I received the most wonderful present today: a bar of soap. "Wash Away Your Sins Cleansing Bar" it's called. "Industrial Strength - Reduces guilt by 98.9% or more! - For ALL 7 Deadly Sins". On the back are the instructions: 1. Open Box, remove soap; 2. Engage water supply; 3. Moisten oneself; 4. Lather vigorously; 5. Rinse; 6. Repent.

It's the perfect gift for me, as loyal readers will no doubt be quick to agree. Guilt is the thing that defines me, in so many ways, and try as hard as I might, it keeps on ensnaring me, in various guises. I know, from talking to so many people, that I am not the only one; it affects people of all walks of life, of all races and creeds and both genders and all sexual orientations.

But I know that, in my experience, and in the particular set of people that I have got to know over the years, no-one can match the Irish queer Catholic on the worldwide guilt stakes (although Jews and Mormons and Welsh Pentecostalists and Free Presbyterians and Anglicans are jostling each other in the top ten.) And the issue? Sex, naturally. That dark, brooding, compulsive and overpowering force that ensnares us and crushes us and drives us to madness. Sorry, I meant to say: that life-enhancing, celebratory, pleasure-sharing, tender activity that is the purest expression of love. Yes, that must be what I meant.

What is guilt for? There must be a good reason for it. There are plenty of bad ones; as a method of social control, none matches it; the Roman Empire still exists, with guilt its main weapon, its subjects living their lives according to its laws. Step outside the laws, and, like some electronic implant, the guilt mechanism emits a signal so strong that you find yourself herded back in to the fold, dutifully repentant. And so the moral order continues, prodigal husbands return to their loving wives and families hopefully disease-free, and the church's power remains. Or, at least, that's how it's supposed to work, when people believe in God, and fear the punishment of Hell.

But it doesn't work. Ask any female prostitute about her clients, and she'll say that most are married men. The more "powerful" they are, the more masochistic their desires, ones which they dare not express to the mothers of their children. It may be an economic issue; in the States, more and more women are hiring the services of male escorts, as their wealth increases (and some would say as their spiritual wealth diminishes). With economic power comes an illusion that we are more in control, and that we can shrug off the constraints of a moral order that is of another century. Sex becomes like anything else in a materialistic society: a commodity. And yet, in the States, there is a profound Puritan root to the culture; such sexual excess that occurs in metropolitan America is in stark contrast to the vast church-going majority of its citizens, for whom the wages of sin are tangible and real.

But in these islands, the churches are losing their grip on our societies, and materialism is on the increase. (In Dublin, over Christmas, I could not get over the ostentation; at one pub, I looked down the line at the bar, and beside each drink was a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, and a mobile phone. Haven't seen that in London before.) Yet, no matter how vigorously I stand outside the armies of Christ, and define myself as pagan, I still find myself trapped in the grip of a harrowing guilt on matters sexual. It's almost as if the stronger I fight it, the more my sexual nature fights back, and insists that I succumb. It's as if guilt itself is the reason why I am sexual, as opposed to it being a working control mechanism that prevents me from its excesses. Paradoxically, the taboo may be a flame, a beacon of warning, but I find myself drawn to it like a hapless moth, with scorched wings. Either I put out the flame or I put up my wings; neither of which seem to be feasible.

I was reminded recently of an encounter, over six years ago, with a man I met via a phoneline, whose life was miserably out of control, by his own account. I wrote about him in these pages; in a horribly detached and almost anthropological way. I was less than a year in London, and its denizens seemed impossibly exotic. He was an organist in a Catholic church, and taught religion in a school; and he spent his spare time in a completely guilt-ridden hell-bent haze, hunting for sex on the phonelines and asking men to treat him like dirt.

In my "frontline report" I asked him about his hope of finding a boyfriend and settling down; this seemed an impossibility. He was a member of Sex Addicts Anonymous, and it seemed that by tackling his problem in such a manner (SAA views marriage or celibacy as the only choice for recovery) he was guaranteeing that his life would, indeed, be Hell on Earth. I wondered at the time what his teaching would be like, and imagined that it would be ultra-conservative, to compensate for his own secret shame; and I felt sad for his pupils, being influenced by such a man.

Six years later, and I find myself with more in common with him than I could ever have thought possible. By engaging in the discourse of sex addiction, and trying on the label of sex addict for size, in seeking some redemption from the corrosive experience of repetitive hollow encounters with men on the gay scene, who have learned to use adrenaline-heightened sex games as a means of keeping people distant, getting bored with relationships the moment the sex ceases to be fun, when needs for comfort and security leak out and threaten to entrap, I am endeavouring to find a solution to the emptiness that such a lifestyle engenders. The danger is that I end up feeling guilty for feeling sexual; which is really shame about being alive, for sex is a fundamental creative life-force. It's the same trap my organist acquaintance fell into. I understand now that, no matter how liberal my Catholic education was, it's in my blood and bones.

Guilt fans the flame of desire, and does not quench it. No amount of social engineering or religious morality or addiction theory can remove the essential conundrum, that we are relationship-oriented emotional beings, but our bodies are animal. But in this new century, we on the gay scene appear to have lost a fundamentally important quality, in the way we have dissociated sex from intimacy. It may be that it is too painful to truly love, for with death a constant companion, it's too risky an endeavour. In which case, guilt is truly redundant; for the only loving choice, the spiritual (as opposed to religious) path, is to go for kindness and affection, for its own sake, and find it and offer it wherever one can, and to step off the hamster wheel of

guilt.