So the other day I’m in Dexter’s – home of the Dexter’s burger, which is apparently unique because it has cheese and chillies and other things people put in burgers – eating the disproportionately large pear & chilli chocolate ice cream sundae while my mother eats their uniquely thawed cheesecake and we’re discussing gay footballers.
He can’t be gay! He has a wife and children!
So? If you were a gay footballer you would want to do everything possible to hide that. It’s not a universally accepted combination.
That kind of thing, right? Anyhoo we banter along this speculative polemic and my mother says something rather off (I meant to write odd there but miss-keyed, off seems more appropriate in retrospect). I can’t remember the exact phrasing, which is annoying (I shouldn’t be stoned before dinner with my mum. Seriously, I got off work an hour early to smoke a joint on the common. How cool am I?), but it ran along the lines of:
Footballers are less likely to know they’re gay, as opposed to media types and whatnot who are much more likely to experiment.
Experiment? It’s not a fucking quirk! It’s not like discovering you like having the back of your heel licked or finding you have a taste for grilled olives, right? Which poncey fucking journo floundered about fucking girls for 25 years before discovering they actually preferred cock while fact finding in Soho? I mean, sure, you’re more likely to discover you’re bi if you’re open minded, but then would you get involved if you didn’t already feel inclined? You’re maybe more likely to affirm that you genuinely are bi and not just pretending to be bi to try and fuck someone else altogether. Or because it’s cool. Or because you just don’t want to offend anyone. Make them feel left out. But you’re not going to find ‘gay’, like spirituality, or dreadlocks. Unless...
Imagine the scenario: a bunch of straight guys are on a gay tour of London and their rep takes them to some secretive side road. ‘Guys, we have to go in here. You have to try their cock; it really is the best in London!’ So the guys all go in and they’re seated round a table by a pleasant, mildly camp waiter who offers them menus and drinks, presumably Lambrini or baby shams. While the swagger of straight men marvel on the novelty decor, the rep selects something appropriate and after a short wait a guy comes out with his cock out. One by one the guys all give it a good suck. Most of them find it not unpleasant but neither particularly arousing, except one of the group who has realised he’s gay. Never and inkling before now but one taste of cock and he’s not going back.
Is that how it works? No it’s just a cock and balls story.
Now I imagine that it is the case that poor old Jimmy Footballboots doesn’t want to be gay and has probably spent his adult life trying to run it off or magic cloth it away, which is the sort of thing people do. Just like I never want to confront the fact that I want to fuck Jim Davidson. Not in a shove-a-pool-cue-up-his-arse-and-snap-it way, but gently, lovingly, with caresses and everything. However, Jimmy knows he’s gay. If he’s actually gay he discovered it quite a long time ago, right?
I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea that maybe I’m actually gay when I’ve played with dildos or watched some guy jacking off on webcam from his bedroom in Leeds. I’m not, much. A little, but not really very gay at all. I’m almost disappointed. Why can’t I just find everyone sexy, like Russell Brand? That would be easy, ... *groan*. Really though? Could I be secretly gay? Have I been socially conditioned into being straight? Am I lying to myself as, to be fair, I do all the time? No. If I were gay I probably wouldn’t have drawn all those tits when I was 14. Did Jimmy Footballboots draw tits? That’s probably the test.
Now, I’ve been treating my mum’s argument with open disdain, but every genuine assertion has some morsel of truth that has convinced its speaker, or at least initiated the thought process from which the ultimate false proposition eventually arises. In this case there is a clear factual element: there are more openly gay people in the creative industries than in sport. This may be because the first industry does not require a certain public machismo, in fact it would probably just seem crude (there are of course exceptions. I’m not naming any names but he writes for a weekend driving supplement and wears jeans with a dress jacket. You know. You didn’t even need the clues.) However, I don’t think machismo is the biggest factor: for one, if you came out as a footballer you’d only be proving your balls and two, if a Keane or a Vieira or a Jones say they were gay I would not be the first one buying them village people outfits. Likewise nothing could make me less afraid of Arjen Robben. I personally blame the parents. Thing is, see, if you’re a creative industrialist, you’ve already let them down. They already think you’re a tosser. They don’t proudly tell their friends that their little darling writes all the reality TV goss in Metro. So fuck it, you might as well tell them you’re a lesbian as well and if they never talk to you again then balls to them.
