I am not convinced of the efficacy of using the law to change social mores. Certainly, the law has a big impact; I know that the rebel in me, the part of me that still rankles and wrestles and agitates, has its roots in my adolescence, when it dawned on me that having sex was illegal. I still simmer on the fuel of that outrage sometimes, the resentment of the outlaw. David Norris used the psychological impact of being criminalized as grounds for his (eventually successful) legal challenge to that law, and I can quite accept that it was as depressing and demoralizing as he and his psychological assessors claimed in court. But did it stop him from having sex? I doubt it. It certainly didn’t stop me. Even on pain of life imprisonment, desire has a way of asserting itself. One might even make the argument that such legal bondage increases desire rather than dampens it. Because there is a component of sex that is anarchic. Sex can offer the experience of transgression from duty and responsibility and rationality, it takes us out of the mundane, the ordinary, the civilized, the safe, the known. Legislators and moralists may decry this behaviour and wish to deny it, to stamp it out – down with that sort of thing – but, like the Hydra, the more one hacks off those feral heads, the more they keep on a-growing back.

And yet there has to be some way of regulating it, of taming the beast, I acknowledge that. It’s driven us crazy since time immemorial – Sophocles, on being sympathized with about growing old and losing his sex drive, replied that, on the contrary, it was like being unchained from a lunatic. The word lunatic is telling – it comes from luna, the word for the moon, which symbolises feelings, body, intuition, the chthonic, the Dionysian – as opposed to solar qualities of rationality, order, the Apollonian. How we deal with lunatics tends to be very similar to how we treat sexual anarchists. In the not-so-distant Irish past, the Magdalen laundries were evidence that, in our culture, the two were treated in exactly the same way – sexuality in women was lunacy, and there was only one response: lock them up and throw away the key. As is all too common with religion, the compassion and love shown to the original Mary Magdalen by Jesus got obscenely distorted into a cruel fundamentalist judgmentalism.

The current Irish law that criminalizes prostitutes (sadly introduced in the same Act that decriminalized homosexuality) perpetuates this cultural association. Sending whores to prison serves the same scapegoating function in society as putting lunatics in an asylum. It bolsters a sense of moral certainty and safety, but does fuck all for the benighted inmates. The modern, sensible approach to mental health is a community-care based model, but sadly that is still under-resourced and primitive in Ireland, perhaps betraying an unconscious fear that if we let them into our community, we have to relate to them, and by coming into relationship with lunacy, sexual or mental or spiritual, we have to face our fear that it’s catching.

We can’t lock our troubles away as a society, it just doesn’t work. To conquer the Hydra, we need to raise it up to the sun, bring it out into the open, discuss the complex issues, make sense of them, negotiate with them. Can anyone honestly say that sending (for example) a father of three to jail after a drunken night on the town, in which he ended up in a working girl’s bed, serves any useful purpose?

I am, sadly, a moral relativist. I can’t see that moral absolutes serve us when it comes to desire; context is all, for I do not believe that there is anything inherently wrong with consensual sex. Friends of mine who wrestle with the beast (and they are mostly men, it has to be said, testosterone is not to be sneezed at as an influence) attempt all sorts of ways to control it, to moderate it. In gay culture especially, the sexualized man is increasingly the norm, no longer the outlaw, as any visit to gaydar.ie will demonstrate. I know some of my friends hold on to a fierce sense of personal judgmentalism about this aspect of the gay scene, of male hypersexuality, and I sometimes wince at the force of it; it pushes my button marked “sinful outlaw” and I get defensive, no matter how hard I work on it. I object when personal standards become universal ones, when people use a particularly harsh personal rule to keep themselves on the straight and narrow, and judge others by the same standards. My response is that people are different. Some of us have a vigorously energetic lunatic tugging at our chain all our lives, while others simply do not have any experience of it. I do not judge someone who’s only been monogamous as being “better” in any way than someone who has had lots of sex with lots of different people. It’s only if someone is dishonest or hypocritical, that’s when my hackles rise.

The lunatic energy can be put to use in a different way, however. As my dear old Dad has always told me, the trick is to sublimate, to use that energy to fuel something else instead. He built a business on it, as he only got married at the age of 40. It’s a classically Freudian perspective, and although Freud is outdated in many ways, I find his writing on sex still relevant today.

What’s fascinating though is that when in the grip of that lunatic force, but using it differently, as I have been recently when obsessively throwing myself into a redesign of my blog that took several long days and nights, I recognise that the essence of my experience is very similar to when I’ve gone a-hunting for sex. The same feeling of being in the grip of something beyond my control. The same dogged pursuit of something intensely selfish and creative, at the expense of everything else. It’s the neglect of the relational, the domestic, the mundane, defying Hera and following Zeus, reaching for the stars. I’ve been like the archetypal nutty professor forgetting to eat or sleep or do the washing up. What I abandon in those crazy periods is any interest in the matrix of social networking, of keeping in touch with friends and family, which, for reasons of socialization or genetic makeup, women excel at. The accountability, the keeping in touch, the checking out how every one is, who was asking after whom, how so-and-so is coping, how that couple are getting on. It’s the naming of people, the placing of people, the socializing of people. In the grip of a creative lunatic frenzy, sexual or otherwise, such normalcy seems toxic.

But it passes. It always does. And then we get on with things.

“Before enlightenment, eat rice, wash bowl. After enlightenment, eat rice, wash bowl.”

