The nose hair trimmer

My mother had been dead for a few years.  I was still a virgin - and not yet out to anyone.  I was, in fact, at that point in my life where my being gay was like nail fungus or a ghost limb.  You suffered it, kept silent out of embarrassment, tried to keep it in a box for fear of it leaping out, but like whack-a-mole, its head just kept emerging, to your chagrin.

I was GAY GAY GAY, and it was as if everyone knew it, except me.  My father was repainting the bathroom and asked me about the colour scheme because he knew I was, in his words, 'sensitive'.  My sister asked me about the decorating I had done in my room and called me a 'special case'.

All our lives we've been told we're evil or bad.  We're not good because we don't contribute to society, i.e., have children.  We're selfish. We're lustful, perverted.  Religion, government, society, our friends, our family, they all contribute to this sense that we are just not right - or worse - worthy of annihilation.

Do you recall that weird period? Thankfully, with me it didn't last too long, just a string of years.  When I was twenty-five I was like, fuck this!  Who gives a shit?  I certainly didn't.  If I were hacked today and some digital scimitar was hanging over my head - We'll send every cock shot on your phone to your employer and your family if you don't cough up the cash - I'd say GO AHEAD BABY 😂

Anyway, I was still afraid of myself as a teenager.  And it didn't help that I came into my own sense of manhood with the spectre of AIDS hanging over me and every other cock-loving fag on the planet.  I became a monk for years.  And I didn't make Oka cheese.  I just sat and stewed within myself, there was no pasteurised Breton recipe for me.

It was Christmas, not that that meant anything special to me except the fact that it gathered the whole of my family together.  It may have been 1980 or 1981; I was certainly not yet 20 from what I can remember.  I sensed that I was getting hairier, it seemed to come from everywhere - my legs, my ass, my feet and .. my nose.

Thinking back now, I had this odd sense of propriety about myself, as if I were inviolate as long as I kept my mouth shut.  But like I said .. like I said .. I was becoming a real man with testosterone coursing through my veins, and I asked my sister that Christmas for a nose hair trimmer.  How GAY is that?!  That is ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent QUEER.

I opened the box and beamed - ah, I had gotten what I wanted.  Now I can rid my nose of those pesky ugly nose hairs!

"A nose hair trimmer?" my brother-in-law intoned loudly to the wreathed room and my surviving family in general.  "That's for FAGS .."


"One of the best tools of self-awareness is simple emotional vulnerability"
Moby