Short Back, Sides, and a Web of Deceit
A simple haircut, a sharp pair of scissors, and one panicked lie that became a years-long domestic sitcom starring my imaginary wife and two very inconsistent children.
Welcome to Bearly Politics - my corner of the interwebs where I overthink politics, occasionally make sense and sometimes tell stories about everyday nonsense, like lying to my barber for years.
I feel like what I’ve been writing lately has been… depressing.
If it isn’t to point out the constant excusing of racist behaviour, the Tory party being a necessary evil and a constant stream of criticism about Reform with the occasional shout at the government, it’s looking at the terrifying possibility of Project 2025 like initiative slowly metastasising towards our own country.
All feels a bit fucking grim, doesn’t it?
So let’s change tack today (a term I secretly love, because in my mind I’m bodily changing the course of a small boat called “Jolene”), and talk about LGBTQ+ issues - and not sad LGBTQ+ issues like the constant anxiety that our rights are going to be under attack by populist governments who we give the apparent ick to.
No, I would like to talk today about a smaller, far sillier and far more domestic issue - the everyday weirdness that is being a gay man who keeps having to “come out.”
Because, dear reader, I am one of those gay men who pass - I’m basically what the old-school forums of the interwebs called at the time “straight acting”, a term which I’ve always found to be just a bit ridiculous. What in the world does that even mean? Is there a choreography to it I should know? An instruction manual? A “How To Perform Heterosexuality in Ten Easy Steps” guidebook?
Either way, it’s what people say when they can’t completely figure you out. I look, in short like some woman’s husband, possibly a Sarah, who has wandered off by himself in the Marks and Spencer Food Hall and is now standing slightly confused at the self-checkout1. Or Aldi. Or Tesco - it all really depends on the day to be honest, I have the brand loyalty of a pigeon. I look the part, big, lumbering, always in a rugby jersey of sorts (Gant, not Springbok, everyone calm down) with a haircut that positively screams “low effort pragmatism.”
The point of this exposition is that people look at me and they make an assumption - and in fairness, I let them. The thing they don’t realise of course is that, for people like me, coming out isn’t a single cinematic of self-discovery and then everyone is in the know - it’s a small but persistent administrative task that I have to do.
Every new colleague, friend, plumber or Uber driver. You learn to drop in little clarifiers into conversation, like tiny fabulous breadcrumbs to help people over to the conclusion.
“Oh, my husband said the other day…” or “I went to Croatia with my husband over the summer…”
It’s gently done, so no one feels ambushed - the aim is to normalise without drama, sort of like a para-social footnote in the small-talk.
It’s something you become quite adept at, and there are many gay men who will know what I’m talking about - except for one place I’ve never managed to do it:
The Barber’s Chair.
It’s not down to fear or prejudice - nothing like that at all. It’s just a deep seated instinct to avoid awkwardness. The barber’s chair is its own tiny microcosm of masculinity - it’s all easy banter and manly neutral ground. You talk about the rugby, the weather, holidays and just how expensive everything’s got. It’s basically the conversational equivalent of comfort food. To introduce anything that might cause even the smallest flicker of hesitation or awkwardness feels like tossing a spanner into a well-oiled, slightly sacrosanct machine.
It started years ago now, but he asked the question:
“So, you seein’ anyone, Mate?”
An innocuous question, to which I should have answered, “I am, I’m married in fact - to a man.” (Though possibly without the emphasis). Except in my panic, and with a man with a sharp pair of shears close to my face, I blurted out:
“Oh, yeah”, I blurted out, “my girlfriend… Lottie”
And that was the moment I created a whole damned person.
Lottie, in that split second of panic, arrived in my mind fully formed, and when he asked “yeah, what does she do?” I answered, “Er, pastry chef. Up in North London. Yeah, her mille-feuille could make a man cry.”
He grinned. “Lucky man”, he said, and there is where I left it, thinking to myself that that would be the end of it2. A harmless little fib - tucked away in the folds of small talk, never to be revised again. Except for one problem - barbers, as it turns out, have very long, very specific memories.
The next time I went in, after all the basics had been covered (weather, rugby, cost-of-living), he looked at me, via the mirror, and asked, “So, how’s Lottie?”
Fuck.
3Now, instead of doing the normal, logical thing and saying “oh, I was joking” or “actually, my husband’s doing well,” I decided to double down.
“She’s good,” I responded, “Busy week at the bakery. Yeah, someone ordered a croissant tower. You know how these things go.”
He nodded, approvingly. “Ah, yeah, mate - women and their projects, eh?”
