I was asked last night which subjects inspire me in these pages, how I decide what to write about. I replied with a guffaw of laughter, because it sounded as if he was asking the nature of inspiration. Which, I immediately realised, he was. He's like that. He runs the writing group for gay men that I attend in London, where we have spent this term reading Plato and writing about love. A sublime pleasure.

So I hummed and hawed and couldn't reply. I said that I was having trouble, for example, with this week's copy, because the subject was somewhat daunting: Queer Theory. This is a "queer" column so I'd better try and understand the thinking behind my adoption of the word and not just because I like the angry sting of it.
At some stage every fortnight, I usually put up a little mental post-it note in my head when something occurs to me. Sometimes I don't need to the subject is impossible to avoid, like the breakup of a relationship, or the latest reports on suicide among young men, or HIV seroconversion rates increasing. If I'm lucky, the post-it note keeps me alert to when the topic crops up elsewhere, in newspapers, the television, in books, in conversations. An old note in my head was on the research that "proves" that women are just as promiscuous by nature as men are. I didn't believe it, but it was interesting anyway.
Then, more recently, I saw a book called Cruising Culture, subtitled Promiscuity, Desire and American Gay Literature in amazon.com, and when it arrived, I devoured it, and realised that it's the first book I've been able to digest that emanates from an academic (queer) theorist, influenced by, although not directly mentioning, Michel Foucault.
Up to now, I have found the branch of philosophy that centres on Foucault's work about as appealing as eating sand. My "discourse", to use a shibboleth of the Foucault school that has now entered common parlance, is influenced by a different philosophical approach Jungian, Platonic, astrological, and psychospiritual as different to postmodern theory as chalk and cheese. Taking the food metaphors a bit further the way I think is a bit like a stinking rich messy organic gorgonzola and postmodern theory is like a bone-dry depersonalised abstract cube of dust.
I'll quote from the editor's introduction to describe this school of thought: "Recent theory has simultaneously encouraged a scepticism towards the supposed authenticity of personal or common histories, making identity the site of textualised narrative constructions and reconstructions rather than of transparent record". (See how dense this is? It's tough going and this is as straightforward as it gets.)
Then, a friend sends me an academic journal called Sexualities a special issue entitled "Stretching Queer Boundaries: Queer Method and Practice for the 21st Century." This is the Foucault school at its most dense, cerebral high theory in a language that is inaccessible to the lay person. Queer theory is a way of deconstructing the nature of (sexual) identity, and "may be thought of as activating an identity politics so attuned to the constraining effects of naming, of delineating a foundational category which precedes and underwrites political intervention, that it may better be understood as promoting a non-identity or even anti-identity politics Queer is less an identity than a critique of identity." (Australian Humanities Review).
OK. Breathe. That's about as much as I can take.
The trouble with such a discourse is that this "narrative" in which I strive to describe my personal experience, and attempt to express/ ascertain/understand my "identity" in relation to the society I choose to inhabit is put under punishing analytical scrutiny, almost to the point of disintegration. Nothing is taken for granted about my identification of those things that I recognise as real which is at once liberating and destabilising. For someone like me who has invested so much effort in creating this diarist persona called Bootboy, it is threatening. But, by detaching oneself from personal perspective, and attempting to take a loftier bird's eye view of the body politic and how it functions, especially in regard to the definition of sexuality, there are undoubtedly rich rewards.
I am the first to acknowledge the distortion that comes from a subjective perspective. For example, climbing out of depression has altered my worldview it is not coincidental that I am now interested in more intellectual frameworks, as opposed to deeply personal inner processes in myself and in those with whom I interact, sexually and emotionally. Society deemed my depression as something that needed to be fixed, without a redeeming feature ie I was non-productive, financially or creatively, and if I didn't get my finger out I'd be homeless or worse and so I was prescribed a drug to make me a fully-functioning member of society again. (Although I'm happy to say I'm redefining what fully-functioning means to me, changing my life for the better in many ways in the process.)
Therefore, instead of perceiving the world of the commercialised gay scene as a deeply traumatised and neurotic one, hell-bent on a flight from love and intimacy in the pursuit of shameless hedonism, I am now less inclined to, because I am not hurting as much inside.
I still believe it's true, but I no longer believe it is the only truth there are many joyous individuals who have created networks of lovers and friends in a queer counterculture that offers much to those like me that swim against the tide. I am less critical because I am happier therefore my urgent pained voice calling for change in the subculture is muted. But not silenced. I've been picking at the scabs of my hurt soul for so long that I've got myself in a right mess and now that they've stopped itching, I can look around again and start thinking less subjectively. But, like enlightenment or redemption, I'll never achieve true objectivity.
This all started with a few thoughts on promiscuity to complete the synchrony, as I sit down to write this, a daytime TV talk show is discussing female promiscuity, amid much laughter and embarrassment and quite a bit of shame. So the force is with me. But I'm out of space. I'll be back.