The love that will not shut up - by Will Self

Self's new novel is an updating of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Today, 'inverts' and green carnations have been replaced by Aids and militant politics. But what would Wilde make of a world in which queer culture is in the mainstream? And what does 'gay' mean now anyway?

Is "gay" a useful word at all any more? Let's face it, it's been semantically twisted and bent over the years until its connotations are at best fluffily innocuous – some might even say specious – and at worst hopelessly contraindicated. In what meaningful sense can any or all of the following be described as "gay": Michael Barrymore, Peter Mandelson, Chris Smith, Ron Davies, Julian Clary, Elton John? If you regard this list as an exercise in free association, does any of these people strike you as "gayer" than any of the others? Perhaps you will object that Ron Davies doesn't belong on the list; after all, although he frequented one of London's notorious cruising grounds, this was simply "a moment of madness" in an otherwise tediously heterosexual life. Granted, Davies did admit to same-sex loving in the distant past, but that was just the "stage"– so beloved of Freudians – that he was going through.

This is a non-trivial point, because while we think of "gay" as an adjective applied to people, historically same-sex loving has not been perceived as being an attribute – essential or otherwise – of persons, but rather purely functionally. Taking the long-term view, gay is as gay does. Interestingly, this more entrenched perception of same-sex loving seems to have come full circle in the contemporary use of "gay" among teenagers, for whom it's an all-purpose pejorative. My 12-year-old uses "gay" the way that I and my contemporaries used "naff". (Which in turn, as a footnote, derives from a Gaelic term for the female genitals.)

As for the others in my list, well, are some of them gayer than others? It's difficult to imagine calling Peter Mandelson "gay" to his face, or to hear him use the term of himself. Michael Barrymore, now a monumental wreck of a man, crushed by the two, collapsing pillars of alcoholism and celebrity, has not the slightest hint of gayness about him. Even at his peak, prancing about in those Elysian studios, ushering contestants into the synthetic immortality of television, Barrymore didn't strike me as particularly gay. Let's confront a truth here, at least part of the connotation of "gay" is effeminacy, and lurking behind this is the act which still defines a man as quintessentially effeminate, passive sodomy. The fall of Barrymore is as much predicated on a peculiarly modern prejudice – the implication of much of the coverage being that he was an active, not to say, abusive sodomite.

I would argue it's not without accident that "gay" became synonymous with male same-sex loving. Originally a slang term applied to female prostitutes, it was inseminated by its manifest meanings – jolly, happy, abandoned – to create a pejorative perfect for subverting. The closest example to the way "gay" was turned into an ascription of pride that I can think of, is the term "nigger". With young Afro-American men, the pride enshrined in the free use of this one-time anathema is arguably a pride not worth having, with its overtones of violence, misogyny and alienation. But maybe the same is now true of "gay"? Could it be that pride-in-effeminacy no longer serves the cause of same-sex loving that well? Could it also be that the constituency which is – very loosely – bracketed by the term, no longer has a useful or workable identity either?

Because this isn't simply a piece about semantics – not even the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote those (and in what meaningful sense, I wonder, could he be described as "gay"?) – it's a piece about tolerance and freedom. Make no mistake about it, when I propose the doing away of gay, I don't for a second doubt the reality of homophobia in this country, or its deep and sturdy roots in our social mulch. Arguably, Britain has had a more virulent, enduring and politically-sanctioned antipathy towards same-sex loving than any other Western European country (with the obvious and grotesque singularity of Nazi Germany excepted). Perhaps this can be accounted for by our religious history, with its reinforcement of the prejudices of one denomination by the other? Or maybe it's a function of our early industrialisation, and accompanying rigid gender stereotypes?

Personally, I agree with Oscar Wilde (gay, or proto-gay?), who described this country as "the native land of the hypocrite". Same-sex loving was so entrenched and widespread in the hierarchies of Victorian England that to regard it as the chancre of the body politic, rather than its very cement – the doomed and annihilating love of older men for younger, which ended in the trenches – could only be the act of those so blinkered they were unable to see that their right hands were pleasuring their left. It seems to me that it's this hypocrisy – rather than the homophobia – which is logically prior. Wilde's own fate, of course, presaged – and some would argue caused – a backlash and further intensification, that led to another 70 years of systematic persecution of same-sex loving, as well as a myriad of random acts of senseless cruelty.

