Letter From An Alien: It’s Over, Roland

http://www.towleroad.com/2012/02/a-marine-comes-home.html This photo has gone viral recently. It was first posted on a ‘Gay Marines’ FB page and has since been sent round the internet, with the tagline ‘Gay Marine Comes Home’. You know me. I am an out and proud ‘homophile’. I am bordering on being a homo myself.  My blog archives are full [...]

Revenge Of Teh Menz

This week so far has been all about the men. For once. So I thought I’d share some links to recent articles that examine men and masculinity, not only through the judgemental lens of feminism. I was delighted to see my favourite writer on men, Mark Simpson, had an article in this week’s Guardian (UK newspaper). [...]

Unnatural Selection?

A recent New York Times interview with Sex In The City star Cynthia Nixon, has caused a bit of a furore amongst mainly American gays. I first read about the story in Queerty, which is itself a VERY gay website. But I appreciated them running  it, and quoting Nixon at length and opening up the discussion to the [...]

Obscenity Discourse

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/jan/06/michael-peacock-obscenity-trial?newsfeed=true In an unusual move, the Guardian, the ‘liberal voice’ of Britain, which is normally the feminist voice, and the puritanical voice, has come out in favour of a man who sells hardcore S and M m/m porn. Why this strange turnaround? Well, if we look a bit more closely at their discourse, we can [...]

The Last of The Gang To Die

http://englishcottage.tumblr.com/ The Strange Decline of The English Cottage is a documentary that is being made at the moment, for BBC4 about the old tradition of ‘cottaging’ in Britain. Men having sex with each other in public toilets. I found this article about the project delightfully ironic, as it mentions Miss Marple in relation to the [...]

In Defence Of… Hazing – Mark Simpson Takes One For The Team

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/04/28/assume-the-position-a-queer-defence-of-hazing-2/#comments When I joined my local rugby team, I was made to do terrible, awful things. Even now, all these years later, I feel distressed and choked up recounting what happened. I had to stand on a chair as a full pint of beer was shoved in my groin, soaking it. I then had to [...]

Killing Kate

‘Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such a woman oweth to her husband.’ -The Taming of the Shrew, 5. 2 There’s small choice in rotten apples. The Taming of the Shrew, 1. 1 The last time I wrote about the royal family was in 1997. I had an article published in a [...]

Letters From An Alien: A Search For Courtly Love?

Michel Foucault: The experience of heterosexuality, at least since the Middle Ages, has always consisted of two panels: On the one hand, the panel of courtship in which the man seduces the woman: and, on the other, the panel of the sexual act itself. Now the great heterosexual literature of the West has had to [...]

‘Suck My Dick, Sigmund…’

Mr Fuck Theory doesn’t like Mr Freud very much. And I don’t like Mr Fuck Theory. But I want to put our emotional responses aside to try and explain why I disagree with Fuck Theory’s ‘critique’ of Freud’s ‘conceptual violence’ in relation to femininity and homosexuality. Here is Fuck Theory’s post: http://fucktheory.tumblr.com/post/4070969035/the-blind-spot-of-an-old-dream-of-symmetry-the ‘The Blind Spot [...]

Sex, Lies and Neuroscience: The Gaga Effect

I found out that Gaga’s latest album and single were to be called ‘Born This Way’ towards the end of last year. My heart sank.  I knew it was going to become, if not a popular gay anthem, at least a symbol of the worst kind of essentialist thinking around sexuality. Unfortunately my fears have [...]