Yeah the Boys (bold, propulsive)

Zeke

It is a universal truth, acknowledged by no one, that gay men are meant to be so grateful for the straight people who don’t actively want to murder us that we ought to sit down, shut up and be the kind of faggot they want us to be.

I should know. I tried to please everyone, walking a tightrope for the world’s approval, and that’s how I ended up here: in a literal toilet, barefoot, bruised, bleeding and, most unbearably of all, alone.

Here’s the thing: some straighties are super chill, but on any given day you stumble fucklong into someone with a fixed idea about what gay men should be.

We’re meant to be married and mortgaged, with two adopted kids and a fluffy Cocker Spaniel, for the moderate conservatives who tolerate us as long as we’re clean and (w)holesome – living proof even deviants obsessed with buggery can be redeemed by a collared Tarocash shirt and Sunday mass in a broad-minded parish.

We’re meant to be wounded victim poster-boys for outrage addicts masquerading as allies, who like to use us as human battering rams for advancing their activism campaign du jour.

We are brilliant little clockwork toys: pull the string on our backs to hear one of six nauseating pre-recorded phrases like ‘it gets better’ and ‘love is love’!

We’re meant to be camp, witty ‘yasss, queen’ bunny rabbits for a certain subset of toxic straight women who see homos as about as useful, interchangeable and capable of self-actualisation as a Gucci clutch purse.

And we’re meant to be as beige as possible for the straight guys who will deign to talk to us about shared interests as long as we don’t make it too obvious we’re not proper, fully functional males with a red-blooded thirst for tits.

Nobody talks about how it is humanly impossible to be all these at once, but we’re expected to try, to prevent whoever is in front of us from turning their back on us (gay kryptonite, fatal).

It’s not even their fault. If we didn’t have to contend with those who sometimes do want to literally murder us, we could ignore them.

But we need the nice ones, so we become hypervigilant approval monsters.

When we’re given the choice between death or disapproval, never underestimate our willingness to choose death.

Why? Because nobody, and this is the real issue, wants to accept us for who we really are:

Horny.

Dirty.

Male-fucking.

MEN.

Men we are, and men we were, and men we always will be.

From the first homosexual caveman, Ug, who shoved his club up the clacker of his buddy Grug, to the gay pirates, to Brokeback Mountain.

From me and Charlie and Hammer to some future poofter named Zoltan zipping around New Sydney on his hoverboard in the year 3000, dodging killer AI robots in his quest to trawl for some hot tradie man-arse at the cyber-mall.

It will never change. We are who we are.

We are who the world is disgusted by and who the world does not want us to be.

We pretend not to be ourselves even among those who claim to love us.

We contort ourselves into publicly pre-approved, psychologically unsound pretzel shapes to be spared total social opprobrium from the rest of the tribe.

Or we die.

Which is how this was always going to end, when the three of us collided with the world. It was foretold. Inexorable. A maverick can’t break out of the box and expect to survive. It was always going to end exactly like this.

With one of our hearts no longer beating.