So I looked around the room with this weird mix of nostalgia and… Actually, maybe it was just nostalgia, but in the serious pain-for-something-lost sense. And then I looked at Oliver. And his reaction was very much not nostalgia. It was the opposite of nostalgia. Like fuck-this-shit-algia or something. I think he’d have been more comfortable at a bullfight.

“Are you hating this?” I asked.

He had to raise his voice to be heard over the music. “By what metric?”

“Um? Any metric?”

“I believe I can honestly say,” he shouted in that nightclub nobody-can-hear-this-because-nobody-can-hear-anything way, “that I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would enjoy watching two people I don’t know get married in a disused train tunnel full of repetitive electronica and flashing lights more than I currently am.”

I tried to be cool with that. Or even to be flattered by it—after all, it would have been a bit weird if my boyfriend had been super happy at the wedding of my arsehole ex. But the truth was, the arsehole ex wasn’t the only issue. This issue was that Oliver was…well.

Okay, this was difficult. Because the reason I’d needed to date someone like him to begin with was that I’d needed to distance myself from the parts of queer culture that looked bad to a certain kind of rich straight person. And while I’d come to realise that Oliver was more than a respectable job and a wholesome jumper, it still weirded me out that he found so little value in what I’d always instinctively thought was our community.

“You don’t feel, like, connected to any of this?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

He winced. “I wish I did and I’m sure I should. But no.”

“It can be fun, though,” I tried. “I mean, isn’t it great to be in a place where you know nobody’s judging you for who you are?”

There was whatever passed for silence in a room full of wedding noise. I got that sinking sensation that I hadn’t had for a while, where I knew I’d said the wrong thing but I wasn’t sure how.

“Lucien”—Oliver had a pained, sincere look about him, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut—“I love that you feel accepted by this world, and I’d never want to take that away from anyone. But I’ve never felt any of”—he made a slightly helpless gesture—“this is for me.”

“It could be for you.” That probably wasn’t right. “I mean, it is for you.” That probably wasn’t right either.

He leaned a little closer to my ear so that he could stop having to yell complex things about his relationship to identity politics over wedding music. “I understand that you’re trying to make me feel included, but I’m afraid you’re doing the opposite.”