It was 11 am and she had only just arrived back at her flat at St George Wharf. The sound of her six inch stilettos on the marble floor had awoken the night porter from his furtive sleep and he had eyed her contemptuously as she called the lift to take her to the fifteenth floor – the housing association floor.

She shuddered as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored walls of the lift. The reflection that glared back at her was merciless and she hardly recognised herself as “London’s premier gender bending artist.”

Oh God, how things had changed since she had started on the club scene 14 years ago. How had she come to this?

It was her tiny eyes that struck her first. It was almost as if they had been consumed by her pudgy, oblong face. All that remained were blood-shot slits, poking out from beneath her heavily painted trademark false eye lashes. The lids were encrusted and outlined with a week’s worth of thick mascara and sat below heavily drawn beetle brows. Once her eyes had sparkled with optimism and energy, now they just looked lifeless.

She had to face facts – she was verging on becoming what she had always detested in other drag queens – the Docker in Drag. Worse than that though, was the realisation that she really did not care anymore.
Oh, how different it had been when she had burst on to the scene at just 15. She had been the youngest drag queen in London back then. The Sun had even run a short piece on her where she had talked fearlessly about being different, urging all young queens at school to throw open the closet door and be themselves.

This was the young boy from Basildon who had made the most of his short, podgy frame and androgynous looks. A lot of glitter, determination and an eclectic line in multi-coloured fright wigs had led to him hosting at every major club across London. The bullied school boy with his man boobs and mousy, shoulder length hair had done good.

As the lift doors swung open Pru struggled to remind herself of how far she had come. Who would have thought she would get re-housed from a sink estate in Stockwell to Vauxhall’s premier riverside development? It had thrilled her to think that somewhere just floors above no less than John Major was busy studying cricket scores, while in some other far flung corner of the complex Chelsea Clinton was sinking into a bubbling marble tub.

She had hoped that she may bump into them on the day that she moved in when five Brazilian muscle marys had dragged her furniture through the foyer. Oh, if only the former P.M. knew what really went on down below, she had thought with glee.

But six weeks later reality had set in. She may now have had a fitted Ikea kitchen and flush, mirrored wardrobes, but nothing else had changed. The novelty had quickly worn off and she was left with her usual routine – endless nights in clubs surrounded by the usual hangers on with K dripping from their noses, followed by long days in a damp Camberwell studio thrashing out “Project Pru” – her first solo album which she hoped might take her to the big time.

In her brighter moments she could actually see success looming on the horizon. She envisaged herself glimmering from a TV set with her own talk show. She heard herself delivering cutting remarks on The X- Factor. But after yet another night of performing Lady Gaga and traipsing around the sauna handing out flyers for “Porn Idol”, she had no choice but to face the reality. And the truth was that five months off her 30th birthday the force of nature that was once Prudence Chastity Chambers was tired.

Pru closed the door to her apartment and fell against the wall. She removed the stilettos that clung to her swollen ankles and threw them across the hall. In just ten hours time she would be putting them on again and getting ready to stand in front of a microphone to lipsynch to the usual saucer-eyed punters.

Moving towards her boudoir she began to remove the towering blue wig that had taken half an hour to get in place. Collapsing on her leopard print duvet she took in the silence. She had no energy to start removing her makeup. It had been in place for the last two days anyway. She glanced at her beloved Dalmation Bruno who was snoozing in his usual spot next to her bed. Reaching out to him she ruffled the soft hair around his diamond collar.

“What you dreaming of Bruners? Let mummy join you. Let’s go somewhere nice together, darlin’.”

She removed the five crumpled ten pound notes, her night’s wages, from her garter belt and placed them in their usual place at the bottom of her makeup case and closed her eyes. She was just beginning to drift off to thoughts of her own coke fuelled interview on Tonight With Jonathan Ross when she was brought back into consciousness by a guttural cry from the adjacent bedroom. This was followed by the rhythmic thump of a headboard and the sound of a lamp falling from a bedside table. Bruno woke and started barking.

A Latin voice rung out from the other side of the wall.
“Aii, aiii, aiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…..”

Any hope of a rejuvenating sleep vanished as Pru realised that her oldest friend Kyle was doing his bit for international relations two metres away.

