English journalist, author and critic Mark Simpson was BOTD in 1965. Born in York, he moved to London in his 20s, buying a gym membership and a collection of black muscle t-shirts and immersing himself in London’s gay scene. In 1994, he became a columnist for newly-launched gay magazine Attitude, offering a wittily misanthropic take on the vagaries of contemporary gay life and the decline of hook-up culture. Presenting as a muscular shaven-headed leatherman, he was strikingly at odds with louche Oxbridge-educated gay commentators like Philip Hensher, who dubbed Simpson “the skinhead Oscar Wilde”. In his debut essay collection Male Impersonators, Simpson discussed the impact of capitalism and pop culture of modern masculinity, using Mark Wahlberg’s 1992 advertising campaign for Calvin Klein to demonstrate the commodification and sexualisation of the male body. He also critiqued the portrayal of trans identity in Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game, and made a compelling case for Tom Cruise as the gay love interest of Top Gun. In his 1996 book Anti-Gay, featuring contributions from Bruce LaBruce and Peter Tatchell, Simpson bemoaned the relentlessly positive and desexualised images of homosexuality in popular media, A selection of his interviews for Attitude and The Guardian were published in the 2002 collection Sex Terror: Erotic Misadventures in Pop Culture, with a cover image of a shirtless, pumped and well-oiled Simpson holding a phallic chainsaw. In 2004’s Saint Morrissey, he explored the queer appeal of rock band The Smiths’ sexually ambiguous and famously reticent lead singer. Simpson is best known for coining the term “metrosexual” to describe a (usually heterosexual) urban-dwelling man who “takes himself as own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference“, citing football star David Beckham as Britain’s prime offender. Simpson intended the term to describe a crisis in modern masculinity, in which “the stoic, self-denying, modest straight male” was replaced “by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image… [and] being looked at.” To Simpson’s horror, the term entered mainstream discourse, gradually losing its critical edge and being self-adopted by gay and straight public figures to signal their sophistication and progressive values. In 2011, he released an e-book Metrosexy, collating his various articles about the cult of metrosexuality. He introduced the term “spornosexual” in 2014, to describe gym-going straight men who aspire to the muscular perfection of sports stars and porn actors, sharing eroticised photos of their bodies on social media to establish their self-worth. Now largely absent from mainstream media, Simpson continues to publish articles on his website. He lives in York, where he complains about spornosexuals cluttering up his gym changing rooms to take shirtless selfies. His relationship status is unknown.