivered one step too far? Is the gay limb of the sex industry now pedalling this particular cultural nuance disproportionately, fortifying and even dictating our prejudice?

Perhaps gay men lust after the sense of danger and wrongness that sleeping with a "dirty chav" presents? After all, the largely fictional chav portrait shows these boys to be coarse, homophobic and with a tendency for violence and criminality. This no doubt makes the chav a tantalising sexual conquest for a sector of socially bored identity-confused men.

Many gay men experience in their adolescence a phase of self-doubt and self-loathing as they realise that their heart’s path swims against the maintream tide. Does the faceless, abhorrent ‘chav’ represent a vehicle for revenge and self-expression? Or as a blogger for Bent magazine put it last month – “they want to do the guy who bullied them at school”. Or is the chav a character through which the gay man seeks to rediscover the clandestine excitement of his sexual awakening?

The elite’s sexual obsession with the working class has historical foundations. We see it in the life of Oscar Wilde who had a penchant for renting rough penniless youths. We see it in Chaucerian Britain when particular boys were plucked from obscure peasant backgrounds to become courtiers and be doted on by fond masters. Perhaps in the past sleeping with a lower class of man enabled the homosexual to keep his (then illegal) sex at an arm’s length from his own social peers?

D.H.Lawrence’s 1920s romp Lady Chatterley’s Lover does a fine job of highlighting the perpetual social insecurity between classes, and goes as far to suggest that sex with people who have less is worth more, it feels closer to nature. Perhaps the beacon of ‘chav’ offers a window of escapism through which middle-class gay men can forget the plight of their office jobs? The chav concept also functions to some as a highly-sought contrast to the sickly-sweet centre of mainstream gay pop culture. Nothing could be more remote from a sequin-clad Soho drag queen than a skinhead in a stark Stockwell council flat (despite the fact that ironically one can be both!)

Of course only a very small portion of gay men fetishize chavs, and this blog post seeks only to explore the reasons behind why the chav aesthetic is such a successful spoke of the gay industry’s wheel. Soho video stores are stuffed with titles like the ‘Rude Boiz’ series, whilst the tills of tracksuit-only gay nights are ringing. But what are the longterm socio-political implications of this fantasy?

I think it may have a negative impact on how young gay men grow up to view society and build up the idea of a non-existent ‘underclass’ of ‘scally lads’ all desperate for illicit gay sex and cold council flat orgies, when actually, in my experience, gay working class men are often a lot happier with themselves, a lot more comfortable with their sexuality and a lot more open-minded than their wound-up, more-educated, mother-dodging, mozzarella-scoffing middle class counterparts.

Owen Jones concludes in his book on chavs that “the demonization of the working class is the flagrant triumphalism of the rich who, no longer challenged by those below them, instead point and laugh at them”

Gay writers have always satirised the rich. Just look at the plays Wilde penned when he wasn’t beneath the sheets with chimney sweeps, and look at the works of his contemporary imitators like Stephen Fry. Perhaps one solution would be for gay pop culture to fetishize the rich too. But who would attend a club night where the dress-code was fluorescent socks, comb-overs and garishly large cufflinks? I will therefore now start work on my first adult movie – Eton Messs.

Hopefully in 10 years or so we’ll be able to look back on ‘chav’ porn and it will seem as dated, ridiculously artificial and perversely constructed as the 1970s Tom O' Finland clones in their skin-tight leather trousers and squirrelly moustaches. And let’s pray that these boys who are making chav porn for a measly £150 per scene are in a fortunate enough position to join in with that laughing.

Sugababes New Single 'Freedom' - June 2011

2011-06-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Moore just shared a link via Twitter to Mazzy Star's famous OC soundtrack tune Into Dust. I clicked on the link obediently wondering what the reason behind this unexplained sharing, but before I could work it out and before David Roback's pletrum had even left his guitar string I noticed a hot pink promotional video in the YouTube roll on the right - "Sugababes New Single", I immediately clicked on that instead and a bizarre Barbie-themed Nokia advert pops up:

Freedom - a snippet of a new Sugababes single:

I'm not sure what I think yet. Jake and Dinos Chapman spring to mind. So does some dance song from that 90s that I currently cannot recall (the one that goes "You got all that I need" or something?). When the babes yell "Ooh-yeahuHhhHHH" it all sounds very Aguilera.

Let's just hope the Nokia promotion stops here though and the Sugababes' new material doesn't become a Nadine Coyle esque "Only available in the cereals and crisps aisle" gold handcuffed nightmare.

Whilst I'm sharing YouTube videos like I'm some goth fairy on Tumblr, and whilst we're on a pretty and pink theme, could I also draw your attention to the post-feminist omnisexual anthem organ-laced Burger Baby by unsung queer pop heroes Gravy Train!!!! (the exclamation marks are part of their name)

Click on this peachy butt bee-arches:

Behind the Scenes: The making of the Sugababes Nokia ad:

I caught up with Sophy Woltman who worked on the doll video as part of Wieden & Kennedy who are Nokia's ad agency:

Q: So what are these dolls?

SW: They're are super cool dolls made by a brand called Integrity.

Q: So were the Sugababes not involved themselves?

SW: It's a collaborative project. We wanted to use Sugababes' new song Freedom because it has the right sound and works really well with the ad's concepts.

Q: Concepts being?

SW: Well for a start we wanted an ad with a music video feel to it, and secondly we were playing with the idea of product placement and the role that commercial brands play in music videos.

Q: How. Ironic.

SW: Yes!

Q: So have Sugababes even seen this video?

SW: Yes they have, they got in touch to say they love it.

Q: Do you have a favourite Sugababes song?

SW: I have to admit, I've always liked their first ever song Overload best, but their new song Freedom is pretty brilliant I think you'll agree.

Q: And who is the mastermind behind this Nokia video?

SW: Well, there's the director David Wilson, and the creatives Alex Holder and Oli Beale. You should watch the 'making of' on YouTube it's BRILLIANT.

Thanks Sophy, we will do!

9 Album Covers That Defined My Pre-Adolescence

2011-06-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

Now I know I could have made this blog post a badge of coolness and filled it with Bjork, Radiohead, Nirvana and Patti Smith. Indeed, there were several cool LPs lying around the front room of my childhood like Grace Jones, The Human League and Annie Lennox that just didn't interest me. Both of my parents are very into their pop music, although my mum's passion for 1980s female artists definitely conquered over my Dad's enjoyment of Bob Dylan, Sweet, Wishbone Ash and the back end of the 70s. I'm an only child too so I never had older siblings to drip feed me chart music.

This list is the music that I played over and over, and the images that accompanied each, the records whose covers wetted, no, drowned, my young imagination whether I like to admit it or not! Of course around the corner lay adolescence and it was my interest in Basement Jaxx that became my ticket into my next phase - I soon moved onto the dizzyingly cool heights of Chemical Brothers, Armand Van Helden and Faithless (although Kate would be back in good stead!)

1) 2 Unlimited - Get Ready For This

Literally the fastest and most intense song I'd ever heard. It the Crystal Castles of the early 90s, and although I'm sure it was the incredibly mainstream surface of a much more interesting rave scene that I was unaware of, I loved this single and played it on repeat. I even had an alien dance for the slower break sections two thirds of the way through.

2) Basement Jaxx - Remedy

I'm not sure how I got into Basement Jaxx as an only child living in the countryside near Melton Mowbray. Presumably through Radio 1. I used to stare at the cover of Remedy trying to work out which way round the bodies were and whether they belonged to men or women. The cover image, which I suppose in hindsight is an orgy, excited me.

3) Billie Piper - Billie

Because We Want To was an instant classic, embarrassingly I think I genuinely thought it was rebellious! The softer than soft depiction of Billie's face on the cassette tape cover fascinated me, I remember staring at it for the near duration of a coach trip to France, sitting next to a boy called Edward Long. I remember him telling me that 'Oops I Did It Again' had been voted the best album of the last twenty years by music industry professionals. I wonder what happened to Edward Long? Wherever he is I bet he's mega straight and has forgotten his one-time magical pop touch.

4) Corona - Rhythm of The Night

Like I said, I lived in the countryside near Melton Mowbray where the most exciting the landscape within a mile of my house got was this meander that bubbled froth. So staring at the stock image of skyscrapers on Corona's single was like seeing the future in a crystal ball. I remember asking my friend to watch me sing this from the otherside of a fish tank. If you're reading Joshua - I hope the councilling isn't costing you too much. I still like this song, along with any other 90s dance track that includes Rhythm in the title.

