Day 42: Being a Girl

Unashamed exhibitionist that I am, in all honesty it's amazing I've never done it before - but this weekend for the first time I dressed up in drag. My girlfriend Emma had a brilliant time painting my face to 'make me pretty', and the universal comedy value of shoving a couple of balloons inside a t-shirt is something anyone can appreciate.

With a black roll-neck jumper, a wig, and some fake glasses, she was going as Andy Warhol. Somewhere along the way I became 'Joyce' - a pretty rough looking thirty-something housewife with a penchant for pottery classes. We set off to a cross-dressing valentines warehouse party called 'Macho Minge' - but it was a few bus journeys away, in Hackney.

At the beginning of the night in particular, the distance to the party seemed vast. As the bus snaked up through South London to Elephant and Castle, I became quite aware that I was the only man on the bus dressed as a woman. I wasn't sure how best to handle this situation, even though I'd had ample time to develop a strategy before leaving the house. Part of me wondered if it might be best to actually pretend to be a woman. I decided that this might end up being a gamble I'd regret however, and realised that there really wasn't any good way of breaching the situation, and instead decided to just stare at the ground in quiet, fearful shame.

Things got better once we left South London however, once we started being surrounded by people who could appreciate the joke. Brilliantly, I'm also pretty damn sure a bunch of pissed polish blokes were genuinely giving me the eye at one point (to be fair, I did have one hell of a rack). Still, after a sustained campaign of blushing, we eventually we got to the party, where things loosened up considerably. It's funny how walking into a room full of bearded men in dresses can have this effect, I'll freely admit.

After spending the night drinking, dancing, and being photographed by questionable men who in retrospect will probably end up doing terrible things with pictures of me, it was time to take my clip-on earrings off and get a taxi home.

Despite the immediately overwhelming sense of "OH GOD MATT WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING I AM TERRIFIED" it ended up being a great party, and a really entertaining chance to play up to stereotypes like silly buggers and pretend to be a girl for the night. I played hard to get, I threw tantrums, I lost my handbag, and was repeatedly touched up by strange men. The defining moment of the night however came at the very end when I was presented with a beautiful home-made valentines card, and - big girl that I'd become - I found it very difficult to stop myself from welling up.

Thank you. You deserve so much better than a slag like me. x