What was I doing here with this earnest bearded man? The whole thing felt wrong – not dangerous or disturbing, just bizarre. I didn’t want to know that he’d bought a new bike off Gumtree or that his parents were getting a divorce. This wasn’t the plan! This wasn’t right at all! I didn’t want to sit across from some man in a pub, talking about literature and gentrification and whether the night tube was a good development. I took long gulps of red wine and wondered what on earth I was doing. He was taking my uninformed but spirited opinions very seriously. In fact, that’s all he had talked about since I arrived. He had pretty grey eyes and he knew more than I would have imagined about cricket in the postcolonial novel. He was skinnier than his photographs, his face pointier, and his gestures unexpectedly camp. I was thirty years old, utterly, shamelessly gay, and on my first ever date with a man. We had been sitting across from each other for fifteen minutes, and as the alcohol swam into my bloodstream, my nerves dissipated and were replaced by a desperate desire to laugh.