5) Vengaboys - The Party Album

As a contemporary teenager would say or type - "OMFG!!!" I first heard Up & Down on a Now CD and wasn't too enthralled, but We Like To Party - that's a whole different story. The Vengaboys were the first band in my life who could seriously rival Aqua. I had an obession with Kim's animated tits and remember lying to my friend Matt Bishop that I had a poster of her topless holding a cowboy hat over her vajayjay. When you take away the lyrics The Vengaboys essentially made European house pop, which is perhaps why I can't really digest Guetta today. I stuck with The Vengboys all the way through despite hating their later work, if I ever meet them - they owe me lunch.

6) Kate Bush - Lionheart

Being INCREDIBLY honest here - I didn't like it when mum played Kate Bush. I used to find Kate's voice too shrill and her tunes seemed to drag on and bore me. Basically she was too challenging and I'd not experienced enough of the world in order to turn her records into pairs of arms and wrap them around me. But something must have clicked subconciously because later aged 15 I became a mega fan, strangely enough through The Red Shoes. Still, the front cover of Lionheart made a big impact on me as a child and I used to CRAVE having my own lion suit. Funnily enough animal suits have had a bit of a fashion renaissance of late.

7) Cher - Love Hurts

Another of my mum's CDs technically. Cher's voice was impossible to ignore and I think I could sense how much my mum connected with the passion and anger behind some of her songs. I was really into playing cards from a young age, not card games themselves, but the images of Kings, Queens and yes - Jacks. I loved the way in which the characters were depicted upside down immediately beneath themselves, a reverse mirror image and I used to draw my own versions. So when I saw Cher's playing card themed cover to Love Hurts I was, erm, stunned I guess!

8) I'm Too Sexy - Right Said Fred

Whoever now lives in my childhood home - if you were wondering why there are dents all over the front room floorboards - it was me in my mum's heels. CLASSIC

9) Cyndi Lauper - She's So Unusual

This is the back of the LP not the front. I used to pretend the ferris wheel here was a pylon in a field near my house, and I was fascinated by the oil paints (clearly now I see it's a Vangogh copy) on the reverse of these shoes. So Dorothy.

So - there you have it! 9 images, 9 childhood memories.

Jameela Jamil: One Pose To Rule T4

2011-06-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

I like Jameela Jamil. I mean, I wouldn't go as far to say I Facebook 'Like' her, and she's certainly not as acute or comedic as some of her more succesful T4 predecessors but she's a general healthy hybrid of things that work for T4, and as my hot blogger friend Adam says "she is the woman of every single ethnicity"

I must admit, I felt a bit robbed of a quid with the recent issue of COMPANY mag, as although Jameela looked beautiful on the crazy-cool cover, there was next-to-nothing to read or look at inside, compared to say GLAMOUR which is action-packed with all manner of funky things to mull over. Then again I am a 23-year-old male. Sad times. Jameela Jamil has her own "column" in COMPANY, but it's nowhere near as exciting as her Wikipedia page.

SO. At the weekend we were discussing T4 presenters in my friend's friend's trendy Dalston-based kitchen when my old pal Shirley Knot said "How can you like Jameela when she only has one pose?" - And so last night I Google imaged her, and yes - as usual -Shirley is so right. Jameela Jamil has the same pose in the majority of her photos.

The Jameela pose consists of one sharp Tobleronesque elbow flapped out like an origami swan's wing, and a slight quarter profile turn of the whole body, adorned with a geek-chic pout to achieve the flattered-Disney-llama effect.

Can someone please start a blog called "Jameela Jamil and her ONE POSE" ? You never know, it might become a smash hit like "Kim Jong Il Looking At Things". And I'm sure Jameela gets paid to be photographed with those empty handbags anyway.

Run The World (Girls) Has Ruined Beyoncé (Sadly)

2011-05-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

Eight years after Beyoncé launched her solo career with Crazy In Love, a pop classic that defined the noughties, it seems she has reached the bottom of the cookie jar. Run The World (Girls) is her worst single to date. Here are some things that disappoint me about Run The World (Girls):

1. The song

It’s just about listenable thanks to the popular Major Lazer sample but (unlike her husband Jay-Z) Beyoncé struggles to make a sample her own. It sounds like a cheap DJ software amateur mash-up that you’d hear in a Gran Canaria gay bar. Kelis has been wowing crowds by dancing and improvising to Pon De Floor by Major Lazer for years and she really pulls it off, Kelis has the urban welly for stuff like this but with Beyoncé it looks a little clumsy and dated even.

2. The message

This whole pseudo-feminist thing is so wank, and it’s offensive. Women don’t rule the world. Men don’t rule the world. Successful, driven, powerful, wealthy egomaniacs run the world, and I suppose the kids of those people. To say that women rule the world (and the fact that Beyoncé feels the need to say that) simply highlights the fact that they don’t. Laughably the song is written and produced by five men, the single’s cover shoot is directed by a man, the video itself is written and directed by a man. Beyoncé herself may be inspired by Diana Ross but she is ruled by men and she always has been.

Whilst songs like Independent Women, A Woman Like Me (from the Pink Panther), If I Were A Boy and Suga Mama all managed to be great pop songs whilst also having something interesting to say about gender, Run The World (Girls) is just totally dumb. Why is she paraphrasing and subsequently erasing her own brilliant pop legacy with this mindless shit? It’s not even good quality mindless shit.

3. The voice

Beyoncé is an incredible singer with a good vocal range, but even when she’s not singing her voice can be very distinctive and effective. Not on Run The World (Girls), it’s chavvy, it’s whiny, it’s Lisa Mafia meets Mumsnet, it’s nauseating. How long do we think she spent in the studio? Twenty-five minutes? I doubt it.

4. The direction she is taking here

Beyoncé is back-pedalling. In a move that she probably sees as “rediscovering the routes of African American pop music” or something she is actually just over simplifying black history to the point of damaging it. It’s like she’s taken a Diana Ross Greatest Hits album, scratched it up with her Sasha Fierce glove, scrawled the words GIRL POWER on it with a permanent marker, put it in an industrial blender and surprise, surprise – it doesn’t play in the car anymore.

5. Gagaphobia

For some reason unbeknownst to man Beyoncé is scared of Lady Gaga and more generally speaking - the current direction of pop music. She was quite happy letting Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland exist in her own shadow for years (and rightly so, she was the bread-winner in DC and it was her Daddy in charge not theirs) but she doesn’t like playing catch-up with Gaga. She joined in with Telephone, tried the whole lesbo thing, tried inventing a fierce alter-ego, and she went all out there with her wacky 1950s inspired video to Why Don’t You Love Me? And she did OK, but it didn’t quite cut the mustard. She just doesn’t have the creative intellect to be a new Grace Jones. When Rihanna takes creative risks she embraces them, she becomes them. When Beyoncé tries something new it’s only ever ‘Oh, she’s trying something new’. Perhaps that’s why she’s recentralising her troops and becoming a stripped down version of herself. In short – midlife crisis.

The sad part is, she doesn’t need to do any of this. What Beyoncé is incredibly good at is looking tantalisingly sexy, stamping her feet, shaking those thighs and belting out a proper good whopper of a chart topper. But for some reason she feels pressured not to do this with Run The World (Girls). Instead of taking her pop career forwards she has retreated back into the J.Lo, Shakira mindset of “keep it simple, keep it catchy, borrow something that already works and sell sell sell”.

Just because Beyoncé can fart into a Dictaphone and release it as a single doesn't mean she has to. She should be developing her sound and discovering new territories not stomping over this tired and old freakum territory.

6. The Hype, The HYPE!

Run The World (Girls) already has a Wikipedia page with over 8,000 words written on it. That’s more information on Wikipedia about Beyoncé’s earth-shattering new feminist single than there is about the suffragettes.

7. Can’t dance to it

Unlike Single Ladies which was postmodern and minimal in very rhythmic and club-friendly fashion, Run The World (Girls) is awkwardly sparse and completely flat in places. It’s the sort of thing Britney would record for a Sketchers advert, talking of which, why hasn’t Beyoncé embraced the Britney / Ke$ha dub-prep movement, seems like she’s missed a trick there?

8. Instantly forgettable

Beyoncé’s best songs, and indeed Destiny’s Childs best songs, live and breath inside you, they’re cleverly put together and contagious. As soon as someone says “Kelly – can you handle this?”, or “ch-ch: Question”, or “All ma single ladies” – the song starts to form in your head and reproduce itself. With Run The World (Girls) it’s just Major Lazer that springs to mind.

