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. 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. So alike, but oceans apart. Many...
Football I remember a very miserable afternoon – a rainy Saturday – spent in a pub that smelled of cauliflower and dog, staring with great concentration at a TV up on the wall. I didn’t really dare look away in case I looked like I was bored and I couldn’t have given two bronze fucks about what was happening on the screen so I fixed my gaze on a spider at the corner of the TV. The spider span a web and then fell onto a table and crawled into...
When you’re dating you hear a lot of talk about ‘soulmates’, ‘the one’ or the perfect match. Even the singles website where I met most of perfectly willing – but not always able – victims was called Soulmates, as if everybody on it were hopeless romantics staring at the sky with mooncalf eyes, waiting for Mr Right to swing off a star and drop into their arms. Quizzes, algorithms and your own ridiculous preconceptions help you decide who this person is likely to be, this ‘other half’ of you, and...
Dating used to be very simple: you meet a series of near-strangers for an awkward drink in a pub that’s always too noisy/busy/rough/far away from a Tube station, decide whether you like them or not and if so do it all over again in a nicer venue and perhaps with food. And then you get married. Now that everybody has the attention span of a gnat and is swiping left and right on their iPhones without so much as a thought for the kingdoms of emotions they’re quashing, dating has...
1. “All his photos were taken from quite far away. I hope he’s not a horse-frightener.” 2. “I hope he was joking when he described himself as a flâneur. Because seriously.” 3. “Does my stomach look fat while I sit like this?” 4. “Should I stand up when he gets here so he can see I’m actually quite ripped?” 5. “Should I get a drink while I’m waiting, or hang on until he gets here?” 6. “What should I drink? What will make me look more desirable?” 7. “Maybe I...
Think you’re being nice with your throwaway accolades? Think again, baby cakes. Call me over-sensitive (if you dare), but I could really do without some of these more patronising praises. Hot ginge When I was first born, my mother looked at me in the overbearing light of the hospital ward and thought she detected a hint of ginger in my hair. It wouldn’t be totally unsurprising – two of her siblings are redheads. “Shit,” she thought. Not because red hair is unattractive, but because ginger people are the focus of...
Kissing is vital in any relationship. While a gentle squeeze on the arm or the arse can remind your partner you care, a kiss on the lips – even if it's a quick peck in the supermarket – is the internationally understood shorthand for intimacy. And you have to really mean it, or your lacklustre kiss gives you away. You may think that relationships live and die on sex, but for me, the real test comes much sooner. If a guy is a bad kisser, it doesn’t matter how he...
It is National Coming Out Day*, the day when the collective force of a zillion closet doors being thrust open is enough to knock you off your feet. If someone stares intently at you and clears their throat, or puts their latte to one side with the biggest case of 'serious-face' you've ever seen, there's a good chance they're about to tell you they're gay – or they have a peanut stuck in their throat and are unable to speak, silently willing you to decode their desperate stare. Before you...
You can’t get more upfront and visual than Grindr. It’s the frank, confrontational reality TV show contestant of the social media app world, assuring you if it has anything to say it will “say it your face” or telling you “what you see is what you get”. Of course the truth is something quite different. Grindr is merely a cloudy mirror, vaguely reflecting society but usually doing its own hair or photoshopping out its eye-bags. What it has done with its instant gratification storefront, however, is slowly strangle some of...
