There are many things in life today that can bring a Proustian whiff of the 1990s flooding back to one’s cultural nostrils. The Groucho Club. A Gallagher brother arguing ferociously about an immutable truth with an inanimate object. Cargo pants for girls. But nothing brings the decade back in such a heady rush as a man playing at being gay because it makes him look cool. Which brings us to the actor James Franco, who has had various long-term girlfriends, but who has now revealed that he is actually “gay until the point of intercourse”. One cannot help but be reminded of Brett Anderson, frontman of Suede, who once said he was “a bisexual who had never had a homosexual experience”. To be fair to Brett, we all said some dickish things 20 years ago, but Franco has really taken that posturing gauntlet and run with it.

Of course, it is quite possible to be gay and not that into sex, just as it is possible to be straight and not that into sex. It’s just that – well – this is James Franco. He’s not a lipstick lesbian – a bollockless bisexual might be the term we’re grasping for here.

Just in case you are not up to speed on the sort of things the man has done in his exploration of what it means to be, or not to be, James Franco, let us recap. There was the book of poetry, in which he wrote “There is a fake version of me / And he’s the one that writes / These poems. / He has an attitude and a swagger / That I don’t have.” This was in a poem called Fake, which culminated in the lines: “He’s become the real me / Because everyone treats me / Like I’m the fake me.”

There was another book he wrote, Actors Anonymous, a sort of novel in which various actors get up to all sorts of exciting and seedy stuff.

“Hollywood has always been a private club. I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside,” said one of the characters, who also happened to be called James Franco. Then there are all the selfies, and the essay he wrote for the New York Times about why he takes so many selfies (of James Franco). Then there were the selfies he apparently sent to a 17-year-old stranger, while trying to get her to meet him in a hotel room and telling her not to tell anybody about them at all. Was this just another cunning art project to expose the subtle interplay of fame, social media and deceit – or a cunning ruse to get a nubile bit on the side for James Franco?

We should stop here, the ontological study of James Franco not being something in which Lost in Showbiz wishes to get too deep, what with it being best conducted and also independently peer-reviewed by James Franco. A man who might better describe himself as a creative genius until the point of creating anything other than himself.