OOPS. Single again. Not much to say that hasn’t been said before on the subject, by many others more talented than yours truly, dear reader. It’s the early hours of the morning as I write this, A Taste Of Honey is playing comfortlessly on TV, and I am aware of how much surrounds me in apparent conspiracy to persuade me that a homosexual’s life is destined to be a lonely one.

In the 1957 Tony Richardson film, Rita Tushingham plays the schoolgirl Joanne, Dora Bryan her mother, and Melvyn Murray plays Jeffrey, the camp student of textile design that she befriends. There’s something bold, brash and appealingly pimply about this film, even now. The charming, tender sexuality of the black sailor who impregnates her: I dreamt about you late night/I fell out of bed twice he says, and we believe it. The impotence and fussiness of Jeffrey, the homosexual character. “I don’t care much for women, sometimes” he retorts viciously, when pressed to give details on what he actually does in bed. It’s a cold, cold hatred we glimpse.

He has his moment when he turns on the mother at the end of the film and exposes her for the monster she is. But, ultimately, he leaves, to wander the streets alone with his drawings, as the mother, herself desperate, pushes him out of the cosy sexless domesticity that he had created with the pregnant Joanne. (“You’re like my big sister, Jeffrey,” she mocks). It’s a loveless, manipulative world, we learn; hard enough for the sensitive young daughter, but impossible for the touchy, delicate young man. He has no place to go. At one stage he makes a ham-fisted proposal to Joanne to make a decent woman of her, to be the child’s father, he even says he wants to make a go of it sexually with her, as he fumbles to kiss her.

But she is not that desperate. She has a feisty pride; utterly individualistic, and yet doomed to the same life her mother led, a teenage single parent, constantly looking for someone to meet her needs. Always being disappointed, but hiding the pain through a cocky bravado. All through the film, hordes of young children wander around singing in ironic counterpoint to the cruelty of post-pubescent life.

RACKED WITH GUILT

You can tell I’m in a cheerful mood. I am not about to kiss and tell, and give you gory details of the break-up, suffice to say that we’re still friends, and what we have in common will, I hope, outlast what was irreconcilable.

But each time I find myself single again, I get into this mood. Haunted by a vision of myself in thirty years time, propping up a bar, still on the lookout for Mr. Right. See him there, his boyish charm long gone, shaved head concealing natural baldness; tired eyes telling many stories of betrayal and despair. Dressed to kill in leather, still sexy after all those years, DMs well-licked and shiny. Having explored every sexual avenue known to man, he is overwhelmed with a jaded sense of déjà vu as youths approach him with what they believe is original charm.

Every night he goes home to his dogs and cats and hard-core porn, and wanks himself to sleep, talking breathlessly on a videophone to a complete stranger, obscenities into the fibre-optic void. For no-one can match his image of Mr. Right, and he has given up trying. But old habits die hard, and his once hormonally-driven compulsion for endless sex has been replaced with a fear of missing out on something if he should fail to go out one night. Occasionally someone with an eagerness to please or amuse will catch his attention, and he will oblige by taking them home; but there is something so uneasily cold about him, distant and reserved, that the sensitive ones are not interested in seeing him again.

The ones who believe that they only deserve heartless bastards throw themselves at him, offering their bodies in total subservience, begging to be treated like dirt. He plays along, to please them; but it is not in his nature to hurt anyone, so it remains a theatrical charade, with the masks cracking after they have come, and come, and come. He is, after all, a thorough lover, diligent, and considerate. He asks for nothing but perfection, but to his sorrow meets with murk all the time; jealousy, insecurity, unhappiness and pain. He is appalled, and is racked with guilt and shame; the murk mirrors his own self-loathing.

A SEXUAL QUEST

I don’t believe I am going to end up like him, but I know I could. I know that the urge to seek redemption through sexual extravagance is a strong one in me, and in many other gay men of my acquaintance; the line between sexual celebration and compulsion is a thin one. Quite often I change my mind countless times in one day, about sex, crossing the whole gamut from mortified guilt to sensuous contentment to orgiastic celebration. Sex, so easily available to gay men, offers us a way of learning about ourselves and our fantasy lives that is vivid and intense; the sexual playgrounds of the saunas, pubs, clubs and parks offer us stages to perform on, with willing cast members only too eager to join in on cue.

But it is far too easy to confuse a sexual quest with a quest for companionship and love, that mystical union that we all believe is out there for us, somewhere. It is too easy for men to believe that horniness is the sine qua non of a prospective partner. Inner qualities of sensitivity and generosity are not immediately visible in most men, except the tenderest of flowers; the gay scene, despite what we as individuals could have learnt, continues to discourage those who express their feelings.

Look around you. Gay male sexuality can be a hard-nosed performance arena, far removed from the world of feelings. The knack, I suppose, is to try to mix the two. Which leads us back to Mr. Right again. Is he a figment of my/our imagination, or is he waiting out there? Or has he been there inside me/us all along?

A Taste Of Honey is vivid and truthful about Northern England in 1957. I am waiting for a film of its calibre to come out of Britain or Ireland telling the story of a post-Stonewall Jeffrey; a Jeffrey still as plain and spiky and whiny and uncomfortably camp. I wonder would he still be as lonely? Is there a place for him in our society, nearly forty years on?