David Jones, Friday night, to buy slippers. Don’t titter: my floors are wooden and freezing and I’m the cold feet warm heart type.
DJs didn’t have the ones I wanted (yes, I have slipper ‘wants’ that include a rubber sole and wool interior). Then the bargain bin caught my eye. But it was a DJ’s bargain bin and contained nothing under $50 except an ugly range of cotton-knit pastel jumpers that were so 1986 I couldn’t believe they had the cheek to stock them.
I’d decided to take my patronage elsewhere, when the man beside me said, out of the blue, “What do you reckon, mate – too poofy?”
Actually, it was more 'out of the yellow'. He was in his late forties, slim, attractive, salt and pepper hair. With him was a plain-looking woman who was trying to get him to buy one of the cotton jumpers in a colour I can only describe as Lemsip.
Here’s the gay man’s dilemma: ignore the 'poof' quip and pretend you’re a bloke just like him, or take a stand for homosexuals everywhere and give him a lecture on sexual politics. I took the middle ground. “It’s no use asking me,” I replied. “I am a poof.”
I was a peeved poof. Friday night upstairs at DJs is a meat market – gorgeously vain Abercrombie & Fitch males prowling around each other like Siamese Fighting Fish. Despite all that beauty, the guy speaking to me was trying on a jumper in... I’ll try to do it justice... Post-it yellow.
But he wasn’t phased. “So...” he said, glancing at me, but now in earnest. “What do you think?”
I looked at him in the framed mirror that reflected him and me, but cut his female friend through the centre with a sliver of chrome. He was determined to get my opinion now: he was in his own episode of Queer Eye.
I wanted to say the sort of thing you’d say to a friend, or a gay man – to snigger, roll my eyes, to say, "Are you kidding, you colour-blind bitch?"
But the – girlfriend? wife?– had her heart set on that sulphurous thing and she looked to me for feminine support.
I was being played by both sides.
“I don’t think it goes with your shirt,” I truthfully said.
“But it’s OK,” I lied.
The woman beamed, the man said, “Good enough.” Together they marched to the cashier.
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