Archive → May, 2010
When did Weird turn into Gay?
I wouldn’t call myself eccentric. I don’t collect Nazi memorabilia, I don’t ride alternative transportation devices and I don’t eat my food in alphabetical order. I will admit to seeming a bit odd to some people. I do have an unconventional sense of style, I like Swing dancing and I scribble in moleskine notebooks with a fountain pen. I’d like to think of myself more as ‘old-timey’ rather than eccentric, so maybe I am. I’ve always been a bit like that, I read Moby Dick in year 8 and in primary school I wanted to be a lawyer when I grew up. In highschool I became a Goth, started a shitty Black Metal band and cut/dyed my hair into a 8 inch long blue fringe.
Naturally, school involved getting teased and/or beaten up quite a lot. This didn’t bother me too much, I just figured they’d all grow up to be drug addicts and public servants, which more-or-less came to providence. What went pear-shaped, socially, was the move from high-school to the ‘real world’. I chilled out and stopped painting my nails black and became a bit more conventional, although still a little odd. Jibes and random abuse didn’t really stop, it just changed from ‘Goth Fag’ to simply ‘Fag’.
Street abuse isn’t just random abuse. It is in fact a finely tuned barometer of how the world actually views you. It’s just the obnoxious belligerents who have the cojones to say it to your face, albeit from the window of a passing car more often than not. Pro tip: do not ask these people to come back and say it to your face. Or threated to ‘kick their ass’, they might just oblige.
The point is this. I had turned from being seen as weird, to being seen as gay. I don’t have anything against gay people, I have gay friends and coworkers. My problem is the infraction this puts in one’s love-life. If I had a penny for every time I go to a party / bar / swop-meet and get asked “are you gay?” I’d have a lot of worthless metal. This is in part due to my left-of-center sense of style. I wear blazers and scarves. I roll-up the cuffs of my jeans more than necessary to show off my cowboy boots and doc martens. I wear my hair in a quiff with Murray’s Pomade. I like to dress like an (in my mind) Indie Art-Rocker, but it turns out Adelaide is a small town somewhat low on the Indie Art-Rock scene. Maybe it’s just Adelaide. I remember being astounded in Melbourne that I wasn’t having abuse (or bottles) thrown at me several times on a saturday night out.
When did being weird become being gay?
At least when I was weird at least I got to hook-up with weird alternative girls. Now they’ve all turned into scenesters who date ‘alternative’ guys who all have with nondescript tattoo sleeves and identical spray-on black jeans. It’s not all that bad though. Once I explain to a girl that I’m not gay, and that I like ladies and their anatomy, they usually go “ah, so you just dress well…”. Not that this is all bad. Appearing gay has it’s advantages, particularly with girls. Their normally ironclad defences against male sexual advances are taken unawares. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to take advantage of girls… I’m just making the best of a bad situation.
I could tone down my image, start wearing more conventional clothes, start drinking beer instead of Gin & Tonics and retire the cowboy boots for cons, even if they do make my feet like like a 12 year olds, but I’d rather not. My day interviewing entrants for reality TV show Beauty & The Geek made me realize how genuinely unique people make me happy and how much I dislike the superficial melange that is the in-crowd. As attractive and popular as they may be, I really don’t want to hang out with people who find reading ‘boring’ or who think being a size 8 with a DD chest is their most attractive feature as a human being.
I’m more than happy being weird, even if it makes girls think I’m gay(ish). I’m the one who get to sit in their bed eating sorbet while they ask you to compare which panties make their butt look cuter. It’s a hard-knock life.