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“young queens” annoys him his reaction is instant,
“BATTER YIR FUCKIN CUNT IN, SON!” He is in
no way ineffectual.
Denise and Brian grew up together on the same
housing scheme, a place to which Denise says he
will never return. With the additional knowledge of
narrator, Brian explains, “Denise never really fitted
in back there. Too camp; too much of a superiority
complex.” Obviously, Denise did not fit in primarily
because he was gay, but it is interesting that the narrator
doesn’t exactly say that. Instead, he gives us
other options to add to our unspoken assumption
of prejudice. This is borne out by the fact that even
when Denise moved away from the scheme into
the gay scene of central Edinburgh he did not find
acceptance: “Gay punters that hang around Chapps,
The Blue Moon and The Duck hate Denise. His
stereotypical queen stuff embarrasses most homosexuals.”
So in effect Denise is a double outsider
– rejected both by scheme and scene alike. This is
not as bleak as it may at first seem though; we learn
that Denise “loves to be hated”. Although he actively
chooses to be disliked he manages to retain a wide
circle of loyal (and often heterosexual) friends.
Denise is not the only character with a penchant for
camp; Brian himself engages in camp banter with his
heterosexual friends, “Raymie sighs … then puts his
tongue in my ear. I peck him on the cheek and pat his
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
arse – You’re raw sex, Raymie, raw fuckin sex man, I
tell him.” The emphasis on camp throughout ‘A Smart
Cunt’ may have a significant function in the text, apart
from providing humour. Marty Roth quotes Andrew
Britton as saying that the over-the-top performance
of camp requires a ‘sense of perversity in relation to
bourgeois norms” as well as resulting in “the frisson
of transgression” (Roth, ‘Homosexual Expression and
Homophobic Censorship: The Situation of the Text,’ in
Bergman ed., Camp Grounds, 1993). These two qualities
tend to be possessed both by Welsh’s writing and
by his characters; in this case the use of camp helps to
create this sense of transgression.
The key point about ‘A Smart Cunt’ in this context
is found in the narrator’s attitude to his gay associates,
Denise and Penman. They are his friends, their
sexuality is not an issue for him, or indeed for others
in the group such as Veitchy, Raymie and Spud. Brain
has a sound knowledge of the gay scene and the gay
lexicon. For example, he recognises when Denise is
choosing to act like a stereotype, and he appreciates
who is a queen and that the term does not apply to all
homosexuals. This very aware attitude is thrown into
relief by his diatribe against the crème de la crème of
Scottish masculinity, the Hardman (actually a “big sensitive
blouse”), “the Scottish Hardman chips a nail, so
he head-butts some poor fucker.” In Brian’s schema it
is the Hardman, not the homosexual, that is the ‘other’.
547
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