“You’re not gay are you?” my wife asked the other day.

Raising one side of my dark untrimmed monobrow into an inquisitive arch, I gently asked what, exactly, had caused her to ask such a pointed question after twelve years of blissful marriage.

“Have I,” I sniffed, “failed in some way to satisfy your animal lusts and desires?” No, she said, I had not.

“Have I paid undue attention to the resting actors who wait on us in restaurants?”

“No, dear, you have not.”

“Have I honed my body to the peak of physical perfection and hung out in steam rooms waiting for Mr. Perfect?”

She agreed that I had unquestionably not done the former, and that she had no evidence of the latter.

“What, then?” I queried.

“Well,” she said, “not many straight men get over-excited about exotic varieties of tea and fancy Chinese teapots. Whereas you,” she pointed out, “do.”

So there it was, then. Out in the open, words unminced. It was the tea. And as I sat there, clutching my exquisitely scented cup of first flush Darjeeling, I knew that I could not in all fairness express great outrage at her question. My sudden embarkation from the land of Lipton’s into exotic oolongs and florally-scented early pluckings from the inaccessible slopes of Northern India had taken me by surprise, too. And, I now recalled, my first encounter with Lapsang Souchong and shattering realization that there was a world beyond the teabag had taken place a quarter century ago in the company of a college contemporary of unimpeachably effeminate demeanor, while, however hard I tried, I could not remember a single heterosexual friend or acquaintance who has ever had more than a passing interest in the quality of the tea they drank.

My gay friends all tell me that they knew they were gay from early in their childhoods. But what if there are exceptions? There are exceptions to virtually every rule, aren’t there? What if I am the exception to this one, and this tea thing represents the first minor crazing of a façade that will soon be crumbling into small, perfectly matched pieces? What if years back I drove my true nature deep, deep within me – but not deep enough?

It isn’t as if I didn’t fool around a bit when I was a boy. What if that fooling around was the essence of moi, and the dashing, womanizing rake that I now present to the world is a tissue of conformist lies, a callous of untruth that I have constructed over my soft vulnerable inner self? What if this sudden fondness for tea is the first tell-tale sign of an impending eruption of homoerotic lust – the true flowering of the real me? If it is, what sort of gay man will I be? Will my family soon be watching me on the local news, sitting on a float in the gay pride parade, scantily clad in leather and chains? Will my speech patterns change?

My wife spends a great deal of time in the company of gay men, whose company she actively enjoys (and with good reason, I find myself saying aloud, when they so often provide a cultured and articulate antidote to the red meat gunghoism of so many of our compatriots.) One of them (Oh, my!) even suggested the other day that she must be a gay man in a woman’s body. Could it then be that I am as close as she could get to marrying a gay man, while still having someone to father her children? Can I turn her question round and pin part of the blame for this mess, if mess there in fact is, on her?

Quite a few of my own friends are gay men, too. I also enjoy their company. I don’t even mind all that much when they hug me and rub their prickly bearded faces against mine, except when my mother is present, when – yes, I admit it – it makes me nervous as all hell. (On the other hand I can’t say I actively enjoy being nuzzled by a beard, which may be a strike in favor of my heterosexuality, or may simply, I suppose, mean that I prefer smoother surfaces.)

When I was a teenager I spent a lot of my time reading my mother’s shelter magazines and imagining redecorating the house from top to bottom. I also attended an English boys’ boarding school where I frankly and entirely onanistically lusted after a number of my coevals and juniors – although I would claim that this was par for the course in that enclosed community. Finally, and this might be the killer blow, the piece of evidence that tips the scales, I was an art dealer for twenty years of my adult life.

On the other hand I enjoy sports – a taste which is certainly not popularly thought of as being typical of gay men. But some might suggest that there is every reason why a gay person would revel in the more physical sports, where finely honed muscles are on glistening fully-flexed display, and extremely fit young men are running around getting attractively hot. It is true that one might not watch curling for easily recognizable sexual reasons (although who knows what hidden passions might be aroused in some quiet Scot or Canadian by all that frantic sweeping as the stone grinds its inexorable way down the ice?) But might not an onlooker of a certain cast of mind extract a sexual charge, from the tension of an archer’s wrist and fingers in the instant before an arrows violent release? How different is this from the case of my unalluring schoolmate Runtle, caught in the chapel organ loft with a junior boy standing naked beside him and holding a length of piano wire taut between his outstretched hands? We never did learn what Runtle himself was doing, but it’s dollars to donuts, my friends, that the archer-like tension in that boy’s wrists was a major contributor to his thrill.

If sports are not, then, unequivocal proof that I am straight, perhaps the fact that I’m good at fixing things is. I do plumbing and wiring. I am interested in the way things work. I am practical, and I don’t mind getting my hair dirty. Then again, the world must be simply crawling with gay plumbers and electricians. We ourselves, now I think of it, once hired a central-heating man to install some ductwork, who in spite of being married, and whether he knew it or not (this was in a rural district where the suspicion of such things seldom arises), was clearly gay. The neatness of his ductwork installation was only part of the evidence, and although there is no particular logical reason for its being so, the decider for us, when added to his general demeanor, was his confession that it was his habit to mow his grass clad only in his socks and boots.

But even so, statistically speaking, a handy individual who is not professionally involved in the building trades, is, all other things being equal (and yes, I know, they seldom are), more likely to be straight than gay. So put a check mark in the “Author is Straight” column for that one.

I think that the clincher, however, is that when I told a woman friend about my new tea passion, rather than throwing up her hands and exclaiming that I must therefore be gay, she immediately doubted the wisdom of her recent advice to a girlfriend to drop a man who knew more than she did about fine china. “You’re obviously not gay,” she said, “so perhaps he wasn’t either.” And at this stage in my life I don’t particularly want to find that I am: it would be hellishly inconvenient, and I would have a great deal of difficult explaining to do. In the end, though, whatever counter-indicative tastes I might espouse, I simply don’t fancy it: the thought of having sex with another man rings no more bells for me than man-on-dog activity apparently does for Rick Santorum. My woman friend’s words were, therefore, encouraging, at least until she remembered a fact that she considered to be of great salience: “But you,” she pointed out, “are English. Straight English men have all sorts of tastes which would be a sure sign of effeminate gayness in an American like the china buff.” And it was at that moment that I exercised the most superhuman restraint I have ever exercised in my life, and forbore from telling her that as well as being quite cuckoo over tea I am also a connoisseur of English 18th century soft-paste porcelain.