And here are Beyonce's two best songs, that tragically she never released:

Staged In Chelsea: Some notes on the characters and how shit it is

2011-05-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

Made In Chelsea starts off well with sunny shots of shops on the Kings Road whilst Unillusion off Yelle’s album Safari Disco Club is played. 5 seconds later the quality takes a nosedive.

The beginning narration (copied off Keira Knightley’s spiel from the start of The Hole) goes “This is our world, but just because we have everything doesn’t mean that.. blah blah blah”, and straight away I am bored.

The cameras take us to the pricey Chelsea club Raffles where we meet Pocahontas-lookalike OLLIE LOCKE the insuperably vain doorboy/promoter. He is actually one of the more fun characters, priding himself in being able to name two novels from Charles Dickens’ endless list of world-famous household titles, he mooches deliberately quotable sound bites like “Sometimes I just love the smell of cow shit”.

When Ollie talks about Sunday night being date night I tried my hardest to imagine anyone dating him other than Henry Conway. It turns out that Ollie’s date is with a woman, which means he must a) be terrified of his parents watching the show, b) he spends so much time getting ready that he’s forgotten there’s a world outside the closet, or c) he’s playing an in-joke with his pals on national television.

Next-up we meet FRANCIS, a small posh boy with a receding hairline that makes the Duke of Cambridge seem like a banshee by comparison. Francis refers to CAGGIE as a 'potential suitor', which a quick Google search informs me is technically allowed but I think you’ll agree sounds terribly jarring. Despite his desperation for female approval he actually spends more time posing for naff portraits of himself or softly pushing double-entendres in front of his best mate FREDRIK FERRIER, staring at him with a masochistic yearning. Indeed, Francis is evidently infatutaed with Fredrik on a deep level that he has no conscious access to.

Then there’s SPENCER who is a semi-posh David Brent with long hair and fish eyes. The storyline that Made In Chelsea’s idea-starved makers have built around Spencer is that he courts Caggie behind his Brazilian girlfriend’s back. All rather predictable and boring.

Next up we have CHESKA (Francesca Hull). She looks like a hybrid of Jerry Hall and someone you met and then forgot at uni, basically - five years too old to be in this show -, and she writes for “Matchbox magazine”, which isn’t actually a magazine but turns out to be a recently invented blog that will be used as a promotional tool for the program as well as to build up the show’s pseudo-realism kudos. Matchbox Magazine is possibly the one trump card MIC has over The Only Way Is Essex (where presumably the cast literacy level is too low for bloggers). Will we read Matchbox Magazine from now on? Sadly, probably, assuming the show heats up. Will Matchbox Magazine be full of shit, advertising deals and exist solely to pedal the reality TV careers of those on the show? Sadly, yes.

By the way, anyone looking for a fun game to play during the advert breaks: close your eyes, point at something in your living room, see what it is and then see if it would be eligible as the name of a shit magazine – it always works. E.g. “Radiator Magazine”, “Lightswitch Magazine”, “Skirting Board Magazine”, “Picture Rail”, “Mantle Piece"… told you. Cheska has a friend called BINKY, she doesn’t do much and at first I thought she was a coat but then she spoke.

Which brings me onto the subject of clothes. They're clearly intended to be a big deal with Made In Chelsea, but there is very little fabric worth feasting the eyes on (perhaps designers have taken out visual super-injunctions against any of their creations being show on the shoulders of these Chelseans). Caggie and Millie both dress like Stacey Ferguson during her Dutchess phase, whilst male-lead HUGO dresses more like a gay knock-off-YSL fan than a public school boy. There are far too many fake furs and far too much imitation denim.

Hugo's olive skin, greasy black hair, tacky bracelets and designer stubble make him look like a sun-lounge attendant on Gran Canaria’s gay beach or someone who tries to sell your parents power-hose moss-removal on their doorstep, but he does come across a relatively decent guy. He gives straightforward advice to Spencer and refrains from saying anything garish, possibly due to a limited vocabulary, possibly due to shyness. Ollie considers himself a fashionista but wears the kind of stuff I'd wear to a smart-casual event in sixth form: pastel shirt, smart jeans, belt. All very bland.

FREDRIK is totes my favourite character at the moment (I say at the moment, the series has finished as far as I’m concerned). Fredrik has an interesting look to him, a bit like a transsexual Goldilocks; a bit like one of those troll figurines from the 90s, a bit like Robert Webb playing an Edwardian school girl. He is satisfyingly posh, alluring and seems relatively balanced. It’s fun watching him shrug off attention from the washed-out wannabes. I suppose I fancy him a tiny bit.

Out of the girls I quite like AMBER ATHERTON, she’s posh and secretly quite intelligent, I enjoyed the scene in which she bitched to ROSIE about their mention on Cheska’s blog. Anyone who bitches about a blog is cool, right? They stand around in some white-washed PR office / art studio / something, and take it in turns to dazzle their eyes with disbelief at each other.

The most annoying moment in this evening’s first episode was when this homosexual in a vile green jacket declared “Topshop is definitely a turn OFF. Big hair is a definitely turn ON” and then later, idiotically, to his friend – “you're a girl you're not a lesbian!” I stared speechless at my TV screen whilst he laughed at himself like a possessed mule. Yet another gay on TV to be ashamed of, hats tipped to E4, I didn’t catch his name. Marv or something? Marf? Mart?

As the episode came to a close it was remarkable how little had actually happened, and not in a beautifully vacuous post-modern Hills way, but in a “how did they manage to make this so dull and lacklustre?” way. The dialogue/words were awful and made me want to see a list of which schools these supposedly privileged individuals actually attended. If one of those boys was my son and I'd sent them to a 25k a year school then I'd be wanting a refund, they all lacked intuition, inquisitiveness and genuine wit. The sad truth is that these Chelsea lads lack nearly all the English credentials that their 1950s predecessors had, people like Robin Maugham, Guy Burgess, Gerald Hamilton, the (gay) men who set the level of grandeur and decorum in Chelsea.

Instead, Made In Chelsea is stuffed with Americanisms, predictability, a bland sense of vanity, a misunderstanding of high fashion, a shallow interpretation of etiquette in which people take embarrassing pride over petty grand narratives, and generic drivel. The girls lack the natural attractiveness, charm and confidence of elite public school girls that we're used to seeing in pop culture, and instead they spent a lot of time pushing straws around their near-empty drinks looking brain-dead.

Made In Chelsea is a bad show made from a stale idea, and yet disappointingly it could have been so much better. If Henry Conway really is involved behind the scenes then he needs to sparkle things up sharpish, otherwise the queue for cameos is going to be pretty sparse as real celebrities stay well clear of this TV danger-zone.

Call me a crude but I'd rather just watch some porn, which for me is the test as to whether something is good television. Would I rather watch porn? Tomorrow night for example my eyes will be glued to the TV screen, white wine in hand, expletives at the ready for the start of The Apprentice - an example of well-crafted television.

If you want the real Made In Chelsea then read the brilliant writer Ed Caesar’s piece Boujis Nights: Partying With The Posh Boys from 2008.

Betty Blue Eyes Review: Raquel In Royston Vasey

2011-04-19T05:33:00.000-07:00

Starring Reece Shearsmith (The League of Gentlemen) and Sarah Lancashire (Raquel in Coronation Street); watching Betty Blue Eyes was a bit like watching a musical amalgamation of my parents’ 1990s TV highlights. Indeed, it is a genius crowd-pleasing pairing for a new West End show.

Both actors shine, Shearsmith with his own brand of uplifting self-deprecation and perfectly timed facial expressions, Lancashire with her natural flare for injecting comedy into moments of melancholy, and vice versa. Although it is Adrian Scarborough who plays the eagle-eyed latrine-lurking meat inspector who brings home the bacon this time, somehow managing to roll Chitty Bang Bang’s Professor Pots, Baron Bomburst and The Child Catcher into one wonderfully villainous and perverse truffle of a performance.

The best scene in the show depicts a glistening and idyllic 1940s ballroom which (just when the audience are waiting for the catchy chorus to come round again) crashes into a black oblivion of smoke and rubble – in short, it's a ballroom blitz. Although the plot device here is not exactly original (I saw a scene just like it in the recent Cinderella ballet at Sadler’s Wells), the chorus girls in Betty Blue Eyes are fabulous, giving ear-to-ear grins one minute, then hilarious frowns with invasively pointed toes and stuffy pouts the next. Alan Bennett, who wrote the screenplay for A Private Function, has a spiritual presence throughout the show. The audience are served up a very loyal portrait of Benettian Yorkshire, an illustration of his home county that we’re now so accustomed to his work delivering.

