Such a strange experience to watch Would Like To Meet... Three “experts” (style, assertiveness, and body language, respectively) coach a willing sacrificial lamb, who hasn’t dated in years, in the arts of flirting and meeting people. It is sadistic TV, but the pay-off is that we get to see a more confident, less cobweb-ridden soul at the end of the hour. Richard, a school teacher, was the first gay man in the series – a sweet, slight, apologetic, self-loathing soul living in splendid isolation in the country, with tweedy clothes and “body issues”.

It was when one of the (female) experts was showing the hapless chap how to cruise, down in Soho, that it began to get surreal for me. They had kitted him out in trendy gear – “gay men are so much more aware of clothes, you’ve got to send out a signal that you’re a single gay man” – and instructed him in the fine art of objectification. “Lock eyes – break eye contact – count to three – turn back, see if he’s looking back”. It was like watching someone being given their first taste of cocaine – a queasy mixture of envy and guilt and pleasure. “Don’t do it!”

But of course he did. And, what’s more, he become more playful, more energised in the world, less bashful. Cynics might say that he had just been given the tools to his self-destruction – the keys to a kingdom of surfaces, projections, the ecstatic drug of constant arousal by strangers, the absence of warmth and continuity. Give him a few years, and we will watch how he’s taken up residence in the hell and damnation of the gay scene, lonely automatons fucking each other’s pneumatic brains out. A “community” whose publications are funded by the sex industry – phone lines and prostitution – its writers and opinion-makers, in the main, blind to the way the community exploits its younger members, celebrates their objectification.

If I have to dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

But Richard himself didn’t see it like that, and in many ways he rose above the standards that the programme makers were setting for him. Thank God he didn’t crop his hair.

One of the more interesting strands to his progress in the show was his assertiveness training. In common with practically all of the previous subjects in this series, he had no idea how to be assertive. But there was a flavour of his subjugation which was very familiar to those of us born under the sign of Narcissus – the interpretation of verbal challenges as punishing personal attacks, receiving them with puppy-dog-eyed compliance, to be followed, eventually, when the wind changes, by a desperate, pained retaliation. “Victimy” is how his behaviour was termed by the “expert”. Mmm, know that one.

So, he was brought along to a martial arts studio, and we watched in amazement as he started letting his frustration out – with more power than his stature would suggest. But, having spent a year in a dojo myself, I know just how much force there lies simmering beneath a sweet-looking poofter.

He was also brought to a “Talkaoke” bar – a weird talking-shop karaoke setup with a round table and microphones and a host to keep the debate going – a twenty-first century version of the salon, like the set of a Restoration Bladerunner. There, one of the most common traits of “victimy” folk was exposed – the capitulation/attack paradigm of conflict resolution. He had no capacity to stand his ground confidently or humorously, didn’t know how not get panicked into sarcasm or hysteria, or fade into the background in smouldering resentful bitter compliance.

The debate, interestingly enough, turned to the gay scene – and it was roundly denounced by someone at the table for being shallow, sex-centred, promiscuous and hateful – to which Richard could only retaliate, with sad ’70s-style fervour, that the speaker was homophobic, and murmured something arcane about the percentage of masters’ students who were gay. But the scene critic turned out to be gay himself. Pity, I didn’t get a look at him.

Anyway, Richard learned the lesson – he has a right to his own opinions, to stand his own ground – it doesn’t make him a bad person to disagree. This, more than anything, seemed to liberate him from the prison he created for himself – or, perhaps, said the shrink, the prison he grew up in – and, in the last part of the programme, we saw him mischievously flirting and having a lovely time with a sweet straight-laced American boy.

It makes sense that he ended up with an American – for the concept of self-worth and pride in oneself as a gay man has American roots. The English don’t do pride very well – it flips into arrogance too easily, and sexual embarrassment seems almost to be woven into the tweed of Englishness – but an American pride and dignity in one’s essential nature is basically what these three “experts” were teaching Richard. At times, I cringed, worried that what they were trying to do was change a polite self-effacing young man into a bolshie cocksure shit – but then I remembered my own discomfort with conflict, and that something was obviously well planned in the experts’ strategy for him, emphasising the importance for gay men of standing their ground with other men. On the BBC website he writes that things didn’t work out with the American, but that he’s enjoying being single and being confident – and the internet community that he’s part of, that featured on the programme, is buzzing with excitement and pride in him – with comments that the programme “normalized” gay relationships in a way that is rare on TV. Hm. Single, plenty of dates, full of hope, Mr Right just around the corner ... yes, that’s my kind of normal.

So many of us gay men fear conflict in relationship, so much so that we allow ourselves to feel smothered rather than disagree, and then we stay single rather than experience smothering. But it’s really an inability to realise that we have grown up, and that we have the capacity to say “no” to those who are close to us, nourishing us. Not with murderous rage, not in a childish tantrum or with a sarcastic sting, but a simple, clear, confident “no, thanks, I don’t feel like that”. And not to fear recrimination or guilt. We may have had early experiences in which saying “no” was met with all sorts of subtle, or not-so-subtle, disconcerting reactions – but that was then. This is now. It’s about separation from Mother, a process which can – and does – happen at any time of life. The more we are merged inside with Her, the more we hate ourselves for being different, and hate everyone else for not being Her. The more we separate, the more we love and respect, ourselves and others. Gay, straight, man, woman. Finis.