Sunday Feb 10 2008

Every year, on Valentine's Day you can see men walking down Grafton Street with bunches of flowers and boxes of chocolates in their hands. Even though gay men love flowers, you can be sure that these men are never gay men. They are bringing the flowers and chocolates to women, because generally women -- even women who've been married for some decades -- still expect to be wooed and, as such, demand romance, whereas two men can always cut to the chase.

To some, it might sound refreshingly liberating to eliminate Mr Hallmark and Mr Milk Tray from the picture and settle in for a nice evening's fisting instead, but there is a price to pay. It has been written that America is a country that went from barbarism to decadence without ever knowing civilisation. It could equally be said that gay men go from innocence to debauchery without ever knowing romance.

The problem starts right back in adolescence. There is no puppy love for a schoolboy who suspects he might be what they all say he is anyway. No quiet hand-holding or snogs behind the bike shed. He'll probably have an unrequited crush until he discovers that you can meet people online and is introduced to sex without any of the little romantic skirmishes that should precede it. By the time he starts going to the clubs, he's probably already settled into a rhythm of one-night stands, steadily making himself sick by eating everything on the menu.

"I grew up in the Nineties," says Mark from Dublin. "And it wasn't just that you knew it would be impossible to go out with anyone in school, it was that you never saw depictions of what might be possible anywhere. Everything I learned about love and sex, I learned from the porn I kept under my mattress. You'd see snippets of late-night Channel 4 shows, but there was no gay Dawson's Creek or Top Gun. You never saw gay men kissing or holding hands or bringing each other flowers or living together. They were only ever fucking. And probably wearing something leather. With studs."

In our 20s, like American singer-songwriter Liz Phair, we continue to "wake up alarmed at the sight of another passing soldier and to wonder whatever happened to a boyfriend -- the kind of guy who'd just win you over?" And, like Liz, we spend our time "fucking and running". There's always a vague notion of wanting to meet Mr Right but nobody has more than three minutes to get our attention. We're ultra picky. If he's not drop-dead gorgeous with a killer personality and a non-mimsy job (ie, not an air steward, retail queen, hairdresser or "carer" of any kind), then forget it. It's an old gag that a lesbian will bring a moving van along on the second date, but with gay men there is unlikely to be a second date. We measure relationships in minutes. Anything over a week and your friends start cracking jokes about buying a hat for the wedding.

"I'm 30 now," Sean from Cork bravely admits. "And I'm a bit embarrassed to say the longest relationship I've had has been four months. There are a few flings that you'd kind of exaggerate the significance of, but when you look back they don't add up to very much. There are loads of reasons why, but I'd say that, after a while, you begin to get comfortable with your own company. You first learn how difficult it is to find love, and then you sort of stop looking for it. You have the attitude that if there is someone out there, he can find me. It's fine a lot of the time but then I do sometimes get invitations to weddings and I see a lot of my straight friends settling down. And I wonder: 'Will that ever happen to me?'"

It is a fact that it is far, far more difficult for a gay man to find a mate than his straight counterpart. Any straight man, no matter what he looks like, no matter how unwinning his personality, can get a girl. To wit: Eamon Dunphy has a girlfriend. Professor Stephen Hawking has a girlfriend. Hugh Hefner, impotent, hideous and roughly 143 years old, has an entire mansion full of girlfriends. And it isn't merely fame and power that stacks the odds in these men's favour. A gay man, no matter how well known, talented or powerful, cannot take love for granted. Brian Kennedy -- famous, reasonable looking, and only slightly weird -- is single. On the other hand, the very-unreasonable-looking Ryan Tubridy has already been married once.

"I'm in my mid-ish 30s," Conor, from Dublin concedes, "and I have a great job and my own place and all that. Without sounding conceited, if I was straight I would be considered a catch. But I might never meet someone to settle down with because, unlike women, gay guys don't tend to look at things, like how secure you are, or how much you earn or even whether you're that nice a guy. Being gay is all about having unrealistic expectations. It's all about what you look like and if you're not chiselled looking, it's hard work finding someone."

A corollary of this is that older gay men have a very hard time finding love. Because

gay men are so visual, so fixated with looks, an older gay man has a far harder time meeting a mate than his straight counterpart. The classic Hollywood pairing of a geriatric old fart and a gorgeous younger woman (think: Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones) would never, ever happen in the gay world unless there was a serious amount of money changing hands. In Ireland, this is especially the case.

The "scene" is so youth-obsessed that there is nowhere to go for the older gay men who were left behind by the liberal revolution we experienced in the Nineties and the earlier part of this decade. In New York and London there are gay gentlemen's clubs, dignified joints where older men can relax and socialise without feeling like old letches. In Dublin, there is only the oft-mocked Jurassic Park -- which is vernacular for the separate downstairs bar in the George.

"When I first started coming to Dublin you would never, ever be seen dead going into a gay bar," says Martin, 54, from Galway. "There was only one that I knew of then anyway. Whenever you'd meet someone, it would always be a bit furtive. You'd both be completely paranoid about secrecy and it would be more than likely be just sex. Now, things are a bit more open and there's the internet and all that as an alternative to the bars. But still, it all came a bit too late for people my age. Most guys wouldn't look at an oul' fecker like me and I'm not into men my own age, so it's impossible," he says.

The internet, of course, changed gay lives in Ireland more than any laws or changes in attitude. It came with built-in discretion and allowed you to meet other guys on a Tuesday night even if you lived in, say, Moate.