Whilst some moments are side-splitting other jokes are a little undercooked, perhaps aimed at day-tripping Raquel fans and tourists, it seems even the cast struggle not to wince at some of the show's less-accomplished punchlines. Betty Blue Eyes faces the classic West End dilemma of needing to create funny ticket-selling caricatures for all the family to enjoy without boring to death the much smaller core of London's creative intelligentia, wine-swigging West End know-it-alls and the impossible-to-impress media whores. Sadly it is the latter who have the final say on whether a show is any good.

Austerity Britain, the Royal Family, the introduction of TV broadcasts, and the recent downfall of the Nazi empire provide sufficient satirical meat to chew on but too often Betty Blue Eyes shies away from being too impactful, choosing instead to be a light-hearted glossary, keeping perhaps tactically within the school syllabus, Betty Blue Eyes could have been called Keep Calm And Carry On: The Musical.

Several reviews have likened the show to Animal Farm, The Wizard of Oz and even Wicked (The ballroom number certainly sounds quite similar to Ozdust Ballroom, whilst the funniest song about a pig in the house sounds very much like The House Began to Pitch)

I was reminded of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, most obviously the ‘Kill The Pig’ routine, but also the wider concept of using the pig as a metaphor for human evil, social invention and the descent of civilisation.

The show is quite evangelical in its constant condemning of killing animals, using comedy to seduce the audience into listening first and then bludgeoning them with a slice of animal rights. Indeed, watching Betty Blue Eyes with a vegetarian friend sat next to me was interesting - to note just how much our appetite as a nationa has changed over last 50 years, with millions happily choosing not to eat meat at all and many more of us quite willingly living on a diet of processed trash.

Betty Blue Eyes is a fun musical, held together by its strong lead actors, and filled with charming details. Perfectly timed in the aftermath of a recession and in the run-up to a Royal Wedding, it’s well worth a watch, if only to see Reece Shearsmith in a pair of sock suspenders.

http://www.bettyblueeyesthemusical.com/

Photos: Pink Collar Boxing

2011-04-16T04:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to the first ever Pink Collar Boxing at The Scala in Kings Cross. Organised by boxer trainer Dermot Mannion, it was an exciting evening with six scheduled fights that took place in The Scala's main arena. The turn out was large and the crowd's cheering, yelling and egging-on crescendoed into a very lively atmosphere by the final fight.

I felt the evening's host Bernie Katz could have been a lot chattier, he didn't make much of an effort to build up a rapport with the audience, meaning there were some awkward sober silences during the first half. I'm sure boxing is meant to be watched with concentration and sincerity, but for an event targeted at a wide audience of amateurs and first-time spectators of the sport, the audience certainly needed a livelier host to provide commentary, insight, jokes, and generally to hold their hand through the evening's discourse.

Some videos of the boxers before each fight, with vox pops from friends possibly, and some X-Factor style hype, would have been another welcome addition to the evening.

All in all though - a fun evening of rambling around The Scala and watching hot men hit it out in the ring. Definitely go for the experience, the next one is in four months: www.pinkcollarboxing.com

I wrote a preview to the event on Gay Times here.

And here are my iPhone snaps:

Above: Club land songtress Lizzie France sang some dance hits, adding to the dance music backdrop of the event. You can here her stuff here.

The fighters included Scott Roberts, news editor of Gaydar Radio, Pat Cash from QX magazine (who had a photographer there on the night so look out for those snaps), and Ricky 'The Hammer' Sinz.

Below: One of the skimpily clad ringside hunks with a round card.

Below: The bell boy! He took his job very seriously, smiles were few and far between. Hot.

Below: Dermot Mannion referees

Juicy Lyrics: Because Gay Rappers Don't Represent

2011-04-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

It's sad how closeted the black music scene seems to be. It's quite apparent to even the untrained eye that several of the big-selling 'urban' artists in the charts right now, men and women, are gay. But rather than help along people like them who don't have electric gates and security guards, they prefer to keep selling a lie, and so consequently, a lot of 'urban' (pop) music is starting to sound very empty.

I love R'n'B and rap, but because it's all written for womanizing straight men and acidic man-hating women, I find myself re-categorising and gender inverting the lyrics myself in my head. It goes so far to the point that I forget the original lyrics and get annoyed when I am reminded of them and they clash with my own little bubble.

Notorious B.I.G, Jay-Z, Ol' Dirty Bastard (and perhaps Nelly) are my favourite rappers. They each have a sound and rhythm to their voice that is unique to them, both melodic and weighted. They also each have their own preference to rhyming structure and form. A gifted wrapper is a poet, a spoken word artist, and even Dizzee Rascal can be credited as such, but by and large - most chart rap is absolute manufactured trash.

Below are my alternative gay lyrics to Biggy Smalls' hit Juicy. I feel quite shy sharing them, despite the fact that they're deliberately tongue-in-cheek and farcical. It's not meant to be rapped in a tone that mimics Biggie's voice, but more rather a camp Yorkshire accent, preferably with one hand on a hip and a generous dollop of eye-rolls.

Of course Notorious wasn't gay, he was the complete opposite - a womanizing mysogynist some say. These lyrics are in no way disrespectful of his legacy, it's just a bit of fun. If you fancy penning your own gayternative to a rap classic then please do share the link below!

Now if you want to match my Juicy to the original then I recommend opening up the original on YouTube (Search Notorious - Juicy), and then when you get good - "rapaoke" if yourself over

the instrumental version perhaps.

JUICY - by JC Superstar

Fuck all you ‘phobes. Get a grip fatherfucker.

Yeah, this album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I'd never mount a muffin, to all the people that lived above the buildings that I was gossiping in front of that called the police on me when I was just tryin' to give feedback on how to dress their daughters, and all the Nadines in the struggle, you know what I'm sayin'?

Uh-ha, it's all good baby bay-bee, uh

Verse One:

It was all a dream, I used to read QX magazine, Billie Piper and Alice Deejay up in the limousine, Hangin' Robbie on my wall , Every Saturday Camp Attack, Tranny Shack, my bedroom had a mirror ball. I watched ass rock 'til my cherry popped, Hating tweed and Typhoo, suckin' on private school cock , Way back, when I had the red and black Minnie Mouse rucksack With the hat to match , Remember kissing Luke, woo-ha, woo-ha, I never thought that his butt would take me that far, Now I'm in the limelight 'cause I ride tight , Time to get laid, sell some homemade marmalade , Born sinner, the opposite of Michael Winner , Remember when I used to sing Javine before dinner , Peace to Fergie, Tommy C, Marlon B , Spunkmaster Pecs, Bum love Starsky , I'm blowin' off like you thought I would , Another cock, same number, same hood , It's all good

Uh, and if you don't know, now you know, quee-ah, uh

Chorus:

You know very well who you are, Don't let them hold you back, reach for his arse, You had a go, and it felt insane, You're not the only one who likes it good and plenty,

Verse Two:

I made the change from a slip brief, To wearing lamé jock straps on Whitby beach , And I'm far from cheap, I play P!nk in my jeep all day, Spread spunk, it's the Yorkshire way , The Moet and Alisha’s Attic keep me bitchy, Girls used to diss me , Now they write letters 'cause I’m sissy , I never thought it could happen, this faggin' stuff , I was too used to fearing' tits and muff , Now hunks hold me close in a buttocks spit roast , Behind Mr. Whippy down on the east coast , Nandos with queens, Soho for weeks , Sold out seats to hear Stephen Fry speak , Livin' life without fear , Pushin' five carrots in my neighbour’s rear. Lunches, PR brunches, interviews by the pool , Considered a fool 'cause I slept around high school

Stereotypes of a gay male misunderstood And it's still all good

Uh...and if you don't know, now you know, quee-ah

Chorus:

You know very well who you are, Don't let them hold you back, reach for his arse, You had a go, and it felt insane, You're not the only one who likes it good and plenty,

Verse Three:

Thunderbirds Are Go, tapes of Genesis , When I didn’t fuck blokes, man I couldn't picture this , 50 inch dreams on a green leather sofa , Got two rides, a limousine with a coiffeur , Phone Bill when the cava’s gone flat , No need to hurry, bumming in an accountant’s flat, And my hole screw is poundin’ , Celebratin' every day, no more public browsin' , Thinkin' back on my one-night shags , Now my Mum pimps a Matalan fleece on her back , And she loves to show me off, of course , Smiles every time my throat is cummed-up and hoarse , We used to fuss when the Newsagent dissed us , “No Heat?” Wonder why All I Want For Christmas missed us? , Birthdays was the worst days , Now I suck Sam’s mate when I’m thirst-ay , Uh, damn right I like the life I live , Jus’ don’t go from negative to positive , And it's all... ,

(It's all good)

...and if you don't know, now you know, quee-ah, uh Uh, uh...and if you don't know, now you know, quee-ah Uh...and if you don't know, now you know, quee-ah, uh

Representin' G-Town in the house, Gay Mafia, Billie Piper, uh, uh yeah a-ight.

