Instagram is a bit of a thing with us. It was just me, to start with. I thought I’d been late to the party when all my mates at the office started using it and telling me I was out of the loop. Archie and the rest of the lads from school were right on it. It actually gave me flashbacks to our school days, where one person was left out of a gang because of some trivial detail. Suddenly it was like we were back – I wasn’t part of the ‘cool gang’ because I didn’t have Instagram. I didn’t take pictures of my French toast or eggs benedict on Sunday morning; I didn’t get someone to snap my ripped torso on the beach as I casually stepped off a speed boat, glass of something bubbling in one hand and the other draped over whoever I was dating. And then, quite suddenly, that’s exactly what I was doing. I downloaded it one Friday night when I had a cold and couldn’t join the boys for a night of pills and pounding music. It was 2013, just before Matthew and I started dating. I was single and bored and I just downloaded the app to see what all the fuss was about. My first photo was of a massive burger I’d made out of hashbrowns, thick slices of cheddar, bacon, and a slice of fried chicken. Hashtag food porn. People liked it.
So I carried on in the weeks and months that followed. Got a bit of teasing from the guys about being a hypocrite. Then got some jealousy from them too because what I was posting was working. People were liking it. I admit it helped that I was good looking. That’s what a lot of the comments were about. That and my physique. It wasn’t long before people started to refer to me as ‘Hot Charlie’, send me messages to ask me out on dates, even tag me in posts where they’d profess to love me and want to have my babies. It does things to you, that sort of attention. Makes you not want to stop. And I carried on. Everything in my life became documented. Well, almost everything. A certain, very photogenic slice of my life. One that was prepped and colour-toned and filtered to fuck before being posted at the best time of day for ‘my audience’.
I was a bit more daring in those early days. There were some mildly risqué shots, or me waking up looking oh-so-perfectly dishevelled in another guy’s bed with hashtag morning-after-the-night-before as the caption. One or two shots of Archie and me with our arses out on top of a mountain somewhere on one of our holidays. But I cleaned it up completely when I started going out with Matthew. He just seemed so polished. So perfectly presented. It actually made me look at the photos on my feed with embarrassment, ashamed I had ever thought such childish silliness was attractive or likeable. I was suddenly entirely about presenting a very rose-tinted, picture-perfect portrayal of a young couple’s life in London. Especially since Matthew came pre-loaded, so-to-speak, with little Titus, not quite nine at that point, and every bit as adorable as any child could be. I’d never really factored kids into my life-plan that much … until I saw Matthew with Titus. And I knew I needed that. Needed to be part of that. Needed to belong to a unit like that. And so I became Daddy, like he was Daddy, and before long, Titus had two perfect daddies and we were the cute same-sex kings of Instagram.
I wasn’t naïve: I knew a lot of people loved us because we were gay parents, and may not have bothered to like our photos if we’d been a guy and a girl. And it came with the occasional bit of nastiness too – some comments, now and then, that bothered me at first but which now I greeted with an eyeroll and a shrug. But it was all just so easy. The photos of us having ‘fun days out’ took a bit of hard work. Some of them needed to be meticulously staged so as to look off-the-cuff natural. My followers lapped it up, liking pics of the single, adorable playboy-turned-family-man, with a family life so perfect it could have been designed in a lab.
Not perfect enough for my mother, though. She thought it empty and shallow, and as I took that photo of Titus grinning, holding up a slice of cake, Matthew leaning in opened-mouthed to take a bite out of it with mock-greed, I could see her give a little shake of her head. ‘People like it, Mum,’ I said, flicking through the resulting snaps, picking the ones with just the right amount of natural happiness in Titus’s eyes. ‘It’s cute. It’s sweet. It’s funny.’
‘If you say so,’ Mum said, picking up my copy of the Observer, discarded on one of the sofas, to browse through its food monthly supplement. She never read the actual paper. She saw it as a left-wing rag. ‘Did you have a good shop?’ she said, whilst scanning an article on Nigel Slater’s allotment tips.
I walked past her and sat on the opposite sofa, two cookies on a plate in my hand. ‘Yeah, just got the book I wanted and picked up some food for dinner.’
‘And we made a new friend,’ Matthew called out from the kitchen.
I shifted a little in the sofa, pulling
