lynsey's profile

A Chapter Five: Jazz Hands I got to Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop just in time to see an old bald headed queer in a black fedora put his foot in a bucket of water. It wasn’t even a joke or anything, and he shook his leg like a dog and swore and then moved his ladder along to wash the other side of the window. A posse of inebriated neds swaggered past with half full Irn Bru bottles, singing ‘Oh, Flower Of Scotland’. Two of them were wearing blue and green checked kilts with yellow desert boots. A ...

Beneath the breast of sorrow nests a coral heart as bold and bright and beautiful as a stolen apple. It breathes in the mortal memories of broken embraces and life's unspoken promises, long after the charms of human arms and lips fall silent like whispers in winter.

Chapter Four: The Best A Man Can Get It was Gary who helped me choose the name ‘Allen Cassidy’: he said it meant ‘handsome hero’ and, apparently, he’d googled it in some baby name directory online. Of course, there were the added connotations such as ‘Butch’ and ‘Hop-a-long’ which was why I started using it onstage at first, when I was doing my homo-erotic hillbilly and my gay cowboy impersonations; but then for some reason it just stuck. I lit a fag and sat down at my computer and then I pul...

Chapter 3: Manhole I declined Nick’s offer to go for a drink after the burial, but as fate would have it Gary’s old dear recognized both of us from some fleeting photograph that was taken years ago at a coming-out ceilidh, and she insisted that we accompany the family in the hearse on the journey back into town. I intended to stand my ground and refuse, but it’s a painful process trying to make polite excuses to an octogenarian whose first-born child has just died, especially when the guy sta...

Chapter Two: The Big Man Gary Quinn was like a surrogate father to me: he taught me how to fish, he taught me how to shave; fuck – he even taught me how to piss while standing up. Nowadays, when I think of him, I’m reminded of that old Cat Stevens song that Boyzone had a hit with in 1995; the only difference was the guy who wrote that became a Muslim and called himself Yusuf Islam, whereas the two of us changed our names first before we gradually converted our bodies. The first time I met Gar...