Below is an interview with Mark Simpson and the Spanish magazine NOIS. Mark Simpson is a British journalist, writer, and broadcaster specialising in pop culture, media, and masculinity. He edited a book called Anti Gay in 1996 which published for the first time a 'post gay' critique of 'gay'. I'm not sure whether this will make sense in Ghana but it will one day if we are not careful!

1 - Do you consider yourself / do you feel ‘gay’?
MS: No. Anything but ‘gay’. How can a misanthrope call himself ‘gay’? I realise perfectly well that discussions about what you ‘want to be called’ are self-indulgent and self-defeating. I also realise that ‘gay’ is now a convenient international shorthand that everyone thinks they understand - but I wish to be inconvenient. And sometimes, I don’t want to be understood.
2 - Is the notion of ‘gay’ itself a problem?
MS: Yes. To call yourself ‘gay’ immediately conscripts you into a sex war where you are expected to ‘affirm’ your sexuality – a duty more harrowing than service in Vietnam or Chechnya, since there is no leave, no fixed term of duty and no chance of being invalided out. ‘Gay’ is not merely a description of a sexual preference but denotes a lifestyle AND and an essence, an ideology AND a supposedly inborn condition. There is no escape. I believe there’s even a book called ‘The Gay Soul’. In other words: gayness is immortal and without end - a truly terrible idea.
3 - Is a Mediterranean or a latino gay the same thing as an anglo-saxon gay?
MS: There’s a saying that ‘a queen is a queen wherever you go’. But actually, I think this is mistaken. A GAY is a gay wherever you go – because to be gay is to be a product of late Twentieth Century American consumerism. Which of course is now as global and homogenised as McDonalds. Hence the emphasis put by gayists on ‘visibility’ and ‘pride’ – this is how they maintain the consistency of the product and coerce a kind of Protestant sexual conformity: you must be visible, you must bear witness, you must act and feel the same as we do; otherwise you are ‘closetted’ and ‘self-loathing’. All indigenous, traditional, mysterious, unspoken, ‘occult’ and small ‘c’ catholic types of same-sex desire are being appropriated, assimilated, and ultimately eliminated by the stridently intolerant evangelism of gayism.
4 - What are the limitations of a gay identity, and of the subcultures built around it?
MS: There are none – so long as you don’t mind being a slave to your ‘sexuality’ and, which is the same thing, the chief financer of the pension plans of lifestyle marketeers.
5 - How would you define ‘post-gay’? In what sense would you call yourself ‘anti-gay’?
MS: I deliberately didn’t call the book POST GAY since - in addition to being rather boring - this term suggests a certain kind of smugness. The contributors all had very large chips on their shoulders. Myself especially. Mind, the point of AG was not to take on a new ‘anti-gay’ identity. Nor was it to launch an ‘anti-gay’ movement. Many agreed with the criticisms of AG but attacked me for not offering an alternative ideology, for refusing to play a queer Moses for the Children of Sodom and take them to the Promised Land. What AG was about was providing an intellectual space for the discussion of non-heterosexuality beyond the usual commercial/political agendas and censorships. I know that this represents an obscene indulgence, but there you have it.
6 - Might not your ‘anti-gay’ stance hinder a political movement that (some will argue) still needs the energy to be derived from a collective identity?

MS: Yes. But then, that’s the problem with honest criticism, isn’t it? When AG was published four years ago many questioned its ‘timing’. My reply was to ask them a question instead: When is the right time to publish the truth? On the other hand, I think you underestimate the power of gayism - and its ability to drown out anything which it finds unpalattable by just turning the music up. A gay disco in London, Europe’s largest apparently, altered its posters after the publication of AG so that they read:‘ Not Anti-Gay, but PROUD to be gay!’
7 - Do gay people need a gay identity?

MS: Don’t ask me, ask the gay capitalists who have made themselves very rich selling the cheapest gay identity they kind find at the highest price they can without blushing.
8 - In Spain the choice seems to be between a gay identity (which for some inevitably leads to a ghetto) and a supposed assimilation into mainstream society. But are both options equally feasible? Will we ever do away with the need for ‘gay spaces’ in which to meet? Can we - in that sense - ever break away from the need for a ghetto?
MS: I think that the choice presented is false. Gay identity is precisely the way in which homosexuality is assimilated by mainstream society these days. ‘Straight’ society’s increased tolerance of homosexuality seems to be in direct proportion to the rise in the idea that homosexuality is safely locked up in the bodies of homosexuals - which is the First Principle of gayism (‘I was born this way’). By patronising ‘gays’ liberal ‘straights’ merely affirm their ‘straightness’. (And hence ‘homophobia’ is characterised as the pathological product of a ‘secret gayness’). Meanwhile, some of the most fervent advocates of the gay identity in the US and the UK are politically right wing and fetishistically attached to institutions; they want gays to adapt to them, rather than the other way around. What all gayists, regardless of their political outlook, wish to achieve is the replacement of same-sex desire and desiring with gayness. In effect, the instutionalising of desire - hence the emphasis put on gay marriage. But desire into identity does not go - as any married couple will tell you.
9 - Some might argue that gays are actually highly self-critical. It may be that we are the only social group that questions itself about its predicament, and that is capable of self-mockery. What do you think?

MS: Of course, homosexuals can be the most self-critical, most self-mocking social group. But not if the gayist commissars have their way. The reaction of the gay press to AG proves this beyond doubt. They universally and humourlessly decried AG. I was called, amongst other things, ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, ‘a compassionless Margaret Thatcher’ (a nice tautology), ‘overwhelmingly cynical’, and, of course, the worst possible crime in the gayist universe, ‘self-loathing’. But I’m not complaining; this was of course the reaction I hoped for. AG merely held a microphone up to the self-important loudspeakers of gay culture and enjoyed the screaming feedback that resulted. The only thing that surprised me was that how many people heard it and winced. The national gay weekly here furiously denounced the book on an almost weekly basis and they were repaid for their efforts to protect their flock from temptation by seeing their own readers voting for AG as one of their Books of the Year. So maybe there is hope after all.