2002-04-16 - 5:04 p.m.

Going back to my home town is becoming an increasingly surreal affair � the place exerts a strange warp on my sensibilities and I apparently consider things like square dancing with old-age pensioners and playing rounds of golf to be within the sphere of normal personal activity. Couple this with the fact that my parents are trying to persuade me to move back in with them (a sure sign they�ve run out of things to talk to each other about) because, reading between the lines, they think it would actually improve my chances of finding a life partner (I can just see it now, engaging in sneaky remedial petting whilst my mum and dad are out back, gardening) and it should come as no surprise that the journey home took the brunt of my reaction.

Feeling my credibility had been decidedly besmirched, I got hideously drunk on the train (it was full of Scottish people, so I didn�t stand out). And not in a good way, getting more and more depressed that everyone back home seemingly has career / spouse / babies / home ownership sorted out by the time they�re about thirteen and a half, and stinging from the admission that my parents are convinced that I�m going to die in poverty and alone (the only worse scenario for them being if I died in poverty and alone but gay). I got sad when the train stopped at Euston, I just wanted it to keep on going for days and days.

Is two and a half hours an excessive amount of time to stare catatonically at a blank wall in your bedroom would you say? In any case, I�d perked up enough to move later that evening and I settled down for a programme called �The Truth About Lesbian Sex�, a supposedly educational documentary that I wanted to see only because it included a couple of passing acquaintances. I really hate these kind of things, and my worst fears were confirmed when it was clear that the ladies concerned really thought that what they did in bed was akin to the unimaginable mating habits of an exotic alien race from a Star Trek episode. Guess what? Lesbians don�t have dicks, so they use their fingers and tongues! Some don�t like to use dildos but, er�some do! Well bugger me with an oversized fluorescent spork, who would�ve thought it?

It was split between women apparently on the wrong programme but desperate to be on TV (�Sometimes I feel like doing it with women, sometimes with men, sometimes nothing at all��) and the arrogant, bigoted, self-ghettoising pontificators who are as annoyingly evident in the gay world as they are in the straight. Setting gay-ness up as some kind of mystical society where you can always spot your own kind, they then singularly failed to identify their fellow lesbians time after time in a line-up, being tellingly hoodwinked by the same tired old stereotypes that they probably hate the straight world for perpetuating in the media. Worse than this was their reliance on reductively blinkered thinking, exemplified by comments such as �I can�t tell if she�s gay or straight�, because obviously those are the only conceivable options. And so much chin music about the deplorable attitudes of straight people! It�s irony, on a base level.

If you�ll indulge me for a day sometime, I want to rant a bit about sexuality just because I haven�t for ages and I�m beginning to put things in place for myself, I think. For now, and I�ve written this somewhere else, so apologies for the repetition, but you know that Onion T-shirt that says �Your favourite band sucks�? I want one that says �Your sexual orientation sucks�.