Anti Gay Marriage? Meh.

2011-04-05T04:40:00.000-07:00

In response to Richard Waghorne’s piece on Gay Marriage : ************************************************************************************** Leaving his incoherent ramble on gay marriage to one side for a second, it mostly offends me when Waghorne writes “actual homophobia already has a scarcely-threatening, almost antique quality to it” - this is simply not true. Thousands of young gay people are subjected to bullying in British schools everyday. As I type this sentence right now a student will be crying alone in a corner somewhere on their lunch break*. Homophobic killings still happen in Britain, and as for the rest of the world – there are entire nations darkened by heavily institutionalized homophobia, to pluck out one example from dozens - Iraq - where gay men are sometimes imprisoned, sexually abused by prison staff, and tortured to death such as having their anuses super glued so that they die painfully of their own digestive malfunction. We don't necessarily have a right to impose our culture on other cultures, but it is admirable that Britain sets an example of tolerance and love. **************************************************************************** Waghorne undermines his piece on gay marriage when he writes that civil partnerships “provide gay couples with nearly all necessary legal provisions”. Nearly all? What about equality? Gay people deserve to be treated the same as anybody else. We don't want tiaras and fancy titles, we don't want to better anyone, we just want the same, and it is so saddening to see a gay writer working against this. As Peter Tatchell has argued for a long time, denying gay people marriage is just another way of classifying them as second-class citizens who should be rejected by the family unit, ostracised from mainstream society, as if they don't belong in the world into which they were born, in which they live, and to which they contribute. If Richard Waghorne doesn't want to marry, and if no man wants to marry Richard Waghorne then that is fine, but why should he write a piece condemning something that he claims to have no interest in doing, and yet a lot of gay people do want to do and deserve? He has written this piece because he fancies himself as controversial, and his experience of reality is clearly somewhat skewed. ************************************************************************************** I am not attacking him because he is “anti-gay” as he thinks the "predictable" and cliche reaction to his piece will be. No, I’m highlighting his article because it reads like the work of a heartless careerist, and a boring one at that. His long rambling introduction of "I, I, I" and "actually gay people should X, Y, Z" just demonstrates the distance between the empty old-fashioned arguments and the heart of today's gay community. *********************************************************************************** It annoys me that he suggests gay partnerships don’t lead towards raising children. He is failing to see the future landscape of Britain here, already gay teenagers are growing up with the understanding that they could quite feasibly raise a family, and indeed there are plenty of gay parents out there right now. Just as gay people can be brilliant teachers, they can be brilliant parents, and if marriage is the springboard for succesful child raising, as Waghorne believes, then gay people have a right to give themselves that security and bond. ************************************************************************************* As for marriage being the perfect template for couples to raise children, I disagree, and we all know this isn’t always true either. Many of my friends were damaged by their parents’ marriages, does Richard Waghorne not know of at least one marriage that had a detrimental effect on a family? The idea that marriage is synonymous with monogamy and fidelity is a myth. Lots of people marry for status, money, security, or out of parental and social pressure and societal expectation, the same reasons why many have children. Whilst my parents were never married (they met at a party at university and had me – they shared parenting responsibilities) we are all perfectly happy as an archipelago-style family and are “successful” without the aid of church bells and a cake. I personally probably won't have a gay wedding, unless I meet a Wimbledon finalist and Marc Jacobs brings out a line of kilts. But I respect those gay people who do want to marry in private, and celebrate with their family and friends, and in the eyes of their all-loving all-accepting God if they're religious. ************************************************************************************* I'm sure there are reasons to doubt the introduction of gay marriae, and issues that must be ironed-out, and hopefully there is a writer somewhere who could convey these arguments more clearly and intelligently than Waghorne. If anything surely the major argument against gay marriage is that is affiliates the modern gay community with an old-school ecclesiastical gay community that is corrupt. Because to believe that the church doesn't have a whopping great twisted homosexual legacy is simply to bury our heads in the choir gowns rack. Marriage might also be (with emphasis on might) an example of government trying to “straighten out” the gay community, take away the bliss of an alternative counter-culture lifestyle, and to subject them to capitalist obedience. Arguments and concepts that when contemplated are complex, confusing and no doubt too chewy for old Weddingless Wordpress Waghorne here. ************************************************************************************ I’m not sure if I will marry myself, but I certainly won’t waste my time writing articles that offend and hurt those people who do want to marry. And if I do ever get married to my Wimbledon tennis finalist then I am certain a lot of straight couples and their prosperous, hearty, healthy heterosexual children will be in attendance. **************************************************************************************************************************************************************** *To borrow a Comic Relief writing style for one moment!

For a more mature rebuttal against Richard Waghorne's attention-grabbing piece check out Conor Pendergrast's piece 'Dear Richard'

Gay Pub Special: Rose Garden, Dalston Superstore, The Griffin & The Eagle

2011-04-03T17:38:00.000-07:00

A few photos and notes from the weekend:

Above we can see Jaki Graham performing at Carpet Burn in The Eagle, Vauxhall (I didn't know who she was either, but a quicky Wiki on the iPhone told me she was quite a big deal in 1994).

The crowd of Muscle Marys and Piercing Brosnans applauded (screamed) so vigorously (it was 1am) that Jaki had to fight back tears of joy - "Oh my! Oh my God! You boys gonna give me a big head!" she delighted, "And some of you were just babies when I was doin' ma thing!" (they weren't).

Despite looking like Kelly Rowland on Fat Booth there was something compelling and very likeable about Jaki, she was clearly a born-performer. Whilst waiting at the bar I downloaded some of Jaki's hits off iTunes for the nightbus - 'Step Right Up' and 'Could It Be I'm Falling In Love' are firm favourites, YouTube this fine lady.

The Eagle is a pretty smoking venue in Vauxhall with an even prettier smoking area, although you CAN'T PAY FOR DRINKS ON CARDS, which I struggle to understand in 2011AD (with the exclusion of rural pubs and pop-up shops). If you're paying £8 entry and £1.50 per item in the cloakroom then you're obviously going to run out of metal quite quickly.

Everyone in The Vauxhall Griffin was given a female pop alter ego on Saturday, part of their alternative pop quiz night 'Push The Button'. I was given Joan Osborne, but complained and so the host took Joan away and angrily stamped Lady Gaga on my chest as if to say 'Oh, grow up you tart!'.

I took a photo above of one man's two-sticker title of Tampera Feat. Maya - brilliant. I wanted to bin his shirt for him, but at least it wasn't chequered.

A collection of 1980s figurines, mainly Thundercats characters, chilling on the picture rail in The Vauxhall Griffin. I loved my hand-me-down He-Man toys as a child. In fact, they have a lot to account for, along with Dolph. Has anyone done research into the ties betwen gay culture and the colourful highly eroticised and utterly camp boys toys of the 1980s?

Bob Chicalors, deputy features editor at Gay Times, danced to all your favourite hits in a Camilla Parker-Bowles mask (part of the quiz). We clocked in at 6th place, winning a box of runners-up Maltesers (mainly for bonus points incurred by our creation of a Lisa Left-Eye Lopes mausaleum in one of the wing's of Mel C's house (long story)).

Breakfast at Dalston Superstore. It's weird being there when it's not rammed with gay-electro teens, gay-friendly girls in Aldo heels and Will Young. This fresh mint tea came beautifully presented with a napkin-tied heat protection grip, and some little slices of lemon. The food there is exquisite and the atmosphere is perfect for nursing a hangover, well worth a hop on the overground. Being healthy I ordered granola with yoghurt, only to sit there in emerald-faced envy as my fashion PR pal Rob tucked into a giant smoked salmon bagel breakfast.

Rose Garden without her wig, a wonderful performer - great legs too!

