Mark Simpson's Blog

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

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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

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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 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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The male desire to be desired shows no signs of tiring In 1994 the UK PM was a dull, no-frills 1960s branch bank manager, called John Major – a name that evoked a dull, no-frills 1960s British car, the Morris Minor. A new railway tunnel had just opened, recklessly connecting Britain to France. The economy was only just… Read More »The Metrosexual at Thirty

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Notes on Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’‘ “[Hitler] wanted a film showing the Congress through a non-expert eye, selecting just what was most artistically satisfying – in terms of spectacle…. He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.”• Leni Riefenstahl Hitler: “What you… Read More »The Leni Gaze

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YouGov’s young LGBTQ+ sleb ‘helpers’ I’m officially ancient. Possibly clinically dead. I only recognised three of these slebs – and forgot that Gaga was officially bisexual. Though given her dating history, that’s something she may be prone to herself. It’s also questionable just how recognised or influential any of these ‘LGBTQ+’ public figures are with ‘young… Read More »Rolling Your Own

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Remembering a lost 20th Century art form A couple of months back, I wrote about the mildly interesting but not exactly gripping BBC boyband reality series Made in Korea, which allows us, reality stylee, a close-up view of the hard drilling of the hopeful young members of fivesome Dear Alice in the K-Pop discipline. It was mostly… Read More »Boybands (Aren’t) Forever

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Why do film critics wank themselves into a frenzy of adulation over the plainly mediocre – sorry, “visionary” – film director Luca Guadagnino? Is it because he’s Italian, with a very Italian and difficult to spell name? Or is it just to confirm the complete redundancy of critics nowadays? And the foolishness of taking them… Read More »Three-Love: The M4M4W Slog-Fest, Challengers

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Iron rules for Simmo’s Swoletopia Anyone who has used a public gym regularly has daydreamed about being in charge of one. At least for an hour. Not so much paying the bills and checking the toilets, as laying down the law. A strongman, a shredded Caesar, running the muscle factory the way you think it should be… Read More »Gym Dic(k)tator

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