Lee Alexander McQueen

Lee Alexander McQueen, aged only 40 and found dead by his own hand on the eve of his idolized mother’s funeral, was a gay fashion designer of undisputed genius. He combined Savile Row craftsmanship with rare imaginative style, from rippling visions of Kate Moss to the intersexual video posturings of Lady Gaga. His last act inevitably stirs memories of the shooting of Gianni Versace in 1997. Self-described as the “pink sheep” of his Lewisham-born family, McQueen was always confidently out and gay, as reflected in his bizarre and spectacular shows. It is significant though that he once compared his creations to armour, giving protection to the wearer, hinting at an inner vulnerability which had its own unerring cut and motif. Read the rest of this entry »

Gay guys cheating

Of course it isn’t only gay men who cheat.  Exposure of footballer John Terry’s recent marital lapse has prompted many of us to ponder our infidelities. Just being men, we may argue, we have an inbuilt tendency to roam and be predatory, or to get bored and distracted. As gay men we’re confronted by a lot of adorable blokes on the scene and a massive industry promoting the enticements of a gay lifestyle everywhere we look. Even gay couples who have been together twenty years or more are highly likely to have had sexual encounters with other men during that time - they just failed to break them up.
 
A friend was saying to me the other day (he’s a regular shag of mine), that he knows his boyfriend sleeps around and he doesn’t mind (naturally), but he can’t understand why his partner denies it and refuses to talk about it. I think it’s a consequence of the way we’ve come over many years , seeking the right to express gay love and imagining ourselves in some ideal relationship similar to the biblical one of David and Jonathan. This somehow fed into our liking for the muscle-bound heroes of the great screen epics over the decades, like Steve Reeves (Hercules Unchained), Stephen Boyd (Ben Hur), and Brad Pitt (Troy). It doesn’t take much to translate that into images of brave, young soldiers fighting the forces of Islamo-fascism today, and dying to preserve the free world we are an essential part of. Read the rest of this entry »