Rose invites some cross-dressing punters onstage. Mistake. Hilarious.

Rose tries to hold herself together whilst everything goes ungracefully wrong!

Rose attempts to teach the boys a dance routine. Not many can walk in heels like our Rose can.

Rose Garden is a sophisticated and visionary drag persona, do go and see her. I regular at The Black Cap, she has regular slots all over London and indeed the world. Visit her Myspace page here.

And that was my gay weekend! Elements of it anyhow. Jack xx

Tumbling from the Top: It's Jay BITCH!

2011-03-28T00:25:00.000-07:00

Jay McKenzie is a twenty-year-old blogger in Christchurch, New Zealand. When he’s not busy studying music production or hanging out in the park with his mates he publishes It’s Jay Bitch – a Tumblr blog that acts as a shrine to Britney Spears, interspersed with homemade videos of Jay dancing in his underwear to Britney, plus a selection of nude photos that male readers email in, tit bits of non-Britney pop culture (like Rihanna’s latest shots), plus sporadic splashes of actual gay porn. It's the sort of blog Warhol would have loved. Jack of Hearts caught up with him online to find out who this Britney-mad boy actually is:

Hey Jay! I love your Tumblr, especially the dancing videos, do you film them whilst your parents are busy doing housework downstairs or something? >>> Haha, I don’t know about that, but from the age of 7-14 I took professional dance classes – so thanks dude - you should see me at the club after a few drinks!

When did your Britney obsession start? >>> Oh here we go! My friend introduced me to her when I was sixteen. It started with 'In The Zone' I think, tracks like Toxic, and I became obsessed with this sexual erotic mid-tempo track called 'Breathe On Me' it’s amazing, I’d love to have sex to it, and yeah it went from there - I started getting her CDs and getting really into it. She makes great pop music! I’ve flown to Sydney twice to see her.

Lots of boys send you photos of themselves naked, do you ever date or meet up with your Tumblr fans? >>> They’re one of the perks of running a Tumblr like mine, I only publish some of them, haha. No I haven’t met up with any, there are none that I know of that live in my city anyway. I’m quite fussy too, but yeah I mean I guess if people wanted to meet me I could arrange something, haha!

What's the gay scene in Christchurch like? >>> It’s alright I guess. I’m an out and open gay guy but I don’t really associate myself with the 'scene'. They know who I am and I know who most of them are, I just don’t want to be a part of it. It’s kind of bitchy and slutty here, is that like most gay scenes? Some people think it’s a bad thing being picky, and I hate myself for it sometimes, but my friend reminded me that even though I’m a flirt I can still take my time with choosing guys and making sure that I only get the best for myself. In real life I am a lot more reserved, I'm usually not one for casual sex I would much prefer a relationship.

What kind of guys do you like? >>> You get the idea by following my Tumblr, it’s basically anything that tickles my fancy, I guess you could say I like youthful boyish looking guys with masculine bodies.

What are your favourites blogs? >>> I love this dude and my buddy fakeblood on Tumblr (but he’s working on getting internet) he runs a sort of similar Tumblr to mine. I’ll leave it at that otherwise we’ll be here for a very long time!

So you’re studying music production - who are your influences? >>> I love pop music, I want to develop a sound that’s like electronic, but like harder and evil, but quite urban at the same time. It’s hard to explain – I’ll hook you up when I have something to share with you. Definitely britney, her music is great, there’s no bullshit with her - she is what she is and she does her thing and she puts out great music. Blackout the album specifically, I love the whole sound and then producer-wise Danja, William Orbit, Benny Blanco, Dr Luke, Max Martin, Billboard, Laze and Royal – there are so many I could just go on and on.

Have you had many homophobes or haters online? >>> A couple who think I’m a jerk, which I kinda am sometimes, but other than that not really. If you choose to come onto a clearly gay tumblr and hate about it - that would look pretty funny. I surround myself with great friends and family and so have never had any homophobic bitches hatin’ on me!

Do you have female fans too? >>> Sure do, got tonnes of girls following! I mean it’s their choice, they clearly know I post peen and sometimes other stuff like anal sex! Errrrr, haha, it’s kind of awkward but they can always unfollow me.

Has anyone in your family seen your Tumblr? >>> Errrm yup, haha, my sister has Tumblr too and she has seen it. It’s kind of awkward but she’s cool about it and jealous of all my followers!

Will you ever bridge the gap between dancing and the porn on your Tumblr, and make a sex tape? >>> I don’t think so, I like to get a bit rowdy sure but the half-naked amateur pictures seem to be working for now!

If you could have a night out with Britney, or ten nights out with the ten hottest guys on your blog - which would you choose? >>> That’s SO unfair! I need to get laid right now - so the guys, but not like an orgy or anything like that, I’d only do it with them one at a time, haha.

_______

Tumblr? What is this boy talking about?

With a considerable worldwide following that is soaring by the thousand, Jay has managed to crack the website Tumblr. Whilst Facebook and Twitter are still filtering their way into the mainstream media’s vocabulary, teenagers have leapt onto Tumblr more and more to share their likes and experiences.

Condemned by some as ‘lazy blogging’, praised by others as the adolescent equivalent to Guardian-style live blogging, Tumblr is a site that lets you rapidly share photos, links and videos that you find online and then mix it up with your own thoughts and comments from your friends too. The result in many cases is an overly regurgitated pile of shit in which teenagers clamber over each other in a nauseating pyramid of celebrity, self-love, shallow art and naivety. Not for Jay.

With It’s Jay Bitch, he has successfully managed to pin a niche that essentially boils down to Britney, hot boys and bumming, but is of a consistent good quality in its selection (the secret of good Tumbling). Jay’s own contributions – videos of him dancing naked in his bedroom – are a way of creating some original content to ensure that the blog doesn’t become an anonymous third-person perve forum, the flashes of hard-core porn take the pressure off the genuine nude shots that boys email in, whilst the Britney theme is just genius.

Refreshing, daring and addictive – It’s Jay Bitch!

Jay Mckenzie interviewed by Jack Cullen, 23rd March 2011

Fuzz Light Year: Cold Cave's 2nd Album: "Cherish The Light Years"

2011-03-25T08:54:00.000-07:00

Cold Cave are brilliant at their art, a dark and intense American electro act, introduced to me by my music-geek pal Duncan James Robertson two years ago, I met the band when they played a tiny gig in Nottingham (review and photos with the band here).

During that Crystal Castles phase when lots of bands in London acquired synth players over night along with a fat girl in leggings and someone who looked a bit like a character played by Noel Fielding, Cold Cave were there in the background, avoiding that bandwagon, pushing out their own brand of intelligent lyrics, excessive feedback noise, brave beats and terrifying melodies. With all the intensity of Fuck Buttons, the vocal energy of The Fall and the image of some Warhammer dark elves, Cold Cave are cool, more than cool, they're placid.

The first single of their new album 'The Great Pan Is Dead' is a real running down the street as fast as you can, manically racing down steps, throwing stacks of paper out of a 15th storey window, type song. I love it. You can stream their third album Cherish The Light Years here below, it's released on April 5th.

For those new to Cold Cave check out The Trees Grew Emotions And Died, Gates, Double Lives In Single Beds and Theme From Tomorrowland - my favourite tracks of theirs.

p.s. AMAAAZZZZINNNG!

Cullenders: Words and phrases that Jack Cullen coined

2011-03-21T16:51:00.000-07:00

A few friends have been complimenting me recently on my my habit for inventing words and sneaking them under the sub-editorial radae, so I thought it might be time to start an official list, otherwise I'll only forget them and some teenage blogger in Brisbane will claim them. I'll try to add citations that show the original date and publication if possible.

So, some lexical babies of mine:

1. Gleeché - (noun) - Swap the lederhosen for Haus of Gaga and you get the stock-gay sensation that is Kurt Hummel. Gleeché first appeared on the Guardian, Tuesday 15th March in the article 'The gay one from Glee - positive role model or dangerous cliché' (definition provided by @domster13 on Twitter)

2. Lesconic - (adjective) - First used to describe a portrait of the Leeds scenester and celesbian-in-waiting Claire Cole.

3. Lime Haus (proper noun) - Respelling of East London's town Limehouse, to give a sense of the place's new found trendiness after Shirley Knot moved there.

4. Bin-bag chic (adjective) - Description of the 2008 fashion trend for outdoor jackets that were large, shiny and looked like bin bags, popular with Italian gay men and in Britain popularised on the high street by Uni Qlo.

