I love my postman. When I've overslept and am lost in a netherworld of dreams of talking cats and the genetic code of poets, I hear the slap of letters on my hall floor and I know it's 9:15 am. His regularity is comforting, a gentle contact from a secure old world.

In the UK, there's been some talk about taking postmen off their regular "beats", to supposedly increase efficiency in a privatise-and-socialism-be-damned world by pooling them and sending them out to different areas each day. So far, I still enjoy the benefits of my postman remembering the two previous flats I've lived in on this estate, and the circulars and fliers addressed there still get to me. Somehow, his kind attention to detail is reassuring, a human touch.

When he's on holiday, I miss him; one of his replacements, a cute fast young lad, runs on the job, balletically reaching out to each letterbox, popping the letters in the door with a twist of his constantly moving body, in his race to get to wherever he's going; it would only take the addition of a jazz soundtrack and a shift to early technicolour hues, to imagine him in an early Gene Kelly film, lithe and rhythmic. It doesn't really matter that his dancing often leaves in its wake a number of residents wandering out in our dishevelled morning leisurewear, to swap with a shrug and a smile the letters he's wrongly delivered. Watching him in his sexy tracksuit and baseball cap, I try to imagine his mates in the staffroom or pub that he's so eager to return to at the end of his round, and am reminded curiously of the culture that spawns the worst of the English football fan thugs.

I wonder why this thought pops up, considering the last time he brought me in a sleepy state to the door, semi-naked, to hand me a package, I felt a cold fiery glance at my body. He left me musing hornily if he ever had nightmares, or dreams, of his mates bringing him off. Then I remembered someone else who had that casual look, David Copeland, who nursed his grievance that his parents thought he might be gay into a personal vendetta of hate and loathing, resulting in death and horrific maiming in the Soho bombing. I don't know why my thoughts run like this. I mustn't be getting enough of something.

But back to my main man, Lionel. He's Jamaican, black as coal, and sports grey sideburns and a gold tooth. He's slow and laconic and methodical, and chuckles at my jokes, saying "Alright, my man" when he sees me. He is without doubt a grandfather, although I've never asked him. There's something about his mirthful comfortable demeanour that declares it. A sense of place in life that he carries around with him.

Perhaps it's just a symptom of getting older, but I'm becoming more aware of the richness that is family life, in all its complex, sometimes cloying, but usually resilient and supportive nature. This is difficult for many gay people; for too many of us have had our lives defined for us by being excluded, even vilified by our families, scapegoats for the ancestral murk. But too many of us lack the balls to demand that we be included thoroughly, for the parts of us that doubt ourselves falter at the prospect of causing ripples, of breaking the mould, of taking responsibility. Armistead Maupin, creator of the Tales Of The City series, has told how he came closest to persuading Rock Hudson to come out, while he was still at the peak of his career. The effect this would have had on American, and world, culture, would have been enormous, as he was the epitome of the masculine ideal in the Hollywood dream factory. But Hudson balked at taking the step because his lover couldn't bear the prospect of breaking his mother's heart. And so, instead of a life-affirming example of hype-busting honesty, we were treated to the sad and shame-filled deathbed disclosure that he had AIDS. He chose to let his lover's fear of standing up for himself in his family take precedence over his own conscience. Perhaps that's the mark of the respect he had for his lover; but I hate to see shame win, even if it is in the name of love. Perhaps for many of us, shame and love are too tightly entwined.

This smalltown boy fled to the big city long after most of his other gay friends had left Dublin. More accurately, I didn't flee - I crawled reluctantly away, for, unlike my friends, I had stayed around long enough to witness that Ireland could change, and cease to be a theocracy. My friends know that they're better off in London or New York, whereas I have no such certainty. In this, like so many other things, I hanker after a life that could have been, routes I could have taken.

And so, to grandfathers. I don't have them in my life, my own died many years ago. I'm not going to provide grandchildren for my folks to dote on.

The tribal culture of queerdom has no place for elderly men, coping with the uncomfortable decay of old bones, with warm smiles and time to listen and laugh and tell stories again and again.

Sexual misfits, finding home in the urban anonymity of world cities, steeped in the

materialism of the body beautiful, the life lived fast, young, and to excess, lose out on so much natural wisdom.

What happens to old queers? The place for us is not yet imagined. Unlike grandfathers, old age for us can bring a narrowing of our lives, a closing in of the walls of one's home, a house full of ghosts and gifts. Unlike Lionel, I won't have a house full of young life at the weekends, with children clambering on my knee and spilling ice cream on my shoes. I will have achieved many other things, but that, alas, is not on my cards.