“So, uh, what’s your favourite drug?” I ask a sallow woman with pretty blue eyes.
She has just told me that she likes drugs, so I’m being polite.
“Oh, that would have to be heroin. Heroin’s really nice. But never do heroin.”
My new friend, an ex-junkie, proceeds to list all the reasons why I should steer clear of smack. This is the highlight of my evening. I’m standing in a drizzly smoking area, outside a warehouse, being lectured to about the dangers of drug use. Inside, nearly every eligible young lesbian in London is doing her bit to make the walls sweat.
The lesbian scene has me by the balls. Yet every Hackney girls’ night or Soho piss-up ends with me sitting on the night bus, face like chewed ham, listening to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. “That’s it,” I say to myself. “I’m retiring from The Scene.”
A week later, I’m back for another healthy dose of gin and humiliation. See, submitting to the lesbian club scene is the only way I can surround myself with gay girls.
The advantage therein? Well, the chance of my being in the proximity of a person kind enough to sleep with me goes up 17 per cent. I’ve done the maths. Then again, me in a club is a bit like Nigel Farage in a Polski sklep. The only way to communicate with your fellow woman, when house music is invading your every orifice, is through the arcane medium of dance. When, like me, you don’t so much dance as move weirdly, you have no voice.
If, on the other hand, it was socially acceptable to go up to a woman in a club and scream facts about tropical diseases in her ear, I’d be made. Reality is a sour bitch.While trying to look as dour and inconspicuous as possible, I’m avoiding eye contact with girls I recognise from unsuccessful OkCupid dates. Throw in a regrettable one-night stand and you have yourself a bona fide fruit salad of broken dreams.
Flirting in Lesbianese is a fine art, especially in the inscrutable East End dialect. It involves mastering a facial expression that says exactly this: “I loathe you, but I would dearly like to put my thumb in your vagina.”
From what I can tell, it’s somewhere between a glare and a snarl, with a sprinkling of leer. On the way to the bar, for my seventh G&T, I pass a stunner with a pixie haircut and a baggy, “wouldn’t you like to know . . .” button-down.
We frown at each other, so things are looking good. A bit later, I see her leaving hand-inhand with a girl whose grimace she clearly preferred. I stand at the bar, sipping my drink and praying to every imaginable deity for the DJ to play a song that I actually know. Feigning enthusiasm for early-Noughties R&B tracks remixed by people with beards and opinions about post-ironic synth revival is surprisingly hard work. With a genuine scowl, I empty my glass. “I’m retiring,” I repeat to myself.
The next weekend, I’m lying face down in bed, having a glorious dream about tractors. My phone rings. It’s a lesbian.
“Are you coming to Fanny Palace tonight?”
“To what?”
“The Facebook page says it’s a ‘post-queer trip-hop extravaganza’.”
“Sounds great,” I say.
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