“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain... Time to die.” – Rutger Hauer, Bladerunner

I feel like Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. It’s a dark wintry night and there is a storm overhead, with great bangs of thunder, and blue flashes of lightning lighting up my damp courtyard. I’m in my little cupboard-sized study, green Venetian blinds at the Georgian window, only the limpid glow from the computer to help me type.

My time is nearly up, as a gay man. I’m nearly forty. I need to go out in the rain and find a halting place to rust gently away. My head-turning power cell is reaching the end of its natural life; the fuel of attention, which coursed giddily through my veins since I first walked into a room of gay men when I was 16, now runs low. My capacity to “switch on” and catch the light in a crowded room and know that people have taken me in, have admired, have fantasised, is over. Time to change to another, longer lasting fuel – perhaps one with a little less toxic side effects, kinder to the environment and to the heart – but it’s also time to pay homage to that extraordinary power that I once wielded, and which all young men wield, when they realise that their youthful presence is yearned for by older men.

What I could do with that attention! I’ve seen and done things you wouldn’t believe, with people you couldn’t imagine, in places beyond your wildest dreams. The erotic power of youthful male beauty in the homosexual world is an extraordinary, anarchic phenomenon. It opens doors to all social classes and generations, it mocks all romantic/social conventions and is truly subversive in its disregard for the law. Young men aren’t supposed to know they’re beautiful. We aren’t prepared for it – we have never been encouraged to imagine it, for all sorts of obvious reasons. But girls are encouraged all the time to look pretty and appealing and to flirt with all and sundry, with make up kits and toys and comics and magazines all about attracting attention. I think for many reasons boys should be prepared for it even more than girls – for the combination of raging testosterone and plenty of attention is a heady one; for all the talk of “ladettes” and girl power, young women still are more cautious and responsible about sex than young men.

But the prospect remains slim that any teacher could talk to 14-15-year-old lads and tell them that, within a year or two, some of them may discover a route to limitless exciting sex, (without commitment if preferred), the prospect of being the centre of attention in a group of admirers of all ages and incomes, and offer advice on what care they’d need to take. Gay teenagers, I suspect, are going to have to discover that for themselves for some time to come, unless the nettle of male sexuality is honestly tackled in education. The only way it’s going to work is if, as part of sex education, gay men were brought in to talk about gay relationships and personal safety to classes of teenagers. There would be outcry from the media, and the orcs would come streaming out of the catacombs of the Vatican at the prospect, but it’s the only sane way I can think of to warn young gay kids of the dangers out there, of the responsibilities that come with sexual power.

I remember being overwhelmed when I first went on the gay scene. I had no way of judging what was happening to me – the attention I got was almost constant. I responded innocently and truthfully, I’m glad to say now, but I also got hurt when men seemed to lose interest once they had scored with me, and I took it far too personally. My sense of self-doubt began to increase the more I realised that what was attracting people was not my character, but that mysterious phenomenon over which I had no control, my youth. Seeds of uncertainty were sown then that took a while to germinate and bloom later in my life, a sense of confusion as to what was valuable or attractive about me inside. The timeless me.

Christ, though, it was mad, crazy, wonderful. In my heyday, I’ve met with ambassadors and politicians and builders and crack addicts and sportsmen. Rentboys and accountants, judges, teachers and fathers-of-four. Fellow actors, of course. Musicians, poets, academics, writers, journalists. Crooks, prison officers, drug dealers, DJs. Faces that are familiar on national television now, are faces I’ve seen where they “shouldn’t” have been. There is a code of ethics among us for those who haven’t come out – it’s a camaraderie of sorts – although I’ve sometimes erred on the side of secrecy at the expense of justice or truth. I’ve been stopped by a policeman for cruising only to have him in my bed, trembling like a child, a few hours later. I’ve had sex with a priest in his dog collar in a public toilet, fucking him in intense revenge. I’ve read a news report of a number of soldiers being shot, with no obvious suspects or leads – and recognised the face of one of them, and remembered the smell of wintergreen on his smooth skin, and that I had his telephone number scrawled in kohl on my National Gay Federation membership card. I’ve heard stories of one of the founding fathers of our state regularly going cottaging. Although I believe the man who told me, the statesman has since died. Our national heritage, not to mention his family, is safe from scandal.

Like much of gay life, the stories that come from it are transient, sensory, thrilling and insubstantial, memories that indeed vanish like tears in the rain. It’s not a heart-filled world, it’s crass and disturbing and isolating and commercial and if one doesn’t have a strong sense of identity the pain of passing one’s sell-by date is too much to bear. I’ve been lucky – very lucky – to have escaped with my good health, having been a teenager in the “wrong” time, in the celebratory hedonistic years just before AIDS was discovered. But what’s disturbing is that teenagers these days, according to research, are still not all practising safe sex – as many as one in five don’t use condoms. It’s not in a young person’s nature really to worry about the future – live fast, party party party, just as I did – but it’s a sad indictment against the gay “community” that our newest members aren’t being taught the basics of self-respect and self-care by those of us who know the score. Too many older guys are in the thrall of youthful erotic power, and can’t think beyond their knobs – but then that’s how they learned about relationships themselves. The hard way. The fun way. The intense way. The way that doesn’t last.