Girl, I’m gonna take you to A Gay Bar!
My student ID.
All this talk of Freshers week has dredged up a few things in my head. Mainly my thoughts have turned to just how ridiculously young I was when I left home. I was seventeen. Not that young you think? No? Well, I was younger than today’s seventeen year olds precisely because of these two facts:
Fact One: I was seventeen in the Eighties,
Fact Two: I was seventeen in a small country village.
I knew nothing of the world. I particularly did not know gay. Gay wasn’t a thing. Not in my little corner of existence. Or if it was it was John Inman or Larry Grayson. Or maybe that bloke out of Give Us a Clue. I dunno, I never, in all honesty, ever really thought about it. Except to defend the honour of Nick Rhodes, keyboard player of Duran Duran, when my brother would bait me by questioning his sexual orientation. For Nick and I were to be married and I would not hear malicious gossip about my intended.
I was one of those folk who thought that Boy George was a girl for a good few weeks before someone had to tell me.* And although the eighties was all about that whole gender bending thing, I never really sat down and thought it had much to do with bottoms. Yes, we had Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but that theatrical gay stuff all seemed so far removed from my life. Yes, I knew what gay was, but it all seemed to happen somewhere else. In leather. And with make-up. In Liverpool mostly. (Girl gayness didn’t really occur until there was a storyline in Brookside. Again, Liverpool: None of my business).
Goings on in Liverpool: none of my business**
I was not and never have been homophobic. But I was homo-clueless. I was gayblivious.
If I did know anyone who was gay, it wasn’t apparent. Turns out quite a few folk I knew at school are gay. In fact, one lad I actually kind of went out with once or twice is now gay. He maybe turned after going out with me. Who knows? Gay men, think of him as my gift to you. He was quite the looker. Ah isn’t it always the way? Not that I would have known that then.
So, off I went to Uni with my twee country ways and my lack of knowledge of anything other than German verb conjugation and the history of the chart positions of Depeche Mode. I roomed with a similarly clueless country lass, who is still my buddy (and who appeared on the Misssives, much to my delight, to comment on the last post). This fellow country wench relied on her older sister, who was two years ahead of us in Uni, to give us the heads up on what was cool and what was not. A mistake, as it turned out. For she was evil.
Two weeks into our time together, we asked the aforementioned sister for advice on where to go in Glasgow of an evening for a night out. Our first trip out of University-land into actual Glasgow. The unsaid, but quite apparent, undertone to our request was that there must be a chance of meeting fit blokes. For although clueless, we were, after all, still seventeen.
And did the besom not send us directly to Glasgow’s Premier Gay Nightclub?
Yes she did.
And did she mention that her recommendation was in fact, Glasgow’s Premier Gay Nightclub?
No, she flippin’ well didn’t.
*****
Next part in the story here.
*Right, hands up the blokes who saw George on telly that first time and thought he was a bit of alright? C’mon, every lad did. You all thought he was a girlie! Fess up!
**Yes, that’s Anna Friel. She’s dead famous now.
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University Challenge
Students before Happy Hours were invented
Whiff of vomit about your street this morning? Increased police presence in your town at the weekend? Nagging feeling that one of your children might have grown up and left home?
Yes, it’s Freshers Week all over the country.
One set of students hits home again after graduation, to whine about not knowing what they are going to do with their lives and sponge off their Mum and Dad even though their old room has since been turned into a lilac Laura Ashley guest room (Hi Mum!). And another new set leaves home and discovers the joys of binge drinking, waking up with a complete stranger stuck to them and the occasional bit of learning.
Yesterday, I had the great honour of checking out the new accommodation of an 18 year old chum of the Flying Martinis heading off to University yesterday. And of course, I was reminded of my first student house in Glasgow.
In our student house we had a Senior Resident. This was a student chosen by the Housing Association to effectively snitch on the other residents and stop them from having a good time. Think Orwell’s Thought Crime Division, and you’ll get the idea. Our Senior Resident was called Dave. He was, as befitted the job description for such a post, a wanker of the highest magnitude.
Dave was studying Theology in training to become a minister, but seemed to be more of the Hell and Damnation type than the Love Thy Neighbour kind of bloke. In fact, I think Dave had his own set of commandments.
The Dave Commandments
1. Thou shalt not speak to me unless you are a fine, tight assed, Asian, male, student.
2. Thou shalt not get your possessions back from confiscation because you left a dirty dish in the sink.
3. Thou shalt not come to me with any complaints, suggestions or problems.
4. Thou shalt not expect any degree of courtesy from me.
5. Thou shalt not make any noise after 9pm unless you are one of the fine, tight assed, Asian, male, students knocking on my door in their underwear or a loosely tied dressing gown.
6. Thou shalt not be under the impression that my role is anything other than surveillance and reporting back to the Housing Association.
7. Thou shalt not insinuate that I am un-Christian, just because I hate each and every one of you.
8. Thou shalt not expect to get back into halls next year, as the dossier I have on you is about phone-book thickness.
9. Thou shalt not sneak friends from home into your bedroom as I will wait until you are all asleep and throw them out into the snowy January street with nowhere else to go.
10. Thou shalt not ridicule the passive aggressive notes left by me in the kitchen by writing “Dave is a Cock” on them.
Aaah, bless, Dave LOVED us. I wonder if he ever did move to Vietnam.
Still, no Senior Residents in the hall I was in yesterday. Just gangs of nice friendly people handing out kits with laminated cards with instructions on how to live life away from Mum, free music downloads and a complimentary Pot Noodle. There were even Fresher Teams whose sole responsibility was to force people out of their rooms and into the pub. Nothing like 15 Vodka and Red Bulls and a trip to Casualty to break that ice!
And on quick inspection of our chum’s living quarters, the mattresses are not made out of woven pubic hair anymore. So that’s nice!
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