Postcards from the edge of gay culture

Mark Simpson enjoys a very unusual rapport with the gay audience that buys his firebrand tracts such as Anti-Gay, and reads his witty features in The Face or columns in Attitude. They really hate him. They accost him in talks, and at bookshop readings, just to tell him how much they hate him. He has made what seems like a career of dissing Kylie Minogue and growling at every disco dolly silly enough to trot near those big Doc Martens.

Mark Simpson enjoys a very unusual rapport with the gay audience that buys his firebrand tracts such as Anti-Gay, and reads his witty features in The Face or columns in Attitude. They really hate him. They accost him in talks, and at bookshop readings, just to tell him how much they hate him. He has made what seems like a career of dissing Kylie Minogue and growling at every disco dolly silly enough to trot near those big Doc Martens.

Simpson has always made no bones about his decidedly non-PC interest in members of Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Indeed, his admiration of the man in uniform seems to hark back to another age - all those scandals from the 19th century which involved Guardsmen turning a shilling in Kensington Gardens. To your average non-angst-ridden gay man (and there's the qualifier), Mark Simpson embodies a scary primal form of homosexuality long thought extinct in the western world. In a word, he's a heretic.

It seems inevitable that at some point he might hook up with his nearest American counterpart, Steven Zeeland: author of The Masculine Marine and Barrack Buddies and Soldier Lovers. Unlike Simpson (who enjoys a prominent profile as a journalist in the UK), Zeeland is even more on the margins of the gay scene in the US. There, once again, his interest in sex with heterosexual marines is considered rather embarrassing to a "modern" gay audience.

As Zeeland spells it out to Simpson soon after they begin a correspondence in March 1995 (the three-year exchange encompassed by The Queen is Dead): "I was never really much of a believer in the gay religion - for years I quarrelled with proselytising friends who insisted my attraction to military boys must be a manifestation of my internalised homophobia."

I don't know to what extent these letters are edited. Anyway, they read beautifully: certainly, an e-mail correspondence would have been very different in flavour. There's a neatness about the exchange of ink and paper that seems to suit a sergeant-major formalism in the soul of both writers. Simpson's opening gambit is a bit of a masterpiece: a fan letter that lets its object know that its author is quite his equal. Luckily, Zeeland is in complete agreement - the two get along famously, and enjoy an evolving friendship (though I wonder if all the more mundane aspects of friendship usually present in such exchanges have been airbrushed out, or never really made it in). How frustrated one feels to have been left out of the occasional meetings and phone-calls mentioned in the missives. It's like being in a threesome where the other two occasionally bunk off together.

Zeeland certainly lives a less glittering and more peripatetic life, and to an English audience his reports have an exotic gloss it would be unfair to think Simpson could equal - not least his account of his friendship with Andrew Cunanan, the killer of Gianni Versace. Simpson's letters, on the other hand, are classic London media-stalwart stuff: accounts of books read, films seen and celebrities bumped into (it's easy to forget that Simpson's potted history of his home town of York must seem equally exotic to Zeeland). Simpson always comes across as a very public figure while Zeeland, with his low profile, his drifting across state lines, seems more the genuine inhabitant of the demi-monde that Simpson espouses.

I was sad to finish the book because the two so-called "misfits" of gay culture are such good company. Simpson frequently owns up to a kind of fatalistic, somewhat forlorn view of life that I found hugely gratifying to read. Like all the best extroverts and wits, he's a bit on the depressive side, and may well be the man to reclaim an important and neglected part of gay culture - that of melancholia.

In Zeeland he finds the perfect transatlantic mirror in his rehearsal of a theme as old as homosexuality: the invert mourns his passing youth and abhors the superficiality of the world he lives in. I found this one of the most congenial, winning, intelligent and original "gay" publications for many years.