I went to Plush on Friday night. For those of you who don’t know, Plush is a gay bar down near Park End. It’s five pounds to get in, and this small fee includes drag queens, copious amounts of Lady Gaga, and even more plentiful amounts of middle aged gay men. It’s like Poptarts, plus more than a little tragedy.
It struck me when I was there, shouting the words of ‘Bad Romance’ into the ears of a man wearing fake eyelashes, how easy it is to pull if you are a gay man. This statement sounds like it’s bordering on the homophobic, but hear me out. One of our friends had passed out on the sofa and we had to stop a rather creepy man sitting next to him and gently stroking his hair, just waiting for him to wake up so he could commence the pounce. I spoke to a homofriendual about it, and he compared heterosexual sleeping around – sporadic but supposedly significant action, long dry periods – to homosexual attitudes, which he briefly surmised by the term ‘sexual grazing’.
I mean, I’m not ecstatic about admitting this, but I had a long period of not getting loads of sex. By ‘loads’ I mean, ‘not much’, and by ‘not much’ I mean ‘none’. I suppose I could have fucked around if I was desperate and hadn’t discovered the onanistic impulse, but it’s just not really done that much, is it, no matter how many times it’s discussed in Sex and the City?
How many straight people do you know who regularly go home with someone after a night out? I’ll bet it’s relatively few, and that’s not just because we’re all Oxford geniuses with varying levels of crippling autism, because the Oxford gay scene really knows what it’s doing.
My homofriendual, for instance, was recently woken out of a deep sleep in his own bed by someone who’d come up from a party downstairs to see if he wanted to bumpez les uglies. Just woke him up. With a sex toy in his hand. I’ll leave the toy itself to your imaginations. I realise the longer I write this column, the more I sound like I want to be a gay man.
But at least there’s an honesty to it. You don’t need to act interested for an hour about who someone’s chosen for their special author before you’re ‘allowed’ to get penetrated. You just do it. And I quite like that. How patronising and latently homophobic am I sounding now? Just about enough for a middle class white girl at Oxford? Fabulous.
