Soho Stories

8pm. I’m sitting on a small leather settee in a packed theatre bar. On my right sits ‘a sneezing’ David Benson, and on my left his friend Katy.

As they’re both actors the conversation revolves around plays, avant-garde performers and Katy’s recent one-woman show. You see, Katy is none other than Katy Manning. One of the original Dr Who girls. And as she talks, shaking her blonde locks from side-to-side, peppering her speech with show biz anecdotes, although it’s interesting, all I can think about are … the Daleks.

When I was growing up the Daleks were scary. I mean really scary. They were like the Terminators of their day. I must’ve been about eight when I first saw them and whenever they appeared on TV, like thousands of other kids, I’d hide behind my parent’s flower-patterned red velour sofa, peeping nervously from behind the arm-rest, pee spots permeating my pants. … More »

Front Lines: Stephen Baldwin comes out in support of ex-gays

As the Big Brother house empties, the sublebrities that peopled it clamour for the attention that no doubt led them to first enter what Marina Hyde has dubbed “the Bungalow of the Damned”. One of the latest evictees, the youngest of the Baldwin gang and reality-TV regular, has been on the interview circuit. Talking to Miranda Sawyer of the Observer, this born-again Christian and general dipstick came out against homosexuality. He is all for ex-gays, but opposed to civil partnerships and gay marriage. … More »

Soho Stories

I’m in a coffee shop. The blue one on the corner of Old Compton Street and Frith Street. I come here a lot. I like it here. It’s authentic. As if it’s been here for years. I don’t like the fake bohemia of Caffé Nero and Costa. If I come to Soho I like to be somewhere with a bit of history. So it’s The Stockpot not Balans. Comptons not The Village. The Colony (RIP) not The Groucho. And always this coffee shop. But what I also like about it is that you can always get a seat. I go for the corner one. By the window. It’s the perfect place to watch Soho life drift by.

Today the street is packed. There’re men with goatees, men with beards, men in jackets, men in coats, fit men, overweight men, camp men, butch men, men chatting, men laughing, men texting, solitary men, groups of men, cruising men. It’s Men Heaven.

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Soho Stories

Those lovely Polari boys have asked me if I would like to write a column for their online magazine.

‘We can be fairly flexible,’ they said, which I took to mean, there’d be no deadlines, no pressure on subject matter and no spotty teenage sub-editors hacking away at my prose.

‘Great!’ I said. ‘I’ll knock something out at the weekend.’

What I didn’t tell them was that my last column ended in tears. … More »

An interview with PETA’s rebel campaigner Dan Mathews

Dan Mathews is the Senior Vice President of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. His memoir, Committed: The Adventures of PETA’s Rebel Campaigner, is most likely the funniest book to have been written on the subject of animal rights activism. He is the force behind PETA’s often controversial and always impactive campaign strategy.

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The Isle of Sins and Scandals

Ireland was once romanticised as being called The Isle of Saints and Scholars. Indeed, with the amount of both that came from Ireland – from St. Brendan’s voyage to America around the Year 500AD to the sublime poetry of William Butler Yeats in the early twentieth century – I’d like to think that Ireland deserved this title for quite some time. Thanks to recent events, however, I begin to wonder if this is the case any longer.

As the Irish government released the Murphy Report, an investigation into the decades of child sex abuse by members of the Catholic Church, shockwaves spread out from Dublin to all over the world, especially to America and Britain where a large proportion of the Irish Diaspora reside. Bishops were strongly encouraged to resign, and it finally came to light how corrupt the Church, once the backbone of Irish society, truly was.

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Front Lines: An Interview with Mark Mander

An interview with Mark Mander, the creator of Clementine the Living Fashion Doll
UK • London, UK
January 10, 2010

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One Year On: An Interview with Clayton Littlewood

I first interviewed Clayton Littlewood in December 2008, after the publication of the book Dirty White Boy, and before his dinner with Elton John, who had read and admired it.

This is how I introduced the book.

Dirty White Boy began as a MySpace blog when Clayton and his partner Jorge were running a shop of the same name. Its subject is London’s Soho, in which the shop was situated, under a brothel no less and on the corner of the gay mecca Old Compton Street. Clayton would sit and watch the chaotic world of Soho go by, take notes in a little black book, and then write his blog.

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Front Lines: Watch out Gately and Thomas, the media vultures are circling

There have been many news stories to make the queens scream this past year. Heads have spun much like Linda Blair’s did in The Exorcist - if, that is, she had been powered by the Hadron Super Collider. Extreme Emotional Reaction, as opposed to that great British standard, Rational Thought, ruled. Remember the ‘Amazon Fail’ incident? Before there were any facts circulating, the cries of homophobia rang out as if Quasimodo himself were tugging on the ropes. And witness the reactions to the BBC’s ill-advised question ‘Should homosexuals be executed?’. Facebook trembled at the high-pitch indignation and the insults hurled at the BBC (along with a few lame comments about the licence fee that were worthy of the average Daily Mail reader). Peter Tatchell responded with a measured grace to the situation, but sadly his lead was not followed, and the playground-politics of gay rights fired off as if from Cape Canaveral itself. There was much brouhaha and the flinging of insults as opposed to rational response.

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Clementine the Nutcracker

In another spectacular production, reminiscent of the heyday of 1970s television, the glamorous starlet Clementine celebrates the season with a fairy on the tree and a visit from a prince. With the handsome hunk Guilherme Logullo.

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