Mark Simpson (journalist)
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Mark Simpson is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster specialising in pop culture, media and masculinity. He has been described by one critic as 'the skinhead Oscar Wilde' [1] and by another as 'a c**t' [2]. Journalist Julie Burchill has said in an interview with Simpson that "if they took my brain out, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, yours is the brain that I'd want them to put in".[3] Simpson is also a frequent commentator on British TV shows.
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[edit] Career
He is credited with coining the term "metrosexual" in 1994.[4] [5] He also introduced the term to the US in 2002, inaugurating the current popularity of the term.[6] He is also credited with being the first to use the term "retrosexual" in the sense of the anti-metrosexual in Becks the virus (Salon.com, 2003).[7] The New York Times recently acclaimed his analysis of how sport and advertising are getting in bed to produce blatantly homoerotic images, what he dubs "Sporno" - "the place where sport and porn meet and produce a gigantic money shot" - as one of the Ideas of the Year. The Times newspaper also featured sporno in their 'Year in Ideas' list [8][9]
The Times 'Ideas of the Year'(December 29, 2007) also included his 'Manlove for ladies' concept - what he sees as the mainstream media increasingly catering to women who have an interest in man-on-man romance: [10] [11]
Also in December of 2007 GQ Russia placed him in their 'Top Ten Things That Changed Men's Lives'.[12]
His first book Male Impersonators (1994) provided the background for his theory of metrosexuality and looked at the role of narcissism and homoeroticism in the representation of masculinity. Returning to Freud's theory of universal bisexual responsiveness, it also 'outed' what he saw as the homoerotic subtext of masculinity itself. In particular he analysed the way films, ads, pop music, and bodybuilding, had replaced 'real' masculinity, if it ever existed, with something 'sexy and simulated'. In his chapter on Marky Mark and his (then) recent Calvin Klein ads he argued that the rapper's appearance on billboards in Times Square and on the side of buses 'in his prime and in his underwear', grabbing his 'package' to shift product, graphically proved how the commodification of the male body - 'and gay men's love for it' - had become 'eyepoppingly' mainstream.
Most famously, it included a chapter arguing persuasively that the real romance in "Top Gun" was between Maverick/Tom Cruise and Iceman/Val Kilmer, something which may have inspired Quentin Tarantino to make a cameo appearance in the film "Sleep With Me" later the same year as a party-guest making a very similar argument.
His highly controversial collection Anti-Gay (1996), described on the jacket as 'The shameful antidote to feelgood politics', 'divided the gay community' according to the Independent. Led by Simpson, various "non-heterosexual" contributors, such as Bruce La Bruce, John Weir, Peter Tatchell, Joe Edie, and Anne-Marie Le Ble, voiced their criticism of the gay 'one-size-fits-all' identity and the gay media's intolerance of anything that wasn't 'glad' and 'clap happy', was probably the first "post-gay" book, appearing before a series of American gay books critical of gay culture, such as 'The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture' (D Harris, 1997) and 'Life Outside' (M Signorile, 1997), 'Sexual Ecology (G Rotello, 1998). [13]
It’s a Queer World published the same year, described on the dust jacket as 'hilariously perverse' and 'taking a warped look at fin-de-siecle pop culture where nothing is as straight - or gay - as it seems', collected Simpson's popular columns of the same name which appeared in Attitude magazine, and showed how gay and straight culture were converging, a decade before this became a common theme.[citations needed] [14]
Saint Morrissey his innovative 'psycho-bio' of the former Smiths front man, was written at the nadir of the singer's career, and published the year before Morrissey's 2004 comeback. Widely praised, it prompted some comparisons with the subject's style: "Simpson is funny, clever, honest, irreverent and egotistical: quite the match for Morrissey. More biographies should be written this way." [15] (Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday Books of the Year')[16]
'The Queen is Dead'(1998) collected his colorful and confessional correspondence with cult American writer Steven Zeeland. According to the jacket blurb: 'A chance letter sparks off an hilariously doomed transatlantic literary romance involving Marines, glory holes, cats, intellectuals, transsexuals and a bizarre love-triangle rivalry with gay serial-killer and Gianni Versace's assassin Andrew Cunanan.' Despite its openly offbeat subject matter, it went down well with reviewers: 'Something of a masterpiece' (Roger Clarke, the Independent). [17]
In 2006, Details magazine ran an exclusive "inside" feature by Simpson regarding the gay porn scandal involving paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne, which Simpson had researched for Salon.com two years before the scandal erupted on the global stage.[18]
He is currently Senior Contributing Editor on British men's fashion magazine Arena Hommes Plus, contributes a monthly column to Germany's Front magazine and has written for numerous publications around the world, including The Times, the Guardian, Salon.com, the Independent on Sunday, Tetu, the Seattle Stranger and Dutch Playboy. He regularly appears on UK TV as a cultural commentator.
[edit] Bibliography
- Saint Morrissey (2004)
- Sex Terror: Erotic Misadventures in Pop Culture (2002) ISBN 978-1560233763
- The Queen is Dead : A Story of Jarheads, Eggheads, Serial Killers and Bad Sex (2001) (with Steven Zeeland) ISBN 978-1900850490
- Anti-Gay (1996) ISBN 978-0304331444
- It's a Queer World: Deviant Adventures in Pop Culture (1995) ISBN 978-0789006097
- Simpson, Mark (1996). It's a Queer World: Deviant Adventures in Pop Culture. Haworth Press, 256 pages. ISBN 0099597519.
- Male Impersonators (1994)
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Philip Hensher, The Independent: "Mark Simpson is a skinhead Oscar Wilde, his bon mots are both alarming and amusing, getting up people's noses and inside their trousers with equal aplomb."; quote used to promote Simpson's books "Sex Terror" and "The Queen is Dead"
- ^ Boyz magazine: "Simpson is a snobby c**t"; quote used to promote his book "Anti-gay"
- ^ The Queer Lady | MARK SIMPSON.com
- ^ Simpson, Mark. "Here come the mirror men", The Independent, 1994.
- ^ Here come the mirror men, MarkSimpson.com
- ^ Simpson, Mark. "Meet the metrosexual", Salon, 2002.
- ^ wordspy.com entry for "retrosexual"
- ^ http://www.out.com/detail.asp?id=18728 Haskell, David. "THE 6th ANNUAL YEAR IN IDEAS; Sporno (subcription required)", NY Times, December 10, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-01-11. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2521758,00.html
- ^ palu. "Metrosexual man invents Sporno", In The Mix, December 18, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-01-11.
- ^ Simpson, Mark. "The Year in Ideas", The Times, December, 2007.
- ^ |http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/12/30/manlove-for-the-ladies/
- ^ |http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/12/11/mark-simpson-tops-arnie-and-freud-simultaneously/
- ^ |url=http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/anti_gay.html
- ^ name='It's a Queer World'>|url=http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/queerworld.html
- ^ |http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/saint-morrissey/
- ^ Granger, Ben. "This Alarming Man", Spike Magazine, 2004.
- ^ name=The Queen is Dead |url=http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/queen_is_dead.html}}
- ^ Collard, James. "Salon vs. Details", Times Online, May 24, 2006.
