(Part of the Showcase Outsider series…)

 I

Homosexuality is a plague upon the straight city of Glasgow. 

Since time immemorial, in class, and at play, a seemingly semantically versatile word, all say:

That broken pen, having to go in today, losing marks on the test: correspondingly, gay, gay and gay. 

And if you sit on that bench there or so much as cross your legs in that way, you’re gay.

Better not then. That’s gay.

Gnomic wisdom. Suffusion. Glasgow’s fine secondary schools. Yonks. 

‘LGBT+’: My education has been consummate. 

I can tell you that’s an acronym. All you need know.

Except. 

In a big piss-laden, throbbing mound of the undesirable, 

A carapace of flagrant denial and stalled self-actualisation grows.

What might not be now unspeakable, stays unspoken.

Hitherto untouched, innocence unbridled, 

All organs unused and abused; another’s well-maintained and put to good use.

Unthinkable, that a shrinking violet from the deep south of Glasgay, 

repelled by an aberrant proclivity 

Is noticed. 

The lads can’t protect me from poofdum now.

What awaits, across a counter, waiting to be served is a

continental European, who might well have his pick of the bunch in an instant geolocative hook-up repository. 

In that modern parlance, I understand 

this is known as a Grindr gimp. 

Well versed, busy lips, wandering eyes 

acquainted with the rules of the game.

A game I’ve yet to play.

None of that

in that school 

in the deep south 

of Glasgay,