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Jack Guinness sitting on a sofa
‘I wanted to honour all the trailblazers who have fought for my rights’: Jack Guinness on the Queer Bible. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer
‘I wanted to honour all the trailblazers who have fought for my rights’: Jack Guinness on the Queer Bible. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer

Jack Guinness and the queer bible: “If brands have a problem with a gay guy, I don’t want to work with them”

This article is more than 6 years old

The Queer Bible, a site promoting gay history, has been launched by model Jack Guinness. It has lessons for us all

If your guilty pleasure is scrolling through celebrity party photos, you’ll have seen the model Jack Guinness frowning through an immaculate beard, with one arm around Alexa Chung or Daisy Lowe or Pixie Geldof. And you’ll have expected him, as he so charmingly puts it: “To be a total arsehole.”

In the flesh, though, he’s as slapstick as Benny Hill on a milk float. Watch his Instagram stories from backstage at fashion shows in Paris or Milan, where he pretends to be “David Fashionborough”, musing on the zoology of these rare species “without a single thought in their heads”, and you’ll wonder how he gets away with it, or why he doesn’t have his own TV show yet.

Yet this is not the biggest disconnect in Guinness’s identity because, after 10 years becoming one of the best-known Brits in fashion (working with brands including Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Dunhill and Barbour), being described by GQ magazine as “the coolest man in London” and popularising the man bun (“for which I’d like to officially apologise”), he has launched a website called the Queer Bible. At the same time he came out.

The Queer Bible is a beautiful online magazine, using mainly queer writers and illustrators to discuss their heroes. “I wanted to honour all the trailblazers who have fought for my rights on my behalf,” says Guinness. “The ones everybody has heard of, but also some of the overlooked characters.” So Robert Mapplethorpe and Oscar Wilde might be covered, but you’ve also got the choreographer Theo Adams discussing why a trans Turkish pop diva is so beloved of men in kebab shops.

Guinness unveiled the Queer Bible in December 2017, revealing that, alongside the photoshoots and the parties, he had secretly been working on this project since 2016, when the singer Sam Smith was laughed at for thinking he was the first gay person to win an Oscar. “And he wasn’t even the first gay person to win that Oscar – then he got destroyed online for his ignorance and had to leave Twitter. But I took it as a challenge. I thought, well, it’s tempting to join in mocking the poor bloke, but do I know my own gay history? I looked at the resources online and I felt that there was a gap. And it was this.”

‘I was the weird new house mate, like Spike in Notting Hill’: with former flatmate Alexa Chung. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

You would have thought that, for Guinness, being a gay guy in fashion would hardly be revolutionary. And yet it really is. The advertising of mainstream male fashion, though somewhat homoerotic to some eyes, apparently all hinges on heteronormativity. Models such as Jack must, he says, “represent a certain kind of masculinity” in their private life.

Perhaps it’s the facial hair that has led to so many photoshoots where he has to “sail boats, climb mountains, chop wood – basically whatever couldn’t be further from my natural interests”, but this public image has meant he had to keep quiet about having a boyfriend. He won’t name problematic brands, but insists that he was regularly told by agents and bookers “awful things that you wouldn’t believe, and always not to let the clients find out I was gay, not to mention it on a shoot, not to say anything to the press, or this would all end,” he says.

“I remember one agent, who used to be a model booker, and she said: ‘Oh, if we found out a model was gay, we’d just drop him straightaway!’ Laughing like I was supposed to say, ‘Haha, great!’

“I just thought: ‘Wow, that’s insane that you think it’s OK to say that to me.’ It made me really angry.

“I’ve been so excited by the fact that brands do still want to work with me,” he adds. It’s early days, though, and the backlash was almost immediate. The day after he launched the site and put a video on his own Instagram to tell his 50k followers about it, a client rang him, “and made insinuations that – well, let’s just say that if it was about my ethnic identity, it would definitely have been racist”.

