Mark Simpson (journalist)

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For other people with this name, see Mark Simpson (disambiguation)

Mark Simpson is a British journalist and writer specialising in pop culture, media and masculinity. He is also a frequent commentator on British TV shows. His style is very British: witty, entertaining, provocative and un-PC, occasionally flip, but also frequently insightful. Part satirist, part philosopher, part mischief-maker, part psychologist, part comedian, part cultural theorist, part bitch he has been described by one critic as 'the skinhead Oscar Wilde' and by another as 'a snobby c**t'. His work provokes passionate responses and he has often been compared to Camille Paglia. His work is influential and zeitgeisty.

He is credited with coining one of the most popular global buzzwords ever, the ‘metrosexual’ in 1994.^[1] He also introduced the term to the US in 2002, inaugurating the current popularity of the term.^[2] He is also credited with being the first to use the term ‘retrosexual’ in the sense of the anti-metrosexual in 'Becks the virus' (Salon.com, 2003) . http://www.wordspy.com/words/retrosexual.asp

His first book ‘Male Impersonators’ (1994) included a chapter arguing persuasively that the real romance in ‘Top Gun’ was between Maverick/Tom Cruise and Iceman/Val Kilmer, something which may have inspired Quentin Tarantino to make a cameo appearance in the film ‘Sleep With Me’ later the same year as a party-guest making a very similar argument. His highly controversial collection ‘Anti-Gay’ (1996), in which various ‘non-heterosexual’ contributors voiced their dissatisfaction with the gay identity, gay lifestyle, gay culture and the gay press and gay ‘feelgood’ propaganda, began what came to be known as the ‘post-gay’ movement, and pre-empted a series of gay books critical of gay culture. ‘It’s a Queer World’ published the same year showed how gay and straight culture were converging, a decade before this became a common theme. ‘Saint Morrissey’ his 2003 fanatical, innovative biography of the former Smiths front man, written at the nadir of the singer’s career, and which appeared the year before Morrissey achieved an astonishing comeback (‘You Are the Quarry’).^[3]

In 2006, Details magazine ran an exclusive ‘inside’ feature by Simpson about the gay porn scandal involving paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne – which Simpson had researched for Salon.com two years before the scandal erupted on the global stage.^[4]