I saw Jared twice that week, and both times our interactions seemed to go strangely off the rails. The first was at Mike’s Open Mic, where we were among the regular performers. Although Mike didn’t officially have regulars — you had to sign up for the event on a first come, first served basis — he somehow always found a spot for us because, unlike some of the other hopeful amateurs, we usually garnered at least some laughs, and I guess a baseline of quality had to be maintained for the night.

            I was on stage, doing my self-deprecating thing.

            ‘Now, in case you’ve never heard of being gay before, it’s like being straight, except you don’t have a love life. You have a ghosting life.’ A small ripple of laughs. ‘You get ghosted… a lot. We are the UK’s most haunted.’ Laughs. ‘No, seriously, I’ve had my heart broken, I’ve… oh, goodness!’ A woman at one end of the front row had just given the weirdest cackle. I seized on it immediately. ‘Are you all right? Do you need a cigarette after that? That sounded orgasmic.’ I imitated the laugh. The woman and her friend laughed harder. Good, it was rubbing off on the rest of the crowd. ‘Were you laughing at me having my heart broken? Whose side are you on?! Yeees, break his heart! A-hah-hah-hah! Make him lose all confidence in himself so that he doesn’t believe anyone could ever love him and it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle! A-hah hah hah hah… Jesus, I didn’t know I’d have… Maleficent in the house tonight. Anyway… ‘

Continue reading “Queer as in weird” →

Aoife, Theo and I had gone to Mary Poppers, a small queer bar on Upper Street. It wasn’t the best venue in the world — kind of cliché with its neon lighting, booming pop music and semi-pornographic videos of muscle studs writhing on flatscreen TVs — but it was a decent place to sit and chat, and for me to scope out the mainly male clientele, if there was anyone hot, which there hadn’t been so far.

            Theo was telling us excitedly about having got one of their tracks into Mixmag, their bulky hoodie and short dreads shifting as they gesticulated emphatically and Aoife listened with a calm, fond smile. I loved to watch her sometimes, the way she watched them. She and Theo were the perfect couple. I always joked that the two of them reassured me that love must be possible in the queer world, even if it had never happened for me. Theo was a person of many talents — a fashion designer, music producer and LGBT helpline volunteer, South London born and bred, kind of amazing, yet so down to earth.

            While listening to their story, I suddenly found my interest caught by someone behind them, queuing at the bar.

            No…

            It couldn’t be.

Continue reading “Shy back then” →

‘Midway through my life, I found myself in a dark forest — for the straight path forward had been lost… ‘

            ‘Mal, what are you talking about?’

            I turned to face them, walking backwards. ‘It’s Dante! The Divine Comedy!’

            ‘Only you could manage to think of something like that while on LSD,’ chuckled Theo.

            ‘Someone as — brilliantly intelligent as me?’

            ‘I was gonna say pretentious… ‘

Continue reading “The forest” →

‘But why are you going home with me?’ he asked in his nasal Greek accent. ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know if maybe I am going to kill you?’

            ‘Yeah, well. You probably won’t.’

            The morning was cold, clear and white. We’d left the club and walked to the Old Street roundabout. He kept asking me questions. I was taciturn, blissed-out and exhausted. Numb, no, dazed is the word. I still felt things. I stopped to kiss him again. Not really horny, but wanting to touch and taste and feel. Someone else, alive and warm. A homeless woman accosted us. I gave her a pound that had been rattling loose in the pocket of my sports shorts.

            We caught the bus to Bow. We asked each other what we’d been on. Both MDMA. We asked each other what we were doing in London. He said ‘research.’ Maybe he really is a serial killer, I thought.

Continue reading “Take care” →

I must have had one drink too many, because that morning I slept through my alarm, if you can call switching off your alarm and going back to sleep for an hour ‘sleeping through’ it. When I reawoke, I looked at the time, scrambled into the shower, microwaved a cup of coffee from Aoife’s cafetière, drank it with some of her almond milk and left, already making up an excuse in my head to explain being over an hour late.

