Mother will never understand
Why you had to leave
But the answers you seek
Will never be found at home
The love that you need
Will never be found at home
‘Smalltown Boy’ – Bronski Beat

I was 21 when I first heard Jimmy Somerville’s extraordinary voice pealing the words to ‘Smalltown Boy’ – a siren call to my soul to move, to leave, to find the answers I sought away from home.

Practically all of my gay friends left Dublin in the following years – for London or the States. I was the last to leave. The trajectory of leaving towns or villages to find love in Metropolis, common to so many gay men, is archetypal in this period of our history, in this part of the world. Themes of bullying and shame and loneliness and ostracisation inform the beginning of the journey. At the end of the road, the proud rainbow, is the pot of gold, the trinity of the big job, the trendy loft apartment, and the dream lover, the one that couldn’t be found at home. If not for any other reason than statistics. Go to where your kind are congregating – ease the existential isolation and dive into the pool of queer humanity.

I’ll never forget my first London gay pride festival – the sweet humbling of being one of a crowd of tens of thousands. The bewildering visceral pleasure of realising all these handsome and stylish creatures were the same as me. I yearned for sameness, to let the bruises of difference fade. Not only safety in numbers, not only strength in numbers, but hope in numbers. Somewhere in the crowd – there’s my man. Maybe. Maybe this time.

Glamour, urban exoticism, the sexual experimentation of the huge gay scene took me out of myself, made me relate differently, enabled me to connect with others in a specially intense, charged way. Especially after I’d been hurt in love. Part of me believed that all I had to do was be seen by enough men and of course he would appear – love at first sight, immediate certainty, dream come true. Each time that didn’t happen, I licked my wounds and comforted myself in devilishly urban ways. I wanted the piercing focus of erotic attention to reach the parts of me that hadn’t been reached before. I wanted to banish feelings of being an outsider, a maverick, the last to be picked for football.

Of course I wanted someone to look after, and I wanted someone to look after me. But it took me some time to realise that leather-clad, jackbooted and shaven-headed men weren’t the most likely to offer kindness or consideration, however much my libido cried out for that creative expression, that contact, that limit-expanding dance with sexual power.

In Metropolis, sexual play is a rough contact sport, and not for the faint-hearted. An actor, I thought I could play the part – but underneath the leather I’m as soft as butter. As is every other “hard” man I’ve met. Trouble is, “hard” men don’t thank you for seeing their softness, for naming it. Too intimate. Too close for comfort.

Metropolitan lifestyles, for smalltown boys, are tantalising because they offer the excruciating hope that you can have it all. The sexually experimental, faithful and endlessly fascinated (but not clingy) lover being top of the list. To this end, gay men work hard to ensure they don’t miss out on the dream – perfect bodies, perfect attitude, perfect gear. If it’s not happening, it’s because they haven’t been to the right club or taken the right drug or got their sixpack well-enough defined.

Along the way, the search for the dream lover becomes extraordinarily blatant; it becomes reason enough to dump men out of your bed and life because “it’s not working out” – ie you’re not perfect, you haven’t given me enough attention to make me feel special, and even if you did I don’t believe you did it because it was me, but because you wanted something for yourself. It’s a narcissistic feedback loop, a dismal manipulative dance of trying to get the other to care.

And what of our Jimmy Somerville, mascot of the queer metropolitan? On his website, he jokingly has Captain Kirk as one of his heroes, and one of his dreams was to leave Glasgow and find his own Captain Kirk. He wryly notes that he still hasn’t found him. I met the wee Scot once, on a surreal night of drowning my sorrows in my local dive after a particularly harrowing breakup – he was unhappily pissed and rageful and obnoxious. The smalltown boy hadn’t found what he hoped he’d find, away from the smalltown.

I think there’s an rule of emotional contentment that goes something like: the bigger the dream, the more painful the life. Big cities attract the powerless, offering dreams of power. Dreams of heroes to whisk us away from ourselves, to rescue us from our plight of enduring our own company. But we can’t command others to love us. If we’re lucky, and we don’t fly so high that we burn up along the way, we may discover that location has nothing to do with loving ourselves. Love, like charity (and regime change), begins at home. Smalltown, Big City, or country boy.