I'm ever so shy you know. Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Velvet Goldmine.
For the past few years, folk (usually women) with far, far too much time on their hands have been crafting racy homoerotic tales starring fictional characters who are normally about as gay as Barry White.
At first fan fiction, or rather its subgenre slashfic, was mainly inspired by TV shows - for example, what would happen if Captain Kirk and Spock finally got jiggy with it whilst Bones dripped candle wax onto their writhing, sweaty bodies, or what if Buffy's Angel and Spike left the women at home one night and ended up drunk, fighting and suddenly finding that all their clothes had fallen off.
After a smattering of boy band fanfic in the late 90s, a slash scene sprang up around UK indie, bolstered by The Libertines. Pete Doherty and Carl Barat's shared onstage lusty glances fanned the flames and stoked the burning loins of a nation of Converse-shod kiddies who were now all wondering if the pair were doing quite a lot more than just writing songs together and burgling each other.
Now, with the advent of Youtube, the fanvid has emerged. The bigger, harder and more immediate brother of slash fic, it lets anyone with access to a two-bit editing suite retell stories from their favourite films complete with a soundtrack of their choice.
Along with numerous gothic paeans to the Harry Potter films, a favourite movie to cut to ribbons and sew delicately back together is Velvet Goldmine, which is on Channel 4 tonight. Directed by Todd Haynes, this 1998 movie features Ewan MacGregor and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as two star-crossed glam rockers who embark on a glittering affair, (loosely) based on the relationship between Iggy Pop and David Bowie.
Panned at the time, the film now has the very modern manifestation of a cult following - a legion of fans that love it so much they use it as the jumping off point to create their own rock star fantasies. Chopping together all the best nudey bits and broody bits and distilling the love story quite literally to its bare essentials, these hot and bothered armchair directors are making their very own romp-athons whilst gloomy Coldplay and even Oasis numbers, a selection of Franz Ferdinand songs and Pete Doherty and Wolfman's For Lovers play over the snogging, simulated fellatio and simply fabulous costumes.
Re-appropriated and reappraised, in its bizarre, mutant afterlife, Velvet Goldmine is now getting the attention many feel it deserves. Well, the naughty parts are, at least.
