Customer Reviews

Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity

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One of the most interesting - and funniest - books I've ever read, and certainly by far the best on masculinity. I especially enjoyed the masterpiece chapter on the movie 'Top Gun' which completely convincingly interprets it as a gay movie and shows how Cruise's real interest is Val Kilmer not Kelly McGillis.

Shortly after this book was published Quentin Tarantino appeared in a film called 'Sleep With Me' arguing this exact point. I wonder if he had a copy of Simpson's book in his dressing-room?

`These smashingly provocative essays by the spunky Brit writer Mark Simpson... detonate myths, stereotypes and icons, gay as well as straight. The psycho-social line separating homo and hetero maleness, he fulsomely shows, is much fuzzier than Robert Bly and Pat Buchanan find it to be.'

`This set of high-spirited essays displays more insight into the masculine mystique than has the decade of earnest men's studies that preceded it. Simpson has an unerring eye for the inner logic and pretences of a wide range of masculine enterprises and symbols. ` - Choices

Male Impersonators should be a contemporary classic. It IS a contemporary classic it is just a 'crying shame' that it is not better known.

Simpson undresses the idea of the 'natural man' and shows us how men perform masculinity, in popular culture in particular. Gay strippers and drag artists, 'macho' body builders, pornography, sport, The War Movie, reality television, rock and roll. They all reveal, as examined by Simpson, the complexities and often the homoerotic and homosexual subtexts of modern masculinities.

My favourite chapter is The Anus And Its Goalposts. The book was published in 1994 but if this chapter was distributed to football fans and players now, in 2011, it might cause football to suffer an identity crisis it could not recover from. Simpson uses Freud, Foucault, Iragaray, and his own unique perspective, to reveal the underlying homo-sexual dynamics that form the 'Beautiful Game'. It made me think on reading it, that if homophobia in football was to be eradicated, there would be nothing left of the sport at all, as it is built on homosexual tension and also denial and fear.

Beautifully written, well referenced, funny and sometimes heartbreaking, Male Impersonators tells us the story of how men have come to be how they are. But as the lack of fame of this book and its author attests to, it is a story the world does not want to hear.

A dangerous book and a wonderful one.

Like most of Simpson's writings, witty and mischievous and iconoclastic. My only minor gripe would be with what I view as Simpson's tendentious application of Freudian theory, which strikes me as a little outdated now. Otherwise, this book is great fun, with some marvelous paradoxical insights.

"Mark Simpson detects and dissects the myths of machismo and its attendant media circus with refreshing gusto and wit."`

MALE IMPERSONATORS Men Performing Masculinity (Cassell,1994, UK; Routledge 1994 US) 'Simpson pulls the pants offpopular culture and wittily winks at the Freudian symbols lurking beneath.' (Four stars out of four) - The Modern Review 'A brilliantly-positioned array of firecrackers, elephant traps and banana skins designed to trick conventional maleness into showing its true hand, or some extremity....Simpson capers like Robin Goodfellow, stripping off the fig leaves with exuberance.' - The Observer 'Mark Simpson's Male Impersonators could do for male sexuality what Camille Paglia did for women, finding latent homo subtexts to Marky Mark, Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise's baseball bat.' - Melody Maker 'Simpson's Male Impersonators achieves more than the past decade of masculinity books put together.' - Choices.  IT'S A QUEER WORLD (Vintage, 1996; Harrington Park Press 1998) An hilariously perverse look at British culture in the nineties, where nothing is as straight - or gay - as it seems 'Mark Simpson is one of the brightest gay writers around, as this collection amply proves.' -Time Out 'With wicked, wacky humour, this book is one of the most entertaining ever written on popular culture and sexuality.' - Gay Times 'Brilliant... seriously funny.' - Scotland On Sunday 'You'd have to be a chronic depressive not to laugh.' - New Statesman & Society 'Provocative, irreverant... a valuable and entertaining read for those of any persuasion seeking fresh perspectives on the era in which we live.' - The Hot Press, Dublin 'Readers will enjoy this book for its perceptiveness, verve and humour.' - The Scotsman 'Always funny and often insightful, it is an easy and delightful read, and may even bring a tear to your eye.' Irish Gay Community News ANTI-GAY Ed Mark Simpson (Cassell, 1996) 'ANTI-GAY has divided the homosexual community' - The Independent 'The year's most controversial book' - BBC Radio 5 'An intellectual enema for today's mentally constipated gay generation.' - Tribune 'I almost hate to agree with anything Simpson has to say' - London Review of Books 'Simpson's collection reads as if you have stumbled into a spirited, rather subversive dinner party' - The Tablet 'The essays gathered in Anti-Gay represent the earliest onslought by the new guerrillas and petroleuses of what might be termed the Post-Homosexual Era, savaging imported American PC pieties, blasting the sex-and-shopping body fascism of gay clubland and caning the insistent brainlessness of queer baby-boomers, but dedicated also, it seems, to trashing the sacred exclusiveness of faggot identity in some niftily subversive snips at the barbed wire along the hetero-homo divide. Their leader is the brilliantly buccaneering Mark Simpson whose opening parodic monologue 'Gay Dream Believer' satanically debases the coinage of substance-abusing disco-chic.' - Jonathan Keates, The Spectator 'My chortles startled not only myself but several fellow passengers.' - Scotsgay 'Worth it for the Bruce LaBruce/Glennda Orgasm contribution alone.' - Attitude 'Daring... provocative' - Lambda Book Report 'Reckless' - Genre 'Dangerous' - Gay Times 'Acid' - Bay Area Reporter 'Acid' - The Guardian 'Leftist' - Out 'Mark Simpson... imbues the book with the vapid appeal of a compassionless Margaret Thatcher' - City Life 'Simpson is far too much a maverick and too acerbic' - Diva 'Mark Simpson... comes across as unaccountably smug' - The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 'Everything Simpson says is true. What's more, he's funny.' - Tˆtu, Paris 'The overwhelming cynicism of Mark Simpson is quite frightening coming from one so young.' - Gay & Lesbian Humanist 'Simpson is a cunt' - Boyz 'The contributors take issue with the coercive nature of prevailing gay orthodoxies, pointing out that oppression and prejudice do not become legitimate simply because they happen to be practised by the previously oppressed.' - The Times 'When I was reading it, I just kept thinking, Thank God someone did this, because the culture we've created is killing us.... Whatever happened to our individuality, our differences? Gay culture has just become this big pink... thing, which makes me want to puke.' - Aiden Shaw, Time Out New York

`A brilliantly-positioned array of firecrackers, elephant traps and banana skins designed to trick conventional maleness into showing its true hand, or some extremity....Simpson capers like Robin Goodfellow, stripping off the fig leaves with exuberance.' - The Observer

"Like me this book plays with men. Provocative, irreverent, acerbic and witty, it offers one gigantic intellectual orgam after another." - Margi Clarke