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Details, October 2003

2003.10.04 – My reading of the pink-coloured entrails of Details (“for men”), in a quest for gay references and invert symbolism in this, the “hippest” of “men’s magazines,” the one specifically created for “all” men, hereby continues.

October 2003 issue:

Cover boy

You can’t butch up Justin Timberlake no matter how hard you try. Sleaze him up (or down), yes. Street him up. Trash ’im up. But not butch.

Still, stylist Joe Zee (outside the United States, Zed), who moonlights for Gap adverts and is the only Asian-American anywhere within a hundred miles of this issue, tarts Justin up in a laughably-prepackaged Harley T-shirt. Dowagers with botox injections and Morticia-black dye jobs wear Harley T-shirts to their Pilates classes.

Or was this an unwitting homage to a lost decade, rather as Limbertake has done himself by portraying Elton John in an Elton John video?

J.T. has a lot going for him, including a channelling of sexiness and mutable male sex appeal that even he does not understand. I mean, check the Aréna Hommes Plus photo spread.

One demerit point for opportunity squandered. (Further half-point deducted for the magazine’s obliviousness to the superbly photogenic, apparently ambisexualist Dave Matthews, whose signature lips are ill-presented in a feature “article.”)

Next time, fag it up a bit more. Oh, but we’ll run across that word shortly.

Bare chests in this issue

Must be open to the waist to be enumerated.

• Advertising: Four (–4 from last month), plus flasher seen from behind
• Editorial: Seven (+1), plus guy taking a leak at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.–style fence as seen from behind

Laughing with or laughing at?

Insider ribaldry or high-gloss bashing? You make the call.

• p. 58: “Gay or British?”: “One cruises the West End, the other the West Side... the British fop and the American queen are cut from the same cloth.” Got some delightful bite, though; perhaps someone gay and/or British wrote it. “PALE SKIN: A curdled-goat’s-milk complexion signifies the subtle sophistication of fox-hunting in a light drizzle. God forbid there should be any little brown ones in the bloodline.... SLIM-CUT SUIT: Nymphette bone structure must be advertised”
• p. 66: Skirts are so not drag. At least if you don’t also have makeup on. “ ‘Traditionally, the safe spaces for men to experiment with skirts are the beach and the rock stage,’ ” offers some historian or other. “Experiment”? How much trying on for size do you need before you get it right? Skirts don’t exactly require annual “How to Tie a Windsor Knot” service pieces in Esquire. “But just when it looked as though the garment would be limited to the Boy Georges of the world, David Beckham scored a goal for men who just might want to wear skirts while chasing them.” Wait till they hear of Eddie Izzard. (Still love Utilikilts, by the way)
• p. 80: Quasi-advertorial blurb on some book by a guy with an improbable surname that “is ‘about what it means to be a slightly thinking guy in the modern world,’ says Docx. ‘If you think about the stereotypical guy, there’s the sports guy, who’s dumb; the fireman, who’s tough but dumb; and the gay guy, who’s clever but emasculated.’ ” Let’s get Docx dolled up in his Docs and braces and take him out to a back room in Amsterdam. We’ll show him “emasculated”
• p. 96: “Why We Still Lie to Our Mothers.” Probably because you never had to come out to her, meaning you have no tradition of honesty (albeit one with a delayed start date). “Once a year... my mother corners me to ask if I’ve ever had sex with a woman. It’s not because she worries that I spend my afternoons chained to the sprinkler pipes in the Grand Central men’s room – I’m straight and she knows it (and the contrary would never occur to her)” until she reads this article
• p. 104: Boy, am I getting tired of token gay writer Augusten Burroughs. I’ve never seen the word FAG in 48-point type before. Details editors seem to believe they have license to write “Are Metrosexuals Fake Fags?” as the headline for a feature article in a mainstream magazine. How very post-gay. Let’s test their resolve: I’m looking for future headlines bearing the words NIGGER and KIKE in type of similar size. “[T]wo lumbering, ordinary buds stopping on the sidewalk to discuss their pedicures seems to me a sign that society is collapsing,” Burroughs writes, fantasizing from start to finish. He continues conjuring falsehoods: “Two fellas can embrace on the street and talk about foreskin restoration and share their pain.” Notice to Danny Peres: There’s no such thing as being so well-dressed, fashionable, and downtown-dwelling that you can scream FAG in a crowded magazine

Covert homoeroticism

• p. 60, col. 1: Blurb about John Cameron Mitchell’s upcoming narrative porn: “The flick will star straight, gay, and lesbian intercourse.... ‘If a character comes in my movie and then bursts into tears, are you going to call that porn?’ ” No, slapstick
• p. 60, col. 2: Such a tremendously conflicted page deserves column-by-column deconstruction. Details’s list of “high-water marks from the long history of cinematic steam” (cliché, anyone?) avoids the invert and/or sapphist entirely. Why isn’t Head On (let alone O Fantasma or Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men) on this list? Or at least Bound, since we already set up the list with cliché?
• p. 100: A flatly ridiculous article about Chippendales dancers. How outdated is that? Who gives a shit about “straight” guys dancing for out-of-control hen parties? Should we do a population comparision between gay strippers at gay bars and “straight” strippers at straight bars? Do you really like your men hairless – yet also long-haired – and outfitted in tacky thong underwear? Any discussion of Chippendales or its ilk is a diversionary tactic, rather like the now-seldom-heard claim that fashion-magazine editors promote sexism by featuring waiflike, anorexic models. Honey, they’re gay. So are strippers. “Before joining the Chippendales, [this goober, with an ultra-straight nipple ring] was a dancer of a tamer kind for the club band KLF [?].... [A] member of the band walked in, looked him up and down, and instantly offered him a job.... ‘I saw some kinky shit... I’m talking about sex. Guys with girls, guys with guys. Man, I saw everything.” Yeah, that does cover 2/3 of the options
• p. 119: “Survivor’s Guilt” carries the subhed “I’m breathing, eating, and fucking while soldiers are dying in Baghdad.” This nightmare scenario, which we are intended to see as somehow different from the life everyone outside of Baghdad is leading, is recapitulated a page later: “I’m breathing, eating, fucking. They’re dying. You’re breathing, eating, fucking. They’re dying.” If the U.S. had forced conscription, would you feel better? Maybe you need Augusten Burroughs to share the pain of foreskin restoration on the (Arab) street

Invisibility

Rufus Wainwright’s album Want is mini-reviewed on page 76, reinforcing his complaint that only the straight press covers him.

Revisionism

• p. 166: Details’s favourite italonegric homunculus, Vin Diesel, officially reaches has-been status. The magazine’s list of the 50 most influential men under the suspiciously-precise age of 38 (how old is Danny Peres?) explicitly switches from Diesel: “A look at some of the members of last year’s class who didn’t make the cut.... Fast and Furious also describes his career”
• p. 200: One mere issue ago, the concept of straight guys conspicuously consuming fashion, home décor, and twee objets was specifically characterized as the new domain of heteros. This month, we learn of a psychiatric designation, compulsive shopping disorder, and a pill you can take for it, Celexa. “Brainwashed since birth” – since birth? these guys are three years old all of a sudden? – “to believe that the right item – hamburger, Rolex, sportif deodorant, or $900 leather pants – will make everything ‘all right,’ CSDers respond to every unpleasant feeling with a ‘buy.’ ” If a shrink can cure you of faggy shopping habits, perhaps a shrink can go all the way  ¶

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