Dressed to Kill

I had no sooner shelved a posting, called ‘Pocket Full of Poses’ on the advice that it was too self-obsessed, when tonight its sentiment rang violently true. Perhaps one day it will see the light as part of an unreleased collection for die-hard fans (I hear there are already bootlegs in Asia), but its gist was one of standard self-deprecating fare, alluding to the name-calling my appearance elicits, from foppish hair to impractically white leather loafers and every metrosexual muscle in between.

Beth – erstwhile girlfriend, incessant critic – argued that it was too insular and failed to connect with the larger, more pressing issues on readers’ minds: global terrorism, the ‘Islamic threat’, Craig off of Big Brother. Tonight however, I found that same insular subject the unwitting site of a body politic, a dapper scapegoat for our badly dressed social ills.

As I wandered the length and breadth of the bar, looking for my friends, I suddenly felt my conspicuousness. Tall, dark and in a carefully handpicked outfit, I was the antithesis of the short and pasty “chavs” that watched my every move. Unable to find a single familiar or even friendly face I sat myself between breasts instead and chatted to a lady by the bar. In this instance, I was a brunet having more fun than a blonde.

That was until the chavs, in their baseball caps and tracksuits, muscled in.
“What’s a gay twat doing with a bird like that?” one asked.
“Well, I’m not gay.” I said, thinking the situation itself made this quite obvious.
“Of course he’s gay,” one said to another. “Look at his shoes.”
At this the shoes shied away. Hoping to get a better a look, a third clamoured under the table, seemingly to be with the loafers.
“Don’t mate,” his friend warned. “He’s probably got a bomb in them!”

Which would, of course, if their theory proved correct, make me a gay terrorist. Could you imagine? (“Does my bomb look big in this?”) I assured my lady friend that I was indeed neither; that I was, in fact, a lover, not a fighter; and packed nothing more sinister than a sex bomb (sex bomb). Despite this, and I guess through fear of guilt by association, she too left.

But what is my association – what is my relationship to the phobias and the isms in the minds of those young men? Does my wearing white shoes make me gay? Does my having a brown face make me a terrorist? Are those the indicators - the tell-tale signs?

Last night I narrowly avoided a fight. The police were called in and the boys, who got more and more aggressive, left unscathed (the lucky bastards). This morning however, looking at the weekend papers, it seems some other young men, in Central London, didn’t escape the grip of the police so easily, nor the scorn of the tabloid press. “Got the bastards,” screamed the headline of The Sun, referring to the arrest of the suspected London bombers, stripped to their underwear, their brown faces filling the 11’’ X 7’’ page.

Turning over I saw another brown face but under a different headline. “Teenager Killed in Racist Attack,” and I thought to myself how tragically one begets the other. Hatred begets hatred. The “cowardly suicide bombers” of The Sun article are, after all, suspects, but their coverage in the news media breeds the kind of hatred that threatens to infect a nervous nation.

I don’t suspect this is the last time I will notice its effect. Nor can I change my brown face or my white shoes. Well, I suppose I can change the shoes. But why should I? George Michael, a singer who is actually gay and not adverse to a bit of white shoe wearing himself, sang in the aptly titled, ‘Freedom’, that “sometimes the clothes do not make the man.” But, for the chavs in their tracksuits, the suspected terrorists in their pants, and even for me, in my shiny white loafers, it’s often hard to escape the assumption. At least unscathted.