"Don't be silly. Girls aren't camp, they're girly. There IS a difference you know... Isn't there? Oh my goodness, I'm not secretly a gay man, am I? That might be one issue too many."
"Put it like this. Can you catch? Unnatural fascination with glitter? Can you knit? How many Kylie albums do you own?"
"No, yes, I luff the shiny things and all of them... Oh. Oh my good lord".


It was only hours after our first meeting that we moved onto discussing sex, while locked in a bathroom at The Breeder Party. The circles I move in being what they are, I know relatively few girls, which makes my mother coming to visit me very uncomfortable. Of course there are girls from uni and girls I've lived with and so on, but that's pretty much all they are. In short then, I have very few girl mates. Things with Imogen got off to a good start when to my surprise I fell sort of hopelessly head over heels when I noticed her ask one of the sticky toddlers, Do you know what this is? after he/she/it found a condom while rummaging through her handbag. After a great start things sort of became a bit fraught. Well, more distant, I guess. As you can probably tell from this.
To be fair, she had a point.
At the start of this year I was living closer to our uni with a group of girls who turned out to be simply frightful to live with-
You can't expect us not to mind you coming back drunk at 4am!
We had that conversation a lot, and many others along similar lines. I spent about two weeks bitching about them to all and sundry, before Imogen got bored of me whinging and invited me to live with her. Then refused point blank to help me move my stuff, which ruined the sentiment a little. So. Our flat and home then for most of the last year worked out pretty well, contrary to expectations. There being only three rooms, my moving in was meant to be a temporary measure- there's only so long you can sleep on the settee for! Lesbian roomies A and B pretty much kept to themselves, while Imogen's never in, nor is the other flatmate. Alec was the rogue male before I honed in on the flat, and we wound up sharing the room. What? You don't expect me to have spent a year sleeping on a settee, do you?
And we're both hot, it's all good. Grand, in fact.
Which made Imogen look like the flat spinster, to be fair. And Jerome was a disaster waiting to happen.
She was going out with him when I met her, although it was in the early stages-
Oh, only about three months now she'd said breezily flicking ash into a pot plant, but it's nothing serious. She looked at me then, a proper sizing me up look - Ah. Right.
Excuse me if I'm right I'd said in response, but you're just as camp as I am. Maybe more, and do I make assumptions about you?
My insistence, not so much that she was wrong but that she might have been lead to her being able to add to her 'list' of favourite things 'kissing gay boys'. Seriously.

Now, for the second time this year, I've managed to end up living in an ugly flat in a rather suspect area of the East End surrounded by very scary looking men neighbours, but all of this is nothing compared to one of my new roomies.
Lauren.
She hasn't noticed. This makes her the only person with the exception of my mother, who doesn't know I'm gay. And she's making me very uncomfortable, being, you know, like, not a guy. And not being pretty. And she's actually properly stalking me. My girl experience is limited to Imogen, and she's currently in Kos getting very verrrry drunk with a group of her fellow Catholic schoolies- which makes her uncontactable. And she gives disastrous advice anyway.
Dear readers. Want to help? I'll do anything, tell any stories, compose some sort of haiku, go into work on time, anything in exchange. If advice works.

Ongoing adoration Tobyx x x x x x x