Queer Meme

I stole this ‘meme’, if that's what it is, from somebody who stole it from somebody else who’d stolen it from somebody else.

How old were you when you knew you were gay?
I remember my first thrill of homosexual attraction. I was transfixed by a shot on TV of a bare-chested boy diving into a river. It was in a TV adaptation of ‘Swallows and Amazons’, and it must have been the 1962 BBC version, but certainly a repeat, as I was only three when it was new. Even so, I don’t think I was older than six when I decided that shirtless and pantless boys were a bloody sight more absorbing to contemplate than girls in any state of dress or undress. Obviously at that age I didn’t associate this aesthetic pleasure with sex. I must have been about seventeen before I made the connection and acknowledged that for me, nothing in this sublunary world matches the beauty of a fit, naked lad with a twanging hard-on. When did you realise you were straight? Or did you just take it as read that you would be?    

Have you ever had sex with the opposite sex?

Yes, at university. Odd experience: a mixture of genuine enjoyment of the company of the women involved and the peer pressure to get laid as often as possible exerted on one another by young men in an all-male college. I suppose I appreciated the ‘penis exercise’, as we practically and unromantically termed the act, but knew that my heart wasn’t in it even if my other relevant organ was. Have you ever has sex with the same sex?

Who was the first person you came out to?
My sister, I think.  Who did you first confide in that you were (gulp) straight?

Are you out to your family?
Yes. I arrived at my parents from Cambridge one day circa 1982 wearing a sweat shirt I’d ordered from Gay News. It bore a lambda symbol on the chest, and I waited to be asked what it meant. On hearing the explanation, neither of my parents could honestly pretend it was a surprise. My dad never had any problem with it, but my mother had visions of me being eternally mocked and queer-bashed and took a few months to come round. It wasn’t long before she was calling me in Cambridge to inform me of anything of queer interest coming up on on the telly.

Do you want children?
Good God, no. What are they supposed to be for? 

Do you have more gay friends or straight friends?
They are nearly all straight.

Were you out in school?

Are you kidding? It was a boys’ Grammar School in working class northern England in the seventies: announcing you were queer would have been like publicly confessing atheism in Saudi Arabia. I was aware of being different in a manner I couldn’t define, and of being frequently reviled and sneered at. I might have been slightly camp in a Nigel Slater-ish sort of way, but I can’t really remember. Publisher Stephen Pickles and TV producer David Liddiment were respectively three and five years ahead of me. Both are queer as coots and they deflected the taunts of those days by developing extravagantly stagey personas, Pickles waspish and camp and Liddiment (a prefect) like a Kapo from Belsen. That they both treated me more kindly than they treated other little oiks suggests they recognised one of the brethren even if he didn’t recognise himself at the time.      
      

Have you ever done Crystal Meth?

No. Never even met her.

Have you ever been in a sling?
Not of any kind for any purpose.




Have you ever done a 3-way?
Yes, three or four times.  All terribly busy. 



Have you ever dressed in drag?
I did two female parts in school plays. You can imagine how this enhanced my reputation, which when all’s said and done is all a girl has.

Cher or Bette?
Eh? Oh, I see, the Diva thing. Neither. Us thinking poufs go for Joni Mitchell, and at university I played no music but hers, which drove everybody around me nuts. I feel vindicated these days when I learn that people who knew me then now have Blue and Hejira in their CD collections. Nearly all my CDs are of female artists - Mari Boine, Miriam Makeba, Lisa Gerrard, Mamak Khadem, Savina Yannatou – but the attraction of Cher, Bette, Barbra and Judy is lost on me. 

Have you dated someone of a different ethnicity?

How old are you, fourteen? You seem to have led a rather sheltered life. I've had (as opposed to 'dated') men from all over the place, but my only extended relationship was with a young man from the Seychelles, now resident in Sweden. We are still in touch sporadically, twenty-odd years after we met in Athens. He was 21 and I a decade older. He was naïf, generous, loyal, stubborn and tough. He was not out of the top drawer intellectually and I’m afraid I was a bit of a bully. Was there any point, I would sometimes ask him, in our staying together?

Him: It’s deep end.

Me: Whaddaya mean, ‘it’s deep end’?

Him: It’s deep end on you!

 
Been to Fire Island? Saugatuck? Key West? Ft. Lauderdale? Palm Springs?
No, and highly unlikely that I ever will. Never even heard of Saugatuck.

Have you ever barebacked?
 No. I’d as soon have a gin and tonic. I put in the side bar a quote from Christopher Hitchens: “The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”

How many Madonna CDs do you own?
None.

Name of your first love?
I can’t tell you that. Needless to say it was wholly unrequited. I’ve decided unattainablility is a great aphrodisiac.

