De-Gay Me

Or Is There Something Gay About Me - Part II

It was just the icing on the cake. It was lovely. And for that I must thank Pete's granny, a little old lady in a big old house between the towns of Ironbridge and Shrewsbury, in a place seemingly with no name. Similarly, I straddle the divide between two states, wandering a no man's land somewhere between bubbling hyperactivity and bloated constipation. I've had far too much cake and caffeine today, and Granny Pete's tea party was indeed the final straw, a bridge too far, or – and this is my favourite from thesaurus.com – "the straw that broke the camel's back."

Before the straw got the better of this camel's back my self-esteem also took a severe clobbering. I was walking with some friends tonight when three separate parties in the park threw what can only be described as abuse my way. On all three occasions, rather shockingly, homosexuality and its wrongful assumption formed the core of the abuse. "Are you gay or something?" asked the first passer-by. Before I had the chance to make my choice – and I would have gone for "something", by the way – his friend, also clad in shell suit and baseball cap, chimed in: "He’s über-gay!" It was a surprisingly articulate insult from such a twat. The others were not so eloquent.

It's all sticks and stones though, isn't it? It didn't bother me too much to be called "über-gay" by a bunch of people who, I think it's fair to say since they made a gross assumption of my lifestyle, will assert their heterosexuality by fathering a child before high school is through. (And by that I mean 3:45pm.) What bothers me however is the presumptions people make based on such elementary things as having styled hair, wearing a blazer and holding a briefcase. Are those really the tell-tale signs? Had I been engaged in an act of man love at the time I might have understood the assumption. Tonight however I was clueless. And my friends, one of whom I was meeting for the first time, were a little weirded out.

"We need to work on my image, Pete," I said. "De-gay me or something." "I think you need a girl for that San," he replied. "Ideally."