Mark Simpson's Blog

Facebook cancelled me. For not being me. When trying to log on to the boomer Fisher-Price-Palantir activity toy recently, I was presented with a screen telling me that to unlock my account I had to ‘verify my identity’ by providing a ‘video selfie’. I went through the gruesome process of providing one: looking left, looking… Read More »Assassinated by A.I.

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Taylor Zakhar Perez ‘Flashdances’ in Lacoste’s locker room, in a “new expression of masculinity” that is, in fact, very familiar now To remind us what reflecting the male gaze back onto itself has done to masculinity in the forty years since Nick Kamen stripped in “Laundrette”, here’s Taylor Zakhar Perez, co-star of the ‘gay ‘ –… Read More »Spornosexual Style – By Lacoste

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How the Levi’s “Laundrette” ad reflected the male gaze back on itself Four decades ago, on Boxing Day 1995, an ad for old-fashioned button-fly jeans first aired on UK TV – causing a national sensation, and sowing the seeds of metrosexuality and spornosexuality in the nation’s living rooms. And torturing the testes of a generation… Read More »Forty Years of Prime-Time Male Tarting

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When Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise still protected us from penis My old mucker and The Queen is Dead correspondent/co-author, US-based Steven Zeeland, recently unearthed a copy of this historic document in his archives. Originally sent to me by HM Customs & Excise in 1998, two years before the twentieth century sputtered to an end, it advised me… Read More »Officially Indecent Correspondence

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An old pop crush finally requited – thirty years late Back in 1996, I took a shine to a jangly, wryly melancholic, lyrical single by Texas indie band Deep Blue Something which managed to be grungey and Smithsy in a way that I hadn’t thought possible – or indeed needed. But once heard, made perfect,… Read More »Saint Morrissey – A Love Story

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Oh LOOK! A big, lavishly illustrated article in last Sunday’s Daily Mail on my work! ‘Meet the “Spornosexuals”: Male body trend is back for 2025’, announces the headline. Yep, that pesky spornosexual ‘male body trend’ that actually never went away. But the article doesn’t credit me. And it is wildly inaccurate, getting the metrosexual-spornosexual timeline hopelessly confused.… Read More »Spornosexual Shocker: Daily Mail Caught With Its Compression Pants Down

The post Spornosexual Shocker: Daily...

Oh LOOK! A big, lavishly illustrated article in last Sunday’s Daily Mail on my work! ‘Meet the “Spornosexuals”: Male body trend is back for 2025’, announces the headline. Yep, that pesky spornosexual ‘male body trend’ that actually never went away. But the article doesn’t credit me. And it is wildly inaccurate, getting the metrosexual-spornosexual timeline hopelessly confused.… Read More »Spornosexual Shocker: Daily Mail Caught With it’s Compression Pants Down

The post Spornosexual Shocker: Dail...

I recently wrote about Trump’s favourite band, the Village People. Since LGBTQIA+++ History Month is upon us again, I thought I would expand on the background to their famous moustachioed “macho man” look, inspired by/appropriated from the late 1970s gay male street styles of Manhattan’s West Village. And how those styles themselves were appropriated. Prior to the most successful… Read More »Full-Flavoured Fags – How The Marlboro Man Changed Gay Men

The post Full-Flavoured Fags – How The Marlbor...

I stayed at the YMCA. I was a bit short on my dough, and the rates were seriously competitive for early noughties Manhattan, which I was visiting, so I put my pride on the shelf. But in truth, I mostly stayed at NYC’s West Side YMCA, (on t’other side of Central Park from Trump Tower),… Read More »The Camp Paradox of The Village People, Trump – & the USA

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I stayed at the YMCA. I was a bit short on my dough, and the rates were seriously competitive for early noughties Manhattan, which I was visiting, so I put my pride on the shelf. But in truth, I mostly stayed at NYC’s West Side YMCA, (on t’other side of Central Park from Trump Tower),… Read More »The Camp Paradox of The Village People, Trump – & the US

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