He is now represented by the model agency Elite, who are “incredibly supportive”, he says. “Whenever I’m hesitant about something they’re the ones going: ‘No, you have to really go for it.’ I cannot tell you how encouraging that’s been…” He interrupts himself. “This feels so silly to talk about, like we’re in the 1980s and coming out is still a thing. But it is still a thing.”

Homing instincts: Jack Guinness at his flat in east London. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer

What makes this kind of bible even more poignant to Guinness is that he was raised under the other one, as his dad is a vicar. “So this is also about the idea of gay people being squeezed out of religious spaces,” he says. “This isn’t just a guide to queer life – we’re creating something special.” He had held back on doing something like this publicly because, he says: “I had a lot of stuff to work through with my own family first.” He keeps stressing that he knows he’s a privileged white guy who has nothing to moan about. But he also admits, in a joking voice that belies something more serious, that “I have the weight of generations of priests upon me”.

“At the start of my career everyone assumed I was one of the loaded Guinnesses,” he says. “But Arthur Guinness had five or six sons and the three strands of the family came down from there. There’s the brewing side, the banking side who got into trouble in the 1980s, then there’s the religious side. So my dad, my grandad and my great-grandad were all vicars, and all of their brothers were vicars, too.”

He grew up first in a flat attached to a vicarage in Brixton, in a “really ethnically diverse church. It was during the Brixton riots. It was like a sitcom in our front room. On Christmas Day we would have 30 people in our house. When the hurricane hit, people lived with us for months after that. We didn’t have much money, but we were middle class, while the kids next door were in serious poverty – Marmite sandwiches for Christmas lunch. And then after that my dad moved to Belgravia and he became Margaret Thatcher’s vicar.”

Sorry, what? Thatcher had left Downing Street and she worshipped in your church? “I don’t know if ‘worship’ is the right word,” he says, a wicked glint in his eye. “She stood up and sat down at the right times. Put her hands together.”

‘One agent laughed and said: Oh, if we found out a model was gay, we’d drop him’: Jack Guinness. Photograph: Pal Hansen/The Observer

The youngest of three children and dyslexic, Guinness went to a wide variety of schools and stopped altogether for some months due to anxiety. He failed half of his GCSEs, so his family were completely stunned when he aced his A-Levels and got into Cambridge to read English literature, which he found “pretty stressful, because I was still the same kid who wasn’t robust enough for school. Everyone at Cambridge has a slightly manic episode at some point. I don’t know anyone there who didn’t go a bit weird. But looking on the bright side,” he adds, the glint returning to his eye, “you do get to meet some really incredible people who can make you feel inadequate for the rest of your life!”

Back in London, he moved into a shared flat with his friend, Clare. The other occupant was Alexa Chung. “I was the weird new house mate, like Spike in Notting Hill – I slept in the living room. Alexa was doing T4 and her work ethic was insane – people have no idea how hard she works. She’d come home from shooting, take her script up to her bedroom, memorise it and then be up at 5am to shoot again the next day. She’s one of the few people I phone up to ask advice from: she always knows what to do.”

Now he lives in another shared flat, “a proper, actual warehouse, not a done-up bachelor pad. It’s a shithole. I’ve had to become amazing at DIY and I don’t mean putting up some nice shelves, I mean fixing boilers, and killing spiders the size of my head.”

He’s thrown so many parties there, from behind a second-hand bar he bought from a junk seller he befriended on the street, that his friends have printed up T-shirts saying: “I Lost My Mind At Jack’s Bar.” This morning he bathed in hot water from the kettle, after the heating packed up again. “The flat might look great in photos, but in reality it’s falling apart.” He pauses for comic timing. “A bit like me.”

Will the party be over now he’s launched the Queer Bible? He knows it’s all a risk, but remembers the words of George Michael. “His response to all that was: I don’t want anyone who has a problem with gay people buying my records, they can fuck off! If there are brands out there that have a problem with a gay guy, I don’t want to work with them.”

thequeerbible.com

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