By the early 1930s, Quentin Crisp would be recording the horror show of a culture where gender stereotyping was so intense, that to wear a brown jacket was a suspect act for a man, unless he could claim to be an "artist". It's not, therefore, that I think the current situation, whereby the regime has boasted two, openly "gay" cabinet ministers, is such a tolerant one, and that the injustices of the past can be abandoned along with the terminology they gave rise to. On the contrary, I think brown jackets could cease to be de rigueur only too easily, but I question whether or not those who sport them can hope to achieve much more by continuing to refer to themselves as brown-jacket-wearers.

Again, this point is neither trivial nor semantic. "Gay liberation" began – as its name suggests – as another tendency in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. The Stonewall riots of 1969 were of a piece with student occupations, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and women's liberation. All were tinged with the then fashionable, spray-on Marxism; all gained important breakthroughs by rejecting gradualism and opting for the ideological putsch. Then, in the 1970s, the dominant philosophy of minority protest changed, from the dialectic of opposed classes, to that of excluded ethnic minorities. But the discrimination affecting women, or "gays", wasn't comparable to that of the industrial proletariat or blacks, and in attempting to shoehorn their movement into these uncomfortable paradigms, campaigners for the equal status of same-sex relationships under the law have assumed a bogus essentialism. In line with this, "gays" are both perceived – and perceive themselves – as part ethnic minority and part third gender.

Again, at a more fundamental level, this means that people who undertake same-sex relationships are still adhering to paradigms of their "nature" which derive from the sexologists of the late 19th century. These men, whether benign – like Havelock Ellis in England – or pernicious – like Kraft-Ebbing in Vienna – or highly ambivalent – like Sigmund Freud, who vacillated between viewing same-sex loving as pathological, or merely strangely other – are the ones who blazoned the term "homosexual" (in fact originally coined by the Hungarian physician Karoly Kertbeny in 1869, but as an adjective, not a noun). It's worth remarking on yet again, that the term was only definable at all in contradistinction to "heterosexual". Heterosexual was the "normal", essential sexual nature – "homosexual" the aberrant. Thus gender rigidity and medicalisation were the attendants of systematic discrimination, but – and this is the true dialectic of the sexual revolution – they were then absorbed into the new synthesis: a committed and highly intelligent movement for the free expression of sexual identity.

But what was this "identity"? To a writer such as Marcel Proust (gay? Or – as he styled his own same-sex loving characters – "invert"?), who lived on the cusp of these developments, it was at one and the same time affliction, pathology, perversity and so normal that he could write one of the finest, most exhaustive dissections of opposite-sex loving (Albertine disparue), merely by changing the gender of the object of his protagonist (and alter-ego's) desire.

To some, the fact of same-sex loving in history is – so they would have us believe – a big yawn, but there's nothing more important for this debate than the sincere acknowledgement of how pervasive these relationships have been. Of course, William and Mary (who kept separate same-sex loving ménages), James I, Charles II and Edward IV (all of whom not only had same-sex relationships, but who also governed the country through same-sex favourites), cannot be claimed as "gay" heroes; and I would argue that it is, in part, the "gay" community's refusal to acknowledge the bisexual orientation of these monarchs that has militated against its full recognition. The same is true, of course, of Shakespeare.

There was one philosopher who forcefully advanced the non-essentialist view of same-sex loving, the French thinker Michel Foucault (who published the first volume of his History of Sexuality in 1976). Much derided in academia for playing fast and loose with his source material, Foucault's view that "homosexuality" was a recent phenomenon and that same-sex lovers had put on a bespoke, pathological identity, tailored for them by psychiatrists, was taken up – paradoxically – by the radical movements that sought to transform the "gay" stereotype of effeminacy.

If Foucault (presumably not remotely "gay") was the ideologue of the clones, then their style counsellor had to have been William Burroughs (gay? Are you joking?). In his Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, a science-fantasy written in the mid-1960s, Burroughs limned in a polymorphous sexual culture of the near-future, in which the eponymous heroes fucked and fought their way across the world. When Burroughs returned to New York after his 20-odd-year exile abroad (occasioned, in part, by his refusal to be at all closeted about his same-sex loving), his greatest joy was to witness the prevalence of just such polymorphous pornography in the Greenwich Village movie theatres. Of course, the Wild Boys also had another scourge to deal with – besides their own irredeemable delinquency – a sexually transmitted virus originating among the baboons of Africa.

