40 GQ.COM.AU SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017
THE EDITOR’S
LETTER
L
ooking back,
I should never
have turned
my phone
notifications on.
Every morning
my alarm goes off and I reach
for the bedside table, only to
find the real wake-up call is
seeing what’s been happening overnight, in the good old US
of A. You see, news alerts have become somewhat of an
obsession for me, ever since a certain real estate mogul-
turned reality TV show host decided he wanted to play
politics. And I know I’m not alone here.
American presidential campaigns have always had
a certain showbiz quality to them, but this one was
downright gruelling. Every day, it seemed there was
some new revelation; a new twist in the story so shocking
that even We s t W i ng creator Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have
scripted it better. And I was hooked; each day’s news
arriving like a fresh instalment of House of Cards. The
political intrigue was captivating.
Then in early October, I woke up to the Washington
Post’s scoop of the notorious Access Hollywood tape,
recorded in 2005. Trump, at that point a hugely
influential public figure – a man who by then was
on the cusp of his sixties – was caught describing not just
his appalling treatment of women, but the fact that
“when you’re a star, they let you do it”.Shocking revelations
were a daily occurrence
at this point, but there
was something different
about this. Something truly
startling. In many ways, it
is those unguarded moments,
when we think people aren’t
listening, that have more
weight than what we tell people, or even ourselves. Those
are the moments that show others who we really are.
In the end, it made little difference. Trump is in the White
House and the revelations keep pouring in, one news alert at
a time. This is the leader of the free world. A man so out of
his depth, so trapped in out-dated ideas of what it means to
be a man, so cast adrift from reality, there seems little chance
of the spectacle improving anytime soon. For us or for him.
At GQ, I’ve been lucky enough to witness the evolution
of men over the past decade. Aussie guys used to be afraid
to show an interest in fashion or talk about their feelings.
But these days, we realise there is no single definition of
masculinity or set of rules that we all have to live by- and that’s a very good thing.
Just look at sports people; cricketers were once portly,
beer-swilling blokes and today they’re style icons. The same
is true of some politicians – unlike Mr Trump, Obama has
always known the benefits of a well-cut suit, and Canadian
PM-cum-style icon Justin Trudeau even recently graced
the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. PHOTOGRAPHY: TIM ASHTON.