"I'D LIKE TO DROP MY TROUSERS TO THE QUEEN/ EVERY SENSIBLE CHILD WILL KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS..." (Morrissey)

THE QUEEN IS DEAD: JARHEADS, EGGHEADS, SERIAL KILLERS & BAD SEX is a collection of letters between British writer Mark Simpson and me published last year by Arcadia Books, UK.

I haven't read it. Not out of any embarrassment over certain unsanitized details of my lewd vagrancy. (On the contrary; my life is an open book ... literally.) I just selfishly prefer my limited-edition-of-one set of Mark's personal letters to me v. the konsumprodukt available in the US from amazon.com.

But I do like looking at THE QUEEN IS DEAD. For me it has something of the exotic gloss of a record album in the import bin:

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-900850-49-4

Designed and typeset in FF Scala and Scala Sans by
Discript, London WC2N 4BN
Printed in England by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

I'm also impressed with (and grateful for) the acuity of our reviewers' critical comments. Honestly, I never really expected to see THE QUEEN IS DEAD published at all -- much less widely reviewed, slated for translation into Portuguese, and at Christmas listed by THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY as one of their

Especially interesting (and, for me as a first-time author in the UK, instructive) have been the assessments of British journalists published in mainstream newspapers.

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.

Thank you. And, "right on" : E-MAIL SHOULD BE RESTRICTED BY LAW NOT TO EXCEED THE WORD LENGTH OF TELEGRAMS IMHO. STOP.

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.

"WHAT'S NEW?"

"I've lived through worse times," I told a friend last week. "But I was younger then."

FLASHBACK

The second week of September 2001 marked the 10 year anniversary of my relationship with THE HAWORTH PRESS.

TRAUMA

Probably I don't need to explain how it happened that celebration of this anniversary was preempted by breaking news.

LASH-BACK

At the height of mid-80's cold war tensions, I was working as a civilian employee on US Army bases in Germany where terrorist bombings occurred with such frequency as to almost become routine.

One of my current projects is editing a 10-year anniversary second edition of my first book, BARRACK BUDDIES. It was during the 1991 Gulf War that I left Germany -- my home since 1982. My interest in interviewing (and later photographing) US servicemen grew out of my stubbornly dogmatic pacifism. Seeing all my GI friends go off to war was more than I could take.

None of my friends were killed. And within months I found a publisher for my interviews with them....

Ten years later I find myself in a military town emptied of sailors "off to war."

STRAY CAT DRESS BLUES

Actually, as it happens almost all of my Navy friends here had already been discharged before 11 SEP 01. Most for getting into trouble. I've always had a soft spot for rebels, troublemakers, military bad boys (and military bad girls too, now).

Last month I turned down an invitation to write a feature story for a prestigious glossy magazine on the state of "gays in the military under George II."

I could have used the money. Badly. But (a) my work has always been more documentarian than political; (b) since my first invitation in 1993 to appear on HARD COPY I've consistently said no to any media exposure I feared might inadvertently exert any negative influence on the conditions under which service personnel work and live. And (c) for the last five years or so the primary focus of my work has been chronicling homoeroticism among military men who do not necessarily identify themselves as gay.

Since "9-11" I've also been ruminating on the question of trivialization.

That my studio photography of sailors these last two years has largely been limited to men (and women) on their way out of the Navy just sort of happened. It's since become requisite. Even so, the second week of September I "blacked out" the galleries of half-naked sailors on this site in acknowledgement of the special sacrifices demanded of active duty service members.

In a statement on the direction I see my work taking, I wrote:

My photography (as my five books) is neither commercially nor politically motivated. Occasionally, I do work up something resembling a spark of lewd-vagrant voyeuristic prurience. Mostly, though (and more and more...), I'm just a not-ready-for-PBS documentarian.

KEYWORD PHRASE: "time capsule."

From here on my writing will likely concentrate on the closing decades of the 20th century: preserving stories that would otherwise go unrecorded.

And sharing some stories of my own.