It’s a deeply sad story, made all the more poignant by the video Borges created celebrating same-sex love. The link to this is below.

Borges found some comfort and support in the superb work by The Trevor Project which helps suicidal young gay people.

It’s the kind of community led initiative that we need so much more of in gay life. It’s about reaching out to vulnerable individuals and making them feel that they belong. It’s also about sharing and there’s not enough of this in the gay world.

Young gay people are faced with so many difficulties when they come out. The process does not stop with a declaration that they are gay, but is ongoing. The victimisation does not magically end and the search for a space where they feel they belong often seems endless. Some, like Borges simply do not make it.

It’s at this time that the gay community should step up to the mark and bring these young people into the fold. They need to feel welcomed, included and respected for who they are as individuals. Shamefully, there seems to be very little of this going on.

What seems to be more common is that young gays are seen as consumers ripe for exploitation by an avaricious gay market who have no empathy for people’s scarring experiences or fragility. They are plucked from the closet and coerced into conforming to a harsh gay aesthetic that advocates sex and cold, hard cash.

Where are the role models for gay men that represent even a smidgen of the creativity and sensitivity that Borges clearly possessed and yearned for in his video? It’s not these that a young gay man finds when he stumbles out of the closet, but a maze of rampant, selfish sex hunters and jaded porn “stars” stabbing each other in the back as they grab for the man with the biggest cock and, most importantly, biggest wallet.

Instead of help lines offering support to vulnerable gay youths, our magazines and “hook-up” sites are littered with endless adverts for sex toys that resemble instruments of torture rather than pleasure. Any hope of finding a relationship quickly diminishes amongst a barrage of demands for “XXL”, “Sleaze,” and that that most disillusioning phrase of all – “No Strings Attached.”

Just look at the news this week about New York’s new gay hotel – the gloriously named Out NYC. http://gawker.com/5874955/manhattans-new-gay-hotel-has-some-sexy-secrets-it-wants-everyone-to-know This rancid concrete block is just adding the finishing touches which promise a staff of 18 – 24 year old Latin men, two way mirrors and a Grindr-esqe meet and greet “ap.” Welcome to self-esteem central.

Any young gay man wanting to work here will be given the dubious job title of “lifestyle consultant.” Most odious of all, the finest rooms Presumably those with the stain resistant walls), will be given to the punters that the staff decide are the “hottest.” It’s possibly the finest, most nauseating example I have yet encountered of the gay “community’s” merciless attempts to force us to conform to a shallow, destructive aesthetic.

Is it any wonder we have so many gay men drugging themselves into oblivion as they strive to reach this unobtainable “ideal”? The real shame is that this is created by the very people who are supposed to be their gay “peers” – the corporate creatures who in brutally, irresponsibly coercing young gays into this “lifestyle” are just as reprehensible as our first persecutors – the straight school bullies.

Only time will tell what delights await the punters at the knocking shop that is the Out NYC. Perhaps antibiotics will be left on the pillows instead of chocolates. No doubt the room directory will contain a welcome message from some insatiable porn slut. There will certainly be an increase in sales of Crisco from the local pharmacy. I’d like to say condoms too, but as we know many of the gay business men who have appointed themselves “community” leaders are not always particularly hot on promoting safe sex.

The entire enterprise encapsulates all that is wrong with the gay scene. It symbolises everything that is wrecking the lives of the young people who come out and are manipulated by it and then spat out, or wheeled out the back of some club after overdosing on it. It’s the antithesis of what the next generation should be striving for and miles away from the beautiful, tender vision of gay interaction that Borges encapsulated in his video.

Borges’ video begins with the words: “There is importance in loving each other the way each of us deserves.” This applies as much to how gay people behave towards each other as it does to how heterosexuals treat us. Let’s honour Borges’ memory by giving all those young people fortunate enough to make it through the pain of growing up gay a community that is worth celebrating.

It had become a reflex action for him now and he never questioned it. There had been a time when he logged on with a feeling of anticipation, wondering what new delights the Pandora’s box that was gay London’s sexual McDonalds might offer him.

Occasionally, he had even experienced something bordering on excitement when he was waiting for a reply from someone who he had exchanged several messages with – someone who, he even dared to think, could potentially be the elusive “one.”