And so, like some sort of queer Scheherazade, I kept the story spinning. Lottie became more detailed, more elaborately and fully fleshed - more real. She’s not just a pastry chef now - she’s an award winning pastry chef. She would love nothing more than an Aga, but we can’t justify the installation fees. She hates Prue Leith with a fiery passion and, somewhere along the line, became vegan.
And that would have been fine. Until one day, the man caught me off guard and asked “You got kids, then?”
And I froze. Because that question - that cursed, damned question - comes with no good exit routes. You can’t say no, because that invites even more questions. You can’t say yes, because that starts an entirely new subplot.
But panic is a helluva thing.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice an octave higher than usual - and for some godforsaken reason, I added “Two of ‘em.”
He grinned. “Boy and a girl?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What are their names?”
Fuck. In that moment my brain - in full-blown fight-flight-or-freeze mode - opened the Telegraph Birth announcement section and blurted:
“Tarquin and Penelope.”
I could see him blink. “Oh,” he said, very politely.
“Yeah,” I rushed to add, “We… didn’t want anything too common.”
And just like that, I became a mid-thirties father of two. Over the years my two wholly imaginary spawn have aged at wildly inconsistent rates. Tarquin has been three, then ten before going back down to six again - all dependent on how confident I feel in the chair that day.
Penelope once had a ballet recital, and then somehow ended in pre-GCSE drama. She’s apparently a menace and talks back. Pulls the dog’s tail - oh yes, we have a dog as well, a decrepit and foul humoured daschund named Horace who “doesn’t like people.”
Once, at the end of a particularly beautiful summer, I said we’d gone to Cornwall for the holiday. Which was fine - until he asked where exactly, and I said “Truro… Or, near Truro. Well, not near Truro - more inland. Kind of coastal, but not by the beach - you know?”
He smiled at me kindly, looking at me in the way you would at someone you suspect of having a mild meltdown.
We are a family with lore - Lottie and I, living with the constant aroma of baked goods with Tarquin and Penelope (year three and five, though, subject to revision) and our beloved Horace, who’s had “a bit of a limp since last winter.”
Every four to six weeks (depending on how busy work is), I sit there, asking for a short on the side, longer on the top, inventing new details about my imaginary family - threading them into conversation like I’m workshopping a twee BBC sitcom that absolutely no one asked for4.
“How’s the wife?”
“Oh, she’s good - busy getting ready to cater a wedding this weekend. Nightmare client. You know how it goes.”
“And the kids?”
“Still alive,” I say, which, to be fair, is the most accurate piece of information I’ve been able to maintain about them.
“Horace - still going strong?”
“Barely,” I’ll say with a sigh, like a man who is preparing himself for inevitable loss.
And the best part of this whole continued farce? I’m pretty sure he knows I’m bullshitting him.
He’s definitely seen my husband around - once he even cut his hair the same week, and I’m sure he must have clocked the resemblance. Two tall men, living in the same area, holidays that are suspiciously aligned.
I think we’ve reached a kind of silent detente. He knows Lottie isn’t real, I know he knows Lottie isn’t real but neither of us will ever acknowledge it. It’s become a bit of a dance - polite, mostly harmless and needlessly absurd.
There’s something… comforting about it. While the lie began as panic, it’s evolved into a weird safe space - a small, well known story that we can both maintain, like two actors who’ve forgotten the original script but can’t stop performing what’s turning into an evolving storyline.
And honestly? I think he prefers it this way - he gets a neat, domestic soap opera to accompany his clippers, and I get fifteen minutes where I don’t need to explain myself.
Lottie gets to live another day, Tarquin gets a new football coach, Penelope wins a generic “school award” and Horace - well, he survives another winter.
And me?
I get a decent fade, a bit of peace and the faint knowledge that somewhere, in the imagination of a man with a shaver and pair of scissors, my fictional wife is baking something glorious.
Help fund my ongoing deception - paid subscriptions keep Bearly Politics alive; shares help more people discover it. Lottie, Tarquin, Penelope and Horace would all be thrilled.
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Everyone deserves politics, a bit of laughter and mild existential dread in their inbox.
Think somewhere between “rugby dad” and “man who knows his way around a flatpack.
Reader, it was not that.
The Golden Whisk Award for Innovation in Viennoiserie - completely made up, because when you’re in a hole, you may as well keep digging.
I imagine by season four there’ll be a new dog and definitely month’s long issues with the dishwasher.
After another pretty grim day, thank you Bear for making me giggle - a lot - I look forward to the next instalment.
Oh man, I just love stuff like this. I have been on both ends of these sorts of conversations, albeit with less lore involved.
You have *got* to kill Horace off, Bear. It's the next logical step of the story. Your barber probably half expects it.