There has been a huge outcry in the office this morning. It seems one of the male members of staff has been seen at gay club, Heaven. This colleague has a fiancé and denies the allegations, but the gossip mongering girls can’t quite believe it. Shock, horror and it has all quite clearly turned what would otherwise be a rather dismal morning into a Disneyland trip with backstage passes. I can only conclude that these people are either tremendously thick, or have never left their leafy suburbs to take a trip anywhere other than DFS or their local for a sneaky spritzer. Apparently, according to these two females a trip to G.A.Y or whichever neon sweating, jockstrap flouting hotspot is disco destination of the month, renders the visitor homosexual. I’m afraid not.
Perhaps society would be made a lot easier on everyone if every sub-section did have it’s own designated area, and it more or less used to. Hackney was for single mothers on benefit who chain smoked Embassy’s till their latest boyfriend brought home the freshly cut crack, but now the area has been flooded with artists, architects and new-age media companies that smoke Camels and get the Company Director to bring the crack to the office instead. And increasingly frequently the two dwellers have create a hybrid; the asbo chav is less inclined to wear velour and more likely to be wearing skin-tight jeans alla Kate Moss, still gets pregnant when she discovers the wonders of the benefit cheque but will also cut back on the Smirnoff Ice and do a mothers yoga class. The Hoxtonite favours fake gold bling with her brogues and pokadot dress, sips on a half-pint in a pub that used be a warming place for builders bums and drops her t’s when conversing with the taxi driver.
The same goes for nightclubs; if it has a predominantly gay theme the ladies love it and the straight men have been clocked into that fact ever since one of them ‘accidentally’ stumbled into one just as S Club 7 were performing on stage and saw drunken female revellers throwing thongs into the crowd with wild abandon, and without any fear. Quite frankly I’m amazed that my colleagues were that excited about a “Real Live Gay!” in their midst. We work in Covent Garden for pete sake, right down the road from Soho – and everyone I know has at least one gay hairdresser they couldn’t live without. A few weeks ago they were in uproar about a film one of them had seen, documenting the life of a trans-gender undergoing the final stages of surgery. Her exact words were, “I didn’t think they actually existed.”
They have just about calmed down now, and the day will resume as usual I suspect – or until one of them spies a male with long hair, a female with a tattoo or a pair of lesbians holding hands. The suspense is killing me.