These days though the process was nothing more than a release. It was a way of exorcising another day spent fulfilling meaningless tasks, lamely trying to flog yet more advertising space to people who either put the phone down on him, or told him through the contemptuous tone of their voices that he was a scumbag loser.

Logging on to GayRomeo he glanced at the online profiles in his area. 196 and it was only 7pm. What were they all looking for he wondered? Was everyone feeling the same as him? He pictured gay men all across London in a similar situation to himself – sitting on the unmade bed of an overly expensive rented room they had fallen out of that morning, trapped in a constant state of inertia as they scanned endless profiles peremptorily demanding “No Strings Attached”, “XXL cocks” and “no drama queens.”

Perhaps the prospect of another meaningless meet and the opportunity to fling their DNA at a stranger for fifteen minutes before another carb deprived dinner was their only way of feeling alive after another day of selling out to a corporate bitch of a boss.

Sean lit a cigarette and decided not to think about it. His fingers and eyes did the work for him as he quickly typed the reason for being online into the box at the top of his profile. It glared back at him in clinical, bold green letters: “FitBrit28 is online for SEX.” Tossing the laptop across the duvet he went off to the kitchen to fix himself the usual pre-dinner protein shake.

He was interrupted by a loud kissing sound from his bedroom – it was the alarm he had set to alert him to a message on the site. Moving back into his room he sipped at the sickly banana liquid and looked at his screen. The profile name said “Prince Harry.”

Opening up the message he saw that Prince Harry was in fact yet another hot Latin guy of about 26, wearing dark glasses and posing seductively on a white sofa in a soulless white room while he licked his lips lasciviously. They were all professional photos and had clearly been taken either for a porn site, an escort profile or by a lonely sixty year old amateur photographer whose sole social outlet was being a member of a gay camera club in Kennington. Sean’s considerable prior experience of Latin men told him that it was probably all three.

He put down the protein shake and lit another cigarette. His eyes narrowed as he sucked on it like a latter day Joan Crawford eyeing her prey. He opened the message.

“Hi sexy. Wanna fuck?”

Sean fell back on to the bed and sighed. This individual had clearly not had the benefit of Prince Harry’s education, but Sean had long ago given up expecting to find charm school graduates on the internet. It was akin to the probability of finding a monogamous, long-term relationship in the sauna.

He looked at the photos of Prince Harry again. There were 4 of them and in each one he was wearing a different pair of dark glasses. He was on the cusp of replying and telling him that the eyes are the gateway to the soul, but then he clicked on the last picture. Prince Harry was sprawled against a fireplace. As in all the other photos he was wearing a loose fitting shirt, but was naked from the waist down. His right hand swung a gargantuan black dildo in the air like some trophy of war. His left cupped an awe inspiring cock which he modestly referred to in his profile text as “One massive fuck stick.”

Sean stubbed out his cigarette and peered closer at the screen. He could not take his eyes off the huge member as it glistened at him in the light from the open fire. He reached for the keyboard and typed frantically: “Yes, where are you gostoso?”

A reply came back at once. Prince Harry was just down the road in Oval. It was a fifteen minute walk. Sean asked for the address, looked it up on Streetmap and said that he would be there in fifteen to twenty minutes – just enough time to apply some Clarins moisturiser and the magical L’oreal under eye concealer stick which perpetuated the lie that he was 28.

It was only after agreeing to the meet that Sean realised that he should really read Prince Harry’s profile. It was written in huge upper case letters, littered with spelling mistakes and made no discernible attempt at punctuation, but the message was clear:-

I M AN ORDINERY, VERY HOT LATIN GUY WHO OCASIONALY LIKES TO BE A VERY BAD BOY AND FUCK SOME NICE TIGHT ARSE I LIKE TO BE NAUGHTY AND BEND YOU OVER AND FUCK YOU UNTIL YOU CANT TAKE ANY MORE AND SCREAM WITH PLEASURE AND THEN I WILL WIP OUT MY MONSTER FUCK STICK DICK OF DEATH AND I WILL SQUIRRT MY HOT LATIN CUM ALL OVER YOUR FACE AS YOU GORGLE AND SWALLOW AND CHUKE AND BEG FOR MORE IF YOU ARE GOOD YOU WILL GET SOME MORE

Sean paused. He looked at Prince Harry’s pictures again. The familiar arrogance glared back at him. He hesitated and rasped deeply on his cigarette. His eyes drifted up to the top of his profile. Oddly the green letters said that Prince Harry was online this evening because he was searching for a “relationship.” And then he looked at the cock again.

