I was having an enjoyable pint or three with a friend of mine the other evening. When he asked me what I was going to write about this week, I found myself giggling helplessly. I had to retreat into the gents to gather myself, before going back to him, still grinning. For I had just been thinking how I was going to expound, to all you lucky, lucky people, on the joys of being fucked.

I looked at his open, bemused face and I realised that suddenly I had gone extremely shy. Although he is a dear friend with whom I could discuss anything, I sensed that, all the same, my laughter was of the nervous variety. As most laughter is, of course, so I’m not saying much. But it got me thinking.

There is a word that I have never used, except in quotes, when describing people in this column, and that is straight. It is not only because the opposite is bent. It is because there are so many gay people I know who are so conservative and resistant to change that straight is the only mot juste for them. And there are also so many other people who refuse classification, not because they are bisexual, but because they see such definitions as inherently limiting. I happen to agree with them. But in that flash of nervousness, I realised that I was about to tell “a straight man” about something intimate and exclusive to my experience of sexuality, as a gay man.

The “straight man” occupies a strange, ambivalent place in the gay pantheon. At once the hated thug and the much-desired love-object, the archetypal Marlboro man’s style is slavishly copied by most gay men I know, and quite a few women too. Jeans and check shirt, with at least a short back and sides. It is the uniform of the woodsman, the cowboy, the worker. Singular, independent, cold as ice.

Ironically, of course, you can spot a gay man a mile away in that mandrag. It’s not authentic. It is an attempt to evoke a quality of distilled masculinity, which we imagine resides in the “straight man”.

What I’ve discovered through my friendships with men of all persuasions is that that “ideal” remains elusive to us all. But it is only some gay men and some homophobes who worry about attaining it. It’s a self-consciousness, a feeling of insecurity about one’s image and what it says about us on the inside. When you get to know a “straight man” his individuality transcends any such classification, of course. That goes without saying. Doesn’t it?

For some, the “straight man” becomes that obscure object of desire. I have met men whose sexual life centres on searching for previously 100% heterosexual men and having sex with them. It is a challenge, not without its risks. I once had to reassure a colleague of mine, a mother of teenage sons, because a gay man of her acquaintance had been saying to her that given enough time he could sleep with any man, including either of her sons. She was quite alarmed, and it would have taken a heart of stone to criticise her. I told her that he was probably boasting, and that if her sons weren’t gay, then they wouldn’t sleep with him, and she was not to worry. (What would you have said?)

STRONG CONDOM

I was thinking of the subject of being fucked because . . . No, scratch that. I was thinking of writing about the subject of being fucked because I had been debating with a heterosexual man earlier in the week who doesn’t believe that the HIV virus causes AIDS. He supports a theory, along with quite a few others, that other factors, most importantly drugs of all kinds (including poppers and AZT), come into play to destroy the body’s immune defences. He believes that one of the risk factors is (unsafe) anal sex per se, which has “unique inherent health risks” and that bodies “aren’t designed that way”.

He insists this is a stance without any moral judgements on homosexuality, for he acknowledges that not all gay men have anal sex, and that not all people who have anal sex are gay men. He was asking for reassurance that he didn’t come across as homophobic, that he wanted to befriend gay people, not condemn them. In response, I found myself saying something like “All homophobes are obsessed with anal sex”.

A sweeping generalisation, I now concede, but not without its merits. I was thinking primarily of male homophobes, (“Save Ulster from Sodomy”,) those who are freaked out by the idea of sameness, of getting close to another man. Especially those who are petrified of being receptive. Emotionally or otherwise. And what’s worse, enjoying it.

rugger bugger

I firmly believe that what we most despise in others is a reflection of part of our own character, and nowhere does this manifest more clearly than in repressed homosexual men. The rugger bugger I mentioned in the Christmas issue, who was so incensed by the sight of two queers sitting beside him that he had to keep up a tirade of tedious vitriol to “impress” his bored girlfriend, is a case in point. What was so threatening to him? I believe that we reminded him of a part of himself that he couldn’t cope with.

I remember a Late Late Show a few years back which addressed the topic of homosexuality, and someone from the audience asked why homosexuals are obsessed with each other’s back passages. Quick as a whippet, Gaybo asked “Why are most heterosexuals obsessed with women’s front passages?” which earned him a few gold stars in my book. But the fact is – and it’s taken me a long time to realise this – practically everyone who isn’t gay presumes that when men have sex with each other there is always a “passive” and “active” partner, and that penetration always takes place.

Well, here I am to tell you that it ain’t necessarily so. But when we do, we take a good strong condom and lashings of lubrication and . . .

No. I’ve gone all shy again. You guys just have to find out for yourself.