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

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.

Source: theguardian