The Queen is Dead: A Story Jarheads, Eggheads, Serial Killers and Bad Sex. (book review).

The Queen Is Dead: A Story Jarheads, Eggheads, Serial Killers and Bad Sex * Mark Simpson and Steven Zeeland * Arcadia * $14.95

In 1995, British writer Mark Simpson read Steven Zeeland's Sailors and Sexual Identity, a part-academic, part-pornographic treatise on marine worship, and wrote a fan letter to its American author. Zeeland responded, thus starting a transatlantic friendship consisting chiefly of exchanged letters. The Queen Is Dead--the title of which evokes both pop star Morrissey and the particular combination of refusal and indulgence of modern gay male mores that these two writers practice--contains three years of that correspondence.

"Execute a heel stomp to your opponent's skull, ending the encounter," quotes Simpson from the Marine Battle Skills Training Handbook, and it seems that these two men have taken notes. Both have kicked their share of contemporary queer thought in the head. An introspective, unrepentant "military chaser," Zeeland tackles military life's inherent homoeroticism, both ripping apart and standing in awe of its constructed masculinity. His fascinating body of work embraces the contradictions that bloom in between the cracks where human nature and official codes of conduct meet.

Simpson, in turn, addresses every pink-washed bit of gayness that gets under his skin. The editor of Anti-Gay, a book that caused a firestorm of controversy in the United Kingdom when it was published in 1996, Simpson has the distinction of being both hated and respected (in Queen he jokingly worries that the book, meant to burn bridges, instead ignited a new brand of gay lifestyle). He's an intellectual skinhead with a lacerating tongue and a jones for Freud.

During the course of their letters, the two writers commiserate over doomed love affairs, compete to produce the most misery-soaked Genet quote, and ruminate on public sex, Zeeland's scarily close connection to Andrew Cunanan, and a shared thesis that gay life is often a lot more hassle than it's worth. They tell their truths with persistent wit, self-deprecating humor, and disgruntled charm. Simpson and Zeeland may never march in a pride parade, but they'd make the best bitchy spectators you'd ever want to have next to you on the sidelines.

White is a critic with ifilm.com and also writes for the L.A. Weekly.