TO LEARN about human behaviour, I urge you to forego the rigours of a degree in sociology or psychology. Avoid academic anthropology like the plague, treat philosophical treatises on human sexuality with disdain. Become a barman, and really educate yourself.

Over the past few weeks, I have been working in a businessmen's bar, pouring drinks into pin-striped-suited men and overhearing practically everything that they are talking about, in all its banal glory. At first it was despite my best efforts, and then, with mounting disbelief, I found myself tuning in.

It is a cliché that, for many gay men, we first realised that we were marked as different from our peers when we found ourselves last to be picked for the schoolyard soccer game, wishing fervently that we were allowed to play hopscotch in the girl's yard, and secretly reading our sister's copy of Jackie.

Conversations about which soccer team to support bored me stupid. I elected to be an Arsenal supporter because I liked the colour of their kit. (This on the basis of one away match when they wore a very fetching yellow and blue.) The sex role rules were not set in stone, however - one of the best football players in my National school was a pigtailed dynamo with the wonderful name of Pamela Tough. This is not to say, of course, that all gay men share the same experience - there are gay sportsmen strutting their stuff with the best of them. Someone from Donegal told me once that in some rural areas of Ireland, the local GAA club was the only venue where men, sharing a passion for cleanliness, could spend many a happy moment in the shower-room together.

teenage kids

It is this feeling of separateness from the macho beer-swilling male bonding sports-enthusiast world that a lot of gay men have in common (and indeed, quite a few heterosexual men as well). We are social misfits in all-male company, rather than sexual deviants - because, for most people, what goes on in the bedroom is no-one else's business. Those gay men who feel comfortable in that all-male heterosexual milieu, if anyone asks, lie. For those who don't, like me, there is the strong temptation to mix solely with gay men. It's easier to socialise with those who have a similar way of relating. I am happy to say, though, that I have a wide range of all persuasions, and none.

Back to the bar. What is fascinating to me is the fact that a group of men together, unwinding after work, will talk ad nauseam about matters of absolutely no importance, repeating the same stories and jokes to each other as if for the first time, discussing the relative merits and demerits of a particular goal in a particular match as if their lives depended on it, and, especially, regaling each other with stories of how drunk they've been, what noxious drinks they mixed, and what bizarre places they found themselves in the morning. Ha ha ha.

What is nightmarish is not that they've done these things. I am not going to deny having bored someone with talk of getting drunk, or even of having talked football in a weak moment of feverish appeasement. But not the same story night after night, after night. And not when you're old enough to have teenage kid. For they've all got families to go home to, and presumably, dinners going black in the oven.

Watch, however, when a woman joins the group. The "lads" don't know where to look - and even the more intelligent of them find themselves at sea. What was the choice discussion fodder is now deemed, by common unspoken consent, to be redundant, but they haven't a clue what to talk about next?

Turn coats

The woman smiles pleasantly, for all she wants is to unwind in exactly the same fashion as her male colleagues. But no-one is talking to her for fear of seeming proprietorial or flirtatious. So, she volunteers a funny comment about something that happened in the office, and they all dutifully laugh. Then that awful hush again. After a while, the group splinters, and they talk mutedly among themselves, and not too long afterwards, finish their drinks, and go home.

I don't know if that woman realises what effect her presence has on that group of men. I think it must be quite obvious to her that she is resented on some obscure level. It would take a thick hide not to be conscious of it. But she is never going to witness the shallow un-self-conscious bravado that the men display to each other, when they're on their own.

That special privilege is reserved for turncoats like us who in an all-male situation do our best not to rock the boat, not to introduce an element of self-consciousness. Because if we start showing that we are the social misfits that we feel; if we let it be known that, although male, we share many of the sensibilities that are supposedly "female", then we run the risk of spoiling the little boys' fun.

And who wants to be a spoilsport?