I love heterosexual men. Or, at least, I love the vulnerable, sensitive side of their characters that they show to me. As I grow older, and become more comfortable with myself as a gay man, with the prickly defences gradually beginning to thaw and the shrouds of guilt dissolving into the Celtic mist from whence they slithered, more and more heterosexual men are entering my life, and I am richer and softer a man because of it.

This train of thought all started with a very slight encounter with a heterosexual man I had last Saturday night. (I use the cumbersome word heterosexual rather than the easier word straight because I am not unstraight.) On most other occasions, I would not have thought twice about it.

I was queuing up at a drinklink for cash, about to meet a friend of mine in a Soho gay bar. Or, rather, I had forced my way through the crowd there to see if he’d arrived (he hadn’t), checked my wallet at the bar, realised I was strapped, and so I forced my way out again.

The atmosphere was not pleasant, and, not for the first time, I was trying to think why I was so uncomfortable. Was it the oil-and-vinegar mix of pre-club queens camping it up in the centre of the space, and the phalanx of brooding, bedenimed single men lining the walls? Was it that I was feeling my age? Was it the sense of nagging failure I feel, despite myself, when I enter a room and heads don’t turn the way they used to, as when I was a pretty youth? Is it that I haven’t turned myself into a muscled hunk, the acceptable face of mature men on the gay scene, the one where the face may be not the freshest but the body is to die for?

Is it that I don’t wear labels, never have, never will, (except the non-label Levi Strauss)? Is it that the more I realise my emotional riches, as I troll along the therapeutic path, the more desperate I feel that the gay scene is destined to be the one place where they will be most invisible?

I can’t guarantee that these pithy philosophical musings were all rolling around my head as I joined the motley line of Saturday night revellers queuing for the ATM, but you get the gist. And, I hadn’t had a drink yet. So I was mercifully devoid of sentimentality.

As I was standing there in thought, I became aware that the man in front of me was looking at me. Not in a predatory way; but, with a gentle repositioning of his stance, he took me in. I knew he wasn’t gay from a combination of experience and the way it felt to be beheld by him. In a word: lovely. No agenda. No covert gaze to the crotch. No need to be looked at in return. Just a simple, curious, frank openness.

I enjoyed his attention for a while, as we did the two-step shuffle down the queue. I wasn’t surprised when he spoke to me; it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Looking into his eyes, I saw wide black pools of irises; he was coming down from E, in that mellow love-the-world clarity, past the frenetic stage. He was in his 20s, handsome and stocky, but with a transparent vulnerability that was, I thought, as much drug-induced as it was to do with his pale skin and blond hair.

But, then, I reconsidered. I had just come from a pub full of gay men in varying stages of intoxication with all the party substances known to man. None of them seemed capable of his emotional transparency; or, at least, what feelings they were revealing were nothing remotely as kind or as inquisitive as that which this young man was treating me to then.

He was admiring my mohican, a last-dash-before-I’m-40 anachronistic fashion statement that suits my mood at the minute. He was suggesting the colours I should dye it, and intimated that he was considering having one. I looked at him and wanted to say, “Don’t you change one thing about you, you little treasure, give us a hug” but didn’t. Precisely, I now realise, because I would have got one, and probably a big squeezy bearhug.

I became quite nicely shy. I don’t do shy much, these days. He asked me where I was going that night. Again, my thought was unspoken: “I’m meeting a friend in a sordid hellhole called a gay bar which I hope you never have to experience in your life because you would be eaten alive there”. Instead I mumbled something about meeting a friend for a pint.

We chatted for a bit more, I basked in his radiance, bashfully attempted to reflect some of it back, and then his turn came at the machine. He drifted off – and that was that. Nothing happened. No earth-shattering exchanges of bodily fluids, no sweet nothings murmured silkily in seductive desperation, not even a friendly grope. And I felt utterly charmed by his simplicity and his genial sociability. I went back to the pub, met my friend, and after several attempts to chat over the impossibly loud dance music, glowering at London’s “finest”, we left. On the street it occurred to us simultaneously to go to a “straight” bar – where we found seats, good music, and space to talk as we needed to. It was relaxed; although just around the corner, it felt as if we were on a completely different planet.

Perhaps it’s a case of the grass is always greener on the other side of the sexuality fence. When we’re not threatened, we can beam out with untrammelled might our love for another human being. And it’s least threatening when sex is not on the menu. With age, as sex slips from top priority in my mind to joint first place, perhaps the men who aren’t gay who love me, even just a little, are teaching me something that I’ve been missing all along.