Declining magic carpet rides

A dou­ble mac­chi­ato and a club sand­wich, not toasted, please.

Yes please.

Then I col­lect my food and bev­er­age and plonk myself at one of the tiny round tables (known as a tablet) at Star­bucks at the World Trade Cen­tre Shop­ping Mall in Cause­way Bay. I’ve got a cou­ple of hours between the ex’s tea cer­e­mony and the mar­riage solem­ni­sa­tion at Cot­ton Tree Drive, and I need to fire off work emails on my notebook.

This slow­poke note­book takes ages to start up, and even longer to log on to the PCCW wire­less hotspot ser­vice. And when I’m finally logged in, some­one is peer­ing over my shoul­der and ask­ing me,

You’re not local, are you?

Erm, no. How can you tell? (While thought bub­ble is say­ing, ‘That’s cos I’m bloody speak­ing Engr­ish’).

‘Cos you’re dif­fer­ent. Locals are not like that.

Hahaha.

Thought bub­ble: Wah lao. Gay­dar red­line already still can make joke! Stop it! Later go toi­let kenah molest!

The Star­bucks barista could pos­si­bly just have been try­ing to be friendly, and maybe I was a lit­tle tired. Tired­ness makes me a lit­tle para­noid. So maybe he wasn’t try­ing to chat me up, and the old gay­dar could have done with a lit­tle fine-tuning.

Grow­ing up in the com­pany of gay men, and being gen­er­ally gay-friendly still doesn’t make me com­fort­able with being approached by gay men. But I have to admit to being flat­tered when I am actu­ally propo­si­tioned. (Being propo­si­tioned by either gen­der, how­ever, doesn’t hap­pen very often, you see.) Most approaches can be han­dled man­aged by a sim­ple, ‘Dude you are bark­ing up the wrong tree’. More aggres­sive approaches, how­ever, require a more defen­sive stance. Espe­cially when the approacher says some­thing stu­pid like, ‘you sure you never been curi­ous’?

There was how­ever, one inci­dent in a gay club (that is no more) in Sin­ga­pore, where a very attrac­tive woman approached me, announced she was a les­bian, and whis­pered in my ear that she always fan­ta­sized about hav­ing sex with a gay man, and asked if I was available.

All I remem­ber was that my brain short-circuited, and it was pos­si­bly the only moment in my life where I con­tem­plated sell­ing out my fierce het­ero­sex­u­al­ity, even if it was just so I could get some straight sex.

Mean­while, back at Starbucks:

Doing work?

OK, I’ll leave you and your dou­ble Mac alone.

Thought bub­ble: Jia lat! Is a Dou­ble Mac­chi­ato a gay bev­er­age? But I like Dou­ble Macs. Fuck! Must change drink liao. Orange Mocha Frap­pu­cino. Hee Hee Hee!

It’s so crowded, you acci­den­tally turn gay also you dunno.