I feel a bit of a lost soul at the minute; my computer has been causing problems, for the first time in years, and I realise how dependent I've become on it for communicating with friends and for work and for engaging with other minds. But I'm also glad of the break, and have begun to take stock of where I've been heading, of what I've been learning. And it's disturbing stuff.

This column has for me been a record of my ramblings through a gay scene that has baffled and sometimes enchanted me; an effort to report what seems like hedonistic madness in terms that someone not in the scene would understand.

In some ways it seems like I'm an apologist for male sexual excess, writing from the perspective of a heterosexual model of relationships and despairing at the lack of emotional openness and commitment among gay men, the appalling sex-centred commercialisation of the scene, the soul-lessness that I see all around me. It's as if, by registering my discomfort, then I'm paradoxically giving myself permission to continue my explorations.

It's a weird moral trip, that has exposed to me, and others, that I'm split right down the middle between someone who craves the ideal of a stable committed monogamous relationship and someone who finds The Game of sex compelling and irresistible.

Recently, however, I've been burrowing away and discovering a seam of life, deep down in the realms of cyberspace, where sexual anarchy has gone from mere hedonism to an amoral disregard for anything but sexual pleasure. I've been hearing stories of blackmail and rape, child abuse and extortion, and what, in legal terms, can only be manslaughter, in that I know of someone who deliberately infects young men with HIV unbeknownst to them. "If they want to take it bareback, they know the risks," I've been told - and I know I'm not in Kansas any more.

I've chatted online with closeted celebrities who are terrified that their desire for high-risk sexual games becomes known, and so I find myself carrying secrets for them in a way that feels highly uncomfortable now.

My persona on the Internet is one that seems to draw confidences - it's the part of me that is a counsellor, after all - but it's startling how, when I ask someone how they feel about doing what they do sexually, that they are only too willing to talk, because no-one seems to have asked them before about their feelings.

What's disturbing is that if I was an unscrupulous journalist, this article would be entitled "Vice shame of teenage popstar" or some such trashy headline, as I name names and provide quotes and rake in the profits from my sale of the story to the tabloids. It's horribly easy to do.

I don't know where I'm heading with all this information. In one case I wrote to the victim of blackmail offering help; but as a columnist, I am suspect in anyone's book, especially that of a paranoid closeted celebrity, so he hasn't got back to me.

Fair enough. I made the effort. I realise that all good deeds should not go unpunished; there's something iffy about a desire to rescue young people, who don't want to be rescued. Perhaps they don't need to be rescued. What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms is their own business; if they choose to get infected with HIV it's their business too.

But there's something about the way that they are so willing to talk to an anonymous stranger about their unhappiness that moves me to wonder why is it so rare that these young men have no one to talk to? What sort of gay community are we building? Is sex the only currency that is of value between men? I'm sick of hearing young men talk about how they want to have lots of fun now when they have bareback sex and they don't care about the future.

Me, I'm glad to be 37, and lucky to be so, considering what I got up to before I heard of AIDS; it's such a gruesome illness that I can't understand how someone could deliberately invite it into their lives.

As the Internet weaves itself more and more of the fabric of our lives, the way we interact and make friends - two single mothers that I know are now regular chatroom devotees, when the kids are in bed - then perhaps we'll develop more of a sense of responsibility and common sense about how we interact there.

Until then, it seems that the lawlessness that prevails throws up heady paradoxes and conundrums. I have written many times in these pages about, for example, a trip down to a gay bar, describing the people I meet and/or have sex with, and how I feel afterwards. In a gay bar, if I got chatting to someone who was being blackmailed, I'd be appalled; I'd be willing to help, I'd listen. But on the Internet, there's an oddly confessional feel to it, for whatever reason.

Perhaps it's just the fact that it's full of lonely people sitting anonymously in front of a screen - it seems that what we say disappears into the ether, has no emotional repercussions or impact. We switch off the computer and it's all forgotten.

But I can't forget what I've heard. If I were a fully committed journalist, I'd see it all as a story, and publish and be damned. I've done enough research to discover that the stories I've heard are more or less true. But there's the oddest collusion that goes on when men talk about sex; and it's one I'm most uncomfortable with. I want to challenge it, but I don't know how, except by writing generally in these pages. The assumption is, that when sex is the game, then all other rules of decency and compassion and care go out the window.

Women have known all along about men's capacity to separate feelings from sex. But in general, men who have sex with men treat each other differently when they have sex; it's not about love, though, it's different. Many friendships are possible when two men like each other and play the game of sex in similar ways. But because the bonds are not emotional or anything to do with being a vulnerable human being - indeed vulnerability is positively avoided when playing the "sport" of sex with other men - it seems that, increasingly, anything goes as long as it's horny.

And in cyberspace, there seems to be no way of stopping it, or even cautioning against it. In some ways, we're entering the Dark Ages again.