They’ve ordered me to be cheerful this week. Put out the party streamers. Be Happy and Gay. Callou, Callay, Oh Happy Day. A three-line whip, no slouching, chin up, ass in, tits out, don’t let the side down. Celebrate thirty years. Don’t rain on the parade. Smile and wave, smile and wave.

Yes, but you’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties. And the party I’m being asked to host, the “let’s celebrate in a light-hearted way thirty years of fabulous gay lesbian and transgendered people in popular culture” party, is not one I’d particularly like to attend, never mind host. But, let’s not poop. I hate to disappoint. In random order, off the top of my head, guests I’d like to see walking up the pink carpet of celebratory 30-years-of-queerdom to the party include:

• Our own Graham Norton, the twenty-first century’s answer to Terry Wogan. (Not that Terry ever asked the question.) Despite his current inane TV persona, he is reported to be wickedly funny in real life. In Heat magazine recently, our cheeky chappy has said he finds it difficult to form relationships. “I seem to appeal to people who are bound to disappoint” he says. “In fairness, the people I do sleep with are better-looking than the people I slept with prior to becoming famous. But I think it’s to do with being rich as well.” When we were both seventeen, the young Norton (although he wasn’t called that then) and I appeared on a young people’s programme on RTÉ, Youngline. I was talking about being gay, he was put on the spot by a couple of punks and forced to declare he had no problems meeting girls in discos. I still have that tape…
• Little Brian Dowling, the first openly gay children’s TV show presenter. (Although, that’s not strictly true. The late Philip Tyler used to present Bosco. The parents of Ireland, however, may not have been aware that he was a regular presence on the gay scene in the early eighties. Indeed, in a Christmas sketch show at the Hirschfeld Centre, directed by the late lamented film-maker Kieran Hickey, under the pseudonym Cissy Caffrey, he sent me up rotten as a sort of Pollyanna-type scout leader, when I was running the gay youth group. But, I digress. This isn’t about me. Really.) Dowling’s wit, chutzpah and tenderness won him the second series of Big Brother, roundly defeating his steely-eyed Soho pink-pounder rival Josh “Josh’n’Pecs” Rafter. In an interview on his official website, the doe-eyed 29-year-old former self-styled trolley-dolly says he would love to have a child before he’s 40, he’s “quite maternal”. But he “would probably want to do it” on his own. He thinks that relationships are “all hard” and worries that if he got to the age of “say, 30 maybe” and was still single, he “might have a nervous breakdown”.
• Boy George O’Dowd. I have to say he endeared himself to me over last year’s pantomime farce, when he was humiliated so publicly with enforced community service, cleaning the streets of the Lower East Side. There’s something about his much-vaunted lack of ego that enabled him to retain his sense of humour with a panache that had me smiling. The selflessness is resonant with his flirtation with the Hare Krishnas, and, indeed, if he has a strong faith still, he’s going to need it, the way he’s heading. His public persona is disintegrating, and he seems to have abandoned moderation to follow quite an extreme life of online cruising and hiring guys for erotic photoshoots: instant muses. He’s hovering in a liminal state between reality and fantasy. The problem with pursuing such a path sexually, with or without chemical enhancement, is that it is a purely selfish route. We, the public, don’t get any of the joy, unless one derives pleasure from the titillation of the gutter press. Because, when taken to a different level, his long love affair with the unavailable, the fantasy that is the “straight man”, that greatest Muse of all, the drummer in the band, produced some of the most memorable tracks of the eighties, so bittersweet was the experience, so gifted was the musician.
• Nell McCafferty, whom I first saw as a dungareed feminist hard-chaw, paraded on the Late Late Show for a ridiculous makeover in the seventies. I had no idea who she was, but I remember how funny it seemed, how dry was her sense of humour. It wasn’t until I read her collection of articles, The Best of Nell, when I was 21, that I was taken by her passion, and it was her more than anyone else that inspired me to be a columnist. But it wasn’t until the blisteringly honest autobiography Nell that I really fell in love with her, for it was only then that so many things made sense, and I found her perspective on the relationship she had with Nuala O’Faolain, and its aftermath, compelling and persuasive. Last year I heard her on Marian Finucane, talking about how she was smoking after her heart bypass operation, wished she had enough money to afford therapy, and was ambivalent about whether she wanted to live or die.
• Guest of honour: David Norris, who deserves to follow the two Marys to the Áras more than anyone else. I’ve known him since I was a teenager, and remember when we were waiting with baited breath in the Hirschfeld Centre for news of the judgment in his High Court case to decriminalize us, and still remember the gloom that befell when he failed. (Although of course, his eventual triumph has had an immeasurably positive impact on our society.) Ever since then, he has never failed to impress with his dignity and his amazing humour and I’m deeply proud of him as an Irishman. He has frequently spoken of his Israeli lover of nearly thirty years. But now I read online that the bould Ezra, although proudly mentioned by Norris in Seanad Éireann reports, is now declaring his love to the worldwide media for someone else – a much younger doe-eyed Palestinian man.

OK, OK, you get the idea. Talented (first- or second-generation) Irish queer people, living outside of traditional relationship ideals, coping the best way they can with it. I could of course invite Anna Nolan, Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan, Frank McGuinness, Declan O’Gorman, Fr Bernard Lynch, and other folk, each well-known for different reasons. Do I dare invite Danny La Rue, eighty years old this year? Oh go on. I just did.

You see what you look for, I guess.

But, honestly. No matter how strikingly single many of my party-attendees may be, there’s one thing for sure. Imagine it. If they were all in the kitchen, at this 30th anniversary party, I’m pretty sure the laughter would raise the roof, and the rest of the house would empty, to join us.

Cheers!