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"Hot now - summer in the city!" Claire is in very full bloom these days. Her pretty pink summer dress stretches hard to cope with the foetal demands, and even her tummy button sticks through. Pointedly. Sadly the poor thing is still very much in the emotional hands of her inseminator, who seems to be playing her like a karaoke machine. However, she's had some calm lately, so I can only hope for the best for them both. That is her and the infant. She's had a hard time, and I feel for her. Last week in the depths of despair, she poured it all out. One day he'd be nice to her. "I want us to be a family." The next he'd be spotted in a bar with his arm round another woman. "And she was FORTY," Claire wailed, young but abandoned. Nowadays being forty is regarded as somewhat obscene, I fear. Although I haven't yet met Mr Goodsperm, I was that forty-year-old woman - briefly in my mind. I knew her rod and I knew her line, and I too wanted a slice of the catch. Lifting her tear-damped face I brace brace brace for a pretty major lecture. "Claire, you're getting a crash course in The Facts of Life - Part Two," I say. "You've done part one - you're pregnant, and there's no turning the clock back." She stops crying and listens. "But what you're now discovering is the emotional baggage that comes along with that." "This is a man's world - a straight man's world. They get the good times, while women and men like me do the suffering." (It's difficult to come out with shit like that without sounding like Tammy Wynette, but you gotta try. Got to. The responsibilities of office can be heavy indeed.) "And most women don't reckon a man even starts to be an adult until he's... twenty-five. A lot would say thirty." (Goodsperm I know is 18). "At eighteen nearly all of them are still little boys." Cattily. Time has erased the dots and commas of this pense, but it seemed to help her a lot.
Justin is 25, so starting to be an adult. Having apparently set aside his rectum for a while, he's now conventionally courting a young lady, Sarah Louise. Or the other way round - it's so hard to tell with the young. Sarah Louise is a honey. They seem well suited. I hope it works. "Convention has a lot going for it," I say to him at the first opportunity. Because the opposite is much more demanding. Many gay men opt for pseudo-convention. They acquire a "mate", a home and cats, and shout at the world, "Look at us - look how normal we are! See Dick and Derek shop in Safeways on a Saturday morning!! You butch and I'll mince, honey!!!" Conventional couples visit them, and mothers bring round houseplants. Usually they slip into a "husband and wife" scenario, and everybody has fun clucking and spotting which is which. (If only they knew how often the face that wears the stubble bites the pillow!) This model is favoured by cool government ministers such as Chris Smith. Awesome. I just can't imagine how tidy their house must be. Others take pride in the fact that "nobody would guess". These have only semi-accepted their "condition", and are most excited when they can pass themselves off as straight. This really only works until marriageable age, after which every single man is cast as gay, accurately or not. Whatever happened to the bachelor? Well, I guess he came out the closet.
Went to a party with J and S-L. First time I'd been in anybody's house for over a year. It was splendid. Made me quite sick of my own little hovel. But not sick enough to clean it, thank God. Remember the old days, during the war, when people would gather round the piano and sing White Cliffs of Dover? Well, it was a lot like that, but instead of a piano there was a huge karaoke machine, the modern, no-hassle equivalent. Now, magnificat doesn't sing - that is not one of our talents - but it was fun hearing the Robbie Williams wannabees.... "She offers me PROTECTION Surely the most ghastly rhyme since speaking caught on. It was also playing when I was at my ohsocool dentist. He sang along with his own version... "I've finished my INSPECTION "Goo Goo, a glug-a-glug," I agreed, manfully.
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Copyright magnificat 1997 - 2001 |