He messaged back: “I am about to leave, but I want you to know that I don’t get fucked. Is that ok? I love your cock and want to worship it though. Are you happy to play?”

The smacking kissing sound filled the room again as another message sprung back: “Sure baby. That is fine. 07792077082. Call when you’re outside because buzzer doesnt work. Cu soon!”

Sean looked at the profile again and paused. He wished he could see Prince Harry’s eyes.

He gagged on one final swig of the protein shake and walked over to his full length mirror and flexed his muscles, still pumped from his gym session. He threw on one of the Fred Perry T-shirts that he always wore for hook-ups and reached for the L’oreal. He scrawled the address down on a piece of paper and added Prince Harry’s phone number to his I-phone under the name “Latin Trade.”

Only as he was rushing up Clapham road in the rain did he realise that he had not asked what Prince Harry’s real name was.

It’s something that I have repeatedly addressed in the pages of this blog. It’s something I continue to fight with myself.

Last year life coaches Ade Adeniji and Darren Brady used Alan Down’s ground-breaking book The Velvet Rage to lead a workshop for gay men.

Here is the article I wrote about the event in Time Out:-

http://www.timeout.com/london/gay-lesbian/article/2762/looking-back-in-anger

Following on from this Adeniji and Brady are running a weekend event entitled The Quest on 28-29 January. As I write this places are filling up fast.

The weekend promises to be interactive, inspirational and, most importantly, non-judgemental. It’s an opportunity for gay men to share their experiences and stories.

This, as I have said before is the only way that we are going to evolve as a community.

Full details can be found here:-

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=1459223671c40b8639334e31b&id=05cda45ef9&e=5bc1a8d4a4

It takes courage to face our past and embrace the future. It takes support to give us the strength to recognise our short-comings and create the person we always wanted to be.

This workshop represents an opportunity to do just this.

I am fortunate in that I have a supportive family. We have had our differences in the past and, it is fair to say, my mother has found out things about me that no mother should really have to hear. To her credit though, she has put those things aside and, despite rocky patches, our relationship remains strong and something that I treasure.

I accepted about a year ago that we are never going to agree on some things. Catholicism is off limits, as is anything reported in The Daily Mail. We have come to respect one another and understand that neither of us is going to change.

Like many gay men, I have always been closer to my mother than I was to my father, who died five years ago. My relationship with him was not marred so much by my sexuality, but by the issues that he had carried all his life.

He was born in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and was separated from his own father for the first four years of his life. He occasionally saw this remote, frightening man across barbed wire. Before then he was palmed out to nannies. The Australians liberated the camp in North Borneo a week before the prisoners were to be sent on a death march. It’s strange to think that if this had not happened I would not be here today.

Freedom brought another kind of imprisonment for my father. It was not long before he was sent to a boarding school in England, while his father concentrated on building up everything that the family had lost when war broke out. He saw his mother three times in eight years.

As I stood at my father’s grave this year I thought about all of this. I stood there and cried for the first time in almost a year. I wept for him. I wanted to say how sorry I was for all of the pain that this outwardly strong, even arrogant man had kept hidden inside him all of his life; the fear, hurt and rejection which had led him to destroy himself.

I also wanted to say that I understood why our relationship had been so difficult. I needed him to understand that there was no blame.
My mother often says that my father and I are very alike. Part of me is proud of that; he had many fine qualities. The other part of me is terrified. I do not want to live in a constant state of fear. I want to be able to trust people and forge meaningful relationships.

Standing under the dark Sussex skies and looking at that grave, I thought about some of the men I had known. I realised, not for the first time, that it was my father who had led me to them. I reflected on the spirals of love addiction I had found myself in for cold, remote men – men who resembled him; men who I felt may be able to rescue me and offer me the support that I did not get as a child. These were the men I was in awe of and the men I could only get so close to.

