I’d always found straight society isolating and potentially dangerous. When I read that line in Knives I remembered vividly the sick feeling that used to come over me at school when other children talked in their hateful, stupid way about fags and gaylords, compacting and inflaming my already acute sense of being an alien, of standing outside. It wasn’t just about my mother. I can see myself then, skinny and pale, dressed as a boy, completely incapable of handling the social demands of being at a girls’ school, my own sexuality and sense of gender hopelessly out of kilter with the options then
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