BRAN, the hero of the most famous voyage tales in Irish myth, leaves for the splendour and delights of a world beyond the sea, which was described to him in a dream. When he gets there, he and his crew stayed there for what they thought was a year before the crew began to get restless and demanded to return home. They were warned that centuries had passed outside but Bran was persuaded to leave.

They were told that if they were to set foot on Ireland they would suddenly age all the centuries they had been away. The voyagers neared land and one of the crew leapt ashore, heedless of the warnings. He immediately turned to dust. Bran wrote his story on Ogham wands and threw them ashore before turning his ship back into the unknown. “And from that hour his wanderings are not known.”

I am beginning to understand the peculiar longing that is particularly Irish. The emigrant’s longing to return home, and the exquisite difficulty of doing so. That peculiar mix of nostalgia and melancholy that afflicts the expatriate Irish, combined with the (unconscious) resistance to the changes that have occurred in that time.

I watched an Irish traditional band play last week, “The Northern Celts,” a group of second-generation Irish from the North of England. What was strange about them was how the spontaneity that I was used to, listening to sessions by Máire Breatnach and friends and others of her calibre in Dublin, was missing. They were playing museum music. The vitality was just not present. Now I am not saying that every traditional group in England is moribund. But I was left with the firm impression that the wildness and the danger of the sessions I have enjoyed in Mother Redcap’s and elsewhere would have frightened the living daylights out of these middle-aged men with misty eyes, exhuming musical corpses.

Channel 4’s Out recently portrayed Ireland as a bright new liberated happy-go-lucky queer-tolerant Nirvana in right royal tabloid style. I had a little frisson of something akin to guilt when there was an open appeal to Ireland’s queer Diaspora to return. (“Please,” said the bould Kieran Rose brazenly to camera.) Truth to tell, I have been thinking recently of ways in which I could return to Ireland (the conquering hero returns, laden with treasure, to the sound of triumphant cheers). Oh, if only it was that easy. But I’ve only been away for a year-and-a-half, and even then with regular visits home. Hardly the stuff of myth . . .

I have a genuine fear for the newly-liberated bright-eyed Dublin denizens in particular. It is that they might transform themselves into what in London are termed Boyz, the name coming from the trashy tabloid freesheet that is distributed weekly in the gay bars and clubs of this huge city. The Boyz subculture is a very attractive one, for it is consumerist, youth-centred, drug-friendly, and very fashionable. For the image, look no further than Take That!

CLOSETED SCENE

Let me define the Boyz mentality. Appearances are everything. Every weekend, they meet en masse and trip on E or acid, bopping away to hypnotic music and having a fabulous time. It has a very American gloss, for the feelgood factor is the sine qua non for membership of the “scene”. Being so youth centred, it casts older men into the realms of has-beens and geriatrics. And when I say older men, I mean as ancient as thirty years old.

The collective mentality centres on bland homogeneity. Everyone who belongs by virtue of their age or looks or clothes colludes with everyone else in conforming to the ideal, to a degree which sometimes verges on the hysterical. Outsiders bear the brunt of the defensiveness against being different. For outsider, read someone who is lonely, unhappy with being seen as a sex object, and who tells a story of isolation and oppression that is still the lot of most gay people in Ireland.

It is not that I begrudge people having a good time. No, scrub that. It is because they’re bent on having a fabulous time. I begrudge them their bland and unthinking transition from teenager to sex object. I fear that that is what they believe being gay means. But then that is obviously my bitter and twisted nature. (Always the worst type of queen, spoiling the party.)

The Boyz mentality is apparent already in Ireland. The biggest ads in Gay Community News are full-page ones with pictures of moody muscled hunks in towels advertising instant sex in saunas. Ads for sex-lines (“Live Gay Sex Action!!”) are increasing, with similar images. Turn to the small ad pages of this magazine. “Gay hunk stripped for action!” “Manhunt!” scream the titles, as the sultry bods titillate and tease. Consumerism is changing the way we see ourselves.

Of course, there is nothing that we can do to stop it. We live in an open economy; it is the way of the world. The people behind gay businesses have been in the vanguard of changing the way we see ourselves, putting their money where their convictions lie, which is the most impressive and risky of commitments. They have provided venues for us in which we can dance, drink, socialise and have sex; I do not wish to turn the clocks back. Besides, as every advertiser will tell you, sex sells.

We should be aware as a community that at the moment there is a very powerful message (in our print media at least) to our young people that being gay is as effortless and hedonistic as the advertising. There have been many letters over the past few months to Hot Press and to GCN speaking of the crassness and the unfriendliness of the scene in Dublin, of how the stranger who is not imbued in the Boyz mentality finds it impossible to find friends.

This is not the Dublin I knew. But when I left a year-and-a-half ago, I was still a criminal. Can so much have changed in so little a time? And if it has, will it genuinely have an appeal for the thousands and thousands of gay and lesbian emigrants, enough to encourage us to return? Or will our nostalgia for the closely-knit closeted scene that we came from render us forever unable to accept the changes?