My secondary school was an all boys school, and it offered a wide range of clubs and societies, probably including testosterone club, fight club, and penis jousting club. Yet despite the opportunities I had, I only joined four clubs during my entire time at Bishop Vesey:

1) Chess club (after all, there ain't no party like a chess club party!)

2) Pokémon trading card club (which was so badly organised it lasted only one day)

3) Homework club (which was actually a euphemism for after-school detention)

4) The gay patrol

The gay patrol was not a cover band of Snow Patrol and Elton John. Rather, it was the name my class dubbed me and a handful of other geeks. The members of the gay patrol were:

Michael

Sam

Dominic

And myself

We weren't actually gay. A least, not that I know of. Sometimes I'm still not sure if even I'm completely straight.

The word gay has three meanings. Here's Urban Dictionary's definition of gay:

GAY:

1. happy. "We'll have a gay old time."

2. homosexual. "You DO know he's gay, don't you? Notice his homoerotic pornography collection."

3. a generic insult, used by adolescent boys to buff up their masculinity. "Man, these seats are gay. I can't even see what's going on!"

So when our classmates called us 'gay', they weren't referring to our blossoming homosexuality. No, it was a reference to everything unmasculine about us - our love for video games, our inaptitude for sports, and our fear of fights. We infuriated our peers by sitting at the front of the class in every lesson. We'd play Pokémon cards in the morning, Pokémon on our Gameboys in the afternoon, and we'd wrap it all off by feeding our Tamagotchis on the bus home. Yep, what we lacked in testosterone and real friends, we made up for in virtual Japanese pets. We were geeks, misfits, a ragtag gang of squeaky prepubescent nerds, but we were united by the fact that the rest of the class hated us.

But Dominic left after just three years at Vesey, and Michael after five. It was just me and Sam in the end, at which point a rival social group called the "Gold House Crew" grudgingly accepted us into their fold. This group liked cars, football and Mike Skinner, none of which I gave a shit about, unfortunately. But I pretended to like football anyway by going to Aston Villa matches, even though I knew none of the team's names. I'm glad I was let into some social group though, otherwise I'd have spent my lunch breaks alone in the library, quite possibly the loneliest kid in school.