But if gay "courtship" was unromantically straightforward before, the internet made it positively transactional. A new term was coined -- "a meet" -- to describe a purely sexual encounter arranged over the internet.

"I've met guys after chatting with them online," says Paul from Kildare, "and it's never what you'd call romantic." First of all, you've probably already chatted about sex online and it's inevitable that you'll get down to it fairly soon after meeting them, if not immediately. You might think a relationship is still possible but when you've already jumped ahead to the sex, it's almost ridiculous then to try to get to know the person after -- sort of, like: 'That was great! Um, what's your name again?' I think we end up doing it backwards a lot of the time and that's why there are so many gay single people."

Then, of course, there's the family/society angle. The whole idea of two men settling down or finding love is so new still that it's something that is still more tolerated than encouraged. Of course, there's the tax breaks and adoption rights and all of those legal things, but there are other more subtle social reasons why gay relationships tend not to come into the public view very often. You'd never see two men holding hands on the street and this is as much because of good old Irish embarrassment at people gawking as it is a result of fear of any real physical or verbal abuse. Work is tricky, too. There aren't many gay men in Ireland who would have the balls to bring their significant others to a staff do. Most would expect that the invitation didn't include gay boyfriends, and it probably didn't.

Straight men and women (especially the latter) will get the odd familial nudge toward matrimony, but rare is the mother who would nag her gay son into settling down. We have no expectations to live up to, so often we don't bother. This might sound like freedom, sort of like not having to get a job, but there's actually a tyranny in freedom. As Freud wrote: "Man needs love just as he needs work."

Tom, 33, from Dublin, says his parents are from the country: "I won't say where, but it is one of Ireland's many back arses of nowhere. When I told them I was gay, they went mad and offered me money to go and get therapy. They were basically treating it like a mental illness. They are only in their 50s so it's not like they are very old, or anything. My friends told me to take the money and spend it on a holiday, to go somewhere like Mykonos, and toast their generosity. It's easy to laugh now, but suffice to say, I won't be bringing any boyfriends home. And of course that affects things."

"Things have improved a bit in that regard," says John from Dublin, of the acceptance of gay relationships within families. "The mothers of most gay guys I know would be fine with it. Siblings are often way cooler about that stuff as well. It's usually the fathers that get a bit wound up about their sons being gay. Mine did a bit. I don't know if things like that affect how you form relationships and fall in love though. I always thought disapproval was a powerful aphrodisiac. Think of Romeo and Juliet. Everyone was disgusted, but that was what made it so exciting in the first place."

Naturally, the huge, glaring reason that romance between two men is so difficult is beyond the reach of mammy or the Revenue Commissioners: it's because it is romance between two men. The instinct of any man, gay or straight, is to sow his wild oats as often as humanly possible.

Straight men know that a bit of sweet-talking along the way can aid this process, so they buy into the whole thing. Once you have women out of the picture, there's really no pressing need for soft lighting or mood music. There's no need even for the pretence of monogamy. And it's always been this way: 10 per cent of sonnets in literature were not written by men to men. Romance becomes more difficult when things are as straightforward as: "Your turn."

The straight world was always at a distinct advantage because they had so much less sex and as Andy Warhol observed: "Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites who never meet."

Into what relief are the arguments for gay marriage thrown by all of this? If gay romance is dead, what role will the supposed ultimate expression of love play in our lives in the future?

"Well I'm gay and marriage would be a good thing all right," says Sean from Dublin. "But you honestly see so few gay couples that you wonder if other things wouldn't need to be in place first. Even when you do meet a couple, they're very often not totally monogamous. One or other will turn a blind eye. I laugh when I read those arch-conservative commentators saying that we would cheapen the institution of marriage. It's pretty cheap already, but I'm sure we'll do our best."

"I disagree," says Mark. "Gay men put more stock into romance precisely because we experience so little of it. We're all dreaming of finding someone to live happily ever after with even if we're going about it the wrong way. I think if something like gay marriage were brought in, we'd live up to it though. Maybe we'd even reinvent it, bring some romance back to it. You know, it's no secret that the biggest romantic weepie of the last five years was Brokeback Mountain. We all aspire to something like that."

Gay marriage should still be granted because we want it for tax and inheritance rights as well as intertwined shirts in the wardrobe. And if we have trouble discovering romance, it could be because it is on the wane anyway. The sex deficit between gay and straight people is closing all the time and the results can be felt everywhere: nobody gets love letters any more, nobody elopes, nobody loves a man in uniform, cigarettes cause cancer, flowers are gifted with sheepish irony.

Lisa Simpson once observed that "romance was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenised and sold off bit by bit", but in fact the real death knell, as far as its appearance in popular culture goes, was sounded by Hollywood. The movies used to be all about romance and when the stars, formerly the repositories of all our romantic fantasies, showed themselves to be nothing more than ordinary mortals, the effect trickled right down to us non-entities.

Back then, Clark Gable murmured to Vivien Leigh in classic black and white. Now we can see Colin Farrell, in Alexander, murmuring to his lover in a curious green light. Studio executives still wonder why people don't go to the movies in the same numbers they used to, but the reason is simple; they stopped trading in romance.

There's no going back to that era now but many people would argue that the highly sexed society in which we live does not preclude romance, that we can still have the reality TV and Britney Spears and online porn and the moonlight and wonder. But, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Through our chink too wide there comes in no wonder. After decadence there can be no civilisation, after debauchery, no romance.

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