Ah well – no good deed goes unpunished: Dragonthief .
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TOM IS EVIL Last change to brighten my birthday by buying me a present from my wishlist. Anything on the ‘Dispatched within 24 hours’ category (if bought today) should arrive on Thursday, thus making me a very very spoilt weblogger. Show your love with money today. Buy me shit.
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On giving a design away…
The orgy of Tom-love just keeps on oiling itself up and writhing in erotic glee. Malpractice is the first site that I have seen that uses my free-for-use template (as seen here and available here). There are a few revisions to it, which frankly I think improve it dramatically. But I guess that was the point of it – to make something simple and basic, fairly elegant, that people could personalise as they saw fit. If you see anyone else using the template, let me know.
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Hope you’re having fun, Ed…
Received an e-mail from someone I knew at school today. He’d been wandering around plasticbag.org. It’s an odd feeling – you put a lot of your life on display on one of these things, but you somehow don’t expect it to be read by people you actually know. And every time someone new does read it, you feel exposed for a while. Having said that, I’ve made it a mission to be as open and up-front as I can about stuff. So hey. Hope you’re having fun, Ed.
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Consider me astonishingly flattered…
God, I’m really popular today for some reason. Everyone’s being really nice to me. I wonder what that’s about. Next up we have a site review from 2xy.org=f(ab)! :: adored. My favourite (surreal) line goes as follows: “I mean, if I were in his shoes, I’d be extremely wary of unbidden strangers who lavish me with thick praise. You can’t be too careful on the Internet these days, especially if you’re as popular as Tom Coates.” What a strange world it is in which we live. Nevertheless consider me astonishingly flattered. And yes, I’m afraid I will link to anyone who says really nice things about me. I don’t care if that’s whoredom or not.
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On Mark Kevin Hall being lovely…
It’s a bit of a Tom-love-in today. Thanks to Mark Kevin Hall from Hidden City for the present and saying all that nice stuff about me.
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On Kerry and Sean’s graphic design…
Thank you Kerry and Sean:
This detail of a wonderful card sent to me by two of my LA friends is perhaps less … spicy … than the original, but still demonstrates their amazing graphic design skill and sense of humour. Thanks guys!
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Old is the new young…
Today on Barbelith: Old is the new young – “Being a glimpse – inexcusably yet unapologetically flippant – into the world of a wannabe Old Git.”
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On Will & Grace…
In the second post on gay issues in a row, Tom decides to take a certain amount of issue with Mark Lawson’s article in the Guardian today on Will & Grace. Tom decides particularly to take issue with this excerpt:
Presented as dramatic courage, Jack really represents cowardice, because he’s there as a contrast with Will’s discreet homosexuality. Jack goes to a gay gym, Will to a mixed one. In Will, the writers have created a gay character who neatly avoids the two aspects of gay men which most provoke homophobia: genital activity and effeminacy. It’s a bit like a sit-com about a football supporter in which the central character never bothers to go to matches and prefers to watch The South Bank Show instead of Match Of The Day.
There are such people, but the characterisation seems dictated by caution rather than authenticity. Another insurance against switch-off is built into the plot. At least in the early episodes – as in the first two reels of The Next Best Thing – there’s nothing to discourage Joe and Joanna Six-Pack from the belief that Will isn’t really gay and that he and Grace will eventually realise that they are Harry and Sally rather than Arthur and Martha.
How many gay people do you know? No really. Think about it. How many gay people do you know? Ok then – now take the number of people you know – not know well, just know – and divide it by twenty. Studies be damned, this is a guess – some people say it’s one in ten, some that it’s one in ninety. That’s irrelevant. The fact is that across work, friends, friends of friends, family, friends of family, people you knew at University, people you knew at school, that out of all those people, many many more were gay than you had the slightest idea.
So somehow these people ‘pass’ for straight – or to put it another way, somehow these people do not come across according to your preconceptions of what it means to be gay. They probably don’t work in the media. They probably don’t wear purple lurex or get dressed up in drag, or have a really big thing about Liza Minelli. Some people will. Good. Excellent. But we’re talking about a huge and diverse community here – of queens who like Travis, queens who like Bach, queens who like the Sex Pistols, queens who like Napalm Death, queens who like Britney Spears, queens who – for god’s sake – like Queen.
Now I’ve no doubt that Will & Grace is a fairly reactionary show which represents a fairly anaemic idea of what it means to be gay. But is Friends any less anaemic a view of what it is to be straight? Or are straight people really all super-annuated three years olds whose obsession with caffeine has driven them close to paranoid dementia? But we’re getting away from the point, now. So answer me this, Mr Lawson – would it be any less mentally closeted to fill a TV show with the kind of queer that you can identify readily? We are, after all, everywhere.
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On the homophobia in Ultraviolet…
So I’ve been watching Ultraviolet on DVD today in between spats of job-finding. And I’ve been loving it. And then I hit the fourth episode – one on paedophilia. And it happened again – as I watched it I became gradually more concerned about where the line was being drawn between gay people and paedophiles. Firstly, it was male-male paedophilia, which always alarms me, since sexual abuse is most often male-female and within families. Secondly, two men walking around in a park is used as an indication that it might be an area attended by paedophiles – as opposed to a cruising ground for a particular kind of exhibitionist or closeted poof. Thirdly, one of the paedophiles is shown disposing of an adult gay porn mag – adult male on male as well. Finally, the two main paedophiles are camp mincers – lip pursing bitches with high voices and limp wrists – semiotic indicators of gay men. A structuralist critic would no doubt have a lot to say about the grouping together of ‘unattractive’ and ‘unaccepted’ sexualities – I just saw a clumsy and insulting episode that was (possibly unintentionally) homophobic. It’s discoloured my whole view of the series.