5. Pope-ular (mindset) - A deliberately populist activity or object related to the efforts of the Vatican City, for example the Pope's online fashion store.

6. Charlie Le Min-Who? (noun, includes question mark) - A boy whose accessories, image and trends outweigh his intelligence, personality and manners, creating a top-heavy wannabe. Coined in the Gay Times write up of the Charlie Le Mindu London Fashion Week after party 2011. Interchangeable with Charlie Le Vin Rouge, Charlie Le Vindaloo.

7. RT-shirt (noun) A painstakingly sought-after re-tweet from a celebrity on Twitter, or tweeting somebody or something on Twitter in the interest of garnering RTs. E.g. "@AlanCarr? Been there, done that, got the RT-shirt."

8. Age-drop (verb) To deliberately mention your age as a means to increase your status, to make others feel inferior, to remind peers of your rapid career progression, or to draw attention to your talents. E.g. "Twitter is new to me and I'm the only 19 year old technophobe in the world" - [Dylan Jones, March 2011]. Age-dropping needn't drop a numerical age, this is called ageless age-dropping. E.g. "New Kids on the Block? I never read those".

REVIEW Britney Spears - Femme Fatale >>> Till The Record Ends: My first thoughts on Britney's 7th album

2011-03-16T05:43:00.000-07:00

It’s Britney BITCH! God I love Britney blog posts. No need to be refined, no need to really even say anything, because words can’t do this girl justice, just as words will never hurt her. Britney is the nuclear-proof cockroach of the charts, her fans are GAGGING for new material, to the point that even before Femme Fatale has been officially released we’ve all over-played it and want more. There is a group of people, me included, who will literally throw money at anything by “Britney Spears”, possibly because we were at an impressionable age when Baby One More Time came out, possibly because she accommodates our alter-egos, or possibly becauses she just pushes out pop music at its purest. Perhaps those are the signs of a true pop star. Someone who has a place in your heart, someone you've kept with you since childhood. An inexplicable emblem.

When it comes to writing about Britney, everything has already been said, she’s not real, she’s just a brand, she can’t sing, she can’t dance, wa wa wa. Few of us know what she’s really like. Perhaps she’s quite intelligent underneath it all, perhaps she really is insane. Perhaps she’s watching TV with Ashton Kutcher right now, perhaps she’s in the bath, perhaps she’s dead. No, when it comes to Britney the old lady drops the blogger’s rulebook into the ocean and you can just type what the fuck you like. This girl don't even turn up to her own press conferences. Super STARRGH, where you from, how’s it going? Even national newspapers know that Britney is a journalistic wild card. Britney just is, and Britney just isn’t. Just say the word to yourself - Britney - go on, say it again, - Britney - what do you feel? - Britney - just remarkable. Its 100% distilled pop culture.

SO, Britney has a new album out, Femme Fatale. It’s a club album really, with girly dance songs seemingly inspired by nursery rhymes and breezy beats that are all underlined with intense and dark production touches. A genre which I’m christening as Dub-Prep. Anyway, I just had a listen and here are my first thoughts on each track:

Till The World Ends

A good first track. Lots of electronic vroop-vroop-vroops that set Femme Fatale’s club theme. Gets a bit boring though. Too reminiscent of Britney’s Pepsi ad. Seeing Britney buy songs off Ke$ha is like Ralph Lauren asking Jack Wills to design a collection. The problem with Ke$ha is that she’s a poor risk-shy hybrid of Uffie and Gaga, who in turn are both imitations of their own idols, and so we’re right at the end of the pop chain here. Imagine if you will a human centipede in which Britney’s plastic mouth is sewn-up to Ke$ha’s flabby glitter arse, forced to swallow her own successor’s shit. Luckily, Femme Fatale has more to offer…

Hold It Against Me

With its refreshing dub step inspired elements, dramatic breaks and hardcore beat, Hold It Against Me is the new trump card in Britney’s songbook. A Dub-Prep classic (WILL. CATCH. ON). The song says “Look Gaga, you can make a twenty-three minute video, re-enact the nativity story underwater with robots and wear a Rhino on your head for all I care, because I’m Britney Spears, I was nailing this shit a decade before you and all I need is my dodgy mascara” Britney has a gift for making pop look easy and effortless, everything’s in cruise control, whereas Gaga, as genius as she may be, makes being a pop star look exhausting.

Inside Out

Odd pauses at the start – effective slash annoying. Very Timbalandy sound. Sadly has one of of those constipated urban beats that is too slow for a party, for marching to work or for playing in the car (parts of my life that I gladly hand over to Miss Spears). I liked the lyric “Gotta look my best if we’re gonna break up”, also “hit me one more time” was a nice self-reference. Sexy beat or sandwich filler? Can’t decide.

I Wanna Go

Ooh, big camp beat HELLO. The whistling annoys me. She does that old trick where “I wanna go” suddenly becomes “I, I, I, Wanna Na Na Na, Go Oh Oh Oh”, which is fine at first but becomes a bit weak as the keystone of the entire song. Fast forward.

How I Roll

Definite like. Some Grace Jones-esque operattack vocal trickery here, à la Kylie Minogue’s X track Nudity. I like the splash of a piano, a nice anachronistic touch that reminds us we’re not actually living in space yet. Explicit lyrics alert, like “You can be my fuck tonight” and “Go down where my pussy’s at”. Britney is well past trying to prove she’s not that innocent, the final effect is just a chilled out message of “Look, I’m turning 30 this year guys”.

Drop Dead (Beautiful) feat. Sabi

Coming to a Shane Dawson YouTube video near you, it’s one of those poochy pouty applying-my-lip-gloss in the back of a taxi ones. Someone needs to tell Britney the phrase is actually drop dead gorgeous. The closest track to anything on Circus, sounds a bit like Kill The Lights (watching me, watching you, doo-bee dee). I love the bit where Britney just laughs her head off. What’s this Sabi malarkey though?

Seal It With A Kiss

I can just picture the Glee version now. The Ke$ha influence is very evident again, lots of Blah Blah Blah yo-yo beats. The chorus is a scared-of-itself rip-off of Katy Perry’s California Girls, which of course was itself a rip off of both Ke$ha's Tik Tok and Gaga’s Just Dance, which in turn was a rip-off of Aqua probably. Weird dub-preppy bit in the middle. The nursery rhyme inspiration this time: Cross my heart, Hope to die.

Big Fat Bass feat. Will.I.Am

Quite a fun number, and you can choose between the Will.I.Am or the Without.I.Am versions. Sounds a bit like something they’d use in a Curry’s advert. I like it when Britney speaks like a manic robot “THE BASS IS GET TING BIG GER THE BASS IS GET TING BIGGER”. A harmless dance tune, but let’s be honest, it’s like a Dannii Minogue album track. Pull the needle off it.

Trouble For Me

“Black Jack, whiskey straight, every day changes your life”. It’s a song about sleeping with hot twats and reluctantly giving them a second chance, mainly because they’re good in bed, which is kind of the story of my life. 2nd favourite track on album.

Trip To Your Heart

My current favourite. It’s a bubblegum electro-lullaby take on Shakira’s She Wolf that steers itself very close to the melody of Forever Young, and with a bit of everyone's favourite One Two, Buckle My Shoe thrown in for good measure. Halfway through the chorus Britney ditches lyrics in favour of going “Mm, loo loo loo dum dum dum doo”, like she’s got a croissant in her mouth or is skipping around the studio pulling her own plaits, I like that part.

Gasoline

Not feeling this one. It’s the If You Seek Amy of Femme Fatale and it’s even more irritating.

Criminal

The intro made me crack up; it’s like a medieval-themed computer game. Like something off Madonna’s American Life album. Guitars and Britney don’t go. There’s also something a bit weird about a heartfelt slow number sung by a computer-generated witch that vaguely sounds like Britney Spears. If you want a Britney ballad you’re still better off listening to her 90s whoppers like Sometimes and Born To Wear A Nappy.

So, there we have it. As Culture Bully put it – “Femme Fatale is an album about celebrating the night: music for and about the clubs and the intimate aftermath that follows.”

It’s nothing mind-blowing, nothing new, none of the tracks are better than Cyndi Lauper’s Into The Night. But it’s Britney bitch, and you’re so buying it.

www.britneyspears.com

P.s. The photos on Britney's Wikipedia page are weird.

Can You Name The Nine Sisters of Liz Taylor’s Secret Circle ‘The Brunilati’ ?

2011-03-03T08:05:00.000-08:00

I've been reading conspiracy theories on the net and became inspired to try my hand at my own. So without further ado...

