I AM writing this with a crick in my neck, the kind we used to call red-hot-pokers when we were kids. I am ramrod stiff, and cannot turn my head to the left. I feel like a cross between Frankenstein’s bolt-necked monster and Julian Cleary, who carries himself as if he has invisible drop earrings tied to his shoulder pads. Very regal and pained.

I was in my gym and something went ping. Or was it pop? It’s as if, when faced with a sheet of bubble-wrap, the sort of padding that goes into jiffy-bags and surrounds your new telly, you find yourself gripped by a malicious urge to demonstrate the uniqueness of our species’ opposable thumb. You squeeze and pinch the air out of the bubble until it pops. Someone, I know not who, took great pleasure in practising the same manoeuvre in the middle of my neck muscle, causing much exquisite pain.

I had gone to the gym yesterday determined to get something ferocious out of my system. Unaccountably, I appear to have come to the conclusion that I don’t want to have sex with strangers. It wasn’t a conscious decision, and I wish to reassure any of you who may be alarmed at this news, that it must be just a phase. (Or perhaps I am just reassuring myself.) However, having denied myself that obvious outlet for my carnal urges, I found myself prowling and growling around like a caged animal last weekend.

Someone (big, shaved head, comfortable face) came over to me in a club on Saturday night and asked me whether I wanted to be on my own, or whether I was looking for a pick-up.

“Those are the alternatives?” I asked him, smiling, for he seemed interesting. But it was a redundant question. The locale conspired against any such prissiness. We chatted for a while, found that we had an appalling amount in common, on the surface at least, and he asked me to go home with him. I declined. He got bored very quickly, and went off to find someone else to take home. I then got bored and restless, because I realised that I was in the wrong place. I tried to dance some energy off, but it was hot and sweaty and smoky. I walked home, avoiding a diversion to the local park, and climbed into my bed, which seemed much larger and harder than usual.

I thought the gym on Monday morning would be just the thing to get my internal pressure cooker off the boil. Work up a good sweat, get those muscles humming, cool off with a swim afterwards. (The old cold shower and plenty of exercise theory for adolescents.) After twenty minutes warming up – snap! Agony. I lay there, feeling foolish, for the damage was not done while recklessly attempting to lift a Herculean weight, but while I was trying to lift my head four inches off the floor. It’s sad, really.

SEXUAL DRIVES

The gymnasium is a strange place. To my joy, when I looked up the word in the dictionary, I found that the root of the word is gumnos, which mean snaked. The ancient Greeks used to perform their exercises naked, for the male body was then held to be the epitome of beauty, for all to admire. To call it homoerotic is to label it unnecessarily, for it limits and insinuates and separates. More and more I have become allergic to the labelling of human experience, and more interested in its description.

In my gym there may be many who define themselves as gay, as well as many who do not. The atmosphere, though, is highly charged with a psychic static electricity, especially in the showers. Men, old, young, and in-between, stand around admiring and being admired, soaping themselves meticulously. One cannot tell the sexual persuasion of those there, except if someone whistles a Steven Sondheim song or displays proudly a tattoo of the Muppet’s Animal on his pretty little bum. Men come and go, displaying, preening, dressing and leaving without words, mostly, and yet they are in constant communication.

I left the gym yesterday, the curious pressure cooker still whistling away inside me. Indeed, the ten minutes in the changing room only added to my internal storm, as there were some beautiful bodies around. At least in my case it does.

I thought of the women who take testosterone in San Francisco. They seek the advantages of both sexes, by ingesting or injecting the male hormone regularly. Their facial hair grows, their voices deepen, their clitorises enlarge, and they find they have more energy and wake up horny, whereas before their interest in sex was minimal. Indeed it was the remarkable intensification of sexual drives that the women most commented on. A good friend of mine who is not gay was talking about the article in the Independent On Sunday about them recently and he joked that he would like some.

I began to wonder, when he said that, if the effects on the women could be largely psychological. If you inject what you believe is the essence of masculinity into you, won’t that liberate the qualities, that are innate in both sexes, of the archetypal horny aggressive buck male?

Male or female, we are still animals, and not the civilised rational beings we imagine ourselves to be. Whatever the theories, I am left with a foul temper, and an insatiable desire.

For chocolate.