The Glass Closet

Which is the best way I can describe my current situation of being not-quite-out, but on the other hand making absolutely no effort whatsoever to keep myself 'in'.

I'm sorry for the homo post, I normally wouldn't cos you know, in the 21st century here and now who really cares? Well the answer as far as this ramble is concerned is, turks *might* do, but the extent to which they might do I really can't make out, and it's a source of some curiosity on my part.

It is really, really, bizarre, y'all. I remember when starting at Shitwark, spending the first couple of weeks at work tiptoeing around the what are you doing at the weekend conversations with 'housemate' and 'friend', until a little bit in felt ok with the people there to start morphing it to 'girlfriend' and 'missus'.

Here, well I don't know. I don't feel like I've reached that point yet. I do know that they are bloody miles behind the UK in many equality issues, including some really very basic ones like years of educational difference between your average boy and girl, attitudes and language about others and races that would make your eyes pop out, and less a class structure so much as an acceptance of the fact that some people are very, very poor, and that's just how it is.

So my understanding is that gay rights is right down the list of things to worry about. But from what I've read and heard, it seems that gayness is very much not ok. I've read stories about people coming out at work and being completely ostracised, there seems to be this bizarre ambivalence about transsexuals and tranvestites in which they are on one hand completely accepted and even idolised as part of the entertainment spectrum, I'd argue more so than in the UK even, but on the other hand on the street are casually beaten up and even murdered and it's seen as justified because they may have been corrupting, i.e. talking to, their eventual murderers.

So in the context of all this, I don't exactly make a point of rainbow flag waving.

BUT. It's very odd. Like I say I make no pretence whatsoever about my life. Everyone on the island knows me and S come as a 2, everytime one of us bumps into someone they ask how is the other one, it's common knowledge that I'm here because of her. Ditto at work. And in all these situations, there's enough in the way of drunken physical affection, forgetting-self uses of endearments, and general wop-you-in-the-face-we're-clearly-going-out-with-each-other signs that in London at least I wouldn't feel like there's any need for a coming out because I would have thought it would be obvious.

And yet. And yet, people at work are still asking me if I'm married, if I want to get married, have I met any nice turkish boys yet. S's mum is still, hilariously, trying to set her up with blokes. The island folk I think are a bit more clued up, but I can't be sure - there's only really 2 or 3 that definitively know, and the rest I think are bumbling along in some surreal version of don't ask don't tell.

Anyway, it's weird. I know I'm not exactly the best homo advert in the first place, having avoided telling my nearest and dearest for most of my life, but having finally come out in England it is feeling very, very odd, to be somewhat, inadvertantly, back 'in', and for this not-insignificant part of my life to become again a taboo subject.

Hmm.