Help! We’re being taken over! The whole world is being taken over!!

They’re everywhere I look.

Every time I turn on my television I am confronted by gangs of grinning sparkly-toothed, bitch-quipping, eyelash-curling, tong-wielding surgeons of poofery and gayness – all experts in their own particular field of ‘gay styling’.

Have we really sunk so low that we should be required to sit through a lecture on how to dress ourselves? Are the guinea pigs used in these televisual presentations that rare brand of queen that was so unfortunate not to be born with style already embedded into their conciseness that they must be coiffured like this just to make it believable that they are in fact gay?

No, it’s worse than that. It’s much worse. The lucky victims are men yes, but they are not like us, they are straight! Yes, it’s true, these happy volunteers all happen to be straight – though why any straight man would want this merry band of flouncers pampering them from head to toe, on national television, in view of all their friends and loved ones is quite beyond me.

But they do, and what’s more they love it. And what is even more frightening, the women in their lives love it too.

So here’s the plan: take your average Joe, wash him, preen him, rip him of any macho appeal and send him out mincing back into the real world looking like all those over styled generic gay men – no offence if that happens to be you – that are everywhere right now. You know, the ones that frequent the trendier gay haunts. Those bars which many of us pretend to like, but secretly feel at our most uncomfortable when standing in one of them, after having spent hours trying to look just as trendy and generic as everyone else in there.

Just what is all this leading to?

We, as gay men I mean, have always had our own particular styles which are often slightly twisted, or more extreme versions of what straight men and women are doing. This is true yes, we have always had our generic looks which have been very individual to our sexual inclination, if not individual in any true sense of the word.

We have mixed-and-matched men’s and women’s cloths, worn scarves, sparkles, hair tints and buckets full of other paraphernalia all to turn ourselves into something overly flamboyant and theatrical – this is our right, it is us expressing our inner gayness! Not always very attractive to others, but oh what fun it is! … (1482 words)