The most significant of these was a Frenchman who I met in a sauna about a year after my father’s death. He walked past me and told me I was “beautiful.” I saw he had a ring on his finger and asked him if he was married. “No,” he said, “the ring belonged to my dead father.” I told him that my father was dead too. In my messed up head our bond was cemented.

Over the next nine months I tried everything I could to win the approval of the aloof, intense, but ultimately heartless man who became known as “Frenchy.” I’d wait for his every text, I would run to him whenever he called, even if he was on GHB and I knew that three other men had been in his bed that day. I refused to accept that he only wanted me for sex.

I thought that if I could win him it would make up for the flawed relationship I had with my father. I yearned for him to consume me.
Needless to say it all ended in tears, or rather in the words of the Smiths’ song “it never really began.” This “relationship” existed only in my head. Only by taking a trip out of London did I get myself back together again.

When I regrouped I realised that something had changed in me. I was beginning to understand that I did not need anyone’s approval. I did not need my father’s and I certainly did not need some insubstantial man whose idea of wooing me was to say he wanted to “f*** me like a dog in front of a bunch of Brazilian hookers.”

As I said goodbye to my father again this Christmas day I thanked him for leading me to men like “Frenchy.” Yes, it had been a harsh awakening, but it had finally made me appreciate that I already had everything I needed inside of me to make it.

Walking away in the dusk I made a vow not to allow fear to close me off from relationships and opportunities like my father did, but at the same time to appreciate that I only needed the right kind of people in my life. Moving into 2012, I feel that I have found those people and for that I am very grateful.

I stood across the road and waited for the traffic lights to turn green. As I lit a cigarette I realised that I had never looked at the front of the building properly before. I have lived just down the road from it for 2 years, but rarely walked past it in the daytime.

I have been there at night, of course. Or rather in the morning. Not so long ago I would rock up there at 5am on the arms of a well known drag queen in a blue fright wig. I would then spend a few hours sauntering about trying to attract the attention of the kind of men who I know have always been bad for me. I’d take whatever drugs were offered to fit in, to feel more at ease. And then I would slink off to the sauna or home alone, my ears still ringing.

As I stood outside the club this morning I remembered the first time I went there. I must have been 17 and it was on a furtive trip to London. I was going to a night that was then called Rude Boys. On the train I studied a map and then got lost at the Vauxhall gyratory. I still remember that night vividly – finally getting into the club, the 5 large Jack Daniels I needed to waltz into the cruise maze in my track suited glory.

I steered well away for many years. My university days were spent getting drunk in Soho, usually with older friends who taught me about life. About being gay. One of my dearest friends, Ian, is now 61 and has been more of a father to me than my real father ever was.They were carefree days and everything seemed possible. I swept through them like I was in a dream. I did not think about the future, because everything seemed possible. Being focussed seemed a waste of time. Yes, I admit it now, I was obnoxious and arrogant.

Ten years later I was back at Fire. It was a different experience to my earlier, adolescent visit. Wending my way to the club that advertised the scantily clad Brazilians when I was 17 was exhilarating. The great unknown. It was a gay nirvana promising respite from years of bullying. Maybe it was even the place that I could find a sense of belonging.

The second time I went there I was still as lost as all those years before when I had clung on to my London A-Z to find the way. But this time it was no longer exciting to feel so lost. I felt jaded and hopeless. I felt I had wasted so much time and that it was too late to achieve all of those fragile dreams I had had in my university days.

Nostalgia led to anger. Rage at myself for not harnessing the potential everyone had once told me I had. Fury at my father, at the school bullies. Hatred of my own immaturity and the weakness that had led me back to a dark club under renovated railway arches with another group of people who were desperately searching for some kind of enfranchisement. People who supported one another as surely as they destroyed one another.

I spent six weeks going out in Vauxhall. I put myself on automatic pilot and moved around like the sort of ghost that Grace Jones talks about in her song “Night Clubbing.” It was a way of blocking out my fears. It was also a way of avoiding moving on in life and finally trying to achieve the things I had always wanted as a kid. Those things now seemed impossible to find. Like the people I was going out with I was beginning to think that this was all there was. If I was going to unravel then, I thought, I might as well do it dramatically.