Now ultimately my mum’s a very liberal minded person, a feat made all the more spectacular by her weekly dose of the Daily-hate-Mail from Sainsbury’s in I-normally-shop-at-Waitrose-you-know Beaconsfield. This is why when she said something I considered to be rather ill thought through and offensive (anyone notice the missing premise? It was the old 'everyone’s straight until...', like vampirism or bird flu) I pointed this out to her and we discussed it. You can’t always do that with your parents though. I had such trouble with my Aunt on immigration (she would welcome ANYONE to her house with the greatest warmth and kindness and hospitality but blames ALL the woes of Broken Britain on Bloody Immigrants. I’m almost tempted to sue the fucking Daily racism indoctrination journal (Mail). They should be tried for crimes against humanity, or at least humanism) that we just had to give up in the end. That’s the thing with the patently irrational, you can’t argue with it.
So imagine if your dad were an active BNP exponent with a penchant for hitting people and breaking things, who gave up smoking after someone waved a pack of cigarettes in his face saying ‘fag?’
One of my friends from school came out when he was 13 or 14. Obviously he didn’t sing and dance about it (he wasn’t Big Gay Al), he told a couple of us but it was an all boys school so it was bums against walls time for most – especially one particularly homophobic lad. I used to think he was a prick but then one day he got dumped and he carved the girl’s name into his chest with a bread knife, so he was clearly a holy fucking twat of Hollywood proportions.
So this guy’s been out for ten years now but neither of his parents knows. They’re not scary, they’re some of the least scary people I’ve met, but his mum frequently talks about how all the gays should be killed, so it’s hardly something you want to discuss over dinner. ‘O mum, by the way, you know that particular subset of people that you wish to exterminate, turns out I’m one of them! What are the chances of that, eh?”
Of course we all bullied him. We used to play in a band (I say band... two songs then it was booze and football and betting on who’d be the next person to get laid) and we’d give him shit. “Don’t sit there, Will sat there. You’ll catch gay.” “Don’t drink from that bottle. Will drank from that bottle. You’ll catch gay.” But it was ironic. It was the 90s. It was post-modern, self-aware bullying. And we didn’t do it much, it got tired. If I sound overly defensive it’s only because I know that’s not strictly defendable, the argument has the same form as the less bad Nazi interment officer – I didn’t kill many Jews... Equally it’s not equivalent to the less bad Nazi interment officer, so I don’t feel that bad.
He also faced badgering of an entirely different kind from our wonderful host: our bassist’s mum. “Will, eat some noodles! You’ll starve! Will, do you want some chips? Do you like pork, Will?” She didn’t care that he was gay. Not so when her own daughter came out though. Between that and her other daughter marrying a Saudi guy she almost white dwarfed.
I’d like to think that if I were gay I could tell my mum and it’d be fine. She is one of the most amiable, tolerant people I know – at least on a personal level. But I’ve seen enough people ripped in half by that conflict between their personal outlook and stuff they’ve read and heard enough times to believe unthinkingly to know that it’s not always that simple. In fact I used to live with a guy who clearly had something deeply troubling that he was permanently trying to cover to the world – perma-glow fake tan, pristine white teeth, super healthy, photos of himself in his graduation outfit beaming from his bedroom wall but every now and then he’d get drunk and go to say things then stop himself saying his mum would not approve. Also once he got an earring and wasn’t sure about it: “I feel like it just screams gay.” I strongly suspect he was gay but born and raised in a place where you couldn’t be gay – o and guess what he read...
In an article for the Guardian recently, Stephen Fry mentioned that a number of his gay friends wouldn’t come out but not because of the reception they’d receive from the press, public, friends and colleagues, but from their parents. Homophobia, like racism and sexism, is mostly challenged and changed over generations. Having grown up in a generation where a much greater number of people are openly gay, from friends and family to celebrities, I hope that we as parents are more approachable and more tolerant so that when our kids become the overpaid, overhyped sports celebs of the future they don’t have to marry and procreate with someone from a sex that doesn’t sexually excite them just to dampen suspicion.
Rejected Daily Mail pseudos
Daily Mailstrom
Daily Mailice
Daily Mailignant tumour
Daily Fail
Daily Shit
Fucking Haterag
Evil Fucking Lyathon
Daily Smail (smell? No, not really)
Daily Mailbomb
Daily Grail (too obtuse)
Samey Stale
Gamey Tale
Also, I hope that by the time we’re parents the Daily Mail has not only gone bankrupt (financially, not just morally) but that it’s bilious, vitriolic and consciously contra-factual segregationism is forever expunged from our journalism and humanity. The same goes for the other great vehicle of Satan: the Catholic Church. O and the Republican Party. And may Robert Kilroy-Silk all lead them on a flying fucking carpet woven from their own self fucking righteousness[*].
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