Introducing Part 1 in this one part series on Jack of Hearts called Conspiracy Theory Thursdays in which this blog invents, exaggerates and then exposes a ground-breaking, earth-shattering conspiracy:

Liz Taylor and the Brunilati !!!*

Forget scientology, forget lizards, forget the Freemasons, forget Orange Wednesdays, this is the hottest conspiracy theory of 2011: The Brunilati

Taylor started the Brunilati with her 1967 prototype “Carla Bruni” (from where the Brunilati take their name) during the middle of her fifth marriage to Richard Burton (from whose name an anagram of ‘Bruni Roth Card’ can also be drawn). It was on the set of her 1967 movie The Taming of The Shrew that Taylor took some of Shakespeare’s societal commentary regarding the social sculpting of women and decided to apply these lessons to real life by anatomically sculpting women with the help of nine plastic surgeons that she just happened to have written down in her pocket phonebook.

The result was a secret circle of powerful and attractive brunettes, who together would slowly but surely take over the world. Some would be singers, others would act, the slightly duff creations would TV present and a select elitist few would go on to marry the most powerful men in the world.

The results of the Brunilati birthing program were as follows:

Brunilati 1: “Sophie Marceau” (1966)
Brunilati 2: “Carla Bruni” (1967)
Brunilati 3: “Liz Hurley” (1968)
Brunilati 4: “Samantha Cameron” (1971)
Brunilati 5: “Claudia Winkleman” (1972)
Brunilati 6: “Martine McCutcheon” (1976)
Brunilati 7: “Zooey Deschanel” (1980)
Brunilati 8: “Kate Middleton” (1982)
Brunilati 9: “Marina Diamindis” (1985)

Artificially harvested in a laboratory in the Hampstead basement of Elizabeth Taylor’s birth place, their bodies are a genetic mish-mash of what is called AC and CC, meaning a mixture of presenter-slash-model-slash-DJ-slash-handbag Alexa Chung (AC) and singer-slash-presenter-slash-human-snow-dome Charlotte Church (CC). Some members of the Brunilati turn out with a stronger AC side, e.g. "Samantha Cameron" making them slightly hard-shouldered sulkers with razor-sharp cheek bones, whilst others have a dominant CC strand, making them more curvaceous and giggly, e.g. "Kate Middleton".

Some critics of the Brunilati conspiracy theory have pointed out that neither Alexa Chung nor Charlotte Church existed during the 1960s when Taylor commenced her experimental project, but these critics forget that Taylor had access to Michael Jackson’s time machine which was originally used on men hired out of magazines to transport them back into their childhoods upon arrival at Jackson’s house.

Named Liz after Taylor herself, work on “Liz Hurley” commenced in 1965, making her technically the first member of the Brunilati, but Hurley wasn’t launched for another three years due to repeat technical difficulties relating to a fault in her acting ability, and so 1967's creation Brunilati 2 "Carla Bruni" became the first official ambassador of Taylor's sick agenda. Bruni's mission? To seduce the President of France. The sexual homing device that Bruni was installed with went horrifically wrong, meaning that instead of targeting the love of the President of France she instead won his heart via the pants of every other man in the country, a rather unpleasant scenic tour, but she got there in the end and Brunilati 2 "Carla Bruni" is Taylor's second most successful creation after Brunilati 8.

Taylor mainly used Hurley as a robot spy, making her Godmother to the Beckham’s children and handing her invites to palace parties. She was meant to marry David Cameron but mistook Hugh Grant for him, making it a disastrous mission that had to be put right by the creation of Brunilati 4 “Samantha Cameron”. Although Hugh Grant proved to be a useful tool in the Brunilati agenda, and work with him was later re-continued by Brunilati 6 “Martine McCutcheon” in 2006 on the set of Love Actually (which contains an anagram of L. Taylor if you pronounce it with the R as in Love Arctually).

Hurley’s part in Austin Powers as a ‘fembot’ was seen by Taylor as a coded form of self-expression, and she was punished accordingly. Hurley has now been emptied of her batteries and is in retirement, rusting in a disused cricket pavilion near Melbourne.

Brunilati 7 “Zooey Deschanel” was designed to become an indie electro-pop singer when Taylor realised she had little influence in this field. However, poor Deschanel couldn’t sing and so Brunilati 9 was later created “Marina Diamindis”. Taylor decided to make Deschanel an actress instead. Her first name Zooey is a clue to the fact that she was bred in captivity, whilst “Des Chanel” is a nod towards Taylor’s closeted obsession with France.

Originally it was intended that Brunilati 9 “Marina Diamindis” would marry Prince Harry in a similar vein to her predecessor Brunilati 8 “Kate Middleton”, currently Taylor’s most successful Brunilatibot. But Marina, mimicked Harry too closely, failing her A-Levels, but couldn’t find a way to forge her grades and so she was condemned to attend Middlesex University where Taylor had little use for her and so turned her into a band called Marina & The Diamonds, making her the first member of the Brunilati to have her name split into a compound. Her debut EP ‘The Crown Jewels’ is a reference to Marina’s former failed mission. Her name, Marina, is a clue that she is not a human but in fact an underwater waxwork puppet. Perhaps the greatest giveaway that Marina is a member of the Brunilati is the title of her bestselling single I Am Not A Robot - an unconvincing red herring.

Following 1985 Taylor ceased production on her Brunilati line, giving her girls the nickname “The Nine Sisters”. Today they rule supreme, and their success means that through them Elizabeth Taylor is married to and can thereby influence some of the world’s most powerful men, including the prime minister of England David Cameron, the president of France Nicholas Sarkozy, the future king of the British Empire Prince William, and Ben Gibbard – the lead vocalist of Deathcab For Cutie.

*That's the only time you will find three exclamation marks in a row on The Jack of Hearts. I was getting into the spirit of conspiracy theorists!

No Blog Is Good Blog?

2011-02-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

Gosh, we’re almost completely through with February and the Jack of Hearts has kept his peach-blossom lips sealed. That’s not to say he hasn’t been writing, but only the leisure time that is usually poured amorously into this blog-parfait has been snatched up by greedy editorial quarterbacks.

I’m sure many of you will have seen my first Guardian homepage splash towards the end of last month: “Is There One Direction for G-A-Y?” - I was thrilled to see it was one of the most read pieces on the Guardian that week and was shared on Facebook by almost 1,000 readers. I now have a Guardian profile but have not submitted a picture yet because my hair changes too regularly. Well, I did actually send over 4 and the reply came back: "1) Too blurred 2) too posed 3) too dark 4) not enough clothes" !

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Recently Gay Times magazine sent me off to live with four “adult movie models” to write some observational features for their forthcoming sex issue.

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The main reason however for this dormant patch on Jack of Hearts is that I’ve been going through a reading phase. Rather than read constantly throughout the year I seem to go through a phase of burning the candle at both ends (quite) going out a lot, eating out a lot, and then going through a reclusive poor phase of tea-drinking, reading and long unplanned walks. During these unpredictable phases of hungrily reading I usually give monogamy a go too, which, weirdly, sucks the desire to write out of me, possibly because I struggle to split my creativity into different channels and instead just have one expressive torch-like beam with which I must choose what to shine it upon, and of course love comes first, unless commissioned by a plush magazine of course. You see this last line is such a mess, it so beautifully demonstrates my point - one cannot do both a blog and a boy at once, or properly at least.

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Having so thoroughly enjoyed Robin Maugham’s autobiography ‘Escape The Shadows’ I’ve set about on reading everything Maugham ever wrote. In addition to this his writing often nods towards the works of others, and so I have also been reading a lot of T. C. Worsley, Norman Douglas, Gerald Hamilton and Christopher Isherwood, and then in a separate arena of interest I’ve been reading comedian's autobiographies, Russell Brand, Alan Carr, Graham Norton. Don't ask why, but I'm on a roll.

Come March I will start blogging more frequently, but in the meantime you might like the following pieces of mine:

1) My Paije Richardson interview in the current issue of GT magazine (it's in the mag but you can buy a copy online - go on - it's a great read GT is!)
2) New bits on my resident Gay Times blog such as this write up of the Charlie Le Mindu LFW after-show party.
3) I’m busy blogging most days about everything from 1960s fashion parties to Royal Weddings over on the British Pathé film archive’s blog here.
4) I have a very interesting feature coming out on 1st March in this online magazine SomeThinkBlue about the connection between bullying and erotic fantasy in adolescence (!)