Exchange Students says country 'breaks your gaydar'/adamfoxie* says his was busted too

Adamfoxie* in France, particularly Paris knows very well how his Gay-dar was broken. It was broken by the young bell hobs, so good looking refined body and language like, outspoken in a nice way.,,,but they just wanted dollars and was there with my partner, who had cheated on me because I was better looking than him..he said..doesnt that sound like a good reason!- lol..excused me...It took him/me wks after landing on the "china Seas": 747 by Pan-nam to get over the gay-dar thing.  I know mine stopped working and about his(companion)..I don't care.



I packed up my stuff and got on a plane to France to begin my Erasmus year. However, I haven’t been shipped off to any bustling French metropolis, oh no. Instead I find myself in a town called Arras in Nord Pas de Calais. Never heard of it? Neither had I!

If my life was a Facebook group last week, it would have been called “The awkward moment when you think you can speak a language and then you move to a country and it turns out you don’t actually understand anything”. Où est la bibliothèque?!

I have been suffering a major case of The-Only-Gay-In-The-Village syndrome for the past couple of weeks. This new column will trace my adventures trying to discover a gay scene in a small French town.

The problem with France is that it breaks your gaydar. And I pride myself on my gaydar, I have literally never been wrong. The one time I was wrong, she actually came out four years later, so I was retrospectively right. And that’s all that matters. See, none of the usual signifiers apply here, as European women have stolen everything that makes you “obviously” gay in Ireland. On Friday, I saw a girl in baggy jeans, checked shirt, boots, tattoos, piercings and dog-tags. In Ireland, this would have screamed lesbian to me. But she was with her boyfriend. It’s terribly confusing. At home, one can play the game “Spot the gay” to one’s heart’s content. However, when on mainland Europe, you have to factor the game “Gay or European” into your game of “Spot the gay”. And that’s where it gets confusing!!

I also saw a girl in dungarees the other day. But she’s probably just French. I know I am stereotyping here, but that’s what makes “Spot the gay” fun! None of the other Erasmus students are even a tiny bit gay. Everyone one of the girls have boyfriends. And I haven’t seen any other students that seem to be either. Indeed, I keep getting a lot of stares around the campus, as I dress in quite a “dykey” way I suppose.

I’m 90% sure I encountered a girl of the Sapphic persuasion in the toilets of the Irish bar the other night (don’t ask) but in the typical lesbian way of things, we ignored each other and avoided eye contact by staring at the ground!

There is nothing more disconcerting than Google-ing a place name and ‘gay’ and coming up with basically no results. And gaydargirls and pinksofa have similarly turned up nothing. I’m not on the search for someone to date or anything, just on the search to find a “scene”. This town is making me miss Dublin a lot. Plus, there is no nightclub at all, never mind a gay bar. I think I’ll be spending a lot of my weekends in Paris and Lille…but until then, the search for the elusive small town French

tabula rasa 
Gaelick...
adamfoxie*


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