Sometimes I wander through the world and it’s as if I’m looking for reflections of me in other people’s eyes, in other people’s lives. Echoing the melancholic lilt of Peggy Lee’s “Is that all there is?” the question that scrolls through my mind is: “Am I really like that?” It’s a search for something. Identity? Community? A pantomime horse with two front ends, I want to be both as individual as possible, and as tribal as possible: to belong to somewhere, someone.

Like this gay thing. I go to a nightclub in London, a place where there’s performance art and edgy cabaret and lame quizzes on the Smiths and DJs who deliberately do not mix – they play a record (like T-Rex or Bowie or Souxsie) and then it stops. And then they put on another one. Like it was when we used to play singles in our bedrooms.

The crowd is casually dressed – no designer labels here, a deliberate anti-gay atmosphere. I feel at home and alien at the same time. Not an unusual experience. I look around. Am I really like that? Men in their forties with Goth-like dyed black long hair and intense stares piercing me through their fringe. Little fat skinheads with glitter in their No. 1 crop. Like members of an African tribe, a group of piercing afficionadoes sport their body modifications, penny-sized holes in their earlobes, barbells through the bridge of their nose, tattoos elegantly snaking around their nape.

Tall patrician artists of a certain age trying not to look like Francis Bacon (and failing) stand with their G&T’s in the corner. Post-lipstick chic dykes – drop-dead gorgeous women not bothering to camp it up anymore – stand in a warm huddle. A bearded Italian on E gestures in mock-seductive body language to me to smooch with him. I smile and demur politely.

The one face I recognise in the entire club is an ex of mine. Unhappy ending, why exhume the corpse of the relationship by saying hi? We embarrass each other when we talk. So I don’t say hi. Am I really like that? Do I not keep in touch with my exes?

The cabaret, a mini stage musical featuring the music of The Smiths, done solo with puppets and a Casio keyboard, is fun and too short, and, distractingly, involves baked beans being dumped on the stage. The club promoters, unusually friendly and kind men, are the ones who have to go on to the rickety stage with dustpan and brush and clean up the mess.

Later on the artiste wanders through the crowd in ’70s glam rock gear. Having been an actor, and knowing the life-saving necessity of hearing ego-boosting praise after a performance, I say “well done, enjoyed it” to him as he passes by. A face like murder barely nods acknowledgment. Later he’s standing beside me, smoking a joint while I dance to Talking Heads. But he doesn’t look. He’s not really there. The performer has no friends. Am I really like that?

I think of all the discos I’ve been to in my life. School discos, head-banging to Thin Lizzy’s Dancing In The Moonlight and Horslips. Those first gay discos, the sweet shock of seeing two men embrace for the first time. The performance of dance, the quest to surf the rhythm of the theme to Midnight Express or Love To Love You, Baby by Donna Summer. The sweat of it. The older clones with moustaches and hankies and poppers, ignoring me, all dead now. The standing against the wall, watching, hoping to be watched, dying inside, nonchalant outside. The walking home with ears humming. And the drunken tears of self-pity, nobody loves me, it’s not fair, I don’t know how to make connections. Boo-hoo-sodden-hoo.

Am I special enough to get attention in the crowd? Am I ordinary enough to be accepted by the crowd? Do I dress in a way that sets me apart, or shows that I’m the same? Have I any hope of anyone getting me, the point of me, in a room full of people hell-bent on keeping up appearances? Can I get a grip on people coated with Teflon? Do I need to get a grip? Am I really like that? Do I not appear just as supremely confident and self-assured as everyone else? How is anyone else to know what’s inside? Oh, play another Smiths song, why don’t you, it doesn’t matter anyway.

Community matters to me, and in a huge metropolis that’s oddly hard to find. What memories I have of the gay scene in the ’80s in Dublin are fond. It wasn’t perfect, nothing is, but there was a sense of people giving of their time to help out, politically, socially, creatively. Later on, I discovered the warmth of the Dublin theatre community – gregarious, social, generous. I could walk into any one of three or four theatre pubs in Dublin of an evening, broke, and be sure of a pint and a good evening sorting the world’s problems out: because I’d do the same, when I was working, for anyone else in the same boat. It’s about give and take. I miss theatre people enormously. Perhaps it’s the actor in me that goes around wondering: “Am I really like that?” Or, perhaps with a more professional slant, “could I be like that?”

I’ve discovered a community that is meeting my needs now for exploring this polarity of difference/sameness, individuality/collective. It’s called OUT, and it’s online. It’s for gay men, and it’s unusual in that it explicitly disallows predatory sexuality, proudly declaring that it’s for Zero Exploitation. Oddly, it works. Not that it’s fluffy and cosy – the discussion groups can be extremely polarized and contentious. And most members are of course people sitting on their own in front of a computer screen, which has its own ramifications – self-selecting isolationists without a full social life, adapting the strange beast that is the Net into something that at least curbs the worst excesses of untrammelled libido.

But OUT encourages people to organise social activities in their area, to get out and meet each other and find people on similar wavelengths. At its best, there have been long public discussions between members about relationships, depression, spirituality, how to cope with the strangeness of the gay scene, full of compassion and understanding. And some of the funniest banter I’ve ever read.

For young guys, especially, I can’t imagine anything more encouraging and supportive than discovering something like OUT. Like every community, you get back what you put in. And OUT seems to be something quite rare in the gay community – a place where young people can make friends and talk about their fears and hopes and get advice from older people who aren’t after their bodies, but who have been through it all themselves. The advice recently given to a 17 year old asking “How do I pull or be pulled?” on the noticeboards was met with some of the most empathic, considerate, human and encouraging advice I’ve ever seen given on the Net to any young person.

When I read that advice, given to a teenager in a panic wondering basically what being gay is all about, going “am I really like that?” – and the answers that come are generous and kind – then someone is learning that being gay – being a man – need not just be about getting your end away. And that’s the beginning of grown-up community.