And then something kicked in. Even now I am not sure what it was, but for argument’s sake I will call it futility. Everything I saw around me seemed so pointless. I wanted to go up to people and shake them and tell them to stop killing themselves. Reality arrived one morning when I got back home, looked in the mirror and saw that I was doing exactly the same thing. You can’t take the moral high ground when you’re the one who needs to butch-up and take responsibility.

That morning as I looked at my thin face with the dark shadows under the eyes, I also thought about all the people who believed in me. I thought about Ian. I recalled the stories of the exciting, often painful life he had led. As I thought about his fearlessness and optimism I saw someone that I could be in the future. I saw that I could choose a future. But I knew that I would only get there my wising up and, most importantly, growing up.

And so, this morning, when those lights did finally turn green I walked across the road and past Fire feeling calmer than I have done in a long time. Even with its new sign and promised revamp, I knew that I would never find what I am looking for (whatever that is), by going back in there. For the first time in a while I realised that I am, perhaps, not as lost as I sometimes think I am. And, most importantly, somewhere inside my head I heard the words of the novelist George Elliot: “It’s never too late to be who you might have been.”

Merely a cursory analysis of the divas that gay men admire reveals their propensity for the dramatic. Judy Garland, Edith Piaf, Amy Winehouse. These are just some of the larger than life, tortured creatures that we find infinitely fascinating.

It’s all about the grand gesture, you see. Why walk quietly into a club when you can sweep in with your entourage of hangers on and sneer at the doorman “do you know who I am?”

What’s the point in quietly accepting that someone has upset you and moving on when you can have a full-blown sambuca fuelled confrontation in the middle of Old Compton Street? After all, it’s more fun that way, isn’t it?

Recently people posted a link to a Wikipedia article about Histrionic Personality Disorder on to Facebook. Symptoms of this little known malaise include attention seeking, seductive behaviour, manipulation and exaggerated displays of emotion. Unsurprisingly, subsequent online comments from gay men indicated a high degree of self-diagnosis.

According to the wiki article Histrionic Personality Disorder usually affects women. A similar condition in men is known as narcissistic personality disorder. A day after I read this article a friend of mine mused: “sometimes I think gay men are narcissists.”

I understand his reasoning. We spend countless hours in the gym to perfect our bodies and then stand inanely in front of a mirror with a camera taking pictures of ourselves for hook-up sites.

We eat healthily and obsess about body fat and yet when the weekend comes some of us can be found under railway arches having unsafe sex and pumping our bodies full of toxins. It just doesn’t compute.

Yet the one thing that does seem to remain constant is the endless search for validation. Our excessive behaviour often hides a need to be loved, respected and noticed. The issue is that we often go about it in the wrong way, hurting ourselves and others in the process. The real tragedy is that often nothing seems to be enough.

We like to live inside our heads and create our own fantasy world as we morph into serial seducers and femme fatales. I glibly refer to my own sometimes reprehensible behaviour as “passion.” It helps to excuse and gloss over the childish way I have behaved towards the men I have felt rejected or used by.

The Shirley Bassey defence mechanism of “the show must go on” has become my faithful companion. I lose count of the number of times a night has ended with me giving “the greatest performance of my life” – which generally means excessive drinking, anonymous sex and boundless petulance. It’s an ugly, pitiful sight.

Little research has been carried out on Histrionic Personality Disorder and given the condition’s similarities with other mental health issues such as co dependence, the money is probably best spent elsewhere. It is believed, however, that early childhood trauma can be the cause.

Here we’re back on familiar territory for gay men:- the distant parents (often the father), the playground bullying, the feeling of growing up as an outsider in a heterosexual world. It all goes back to Alan Downs’ work in The Velvet Rage.

Downs’ book caused controversy when it was published last year. Some accused him of betraying the gay cause. “We have fought hard for what we have,” they shouted, “and now you are saying that we are inadequate.” The truth is that Downs said nothing that a long line of gay novelists, journalist and critics had not alluded to before. He simply expanded upon it and addressed it in a more direct way.

Confronting our demons is not easy to do, but if we are to evolve as human beings then we need to be more honest about who we are and how we got there. We are all fallible. We should exult in our complexities and the quirky behaviour that makes us individuals. Drama can be fun and it’s a form of escape. Gay men know better than anyone that bottling up emotions and concealing their real selves only leads to misery.

