Many a time I’ve spent a puzzling 15 minutes in a kitchen full of vodka bottles while a straight guy slinks around me, like smoke from Marlene Dietrich’s fiftieth cigarette of the evening.īut as more boys move away from a fear of gay men toward a mild curiosity, it’s all too easy to misinterpret it and get carried away. Oh, he’s always been there, of course – the invention of ecstasy and house music has seen to it that the lines are blurrier than ever when it comes to when you can and can’t put your heads on each other’s shoulders. In fact, things seem to have gone so far the other way that there’s now a new kind of straight man you’ll meet: the one who openly flirts with you. I have straight male friends and gay male friends and obviously loads of ladies and everybody is getting married – it’s just like Peter’s Friends or This Life, but everybody’s got a crick in their neck from using their smartphones day in, day out and we’re all tweeting our breakfasts instead of calling each other. Almost never.īut now, everyone has chilled out a bit – at least in my little bubble of existence, anyway – and I can’t even imagine ever feeling that way again. There’s also the added misery of emotionally crippling crushes on these men, the ultimate in the unobtainable, or not daring to catch someone’s eye in the gym changing rooms – the PE anxiety nightmare does not end with your last GCSE – in case they thought you were checking out their pecker. In less enlightened times, when I was much younger and even more socially awkward, I clearly remember almost dreading being introduced to straight men in case they mocked me or disliked me, preferring instead to make a beeline for their girlfriends, sisters or mothers.
Many a time I have spent a puzzling fifteen minutes in a kitchen full of vodka bottles, while a straight guy slinks around me like smoke from Marlene Dietrich’s fiftieth cigarette of the evening. Whether you’re trying to explain to your dad for the eightieth time that you’re not going to kick that football back at him no matter how many times it flies over your head, or enduring the weekly terror of “Backs against the wall, lads” in the showers after PE, it can be difficult to make yourself understood. When you are growing up a future gay, you learn very quickly that your relationships with straight men are never going to be anything other than complex.