I've been immersed in meaty psychoanalytic theory recently, which has stripped away all sentimentality with regard to sexuality. About time too, I hear you say. In particular, a book called Perversion: the Erotic form of Hatred has given me a lot of food for thought. Allow me to vomit it up for your delectation, in easy-to-digest little pieces. But make sure you take no pleasure from it.

Gay men are so nice in public, aren't we? We dress well, we take care not to offend, we're kind and understanding; we're every mother's dream, we're a girl's best friend. Wistfully, women will remark how we're "such a waste"; we're such good companions that surely the sex thing could be overcome, if we put our mind to it.
When we get upset, we have little hissy fits, rather than get angry, because we're so sensitive. We're like pre-Suffragette Victorian ladies, swooning with attacks of the vapours. We're so unlucky in love that we gain sympathy easily, as we regale our friends and colleagues with stories of the perfidy of men, that will have most women nodding in understanding. But we bounce back, ready to fall in love again the next weekend. It's all a bit of a lark, isn't it?
And, slowly, imperceptibly, it doesn't seem to matter that we fry our brains with ecstasy, or that instead of the occasional drink, we find ourselves "popping in to see who's around" in the pub every night, accustoming ourselves to evenings made fuzzy and warm with alcohol. For at night, in our private lives, away from our public daytime personae, we play dangerous games with our feelings, seeking perverse pleasure wherever it can be found.
Perversion is everywhere, says the author of this insidious but persuasive little book, Robert Stoller. Every time a man (for it is mostly men) look upon a person as a sex object, it is perverse. Every time a man uses pornography, or gets turned on by a stiletto heel or a Doc Marten boot, it is perverse. Every time there is a seduction as opposed to a courtship, perversity reigns.
I'm sure you're getting the idea. Every man is a pervert, and quite a few women. He's describing a universal state, the capacity to get turned on by actions or objects or things that have nothing to do with making love with a person, and everything to do with sexual gratification. But he's more interested, naturally, being a shrink, in the more extreme perversions sadomasochism, fetishism, gender confusion, and, from his point of view, homosexuality.
If I were politically correct, I would shun his book like the plague, screaming homophobia; but then I abandoned political squeamishness a long time ago. I'll try any label on for size gay, queer, sex addict, pervert see if it fits, and then discard them all. Today I'm wearing my pervert hat. A natty little number, don't you agree? No? Tough shit.
He wrote the book in the seventies, and his tone is enquiring, not judgmental; and he freely admits the ubiquity of heterosexual perversity, thereby rendering his inclusion of homosexuality as a perversion, as a nonsense. We are not responsible for the sex of the people we find attractive; but we are responsible for the way we treat them, and ourselves, sexually. In this, he has helped me realise that many ways in which we relate to each other sexually as gay men are deeply perverse; indeed, the whole gay male subculture has centred itself commercially and socially around the maintenance, if not celebration, of perversity escorts, phonelines, saunas fund the mainstream gay press.
But far from being rebels and anarchists, most perverts are deeply conservative in public, and keep their perversions, their rage, to themselves. Yes, rage; scratch a pervert and you'll find a furious little boy. That is, unless scratching him turns him on; if so, find another way of getting under his skin. Layers of leather and rubber serve to protect the most thin-skinned of souls.
If perverts were to stop getting distracted by the pleasures of the flesh, to tear up our customised scripts of The Victim's Revenge, stop the endless search for new cast members, something dangerous might happen.
We might start getting really angry. We might allow ourselves to feel powerful. We might threaten those who have hurt us we might even threaten to hurt right back. We might find the courage to stand up and be counted and work towards changing the rotten state of affairs that exists in this world, in the gay scene, in the way women treat men, and men treat women.
We might challenge the institutions that have wreaked such havoc in our personal lives: the church, the education system, the claustrophobic institution of the family, the government. The pharmaceutical multinationals. We might disturb a few people, shock them with the evidence of how hurt and angry men can get. We might offend our families or our neighbours; we might make life less comfortable for those who seek to defend the family as the model for healthy child-rearing.
We might dare to draw the link between how hurt we were as little boys and how scared we are as grown men; it might dawn on us that we don't have to be victims any more. But hey, that's too radical; that might take real courage. There's no script to tell us what to say. We might fail. Now that's a real challenge.
When perversion ceases to be private, that's when real social change happens; in Ireland this began to happen when it was reported in the early nineties that a priest died in a gay sex club in Dublin, and was given the last rites by two other attending priests. Along with other clerical child sex abuse scandals, when priests were discovered to be incapable of following the strict moral code of the church, this served as an engine for social change, loosening the grip that Mother Church had on this state since its foundation.
Perverts, throw off your chains. Stop being nice. There are real battles to be fought, and real injustices to be righted. Shock the world, for the world needs shocking.