masculinitysIn any other country,
peacock men get off
on being admired
swaggering, jiving, preening, enjoying
the attention, showing off
their gear, their shades, “they’re in”;
Wicked threads, man, like your style
Strutting down the street, all bling and shimmying
Lookin’ good, man!
Lookin’ gooooood.
Street corners: theatres, boulevards of chic,
hanging around, impressing the chicks, slagging each
other, slagging the chicks,
impressing each other
but why is it [...]
Did you hear about the man with AIDS, who then got leukemia? You’d think it would be curtains for him. The end of the road, the final twist of the knife, death coming a’knocking. Enough torment already, thanks very much, the trials of Job are nothing compared to the final straw on that spancelled camel’s [...]
The recent Irish Times/Behaviour Attitudes Men Today poll* makes for interesting reading. 30% of us are single, it appears, about half a million of us. 12% of us who are married or in long-term relationships have admitted to having had extra-curricular affairs, (nearly one in five of those under 25) and I imagine that the [...]
I’ve been scraping the bottom of the pop culture barrel recently. All in the name of journalistic research, you understand. Television is fascinating precisely because it’s so popular, there is no better representation of general human preoccupations: this is who we are. And yet, my fascination is also a sort of macabre masochistic experiment: how [...]
John Barrowman, the song and dance man who shot to fame as bisexual matinee idol Captain Jack in Doctor Who and Torchwood, took part in a recent BBC documentary The Making of Me, in which he bravely allowed himself to explore the scientific origins of his sexuality. The trouble with research into homosexuality is that [...]
The coolest tent of the festival
It’s a strange recession we’re in. I still see jobs being advertised in shop windows in my area of Dublin. Anecdotally, it’s not easy to find evidence that things are as bad as the word “recession” implies.
Naturally, I don’t want it to get worse. But it’s hard to challenge the assumption that the only good [...]
Jay Brannan’s first album “goddamned” is out this week, and is a must-download. He financed it himself – he is one of the growing number of singer/songwriters who are managing to start their careers with money earned from tracks released on iTunes and CDBaby and Napster, and whose reputation spread on MySpace, Facebook and, in [...]
Writer Richard Beard had a friend, Dru, with whom he used to go hill-walking and camping every year: an engineer on a ferry, a motorbiker, a real ale drinker. They did ‘manly’, outdoorsy things together, away from their wives and girlfriends and children. One day in 2001, Dru, then 43 years old, turned up wearing [...]
“There was nothing in Irish law to suggest that a family of two women and a child had ‘any lesser right to be recognised as a de facto family than a family composed of a man and woman unmarried to each other and a child’”. So says Mr Justice Hedigan in a recent High Court [...]
Interesting