Zesty Design was a moderately successful agency located on the second floor of a building down a leafy side street in Camden. On their website, they claimed to be ‘experienced purveyors of world-class content’, but what this really boiled down to was short ads for dishwasher tablets or sanitary pads, sometimes an internal reel for a car manufacturer or a supermarket chain, congratulating itself on how eco-friendly its practices were.

Continue reading “Performance review” →

In 2014, six months after moving to London, when she felt she was starting to get her bearings, Aoife found a queer book club online called the Orchid Tree Readers. Catering to ‘anyone LGBTQI-identifying of any gender expression’, but clearly more on the femme side judging by its members’ profile pics, it seemed as good a place as any to make friends in this new and overwhelming city.

            It was not. Aoife sensed this almost immediately upon entering the upstairs room of the small vegan café in Kentish Town. She was late and sweaty, her black hair — so carefully arranged in the office bathroom — plastered to her forehead from the oppressive Tube journey. The eight women around the table were all poised and thin and pretty, mostly white, in their mid-to-late-twenties and dressed in an oddly uniform fashion of muted denim shirts over white t-shirts, often with a little gold or silver chain running under the collar. Aoife had, for reasons now unknown to her, worn a childishly bright pink-and-yellow tie-dye tee. Which, she could tell from the group’s frowns, probably revealed the massive patches of sweat underneath.

            ‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman who’d been in the middle of an introductory spiel as she looked up at Aoife with a pitying smile. Her white t-shirt read simply: LENA DUNHAM. ‘This is booked for a meeting?’

Continue reading “Aoife and Theo” →

And then there was Dario, tall and hunky and dressed like it was the 70’s, vintage shirt half-unbuttoned to show a small silver medallion on a hairy chest, dancing on a half-empty dancefloor early in the night, moving like he was wholly unafraid of bumping into anyone, like they were the ones who’d better move out of his way.

            I didn’t move out of his way. In fact, I deliberately got in it and started talking to him and very soon kissing him. It was the type of first encounter that seems to happen more in your twenties, not so much in your thirties, when doubts and reservations crowd in.

Continue reading “Dario” →

‘This guy on Grindr wants me to come over and Netflix and chill with him,’ I told Aoife with a grimace as she padded back with crisps. ‘Do people still say that?’

            ‘Nooo, don’t go!’ Aoife protested, slumping down beside me. ‘Stay here and Netflix and chill with us… ‘

            ‘Did I say I was gonna go? I mean, look at him.’

            Aoife cocked her head at my phone. ‘Oh, but he’s not bad! In a kind of… Vin Diesel… bald tough guy way.’

            I cackled. ‘Vin Diesel! Whatever happened to her… ‘

            ‘Okay, what are we gonna watch?’ Aoife lunged forward and grabbed the remote.

            ‘I’m cool with whatever, as long as we actually choose something,’ said Theo from the armchair, rolling a joint. ‘… and don’t sit here scrolling for three hours like last time.’

            ‘Oooh, the LGBTQ+ Collection,’ said Aoife, over-enunciating each letter. ‘We get a whole collection. Look at that, fellas.’

Continue reading “Are you still watching” →

‘You’re very handsome!’ I told the tall, sleepy-eyed guy with dark curly hair who I had subtly stalked from the front hall onto the crowded dancefloor.

            ‘And you’re very drunk!’ he replied.

            I extended the hand not holding my cup in a gesture of ‘eh, what can you do.’

Continue reading “Three men in a cubicle” →

‘No.’ Rodrigo paused after peeling my trousers off. He sat back on his haunches, both of us down to our underwear, and looked over my body with sadness, like a doctor preparing to deliver tough news. ‘You are not hot enough.’

            I propped myself up. ‘What?’

            ‘I cannot — continue with this.’ He gestured with his sculptural arm at my soft, pale torso. ‘You are not hot enough.’

Continue reading “Hot enough” →