In This Issue

Gay Times April 11 - Issue 391

Aiden Grimshaw's first gay interview and shoot

After blowing our minds with his brooding ways on last year’s X Factor, Jamie Tabberer attempts to crack the beautiful riddle wrapped in a handsome enigma that is Aiden Grimshaw.

All I keep thinking is, ‘It’s huge’. He himself describes it as “A momentous thing”.

In the presence X Factor 2010 alumni Aiden Grimshaw, I feel well and truly owned. His quiff puts all others to shame.

Having just finished whipping his top on and off all afternoon for his GT shoot – his first with the gay press – the handsome 19-year old and I have settled down for a chat, but I am dumbfounded with hair envy. My inferiority complex wasn’t helped when I asked Aiden’s lovely hairstylist for quiff tips. She looked me up and down, stifled a laugh and said “curling tongs”.

“Although the hair is on my head, the quiff was an accident,” says the aspiring popstar. “Merely a brushing of the hair. It was just me being lazy. But it stuck…”

An accident. That honeyed brown fringe; the one that sparked a thousand imitations, that sent girls and boys all over the UK into Twitter meltdowns. It’s taller, prouder and even more like a work of art in reality than it was on screen. I KNOW this reads like a rubbish penis metaphor but there’s really no other way. He carelessly runs his fingers through it and a thick lock falls out of place. I gasp, and prepare for the apocalypse. He touched. The quiff. Somewhere among the sound of photographers and stylists packing away their armour, I think I hear the sound of that hairstylist fainting.

I, on the other hand, am slowly regaining consciousness. Hair envy subsiding, I’m once again struck by just how attractive a young man Aiden really is – Saturday nights just aren’t the same without him.

Credit where credit’s due, 2010 really was a stellar year for X Factor guy candy, wasn’t it? Were not Wand Erection (sorry, One Direction) invented by Simon Cowell at Boot Camp to invoke sexual fantasy in ravenous gay men? Famously all the same height besides lead singer Liam Payne, and with those contrasting hairstyles, they seemed fresh out of a build-your-own pop band - or gay porn film – manual. A fantasy Aiden’s quick to exacerbate.

“Harry Styles [the curly haired one] used to run around with his cock out all the time,” he tells me with an almost sentimental look on his face. “He had a little gold or silver thong, and he’d parade around the house in it…”

That a gay porn film - albeit a very carefully scripted one - based on the X Factor house hasn’t actually been made yet is beyond me.

“And Wagner would whack his top off all the time, get his pecs out…”

That’ll be why then.

Matt Cardle, the ruggedly masculine and decidedly hairy series winner is also desperately hot of course, but like One Direction, arguably in a generic way. The crooked cap, the numerous lumberjack shirts. And those constant references to his simpler life: his milkman days, his postman days, his painter and decorator days... How many porn clichés can you take before it gets boring?

Enter Aiden: the thinking man’s heartthrob. When I ask him if he realises how good looking he is, he closes up. “I don’t know. It’s flattering. Thank you is all I can say to that.”

I ask how he found the shoot, and once again he plays coy.

“It’s a different experience. I wouldn’t be getting up on a normal Tuesday morning to be dressed and have people take photos of me. The most random thing I’d do on a Tuesday morning in my old life? I don’t know. Wake up. Have a wee. Pretty crazy.”

The whole article features in the latest issue of GT which is out 26 Jan. You can buy the app over here or order a physical copy for delivery HERE and even get posters of the cover here. Don't say we're not good to you.

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