Do you still talk to him?
Yes, by e-mail.

Does size matter?
Absolutely it does, and the 'size-doesn’t-matter' twaddle is a sad piece of rationalisation made up by men with scrawny knobs. Your really huge plonkers are, for purposes other than micturation, pretty useless. I once had a strikingly handsome boyfriend, rather like the lad on the left here, whose member on the jack was gargantuan.  Such was its girth that no hand, mouth or ring-piece could encompass it without risking trauma. You could only really look and say, ‘right, yeah, it’s big, isn’t it?’ When the point of climax was inevitable, Glen would sit astride me wanking that pole, massive bollocks aswing, and I swear you could hear the stuff coming. No, what matters more is proportion. Big dicks on skinny boys look silly, and vice versa.

 

That has to be the cutest cock on the Internet. Click to enlarge (as it were).

Biggest turn on?
Youth. Wiry muscles. Lascivious smile. Stubble. Bollocks. Hairy thighs. A fat bulge in a lad's Jockey shorts. Light dusting of chest hair.

Biggest turn off?
B.O.  Those blokes who single-handedly turn an encounter into a threesome: you, him, and his tool. God-botherers who babble about 'the gay lifestyle' and never stop to consider how vacuous the phrase is.

Ever been harassed due to your orientation?
All the way through school. It took me a long time to realise the extent to which as a kid I had internalized the constant, low-level verbal bullying and rejection and turned them into the body dysmorphia that has been a source of misery (and celibacy) on and off for most of my life.

Worst gay stereotype that applies to you?
Err… Once when a (gay) guest was coming I had to dash out and buy two matching tumblers for vodka and tonic because although I had several, they were all different and more suitably shaped for whisky. Does that count? 

Would you marry if you could?

No. I long ago decided that those of us who lack a talent for intimacy had better do everybody a favour and stop trying.

Would you rather be rich and smart or young and beautiful?
Rich and smart, and pay for surgery.

Ever had sex with more than one person in a day?
Yes. There is a club in Athens called Lambda that has a not-too-dark dark room, where those of us who see sex as a contact sport rather than a divinely-ordained sharing of souls can get it on, or at least in my case could get it on – it’s all in the past for me now.

Do you have any tattoos?
No. My generation associates them with petty criminals, thank you very much.

Do you have any piercings?
Dear God, no. The sight of a Prince Albert makes me wince and cross my legs.

Would you date a smoker?
That question dates you, or my answer dates me. I don’t think I’ve ever had sex with a non-smoker. Persecuting smokers and ostentatiously wafting your hand in front of your face when you pass one is a prissy habit that hadn’t really taken off when I left for Greece, and most Greeks smoke like Battersea Power Station used to.
  

Do you know anyone who has died from HIV?
Not personally. I know some people with HIV though.

Grinder or Scruff?
I don’t understand the question. 'Grinder and Scruff' sound like a pair of cartoon dogs.

Are your best years behind or in front of you?
Christ… I have a horrible, horrible feeling they are behind me.

Got Porn?
Yes. Looking at beautiful, joyful, naked ithyphallic males is a source of unending delight. Bloody Christers burbling about porn addiction make me want to rip off their heads and piss down their necks. Before any literal minded idiot reports me to the Blogger /Twitter Thought Police, I don’t mean that I would literally do that or advocate it as a course of action. Still… I dunno.

Make out music?
Never really been important to me. I remember being ravished on somebody’s living room floor to the accompaniment of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, but I suspect that isn’t what you mean.

Ever been in love with a straight guy?
Dozens of times. Here, for example.

Did you ever have sex with him?
Of course not.

Have you ever been to a nude beach?
Super Paradise on Mykonos a couple of times, and another on Angistri. I bloody hate beaches, but all those tanned boys and their swinging cocks made them tolerable.

Have you ever been to a bath house?
I went to a place in Athens called the Ira Baths, in the (then) very down-market Omonia Square. It was a most anaphrodisiac experience. Rent boys and their clients, men of astounding seniority, were bossed about by a fat, squawking female receptionist who might previously have been employed at Ljubljanka. It was all hideous cracked marble tiles, marble slabs and humid, cockroach-friendly darkness.    

What gay gene did you miss out?
I think most of them, looking back over this. 

Anyway, isn’t it time we retired the adjective ‘gay’, and ‘homosexual’ used as a noun? What information of any importance do they convey about anybody? Am I gay when I’m teaching? Am I a homosexual while reading a book on the train, or just  staring into space? I don’t think so. I just like dick but not pussy. So what? 

Now, if you will excuse me, I have backs to bite, false witness to bear and that which is unseemly to work.