Letter From An Alien: Nothing But Trouble

That’s another fine mess you got me into, Stanley! But it was worth it. Because: Male Impersonators,  Metrosexy and Anti Gay. ‘If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.’  -  Oscar Wilde

Letter From An Alien: A Dangerous Method

Some notes on seeing A Dangerous Method: I hate Keira Knight­ley usu­ally but I thought she acted quite well in this. I liked how her con­tor­tions of emo­tional pain were exactly the same expres­sions in tone, as when she was approach­ing orgasm due to the beat­ings from Jung. The por­trayal of female masochism as a result of [...]

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 [...]

Letter From An Alien: All You Need Is Me

I thought I had read all Mark Simpson’s blog, and heard all Morrissey’s songs, but this one passed me by till now. All You Need Is Me. http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/10/17/all-you-need-is-me/ Apart from the fact Moz’s 2007 (?) performance on a chat show confirms my belief he has become a ‘psychotic lounge singer’ I couldn’t help but smile [...]

Say Something

  Your silence is deafening… Fade-out fading / fade-out Painful ordeal in which the loved being appears to withdraw from all contact, without such enigmatic indifference even being directed against the amorous subject or pronounced to the advantage of anyone else, world or rival. – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse   h/t @fennerpearson    

Letter From An Alien: Subject/Object/Narcissist?

In Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse he says that the ‘amorous subject’ suffers from an overload of empathy. In one sense it is the opposite of narcissism as the amorous subject focuses on the ‘loved object’ more than himself (Barthes always uses ‘he’ and ‘him’) but in another sense ‘love’ in the constructed sense of the word, [...]

Letters From An Alien: Trick

  There is this trick (you will have played it on yourself) where a writer writes something very personal and somehow manages to convince him/herself that on finishing it, it will magically turn into just another book. That is detached from the personal things it refers to. But that is the point when it becomes [...]

Letters From An Alien: The Queen Is Dead, Boys

http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/queen_is_dead.html Dear Misters Simpson and Zeeland, I haven’t finished with you yet. One of the things I loved about The Queen Is Dead was the way it was written as if nobody would read it.  The letters you wrote read to me like intimate missives between two friends, as if they were meant for your [...]

Letters From An Alien: Postponement

(There is a new drug available-that ‘blocks’ the onset of puberty, that is beeng piloted to use for trans ‘children’ to make transition more practicable and less traumatic) You: Like all this kind of new technology it will produce new sexualities – and identities. Plenty of kids, trans or otherwise, would be drawn to the [...]

Letters From An Alien: *You* need kissing, badly

You really shouldn’t leave the evidence lying round so carelessly. Miss Marple will find it all in the end… ‘I have noticed that when I get very drunk I have a tendency to snog the occasional unfortunate lady. I suspect your’re probably right that some gay men have to maintain their gay identity by resisting [...]