Dirty Little Faggot

I am in the shop again. I appear to have stepped in dog pooh. It is very hard to act cool with the ravers and the Goths when you have dog pooh on your shoe. It’s not so bad with the psytrance guys because – dancing barefoot in the bush as they do – they are quite used to such pungent and earthy smells. Not so ravers and Goths. Not so with me either, even if I do dance barefoot in the bush. I think I will have to throw the shoes away.

Yesterday there was a little boy in the street who was bitching and whining and half sobbing because his sister had hit him in the stomach. He was being really annoying about it, and it reminded me of a time when I was little and was whining in much the same way. It’s quite possible that my distress was because I had stepped in dog pooh. Back then, as tears spilled from my clear blue eyes and I sobbed as though the star of a Greek tragedy, my mother aimed a finger at me, leaned close and snarled in that familiar tone of threat and loathing, “Do you want to be a homosexual?”

This stopped me mid choke. “Wha...?”

“You heard. I said... do you want to be a homosexual?” Each word was a sharp missile of enunciation.

“I... I... I don’t wanna be a homer...” Of course I didn’t have a clue what the woman was on about, but there was something about the way she said it that made me think that whatever a homosexual was, it wasn’t something I wanted to be.

“Because you’re acting like one right now. And little boys who act like homosexuals grow up to be homosexuals.”

“Oh,” I said quietly, my blubbing petering out as I regained my composure like the good little heterosexual that I was. “All right. Sorry mum.”

I think it was the confusion that silenced me. This homosexual business was as incomprehensible as my grandmother’s favourite insult for me and my cousins when we had done something wrong. We’d do something that kids do, like get cake on our clothing, and my grandmother would say, “Look at you, you dirty little faggot.”

I don’t know how it could be so, but maybe this is why people occasionally mistakenly think I am gay.