Q: What do you get when you cross Vanity Fair with Maxim?

A: A stupid magazine that no one likes. Also, who knew they still publish Details?

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Back in my gangly teenage days, Details was the epitome of cool. To me, anyway. Mostly that was thanks to a young-ish Rob Sheffield, who wrote every single music review in the magazine (before eventually being snatched up by Rolling Stone). Month after month, Sheffield's section introduced me to the music that made life bearable(Endtroducing..., The Great Escape, Moon Safari) and simultaneously to the writing style I would imitate poorly for the next several decades. As would, possibly, Sheffield himself.

Back then, though, he was in complete control, both stylistically and editorially (or so it seemed). And things were never the same after he moved to RS, either for him or for Details, which within a year had become total crap. All the enjoyable writers jumped ship; Glenn O'Brien took his Style Guy shtick elsewhere; and the relentlessly brilliant features writer Chris Heath ran off to write a biography of Robbie fucking Williams, thus becoming dead to me.

Granted, I was around 17 at the time, so I don't know whether the magazine was actually as great as I thought it was. It might have been I was just a dumb teenager, hard to say. But this was way before metrosexuality became associated with douchebags and Axe body spray, and I really liked reading a magazine that taught me to be as gay as possible without actually suggesting I should have sex with men. In retrospect, I may have missed the point there entirely; I think I was the only subscriber not having sex with men anyway.

By the way, I just realized that, as of 1996, I had never kissed a girl, spent every afternoon rehearsing for school plays, bought all my clothes at Structure, listened to a lot of Pet Shop Boys, sucked at sports, and received this magazine in the mail monthly:

It's a good thing I wasn't ever savagely beaten up in high school, because somebody would have been mistakenly convicted of a hate crime. Or I think it would have been "mistakenly." Honestly, at this point my heterosexuality looks like a sham even to me.