The guy at the swimming pool didn't believe me when I went to renew my three-month pass. He thought my birth date was off by a decade. Same thing happened the other day when I answered the Vieux Campeur satisfaction survey. They ticked the 25-35 box without asking me. It's always nice when that happens. Obviously I look a certain way, dress a certain way. But that doesn't explain everything. You gain ten years, easy, when you become gay. Everyone knows that. Dorian Gray effect guaranteed. I say this for the benefit of straight mothers everywhere. They're often quite depressed about aging. There's a simple solution. Just so they know. You could say that at twenty I was actually forty, and today I'm twenty. That's what people tell me. They say I'm living my teenage years now. I see what they mean. But I think it goes even beyond that. I'm turning time on its head. I'm taking a walk through it. Doing things ass-backwards. I'm messing with the fast-forward and rewind buttons. I'm in Back to the Future. I'm mixing all the ages up, switching from one to the next, choosing them at random, creating a signature cocktail, my very own recipe. It's the same with clothes, the same with gender, it depends on my mood or the situation. I've always thought adults were bad at acting like adults. With the girls I'm seeing, I've rediscovered the tomboy I was as a child. Long time no see. That's why it was strange going through all this with Paul by my side. Not because of my sex life. But because part of the new me is about revisiting my childhood, a time before he was born, establishing a connection to the me that existed before him, a me without him. It was like being ten or twelve years old and being his mother at the same time. Two different ages at once. Or all the ages. Or no age. That's what one of the girls told me once, You have no age. Nice. So maybe that's why gay people never seem to age. At least, not in the same way.

15

The children on my mom's side of the family weren't brought up by their parents, there were maids, nannies, the teacher who had her own room in the château, the English and Irish governesses who took care of the rest, good manners, affection, then around eight years old, the children were sent to boarding school. The boys were shipped off to the Jesuits, the girls went to the nuns, dressed either in navy blue outfits or in their uniforms. They were told it would make them stronger, it turned out to be true. They'd cry throughout the first term, then they got used to it. Their parents were still their parents, it was the nannies and the nuns who were forgotten about.