A gay man is more than limp wrists and laughs

The cabbalists said that Adam, alone in Eden, was not aware of his own existence. Therefore God created Eve in order that Adam should know himself. We exist fully only when we apprehend another person. You can't tickle your own toes.

The cabbalists said that Adam, alone in Eden, was not aware of his own existence. Therefore God created Eve in order that Adam should know himself. We exist fully only when we apprehend another person. You can't tickle your own toes.

Alone in Eden. It's a horrible kind of Paradise. I remember myself, as a teenager in the Seventies, becoming attracted to the nervous delights of the local cottage. That was what I thought being gay meant. A rough spasm, some pain, discomfort and the smell of piss. Not to mention the very real fear of discovery by men who thought that two men squeezed into a cubicle were committing a serious crime. OK, for some people that may represent the beginning and end of all joy. Great. But it isn't necessarily the beginning and end of all joy as I thought at the time. I saw it not as a part of the gay experience; I took it for the whole.

Straight people had loving relationships, tidy kitchens and warm beds. Every book, every drama, every TV sitcom presented this truth. There were no TV sitcoms in the 1970s featuring two gay characters sitting side by side in bed, reading books or running taxi firms or setting up their self-sufficient organic garden.

To be gay, therefore, meant to exist outside society, in silence and secrecy and toilets. It meant putting the sexual beyond the realm of the domestic. It meant being furtive. So one became silent, secret, furtive.

The only explicitly gay books I came across were by Jean Genet and William Burroughs. I thought they were fantastic writers then - and I still do - but both of them depict gay men as being wild, untamed, outside society. Great stuff. Love it. But again, not the whole story. And, indirectly, perhaps, such writing made it easier for gay men to be persecuted and imprisoned. Locking up wild outlaws isn't going to stir too many consciences.

Being a teenager, I had doubts about my identity, not because I suddenly started fancying the girls' hockey team but because - apart from Genet's and Burroughs' outlaws - the only gays I saw represented in the outside world were outrageously camp queens: Larry Grayson, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams - that seemed to be what being gay meant. Shrieking laughter, limp wrists, absurd innuendo. And, of course, we all knew that beyond the laughter, these guys had lonely, melancholy home lives.

Larry Grayson set me back a long way - but of course he didn't. Those who controlled the media were the ones responsible for ensuring that the only gays that we were allowed to see had to be stereotypical. Being gay was dangerous; people needed to think that all gays could be easily identified, and therefore corralled and controlled. The method worked.

And if gays weren't silly comics, then they had to be victims. Death in Venice, the book by Thomas Mann, the movie by Visconti with Dirk Bogarde: old man chases cute boy through the streets of decaying city, never catches up and drops down dead - how the hell did they pitch that story to the backers? But what else could a movie about homosexuality do in 1961 - when gay sex was still a crime in Britain and it was only a few years since a Home Secretary called Sir David Maxwell-Fyffe had vowed to "eradicate homosexuality"?

I took the hint from books, films and TV. There were no normal people there. I did not exist, apparently. My character was shaped accordingly. When things began to change in the late Seventies/early Eighties - with books such as Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and the film My Beautiful Launderette - so, too, did gay people. We saw ourselves living ordinary, unremarkable lives in books and film, and gradually we became ourselves - learning from the exceptionally strong and assertive fictional characters that we, too, need no longer hide in toilets, facetiousness and the terror of silence.