By Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey
WHEN you grow up in a housing scheme it becomes very apparent to people when you start dropping strange words into your vocabulary. I recall one summer afternoon, stewing on a school bus as rowdy classmates were corralled aboard by P.E teachers for the weekly trip to the gravel pitch.
The lads were ladding about in their usual laddish manner – laughing through their nostrils and using ‘gay’ as the reductive synonym for any and all things of a foreign nature: “Rap? That’s gay.” “Baggy trousers without three stripes down the side of them? That’s gay.” People not of the time or the area could easily misconstrue the slur as homophobic, but in its proper context the word ‘gay’, much like the word ‘cunt’ is thrown around with no particular malice, and, is primarily used as a means of distancing oneself from anything of a sensitive or feminine nature.
Thus retaining a viable masculinity – keeping violence at arms length.
By these measures I was already well out of the closet. That day I decided to infiltrate the adrenaline gaggle with a basic observation of my own.
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Picture courtesy of Loki