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 campaigning. He is the force behind PETA’s often controversial and always impactive campaign strategy.

Rebel Scum: On the bully

The subject of Rebel Scum is usually a person or an organisation that has a mission to abuse basic rights from behind the protective gloss of religion. In this issue the subject is more amorphous, although the parallels are obvious, and the column is about the organisations that can help protect against this spectre. The [...]

A Chronicle of Lesbian and Gay Magazines • A Timeline: 1897 – 2008

An historical timeline of gay magazines, from 1897 to 2008.

The Magazine

The word magazine is an Arabic term for storehouse. Although periodicals had been published before, it was first used to describe a publication in 1731 with advent of the Gentlemen’s Magazine.

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 [...]

Recent Articles:

The Movie Songbook • Sharleen Spiteri

March 9, 2010 Sound No Comments
The Movie Songbook • Sharleen Spiteri

The Movie Songbook
Sharleen Spiteri
42:54 min • Island • March 1st, 2010

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Clementine on the auction of Danny La Rue’s gowns

March 8, 2010 Clementine 1 Comment
Clementine on the auction of Danny La Rue’s gowns

A Glamor News Flash from Clementine about the exceptional auction of 86 originals worn by performer Danny La Rue throughout his career.

Friday March 12, Brick Lane Musical Hall, London.

… More »

Soho Stories

March 8, 2010 Soho Stories No Comments
Soho Stories

Thursday 4th March

I’m outside the French House, drinking with Celine and her friend Dave.

I’ve just arrived and after a few pleasantries I ask them about the album they’re recording and they tell me it’s sounding good. Being mixed. And that it’s almost finished. It’s interesting to hear and they’re excited. Then Celine spots a guy in a long blonde wig and a black mini skirt and she goes off to speak to him, leaving Dave and I alone.

Dave was once in the band Soft Cell and although we’ve met a few times before, I’ve never thought to tell him how much his music meant to me when I was growing up. But a couple of things have happened recently that have made me change my mind.

The first is Gaga.

… More »

The Happy Island (1938)

March 8, 2010 Classic: Paper No Comments
The Happy Island (1938)

The Happy Island
Dawn Powell
275 pages • Steerforth • 1938, 1998 [PB]

… More »

Snapshots in History’s Glare

March 3, 2010 Paper No Comments
Snapshots in History’s Glare

Snapshots in History’s Glare
Gore Vidal
256 pages • Harry N. Abrams, Inc. • November 2nd, 2009 [HB]

… More »

Soho Stories

February 23, 2010 Soho Stories 1 Comment
Soho Stories

As the clock chimed six the door to the coffee shop suddenly flew open and there stood David Benson looking like a windswept Bonnie Tyler.

‘Am I late darling?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Oh good.’

Then he gave me a peck on the cheek and whisked me off to Soho’s Curzon cinema.

… More »

Front Lines: PCC ruling over Jan Moir’s controversial column on the death of Stephen Gately

February 18, 2010 Front Lines No Comments
Front Lines: PCC ruling over Jan Moir’s controversial column on the death of Stephen Gately

The Press ruling in the case of Jan Moir’s column on the death of Stephen Gately concluded that whilst it was “uncomfortable with the tenor of the columnist’s remarks”, a censure would be “a slide towards censorship”. Perhaps. More significantly, if Moir was censured it would surely spell the end of the Daily Mail.

… More »

Soho Stories

February 16, 2010 Soho Stories 2 Comments
Soho Stories

I’m in my usual spot. Notebook on one side. Coffee on the other. Flicking through a newspaper. News. Gossip. Katie Price’s tits. Then I come across an interview with Tom Ford, discussing the film he just directed, A Single Man (based on the 1964 novella by Christopher Isherwood).

I’m a big Isherwood fan, so I’m really looking forward to seeing this film. But what has been disappointing is that this is now the third interview I’ve read where Ford has tried to distance himself from the film’s homosexuality ‘It’s not a gay movie. Absolutely not,’ he said in one interview. ‘We edited out the gay kiss from the trailer,’ said another. And then the phrase he keeps coming out with, ‘I don’t define myself by my sexuality.’ Given Isherwood’s disappointment over the way the homosexuality was trivialised in Cabaret he must be turning in his grave at this reticence.

… More »

Man’s World: An interview with author Rupert Smith

February 11, 2010 Interviews No Comments
Man’s World: An interview with author Rupert Smith

Rupert Smith’s novel Man’s World is published later this month. It is the story two men from two different generations that explores both the gay scene of London today and the underground scene of fifty years ago.

Polari talked to Rupert on the eve of the book’s publication.

… More »

Soho Stories

February 2, 2010 Soho Stories 2 Comments
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 »

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Battlestar Galactica: Religion, Politics and Sex

May 9, 2009

Battlestar Galactica: Religion, Politics and Sex

In 2003 Battlestar Galactica was revived and re-envisioned for the ‘00s. In 1978 Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica was a post-Vietnam, post-Star Wars sci-fi drama about a war between humans and Cylons, a Space Western about good versus evil. From 2003 – 2009 Battlestar Galactica offered a dynamic, more complex post-September 11 exploration of the [...]

Carved in Marble: An Interview with Gore Vidal

March 26, 2009

Carved in Marble:  An Interview with Gore Vidal

At the age of eighty-three, Gore Vidal is the grand old man of American letters. His contemporaries – Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Saul Bellow – are all dead. He is the authoritative voice to which Europeans turn for a view on the United States of Amnesia, as he is wont to [...]

Lovely Her: A Portrait of Jacqueline Susann

February 16, 2009

Lovely Her: A Portrait of Jacqueline Susann

Jacqueline Susann, one-time best-selling author and originator of the stropping-and-fucking genre with her smash ‘n’ grab, world-beating bonk-buster Valley of the Dolls, would be 90 had cancer not claimed her Pucci-clad body in 1973 when she was a mere 55.
Not that she’d have ever admitted to being a nonagenarian. Even at the age of 44,she’d [...]

Paul Baker: How Bona to Vada Your Dolly Old Eek

December 3, 2008

Paul Baker: How Bona to Vada Your Dolly Old Eek

Polari is a voice from another era, and is remembered best through the characters Julian and Sandy, voiced by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, from the 1960s BBC Radio series Round the Horne. Who better to explain the phenomenon than Paul Baker, the author of Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang.

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