Somewhere along the line, however, we need to strike a balance. When we turn channel our feelings of unworthiness in the wrong way we destroy both ourselves and others. We should not be ashamed of our emotions, but neither should we become enslaved by them and reliant upon over compensation and selfishness in order to survive.

Our strength should come from talking to one another about our feelings and experiences and sharing our stories in a constructive, mutually supportive way. Far from signalling weakness, recognising our shortcomings will help us rebuild our fractured community. This should be the next logical step in gay evolution.

But what does it really mean?

1. I have a varied selection of Adidas and Reebok trackies, t-shirts, and trainers (which are all bought with my Harvey Nicks charge card.)

2. Said items of clothing will emerge from my flush-fitted Ikea wardrobe for a Vauxhall Chav Fetish night only. Oh, and for the gym. The gay only gym.

3. During said fetish night I will drink only red-stripe beer (and subsequently work off the calories at the gay gym for the rest of the week.)

4. I go to said gym 4-6 times a week because straight men are, of course, renowned for having zero percent body fat.

5. I meticulously pluck and wax every hair from my body because that in no way feminises me.

6. I will stifle any scream or whimper when another man penetrates my perfectly trimmed orifice (even if this is with an oversized, inanimate object.)

7. I am built like the incredible hulk, but will run squealing “not the face” should I encounter a group of straight football hooligans (I know how they behave because I have studied all the Triga DVDs.)

8. No one would guess I am gay at work even if the odd Shirley Bassey number pops up between the heavy Trance on my Ipod shuffle.

9. I am keeping my closet door half open so that I can climb the heights as a media sales executive living in Maida Vale.

10. I have no deep seated shame at all, but really see no point in celebrating gay culture. I want to blend in and don’t believe in labels.

I would like to thank Andy Medhurst and Christopher Leonard for their ideas and contributions to this article.

And, more crucially, what do you do when you reach that point?

Everyone’s experiences are different. For me the crunch point came about four years ago. I was drinking my weight in Jack Daniels every week. Almost every Friday night I sought release from the job I loathed by languishing in a sauna snorting K off random men’s locker keys.

Yet it didn’t seem to interfere with things. I held down the thankless job. I numbed the feelings of lack of self-worth that came from years of bullying with all the aplomb on Neely O’Hara in Valley of The Dolls.

Periodically I questioned my behaviour, but then I looked around me. Wasn’t every other gay man I knew doing the same? Wasn’t it just called being young and carefree? Where was the problem?

The problem came at 2am one morning. In a dark cabin in a sauna in Waterloo one of the three anonymous partners I was with shovelled a little too much of the magic white powder up my left nostril. Within minutes I was sweating uncontrollably and writhing about on the plastic covered mattress like an animal.

Needless to say the three men vanished pretty quickly and left me to it. I must have been lying there for only five minutes, but it felt like an eternity. In that time I saw my past flash before me in vivid detail. I saw my childhood, I saw the school bullies. And then I saw everyone I knew who had died. Lastly I saw my dead father. I was convinced I would soon be joining him.

Crawling along the cold stone floor I called for help. I needed water. I wanted an ambulance. Two Brazilians who worked there dragged me back into the cabin. In agitated tones they told me to wait until it passed. I waited. As soon as I felt better I stumbled to the locker room to collect my belongings. And then the inevitable tears came.

I remember that one of the staff looked at me and told me I was beautiful. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said softly: “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

A similar question was asked by the therapist I took myself to see a month later: “When you go to these places, when you do these things, I wonder what you lose each time?”

I finally began to wonder too. And as time has gone on and I have started to focus on my future, I have begun to ask in the pages of this blog what gay people are sacrificing every time they compulsively act out; every time they seek release from the kind of internalised anger that Alan Downs so eloquently described in his book The Velvet Rage.

I can only speak from my own experiences, but I believe they are not uncommon in other gay men. The childhood victimisation; the distant father; the over-protective mother; the feelings of being an outsider from an early age and the search for enfranchisement through meaningless sex; the addictive need to feel worthy and attractive; the transient solace that is found in anaesthetising your pain.

