I see him standing there, across the tramlines, and I cannot keep my eyes away from him. I don’t think he notices me staring, but he may have already spotted me, and is just playing it cool.
He is wearing my school uniform. He is around 16 or 17 years old. He is camp in the way I was at his age – defiant sartorial statements of whimsical non-conformity. With me, it was a giant Tom Baker-like scarf in school colours, knitted patiently by my mother, that swooshed around my neck and went down to my ankles.
With him, it is a fussy little keyring on a chain with a toy on the end, and highlighted hair, and a defiant upward tilt of the jaw, at the queeny degree, as employed by Larry Grayson and Julian Clary and Kenneth Williams and Murray Melvyn and Quentin Crisp and generation after generation of angular, delicate men. I see it in myself sometimes, and caught sight of it in a photo of me recently – like a patrician swan.
What is it about that set of the jawline, that flared-nostril equine whinny of a posture? It is theatrical, operatic, even. But it’s classless – the fiercest jaw angles I’ve ever seen have been from Sherriff Street flats (in Dublin). To call it effeminate is inaccurate, for I don’t see many women queening it around like that. Yes, of course, there are female divas who glide around as if amidst adoring crowds, but they’ve usually gone to ballet class or had a few singing lessons in their time. Most women, like most men, keep their jaw angles below the horizontal. I think it’s time that masculinity stretched its spectrum a little wider to include this sort of campness, for it is not an imitation of the feminine, nor a mockery of it, it is a body language that comes naturally and distinctively to a certain kind of man. It does imply a self-consciousness, a heightened awareness of some kind, which may perhaps be a result of the experience of being different, rather than a necessary component to it. But there is also a defiance, a confidence, a knowingness. Some of the most insecure men I’ve ever met have been those who have beaten it out of them, forced their body language into a parody of masculinity, an over-muscled butchness that is as recognisably queer as the regal stare down the bridge of the nose.
That’s not to say that the language of the body, indeed the body itself, can’t be a sign of an unhealthy submission to the feminine, to the maternal.
There’s a Z-list celeb that comes to mind, known only to people who watched TV in the early '90s, a precocious bow-tied 12-year-old antiques “expert” who once appeared on Wogan, called James Harries.
Now an affected young woman called Lauren, she was the subject of a hostile documentary earlier this year where it was reported that the counsellor credited with “guiding” the young man to gender re-assignment was, in fact, his mother, using an alias and questionable qualifications.
This goes against so many ethical codes that it is impossible to know where to begin, but it does seem that his/her attachment to his jailer/mother is so absolute, his desire to become her/impress her so deeply rooted, that to try and separate them would be counterproductive, harmful. They still live together. As a Freudian horror story, I don’t think it can be bettered. But as I look at the 16-year-old across the tracks/in the mirror I realise that there’s nothing murky going on, no malignancy, no aberration from the “norm” of masculinity. He is simply himself, shining away. I imagine him smelling of Clearasil and menthol cigarettes, just like I did.
He’s on his way into the city, on his own – the other lads from his class are on my platform, mucking around on the tracks, on their way out to the suburbs and home. I was exactly the same – I used to head off into town after school whenever I could, having lunch with my friends at the Hirschfeld Centre, posing in Bewley’s or being bought lunch by Wildean Trinity scholars reading me Proust while dying to get into my tight grey schoolboy slacks.
It was all very exciting, somewhat bewildering and confusing, and it did go to my head and affect my studies, no doubt about it. But, I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.
It’s lovely to see him, a curious synchronistic manifestation of the hypothetical 16-year-old that I have always borne in mind when writing this column, the imaginary kid that was me/not me.
It’s good when things are exactly as you imagine them to be.b