Homosexualist text and subtext in “men’s” magazines

Details, September 2003

2003.08.25a – Let’s run the Homosexualist Agenda through the gayest “men’s” magazine there is, Details. (“Now leave me alone, I’m in the middle of a waxing”; “What is Maer getting his panties in a twist about?”; “It’s for guys who like staring at pictures of naked men but haven’t quite figured out why.”)

Handing Ash_on Ku_cher on a platter

Details (“for men”) blew the very-most-obvious homosexualist tie-in: Cover mannequin A_shton Kuch_er is the reigning public obsession of snaggletoothed “advice” columnist Dan Savage (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, inter alia). Brad Pitt, come on down!

Bare chests in this issue

Must be open to the waist to be enumerated.

Advertising: Eight
Editorial: Six, plus two photos from Plato’s Retreat

Trannies

p. 64: “Augusten also knows an alarming amount about transgender procedures”
p. 232: “[W]e postindustrial penis-owners are receiving the same daily treatment as garden-variety transsexuals awaiting a lop job.... Trannies sign on the dotted line to dispense with the baggage.... How, exactly, have we become a nation of pre-ops?”

Counting beyond two

Hed (Tom Samiljan, “Does Bisexuality Really Exist?”) telegraphs intent to reinvent long-since-passé inquiry into bisexualism:

“Vin Diesel coyly refuses to reveal his sexual orientation, granting both men and women the privilege of finding him attractive.” Publicity corrupts; absolute publicity corrupts absolutely
- The Details cover story (April ’03) on the goombah–homunculus drew, at its thematic nexus, from a single car ride in Mark Vincent’s Escalade
- Screaming-pink headline, clinging T-shirt, italonegric complexion Photoshopped to homogeneity. “ ‘You couldn’t miss Vin. Even with 4,000 people and transvestites and club kids, he always stood out.... Wait a second, what’s he doing with his shirt off?’ ”
- This in-depth celebrity profile had a displacement of zero (hack and star rode from Beverly Hills hotel to Beverly Hills hotel) and as much substance
- In the back seat of the Escalade could be found, no doubt, a no-doubt-female-or-homosexualist publicist with a tape recorder and a job on the line. The publicity machine wants us to think we need permission to talk about a star; now Details says we need permission to think about one
“Though most of us are more than OK with girl-on-girl action, when a guy says he’s bisexual we still think he’s lying” and that it is like totally gross
“I’ve brought home and had sex with a few guys who insisted they were straight.... When these guys are black, they say they’re on the DL, or down-low,” that hip new black term for “closeted” the Times recently unearthed in an archæological dig
“[W]e still have trouble getting a date on Saturday night”
- Homework assignment: Google "Woody Allen" "practicing heterosexual"
Gay writer can’t let himself be simply gay. “If the women I’ve known pounced on me as hard as I’ve pounced on guys, maybe I’d be sleeping with them, too”
- Homework assignment: Google feasting with panthers
Quotes Bert Archer without required parody/ridicule

A. Shoot ’em if you got ’em

“Nocturnal Admissions” by Augusten (“I ♥ Trannies”) Burroughs, with note-perfect photo illustration of melting Creamsicle® by Bela Borsodi (“Is Dead”), on wet dreams:

“We all learned everything we knew about sex from Tommy, including such pearls as ‘Fags have long hair and eat each other’s shit’ ”
“As most men know, wet dreams are often accompanied by alarming visuals. Family members, members of the same sex (if you’re straight), or even animals are likely to appear.... These dreams are not your subconscious telling you you’re a fruit.... They’re just dreams”

B. Shoot blanks

“The End of Men?” by Jerry Stahl (still undead), on declining sperm counts, estrogenic poisoning, and Y-chromosome defects:

“Men... are also becoming – there’s no other word – feminized.... The technical term, I believe, is sissified”
“The result of such manly deregulation, ironically, is to hasten our march toward gender extinction. This most gay-bashing of administrations is single-handedly pussifying generations of red-blooded American men to come”

Disproving its own thesis

“Is There Such a Thing as Too Gay?” by Tony Hendra (still undead) states that Steven Cojocaru, whom I’d thankfully never heard of, embodies every “stereotype of ‘pansy,’ ‘fairy,’ ‘sissy,’ and all those other hilarious epithets we throw around in private.” (Careful with that “we.”) “He’s just what red-meat Republicans expect a gay man to be: Flirty, lisping, campy, dolled up in ridiculous clothes... [i]n a word, abnormal. His antics make conservatives totally comfortable in their ingrained biases: See, we were right all along.”

I would vouchsafe that this character is just that, a character. We reinvent ourselves for show business. But not by very much. Behind every pansy, fairy, or sissy is a pansy, fairy, or sissy. Some of us just are like that. It is normal for us.

Euphemism for metrosexualist

Piece by cute but nerdy but also now influential and well-off Clive Thompson (“Why We Spend What Daddy Didn’t”) on the current generation of conspicuous consumers – demonstrably differentiable from previous generations of conspicuous consumers.

“For them, the concept of spending that much on the artifacts of everyday life would seem inconceivable and, frankly, a little girlie [sic]”
“Those fears of seeming effeminate have largely evaporated, at least among educated urban men”
“Or we’re gay”

Speak for yourselves, Details. ¶