What did you do during lockdown? Learn Spanish or how to bake banana bread? The hotties who run the hot East London clubnight Homostash decided to take advantage of the restrictions produce a gorgeous full colour Zine featuring all manner of mustachioed lovelies. something they’d been thinking of for a long time but had been too busy running a successful queer tachefest to make happen, until now, with clubs closed.
Despite being the proud owner of a tache and despite living within walking distance of the venue where Homostash takes place, I’ve never been. I think I might have to rectify that when it reopens.
The Zine is a beautifully designed and very sexy collection of image and text. The design is sharp throughout with a strong visual appeal and plenty of hot guys only too happy to strip down to their birthday suits and facial hair for your delectation. This first issue is a compilation of photo shoots done over recent years – a kind of mission statement as well as a compendium of the club’s first five years of frolics, and judging by the quality of the men here I should get my facial hair down there as soon as it reopens.
In Colum McCann’s novel, Dancer, based on the life of Rudolph Nureyev, a gay clone in 70s New York says he wears a moustache so he can retain the scent of last night’s sins, and this zine pays a suitably sexy homage to that humble patch of facial hair.
The articles here are engaging and, in the case of the one with Jahale, informative, as he’s photographed at various important historical locations for queer culture, such as the incomparable Gay’s The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury or the Oscar Wilde monument in Charing Cross, or the house where Virginia Woolf lived.
There’s a refreshing diversity to the models and they’re often creatives of some description: writers, actors, fashion designers or dancers. There’s even an article by the impressively flexible Damian instructing you on some basic yoga moves to ensure you stay limber under lockdown.
There are more furry upper lips than you can shake a stick at and the handsome faces come fast and furious. It’s brash, bold and unabashedly erotic, with Frede in his tight white briefs and Pierre in his leather clone cap, flashing his irresistible armpits. All tastes are catered for here, so long as you like moustaches, which luckily I do.
BUY HOMOSTASH DIARIES 01 HERE
Review by Jonathan Kemp
Queerguru London Contributing Editor Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
