The trouble with Mark Simpson is his enormous knob: a veritable penis dentatum going right up to his Adam’s Apple (the only indelible significator of a man).

What he does with this chainsaw-cock of wit and curiosity and clarity cuts very close to the bone of what masculinity is supposed to be. But far from delivering a massacre of sacred bulls (as it says on the tin – articles arranged under headings such as “Dirty Thoughts”, “Dirty Talk” and “Dirty Books”), Simpson carves elegant ice sculptures with his words, rendering transparent the personalities he discovers behind the (predominantly masculine) masks. As I wander through the sculpture park that he has created in this collection of articles and essays, I get a sense of a man with more than just a sharp, iconoclastic critical faculty, but someone with an increasing maturity on matters emotional and sexual, and a blistering, endearing honesty. Even if he does fish for compliments.

He begins the collection with a brilliant analysis of the inflated importance that sex holds in gay (and therefore, following shortly thereafter, popular) culture. He splits sex, for argument’s sake, into HotSex and crapsex, and declares that he’s no longer in the market for HotSex, which, he says, can “take over your life”. He defines crapsex as that ordinary, affectionate, easy fumbling under the duvet, the “guilty shared secret” that keeps people together monogamously; because it’s so unfulfilling you have to invest some of your unexpressed libido in that neurotic form of behaviour called “affection”. “Crapsex is the real world” he states, as if for the first time, “and is the only chance of happiness that any of us has. Unfortunately this is also why HotSex will get you – and me – every time.”

Simpson’s subjects include the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Eminem phenomenon, meeting his hero Roddy McDowall, articles on Brad Pitt, Marky Mark, Guy Ritchie, and interviews with Alexis Arquette, Dana International, and Julie Birchall, among others.

One of the more interesting interviews was from 1997, with pornstar/writer Aiden Shaw, a thoughtful hunk of a man who confesses that his whole masculinity is completely contrived. It’s the sort of interview that reveals so much about both interviewer and interviewee that it leaves me gasping, and wishing that I had been there, to observe the body language of their parries and thrusts. They discuss, to Shaw’s dismay, narcissism – for, of course, Simpson’s knack is to find those who mirror his own narcissism and to write about them, thus avoiding the charge of being narcissistic himself. But he doesn’t cover his tracks, and I trust him all the more for it. Narcissism, he asserts, “doesn’t simply mean selfishness or vanity, but self-love – the kind of self-love and self-sufficiency that’s necessary for all living things to survive and for all artists to produce things of beauty.” (Agreed, but then I would agree, wouldn’t I?) But, often, narcissists create a grandiose fictional version of themselves – the romantic outsider, the sex terrorist – to conceal their secret worthlessness – Wizards of Oz. Simpson tries to get Shaw to agree with him that there is a trade-off between being an artist/outsider and having happiness, that the false persona is a consolation for the narcissistic wounding. Shaw gives him short shrift – but then we discover that he’s in love for the first time, and so, as any therapist will tell you, all bets are off when it comes to honest self-analysis. Shaw muses on his new attentive lover: “I thought I was too damaged by my experience of ten years of prostitution to be able to love someone.” In reminding myself what Shaw looks like (as he himself acknowledges, people don’t recognise him but have heard of his name) I did a search on Google – and, as well as his official website, with book titles and some moody photos, there can be found, depressingly, his listing as escort no. 220 at www.london-lads.co.uk.

Simpson is a master at sniffing out the self-haters among us men, in order, I presume, to make sense of his own

self-destructive capacities, his own death wish. He has thought through Freudian concepts so well that they inform most of his work – but he hasn’t been in analysis himself. He wonders how anyone could stand all that listening. So, instead of a real live person to talk to, he puts it all into print, and we can then take or leave his words without him ever risking the pain of seeing someone finding him boring. “I like to think I can read myself better, or at least smarter” he says, as opposed to taking the talking cure; and so, by the same token, we may read ourselves better, or at least smarter, by reading him. And I do. And what’s more, I wasn’t bored, and I found it very funny indeed.

Get too close to Simpson’s savage sex-terrorist knob with your own proud member, and you might get it cut off. Offer yourself to him in submission to his alpha male studness, and you may find yourself taking the “pathic” role – a victim, a calamity, a bumboy object of disposable desire. Penis envy and castration anxiety all at once, the queer dilemma. Do I go down on my knees to receive the Body of Mark, with my “faggy” eyes looking up at him – the “bright alert hungry quality which in its innocent form is mostly found in children and small animals, but which in adult men is the nearest thing to a reliable indicator of inversion”? Or do I try to match his clever words with even cleverer words, pissing higher up on the wall, so he can garner a few good quotes to adorn his glittering member, like studs on a leather jockstrap? Like a gym-bunny Edward Scissorhands, Mark Chainsawknob admits to problems with intimacy, which shouldn’t be surprising, and, as he acknowledges, makes him fashionable. Such candour makes his writing all the more insightful and valuable to all of us so similarly “in fashion.”

In Simpson’s transition from boyhood to manhood, like Brad Pitt’s transition from sex object to character actor, he is moving away from sex-centredness to something more like wholeness. Without women to “civilise” us, we gay men, experts at facsimile masculinity, have the tough task of doing it for ourselves, wrestling our desire, nature and/or death wish from their thrones, to achieve, at least, some honourable draw, or timeshare, to find some sort of peace, some kind of warmth, some kind of mature love in our lives, in this “man-boy age of facsimile manhood, in which men no longer grow up, their chests just get bigger instead”.