Maybe I'm a fag hag after all

My ex-boyfriend is getting married and I’m devastated!

There I was, sitting at a pavement café innocently drinking a glass of sangria with my sister, enjoying the warm weather and her company, not a bother in the world on me, when who should walk by but Jay. There he was, sunlight bouncing off his beautiful curls, a radiant smile on his face, holding hands with a brunette.
It was a pleasant reunion. After our little relationship had ended we’d been the best of friends, but he’d moved to a different city and over the years we’d lost touch. But when he proudly announced his impending nuptials, I came over a little uneasy, if not downright queasy. Not because I secretly nursed desires of a passionate reunion at some point in the future. Nothing like that, it’s just that – as far as I knew – Jay was gay. What the hell was going on?
I’d met Jay at a nightclub and we’d bonded over a shared love of Nick Cave. I was the door whore and Jay kept me amused and bought me drinks. Over the course of a few weeks we became friends and one night, when I told him I’d broken up with my current amour earlier that week, he made a lunge at me and kissed me. I was taken by surprise, as I’d assumed the boy was gay but he said he was bisexual. Fair enough. Hell, it was the ‘90s and everyone I knew was bisexual or at least trying to be. That was good enough for me. Or so I thought – until the first night I took him home.
There we were, in my bedroom, candles lit, me in my sexiest lingerie and nothing happened. Nada, nothing, zip. We tried, but it just felt wrong. Not morally wrong, mind, nor mortally wrong – just like-trying-to-shag-your-oldest-mate kind of wrong. Weird. Up to that point, the men in my life had all shown an admirable willingness, even keenness, to fuck me, but not Jay. I was gutted. He was a beautiful specimen of manhood – not the kind of man you’d kick out of bed for eating crisps. But this was it: there had been plenty of crackle, but no snap and not even a hint of pop.
I would have been insulted, but he told me he’d never actually had sex with a woman. He’d tried a few times with a number of girls because he was curious to see how it compared to his experience with men. Over the next few weeks he made a few half-hearted attempts to shag me, but most nights we ended up in bed, stark naked and doing a most unnatural thing under the circumstances. We talked! Perverted or what?
Having finally admitted that he was gay our relationship improved admirably. We went out and flirted with the same boys – and sometimes girls – and shared clothes, CDs and long conversations on the telephone. Unconsummated it may have been, but in its way it was one of the best relationships I ever had.
Over the years Jay had more boyfriends than I could keep track of. Having finally shrugged off the last vestiges of his Catholic guilt, he led an openly gay life. He told his parents and his friends and the last time I’d seen him before this momentous news, he was involved in his first long-term relationship and moving to Cape Town.
When the brunette – a girl by the name of Cathy – disappeared to the loo, I pulled him aside to ask him what he was playing at. He’d been out of the closet since we broke up – a good 10 years ago – so why was he willing to jump back in and lock the door behind him?
I was hoping for some kind of sensible explanation. You know the kind of thing – an inheritance from a granny he couldn’t get until he was married or financial blackmail from his Italian Catholic father to produce an heir. He simply declared that Cathy had turned him straight.
I was flummoxed! Can a person change their sexual orientation so radically? I wouldn’t have thought so. Most of us lean one way or the other. That’s not to say that we aren’t free to be curious or experiment. A few people genuinely have no preference either way – or to put it differently are quite happy to have it both ways, and as often as possible – but people don’t generally go from one extreme to the other. Jay had experimented and had found that girls did very little for him, so how – or why – the big about-face?
I never got a straight – no pun intended – answer out of him. As far as I could tell he hadn’t started using mind-altering drugs or been brainwashed by born again Christians. He seemed happy, and who am I to judge? And if it all goes horribly wrong, well, at least South Africa has very liberal divorce laws – you can buy a DIY kit at your local newsagents.
After he’d left, my sister turned to me and said, “You do that a lot – turn men gay.” The bitch! But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that there was a grain of truth in the jibe. There was my first boyfriend, glad to be gay ever since he joined the air force. Then Chris, who’d called me up one New Year’s Day to tell me he wanted to shag a bloke, and another ex who I found out liked to cruise Gaydar when I wasn’t around. What gives? It’s 2007. Surely at this stage, hiding your sexual orientation is no longer necessary?
All of them, with the exception of Jay had been complete horn dogs – skirt-chasing, chest-thumping, alpha males. If they’d been sexually confused bisexual types I could have understood. But they’d all seemed so straight. So is it that I am somehow drawn to men who play straight but are really gays waiting to happen? Or, odder still, could I be what triggers their gay gene?
Damn! I’ll have to keep an eye on Thomas. But since I already know he has a fondness for good clothes and the finer things in life, this probably means he’s as straight as a pencil. Perhaps gay is the new straight and straight the new gay? But if so, why the hell did nobody bother to inform me?
My friend Clive once smugly told me that all blokes have a secret longing to have homosexual experiences, but I didn’t believe him. Perhaps he was right. Then again, maybe it is my fault. Either way I’ve decided that my gravestone should read: Here lies Anne Sexton – daughter, sister, lover, and fag-hag. What a legacy.