“When I was 21, all my gay friends slept with each other all the time. “My relationship with gay men has always got an edge to it.” Is it a sense of competition? Or envy? “It’s not as simple as that. It doesn’t hit the same when I fall out with gay men, in terms of how I feel about myself.” He notices that I’m intrigued. I can fall out with a woman and quickly make up with them. “I don’t have that kind of relationship with women.
STRAIGHT AND GAY MEN CUM EAT SKIN
And no one gets under my skin like another gay man.” Let’s parse that, I interject. But something keeps nagging at me – surely things must rankle him? “Oh, yeah,” he replies. “Accepting that is why I’m happy.”įor a minute, I feel like I’m speaking to Oprah, or the final boss of total clarity and self-belief. “No one ever puts a nice bow on it,” he explains. But in person and in his book, there’s little finality to any of it, no clear-eyed summing up of what are very complex situations. Yes, he is “slightly estranged” from his father, who once called him a disappointment, and he’d sometimes drink to excess in his twenties, and his flatmate died by suicide. “Such base-level, dick analogy chat.” He feels similarly distant from other mini-traumas that happened after. His years of pretending to be straight as a teenager were more anthropologically fascinating than scarring: “Horny and grim,” he says of his heterosexual male friends at the time. He writes that his childhood was “fine”, his psychological tablecloth “fairly spill-free”. Smith grew up in Brighton, the only child of a white mother and a Black father, who split up shortly after he was born. Something Raven Smith’s Men isn’t is a trauma memoir. I’ve repeatedly been told I’m not like other boys. In tone, it feels like an astute, elevated version of Smith’s Instagram feed, something he’d hoped for.
It’s as wise as it is bawdy the chain-smoking baby of Eve Babitz and Kim Cattrall. There are tales of fathers, boyfriends, perverts and Ken dolls porn, steroids, sports teams and lads. Who are they? Why are they? Where did we find them? Raven Smith’s Men is about the males that have come to define his life. And now his latest essay collection grapples with the most omnipresent mammal that isn’t actually talked about very much: men. Smith is also a Vogue columnist, red carpet fixture and bestselling author – his 2020 book Trivial Pursuits anatomised the mini, ludicrous traumas of modern life. The bored it-girl who fell out a window in Sex and the City. “SUNDAYS” appears next to a slide of Trinny Woodall in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Christmas shopping on a budget,” he writes alongside an image of Winona Ryder shoplifting. His captions read like howls of ironic despair and source the universality buried in pop culture camp. To his nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, Raven Smith speaks in what could be termed “gay internet”: dry, lusty, disillusioned, pictures of celebrities make up much of his feed.