One of the most striking things about being in London is that I realise how, despite having had a fairly liberal, non-religious schooling, and parents who didn't push it when I said I didn't want to go to Mass anymore (after I realised what Bullshit was being spouted about my sexuality), my Catholicism has informed the way I view myself more than most English people can comprehend. It's not just Catholicism, though - I once went out with a Church of Ireland man whose issues about sex and shame were just as pronounced as mine. I think it's more like an ethos that seems embedded in our culture - and I don't need to explain that to anyone reading this in Ireland.

The connection between sexuality and spirituality, in corrupt form manifesting in my life as a powerful association between guilt and sex, is something that I realise won't change in my life. I'm stuck with it; I can't see sex without reference to a spiritual or symbolic framework, whether that's making love or fetishism or dionysian excess, seeking something meaningful in the most casual erotic encounters, even if that meaning is steeped in an emotional masochism, a spiritual self-denial, that only makes sense if somewhere deep down I see my sexual acts as sinful. My erstwhile compulsion to explore taboo sex is evidence that my sexual journey is not based on a simple search for pleasure or a drive to experiment in a playful way, but something far more mysterious, a trawl through the underworld of desire, the fleshly sinfulness of hell, implying a polarity somewhere in my psyche that, logically, must point to a heaven somewhere, if only I could find it. It's that particularly Christian split between the priest and the pervert - not really surprising, as I've written before, in a religion which has as its emblem a grotesque celebration of suffering flesh on an instrument of torture.

But rationality hasn't beaten the spirit out of my sexuality. I've been realising, over a painfully slow period of time, that I'm largely a spiritual being, and that my abandonment of (by?) the Catholic Church, when I was a hot-headed rebellious gay teenager, meant that I threw the baby out with the bathwater. My divine child of playfulness, innocent sensuality and creativity was left to rot in the bottom of the cesspit of a decaying Irish churchly morality, exposed in recent years to be led by hypocrites, spouting the increasingly irrelevant party line while exercising their own perversions and powertrips, especially over generations of children in their care.

Research shows that people with a faith or spiritual outlook are far more content with their lives than others. But, however tempting it may be to believe that by eating a tasteless disc of wafer every Sunday, one is eating a bit of God, and gaining in spiritual weight, I would only have to take a look at the man in his dusty dress handing it to me, with his ossified sexuality and his institutionalised misogyny, to know that it would mean nothing to me. The man and his message must sit comfortably together for me to listen, let alone believe.

Paradoxically, of course, gay men for millennia have sought refuge in ministry to escape the obligation to marry, and I've no doubt that if every gay man of the cloth were to leave his post tomorrow, the Holy Roman Empire would collapse. A man can come to terms with his desire nature, but without truly saintly abstinence, desire has a habit of becoming monstrously powerful if suppressed - hence the paternalistic Catholic church's projection of evil onto sexual women and queers, the two main temptations that torment the supposed celibate, who tries to honour only the Virgin, and not her shadow, the Whore.

In some cultures, notably the old Native American tradition, gay men and lesbians hold a special sacred role in the community - their difference is honoured, not shamed. Sadly, as the Native American culture has succumbed to materialism, the old respect for the sacred has become corrupted, so that alcoholism, gambling and drug addiction have become major problems, in the fumbling search for bliss on earth. Similarly, I believe, gay men in our search for bliss have lost contact with a sense of the sacred, and are riddled with a mawkish sentimentality, and similar problems of alcoholism, drug and sex addiction, and the emptiness that inevitably follows such excess.

Peculiar to the gay male scene is a mockery of the feminine - as seen in the drag queen, artificial, comic, cutting, and dangerous with her power. The sexualised vamp/whore/goddess that gay men so revere is the antithesis to the Virgin, but both archetypes reveal much about the souls of the women-fearing men that place them on their pedestals - whether cabaret stages or altars. The camp sensibility eschews real feeling in favour of an artful pretence - a showy triumph of style over content. But oh, what style! What glamour! How Absolutely Fabulous, darling!

I went to get hugged by a guru last week. A forty-seven year old Indian woman called Amma ("Mother") who, when she was a child, went around spontaneously hugging everyone. Word spread about her particular joyous quality, and of course given the 'backward' ways of the Indian people, they began to flock to get hugged by her, seeing it as something special. She's been hugging people every day of her life since then, with a simple message that people don't hug enough, and could do with a bit more love and affection. She doesn't give speeches, she'll hug anyone, what she has written is inoffensive and follows a long line of Hindu spiritual teachings on love, and the enormous charitable educational and spiritual movement that has built up around her in India and worldwide is non-denominational. The first two items on her "manifesto" (for want of a better word), as mentioned in her website, are equality for women and AIDS awareness. Erm, sounds alright to me.

I went with my friends and eventually got hugged by 4:30am - all told, there must have been three thousand hugged that night. I was asked to gently rest my head on her shoulder while she put her arms around me and laughed and chatted away and murmured in Hindi in my ear and stuffed my hand with petals and sweets. The next person was right beside me, and as soon as I stood up her helpers guided his head down on to her other shoulder. Non-stop embracing, all night long.

It's not the hug that mattered, it was the idea that something so staggeringly simple as being hugged by a warm and giggly maternal woman could be elevated to a sacrament in this modern soulless age, without dogma or brainwashing or shadow, as far as I could see; and, trust me, I was looking. All money raised by her goes to the charity, and I could see no trappings of personal wealth - when she left, after gleefully chucking flower petals over us all at 6:30am, she trotted along into a modest camper van.

I took the train back home with petals in my hair, and caught the commuter rush, with

stony-faced besuited people crammed into uncomfortable damp proximity, as it was

raining. But the grin on my face stayed, for

quite a while.

Amma's website: www.ammachi.org