Well, I’m a year back in Dublin now, and things have worked out far better than I imagined. Although, to be fair, my imagination had not been working overtime as to how things were going to pan out, because most of my familiar frames of reference had been vaporized over 13 years.

Although I’d never claim to be settled yet, because it seems to be part of my nature to constantly feel like I’m standing on shifting sands, it feels like the quality of life here is far more enriching and invigorating than in London. Most especially, the way Irish people engage with each other socially seems far more alive to possibility.
To start with, Irish people seem to socialise far more in groups. This is a distinct disadvantage if one goes out on one’s own, which one has to do if one is new in town, because it’s next-to-impossible to break in to a group without an introduction.
However, on the flipside, if one member of that group knows you, then the rest of that evening can be a joy, because then the best side of Irish social etiquette becomes apparent: kindness, curiosity, a willingness to discuss anything for the sake of it. It’s like getting access to a limb of a tree, with buds on every branch, ready to sprout and grow, conversationally, socially, energetically. The trick is to get up the tree in the first place.
In London, in my experience, groups behave differently. There’s a suspicion of intruders, a reserve, a caution, and many’s the time I’ve found myself sliding down the tree trunk for lack of purchase, my enthusiasm and (often puppy-like) eagerness to get into passionate debate being met with an instinctive backing off, which many English people were rude enough not to hide. Anyway, my barking days are over. I’m swinging from tree to tree, quite happily now.
Dating, however, is a different ball game entirely. At the opening film of the recent Dublin LGBT film festival, GAZE, A Four Letter Word, a flawed and badly-acted American film about the dilemmas gay men face in dealing with the attraction to freely available sex versus the need to form loving relationships, it at least laid bare the options facing us as gay men in the commercialised sexed-up gay scene.
The film was populated with clichéd characters, the sex addict, the backroom boy, the angry politico, the glitter queen, the lying hustler, the queeny couple bickering over domestic stuff, the fag hag, the wedding-obsessed woman; it was a cartoon, with subtlety an alien concept. It was at least a decent attempt to cover the territory, but after the sublime and moving Shortbus from last year, which set the standard for exploring the complexities of sexuality, this was risible stuff.
However, by painting such broad-brushtroke easily-recognisable characters, it at least provided hooks to get a useful debate going, because although gay men may be accomplished in all sorts of sexual and relationship setups, we’re really not that great at discussing them in a reflective way.
I have a request for example on my gaydar profile asking anyone who’d like to chat about the nature of online dating itself to get in touch – and in the past few months, only one person could lift their focus from their groin area to bother to talk it over with me.
Women, however, who, increasingly in my circle of friends at least, are using the internet to find men to date, are only too happy to discuss its ramifications and absurdities with me, even though for some it’s something they don’t wish to be known for.
It still carries a stigma, as if there’s something wrong, something a little desperate, about advertising in this way. Men on the contrary are capable of crashing through social niceties that in many ways is liberating – the pleasure principle run riot – but, once unleashed, it’s very hard to bring it to heel again.
Women know instinctively, it seems, how to weed out players and charlatans. It’s a measured slow process of finding that rare creature who is polite and respectful over a series of emails and then phone-calls and then the sharing of photos and then a coffee. Then the excruciating process of trying to get the timing right with texting after the first coffee... too soon, and you’re desperate, too long, and you’re standoffish.
It does work sometimes, of course, because decent relationship-orientated men are out there (that’s an article of faith, don’t knock it) and once trust has been established, you have then, and only then, arrived at the stage at which most relationships start, having been introduced to each other by a friend or colleague.
With gay men, however, the dating game is far more complex. To start with, who is the chaser, and who the quarry? Who pays for coffee/lunch/dinner? How is it possible to build up the tension of curiosity about someone else, the necessary build up to intimacy, when you’ve already had sex the first time you met?
Sex may take down a lot of barriers, but if it’s done without really knowing the person you are with, the sex you have is necessarily and appropriately detached from your emotions.
However, if someone is “making love” with a stranger, fully engaged emotionally and sensitively, the stranger knows full well how false that is, how “needy” that is, and runs a mile.
If both are experts at the casual sex game, and the gymnastics are assured and sportsmanlike from the getgo, then it becomes obvious how replaceable one is, because Dublin is full of equally talented players.
If you don’t have sex with a gay man on the first night, or at least show an eagerness to have sex, the message transmitted and received is (a la Sex And The City) “he’s just not that into you.”
If you hold out on sex, you are indicating already that you are looking for something serious, but possibly that you have hangups about sex, when what a man craves most of all in a relationship (at least from the giddy viewpoint of the stimulating experience of meeting someone attractive for the first time) is that the sex will be uncomplicated and fun.
So if it’s not available on the first night, then what guarantees will there be that it will be uncomplicated and fun when it finally happens? It’s obvious then that the sexually withholding person is then in control, and no man wants to feel out of control on the first date.
So, if two men agree to see each other, but haven’t leapt into bed with each other at the end of the first night, then all too often both assume that there isn’t sexual chemistry, and slip into friendship. Which isn’t of course a bad thing, it’s wonderful, but time and time again I only realise that that decision has been made by the other person when they start telling me about their other romances and who they fancy.
It’s a message that I am so used to receiving now that I just find it comic. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. And yet, if I’d pounced on the first night, he’d maybe have felt appreciated sexually. But then we might have both felt that we were too easy, and chalked it up as another spot of recreational sex, at a loss how to translate that into something more meaningful, because the sugar rush of instant sex is not nourishing, and relationships, after all, are all about nourishing.
It’s complicated for everyone, I know. I’d just like a better map for my neck of the woods.