The magisterial Neil Bartlett, in his seminal work on Oscar Wilde Who Was That Man?, characterises Dorian Gray as a prolepsis, an anticipation of the shape – if not the form – of a liberated culture of same-sex loving. The dreadful paradox was that no sooner did same-sex lovers find themselves ostensibly "liberated", but they were once more draped in chains. At first for purely fetishistic purposes, but then the chains were those of the retrovirus itself; as Prince styled it: "a big disease with a little name". Foucault famously sneered at his own mortality: "To die for the love of boys, what could be finer?" (although I wonder what the boys themselves made of it), while the clones' exaggerated take on machismo – which acquired political expression in such groups as Act Up and Queer Nation – was hobbled, first by the chains, and then by that most insidious of viruses, globalisation.

What was "queer" anyway, save for a harder-edged version of "gay", the muthafucka to its nigger? The term still derives, conceptually, from an idea of inversion, and just as Kraft-Ebbing et al wished to ground "homosexuality" on an organic basis, so modern essentialists – whether pro or anti – seek out the "gay gene". What either party will see in it – if they find it – like all other would-be genetic engineers, depends on their initial presumption. If anybody has a gene for prejudice it's all of these people. Meanwhile, the so-called "debate" on same-sex loving has tacitly been dropped for being boring. The "gay community" – like the ethnic one and the women's one – has become suitable material for a Benetton billboard: the United Colours of Sodomy perhaps.

Clones, queers, gays, leather queens, bears – whatever, they all have their own niche, and it's one defined as much by marketing as any identity which transcends what you wear, where you go or how you make love. The only people who are pronounced unacceptable on all sides are people who refuse to conform to one thing or the other. Even a ghetto is a kind of exclusive club. The great debate that Aids should've stimulated – about sexuality, about gender identity, about everything – was quietly cancelled when Highly Active Retroviral Treatments came along to remove – at least for the time being – some of the links from the chain. Sometimes, Ms Sontag, it's nice for a disease to be just a disease, not a metaphor. Those times being when it's treatable.

As much by stealth as any other method, and arguably as part of the changes that have defined us all as consumers (even the destitute are "clients"), the last couple of decades have seen almost all legal barriers to those who wish, openly, to maintain same-sex relationships, at least pushed aside. The key ones that remain concern the rights to marriage, inheritance, and parenthood. Section 28, which can be seen as denying the acceptability of these rights at a deeper level, remains on the statute book. It's worth remembering that this regressive legislation was put there in 1988, in the time of Aids, as a Daily Mail-reading-mob appeasement by Margaret Thatcher.

Section 28 is abhorrent, and besides a handful of Ivan Massows, the majority of the Countryside Alliance marchers who descended on the capital last Sunday are as virulent and prejudiced against same-sex relationships as they were. In the Daily Mail and Telegraph-reading hinterland "gay" is a potential paedophile, a pervert, or at best, something to be suffered rather than celebrated. Perhaps it's time for us to take the wind out of homophobes' sails by taking the "gay" out of liberation? Section 28 should be abolished not because we wish to "promote homosexual lifestyles", but because we no longer wish to make an issue out of what kind of loving people do.

Like most novelists I am broadly shallow. When I was writing a novel about chimpanzees I became fixated by the debate about animal rights, when I was writing one about attitudes to mortality I became enthralled by Tibetan Buddhism. For the past year or so I've been "rewriting" Dorian Gray, setting it in the time of Aids and the "liberated" milieu Wilde anticipated. Predictably, during the writing I've become obsessed with issues surrounding sexuality. In my experience sexual orientation is mutable, and in working my way into the minds of my same-sex loving protagonists, I found myself enjoying enhanced homosexual fantasies. I've also been having the debate about sexuality that I thought Aids might provoke – the debate about the redundancy of "gay". Some of my interlocutors – whatever their professed orientation – have acceded to my proposal with fiendish alacrity, saying: "So what? It's what I've believed all along, gay, straight, they're all socially-conditioned categories, not worth the earring they're dangling from."

Other essentialists have held out for longer, and one obstreperous fellow kept his opposition up well into the night during our Cretan holiday. Pressed again and again to define what exactly made "gayness" an essential characteristic for him, he was reduced in the end to saying "Well, I shouldn't like to spend my whole evening chatting someone up, only to find out eventually that he wasn't interested at all in sleeping with me." Now, as this friend is in a long-term, committed relationship, I didn't find this argument very impressive at all.

Were I single, I can't imagine anything more exciting than chatting someone up in a world where orientation was less elastic, less a given for most – if not all – people. I suppose, faute de mieux, some people will feel the need to define themselves as "heterosexual", but I for one find it merely to be something I do, rather than what I am.

'Dorian: an Imitation' is published by Viking at £16.99