The tragedy though is that nothing is ever enough. We can fit a revolving door at the entrance to our flats for ManHunt encounter after Gay Romeo encounter after Grindr encounter to waltz through. We can attach a sign to our rear ends proclaiming “entrance in constant use.” The validation each notch on the bed post gives us is so fragile. A hundred nominations to enter Gaydar’s auspicious Sex Factor contest will never bring the real empowerment that can save us and build a worthwhile foundation for our future.

And going back to the poignant words of my former therapist, what exactly do we lose each time we let some stranger paw at our immaculately buffed bodies, those bodies of the iron butterflies we have become? For me I began to lose the ability to harness any genuine sense of intimacy with another man.

I began to distrust everyman I met. What was the point in giving someone a chance, of even trying to share my fears and hopes and dreams when the experiences I had chosen in the past had shown me that all anyone wanted was a few moments of selfish pleasure?

The deep seated rage that many gay men have does not, however, have to be this destructive force. It is all about how we channel it. There comes a point where we have to check ourselves. Hedonism can be blissful, but like everything there is the risk of it being carried to extremes.

There is the very real danger of us sabotaging any chance we have for happiness. Unless issues are addressed there is the probability of becoming a 55 year old man haunting a sauna like a ghost with only his clutch bag of G for company.

It’s something that a significant segment of the men who use London’s gay scene could do with pondering. It is not easy to make changes and face harsh realities or to deal with the baggage from our past. Anyone who does so should be applauded for their bravery and maturity.

I am not saying that I know the right way to go about this. Again, everyone is unique. We are all fallible human beings and works in progress. Yet what we can do is offer one another support as we continue to share our demons and try to reconstruct a community that focuses on mutual respect and empathy. We owe ourselves this much.

Online “hook-up” sites have revolutionised the way we interact with our peers. They’re symptomatic of the liberated western society we so often take for granted. Few who use them can remember the time when gay men lurked in the bushes seeking some much-needed companionship. Even fewer can recall the era when to do so risked being arrested, imprisoned, losing your job and being totally ostracised.

If the U.K. has made huge bounds in the quest for LGBT equality, it is easy to forget that in other cultures, not so many air miles away, LGBT people suffer unimaginable abuse as they struggle to find ways of expressing “the love that dare not speak its name.

It is these lives that photojournalist Bradley Secker has documented in his exhibition “Iraq’s Unwanted People” at Soho’s First Out Cafe. Secker ‘s work follows the lives of LGBT Iraqi refugees as they seek safety in Syria. The tragedy, however, is that even having escaped Iraq they are unwanted as they are shunted from Syria to Turkey.

Many of Secker’s shots have been taken on the streets of Damascus. They detail brutal beatings, furtive cruising and unparalleled human rights abuses. The opening of the exhibition was followed by a Skype conversation with an anonymous refugee who encapsulated the horror as he uttered the most memorable, spine-chilling line of the evening in a voice cracked with emotion:- “you have no idea what they do to people like me in Iraq.”

As we exult in our freedom, how can we can begin to understand what it is like to be blinded in one eye because of one’s sexuality? How can we conceive of a society that sticks a metal pin through a man’s throat? How close to our everyday lives and humanity is the idea of an individual having his leg repeatedly slashed?

This is a poignant, important exhibition that all gay people living in London should see. We need to show our support and empathy with gay issues that reflect something other than the difficulties of getting on the next guest list in the Vauxhall village.

As we log on to our Grindrs, gasping in awesome expectation at the pixelated dimensions of our next conquest, we need to spare a thought for those gay men who hide in the shadows or sit in a cafe sharing frightened glances as they risk their lives (and their family’s lives) for just a few moments of precious companionship.

These men do not have the luxury of online “dating.” They do not have anything as radical as Grindr. The closest they get is searching for a partner by using coded messages on Blue Tooth. And, even then, every time they go online they gamble with being exposed, entrapped, blackmailed or worse.

These brave men, who do not receive the attention they deserve from our mainstream press (let alone much of our gay press), do not have the luxury of tapping in a postcode to escape from their daily reality. For them location is much more than a moment of pleasure. It means safety, struggle and the frantic search for survival with no guarantees.

Yet if there is one assurance we can give them it is our support.