Ex-Hot Press columnist Dermod Moore reflects on unholy fetishes and Irish attitudes to sex

I'm in my mid-fifties now, looking back on a time that was, in many ways, fiercely lonely yet enriching. I wrote for Hot Press for 18 years, in my thirties, stretching (perhaps a little too long) into my forties; it was a different life, I’m a different person now. It was a life lived to the full in some ways, a life scraping the bottom of the barrel in many others. And I am bemused I had the gall, the bare-faced cheek, to document my exploits, my sadness, my excitements and pleasures.

I have no regrets, and subscribe to the rock’n’roll philosophy so well described by William Blake: the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I was sex-obsessed, no doubt about it. The title of the column, Bootboy, was taken from the small ads that appeared in the back of Hot Press; there was frequent ad in particular that went somewhat along the lines of:

Bootboy, 24, seeks Master. Let me lick your boots, Sir.

At the time I started writing the column, no one was writing about the stories behind such ads, the secret passions, the unholy fetishes; and yet those ads were a lifeline, before the internet, to so many people, most especially in rural Ireland. I know because I’ve heard it said so many times over the years since, from men who used to place them or reply to them, usually drowning in a close-knit, claustrophobic family-centric community. At that time, there was a progressive movement towards equality for LGBT people. Indeed, gay male sex was decriminalised shortly after I started writing the column, due to the sterling efforts of many great people. Not the least of them was my mother, Phil Moore, who sat down with another mother, the then justice minister, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, and persuaded her to bring an end to the barbarism of such a cruel, inhuman law.

And yet the movement for LGBT equality, in order for it to succeed, needed to focus on our ordinariness, our next-door-neighbourness, in order to persuade legislators of the need to enshrine our right to equality in our laws. And it did so with great success, in the end. We now benefit from a constitutional right to marry each other, and there are extremely progressive laws that do away with psychiatric assessments when a person declares themselves to be a different gender to that which they were assigned at birth. And, at the time of writing, it seems a dead cert that the next leader of our country may well be a gay man; at the very least, the leadership contest has been marked by a general indifference to his sexuality, with as much attention given to it as it would be if he were divorced or married to a Zulu heiress. It almost gives me more pleasure that his Asian heritage and name has not featured at all in the discourse, a far cry from other societies that are race-obsessed.

It would be churlish to deny how important these achievements are. A casual, almost throwaway remark by my young nephew last year – “Oh, boys can marry boys now” – filled my heart to bursting, because it was so unimportant to him, just one of the many facts about human existence he was absorbing and digesting. That ordinariness is extraordinary to me. As much as I know it’s not the norm yet throughout Ireland, and there are still families and communities that are blighted by hate, I feel confident that it can only get better.

We still, in Ireland, however, have a huge problem about sex. And sex is what the Bootboy column was primarily about, rather than about being gay. It was written with a punchy queer defiance, and sometimes a pervy, deliberately unsettling voice, which ran counter to the LGBT political necessity to avoid frightening the horses. I wanted to frighten the horses; there’s an anger in some of those columns that my middle-aged self marvels at. I was trying to put into words what is still difficult for many people in Ireland; to talk about sex and its meaning.

If I were to get on my high horse again now, and pick a typical Bootboy topic to rant about, I’d be fulminating against the “Swedish model” laws introduced two months ago that criminalise the purchase of sex. It’s a disgrace that the identified problem – the exploitation and trafficking of women – has been interpreted as a moral issue about sex, and that the solution that has been adopted, the criminal conviction of the purchasers of sex, is seen to be the right answer. It’s a disgrace because most women resort to sex work for economic reasons; they do it to survive, to pay their rent, to feed their children, to escape oppressive regimes, to meet the demands of their pimps, and to support their drug habit (because drugs are the only way that they can escape the pain of their lives).

The common sense solution, therefore, is to tackle poverty and homelessness, to fund the police properly to fight organised crime, and to fund decent refugee assistance programmes. Also, substantive psychological support needs to be offered to help such women get off drugs and build better lives for themselves, so that they can make choices about their lives and bodies that are not driven by desperation. And if they then choose to do sex work for a living then that’s their choice.

The law shouldn’t be used as a tool for regulating behaviour such as prostitution and drug abuse; the only healthy route is to decriminalise and throw all the resources of the state to help support people to live lives without fear, without unbearable pain. The fastest growing economy in Europe sends families with children out to sleep in Garda cells or parks. Sure aren’t we a great little country altogether?

The “Swedish model” that has been enacted by the Oireachtas (a term that unsettled a group of Swedish psychotherapists, to whom I was teaching a sexuality workshop last year, when they heard how it was used internationally) does not tackle these problems at all. Ignoring the pleas from the actual sex workers themselves, the law makes their lives much, much harder, because anything that carries the threat of criminal conviction drives it underground. And if something is underground, it becomes incredibly dangerous.

Groups like Ruhama, a counselling service for sex workers funded by the Catholic Church, prefer the comforting piety of a moral judgment enshrined in law, rather than a much more nuanced and difficult sustained government effort to address the root causes of the problem. The complex reasons why a man should purchase sex from anyone do not get addressed; he is demonised, because the sexual man should be punished. Of course he should, because sex is bad, isn’t it? That fucking penis, why can’t a man just zip up and put it away and forget about it?

I’m now a psychosexual therapist (surprise!) working with the effects of shame and guilt and wrestling with our collective inability as a culture to talk honestly about sex. And no matter what a man’s orientation, the same issues crop up time and time again; they don’t talk to anyone about their desires, they don’t know how to, and they’d die of shame if their dirty little secret was out. And anything that doesn’t get talked about ends up festering and feeling dirtier and can end up taking over.

Whether its nature or nurture, the fact is that men in Ireland are still terrified of talking about sex honestly, even with their best friends, let alone their partners. (And God forbid that Mammy would ever find out.) This is as true for a gay man on a chemsex binge for days taking bareback loads from strangers on Grindr in Dublin city centre, as it is for a cross-dressing father of four in Tralee, as it is for a teenage hurler in Sligo wanking till the small hours to porn on his phone every night till he’s convinced he’s an unlovable pervert.

Shame. It’s a killer.