How to Be a Successful Gay Man

There is a moment, somewhere around the age of eight or nine, when you understand that you have been issued the wrong instruction manual. Everyone else appears to have received theirs at birth, laminated, with diagrams. Yours arrived water-damaged, in a language nobody in your house speaks, and several pages are missing – specifically the ones about football, about what to say when your uncle asks if you have a girlfriend yet, and about how to walk down a corridor without thinking about how you are walking down a corridor. Nobody announces this to you. There is no ceremony. You simply notice, the way you notice a draught, that the room has rules you were not told about and that everyone else absorbed through their skin. And here is the thing nobody warns you about either: that draught will make you extraordinary. This is not a self-help book. I want to be clear about that early, because the genre has a smell and I refuse to be associated with it. There will be no chakras. Nobody is going to ask you to visualise your future self standing on a mountain. If at any point in these pages I suggest you write a letter to your inner child, you have my permission to close the book and set fire to it, preferably in a well-ventilated space and wearing something flattering. Nor is this a book of grievances. There are excellent books about how hard it has been, and they deserve their place on the shelf, and some of them made me cry in an airport. This is not one of them. I am not interested in the wound as a permanent address. I am interested in what got built on the site afterwards. Because something did get built. Look around. Look at the men you know. Look, if you can bear it, at yourself – properly, in good light, which for the record is never the light in a public toilet. The pattern is not subtle. A statistically improbable number of us are the best-dressed person in the room, the one people confide in at parties, the one who knows the restaurant, the one who noticed that the client was lying before anyone else at the table did, the one who remembers your mother’s name and asks after her hip. We are not, on average, unremarkable men. We are frequently the most finished person present, and we did it without a manual, on a budget, while also managing the small administrative burden of inventing ourselves from scratch. That is the thesis of this book, and I am going to defend it for roughly forty thousand words: we are often exceptional precisely because nothing was handed to us. The straight boys were given a script. Terrible dialogue, admittedly, and the second act drags, but a script. Meet girl. Get job. Buy sofa. Produce children. Complain about the sofa. Die. The script is not a conspiracy; it is simply the default, and defaults are comfortable, and comfort is the enemy of interesting. Nobody has ever become fascinating by following a default. We were denied the default. So we went looking. We read things we were not supposed to read. We watched films at two in the morning with the volume at three. We learned to cook because nobody was going to feed us the life we wanted, and we learned to dress because we understood, at an age when other children were still eating glue, that appearance is a language and that fluency is power. We took care of our skin because we knew we would be looked at. We collected culture the way squirrels collect nuts, with a slightly frantic energy and no clear retrieval system, and now, decades later, we can hold a conversation with a bishop, a bouncer and a Belgian art dealer in the same evening, and all three will leave thinking we were the interesting one. That is not luck. That is a training programme. It was involuntary, it was often unkind, and it produced results that would embarrass a business school. So, the tone. This book is going to be funny, because I do not know how to be otherwise and because anything true about our lives is also, at some angle, extremely funny. It will occasionally be insolent. It will never be bitter. Bitterness is the one accessory that ages you faster than sunbeds, and it goes with nothing.