For the first time in over 15 years, I’m sitting in the Bailey on Duke St, Dublin, with a pint, immersed in a book. I used to practically live in the Bailey, but I am now in an unfamiliar land, in time and space, full of young ghosts; any faces that I recognise on the street passing by are middle-aged now, and are few and far between. (When will I ever accept that I am middle-aged?) The pub is strange to me, it could be any one of dozens in the city now, generic swank. A Philippino waiter takes my order. Men with Vuitton carry bags swan in to be airkissed by women with Brown Thomas carry bags talking on their mobile phones. It was ever thus in the Bailey, but to me, now, they look too young to be so rich.
The book is G.A.A.Y by Jarlath Gregory. I read it straight through, unable to leave his world, the young gay scene in Dublin and London. The book transports me to the same stage in my life, in Dublin, the giddiness, the yearning, the humour. The obsessions. The insecurity. The style. (But we were the punks and the Dancing Queens and the New Romantics first.)The desperate pining for fame, the supposed antidote to loneliness, to feeling unloved. The bitching about Louis Walsh. The repetitive (one might say recidivist) search for love in all the wrong places. Subtitled “One hundred ways to love a beautiful loser”, it is straight from my life, 20 years ago. But for one thing – the wry, savagely beautiful, confident self-awareness. “The language of sex is the language of loss”, Gregory writes. “We become divisible, seeking to leave something of ourselves in others. We offer the other a share of our stories, and become written into the story of their lives in return.” I’ve had enough sex in my life, with men from many different cultures in the melting pot of one of the world’s great cities, to know that that is a uniquely Irish (translate as: literary) take on sex, and it makes me want to pack up my books immediately and leave the petrified perverse rationalism of London and flee, back to where I came from, that old familiar bittersweet metaphysical agony of home. I’ve been a fish out of water for too long, spiritually anaemic in a profoundly Irish way – I need to hear stories, I want to make stories, I want to tell stories to the men I meet. Meaning-making is my oxygen, it thickens my blood. I’ve been flapping around gasping on the deck of old Blighty waiting for someone to nourish me with narrative without being aware that that’s what I needed, all along. I think it’s time I stopped struggling, saved my energy, abandoned ship, and started swimming home. If last year’s Coming Out – Irish Gay Experiences was the book that confirmed all the reasons why I left Ireland, given that more than half the “coming out” stories were anonymous or pseudonymous, then G.A.A.Y is the book that, however Siren-like it may be, calls me home. Even if, as the lead character, Anto Broderick, laments: “consciousness sucks.”
It’s not that I haven’t learned an enormous amount in London, nor have I wasted my time – soon I’ll be giving a workshop, along with a leading gay Harley St psychotherapist, to others in my profession, about gay men and sex, questioning the increasingly popular discourse of sex addiction, and how it underpins the (to my pagan mind, sacrilegious) notion that sex is a shameful thing. In the UK, there is a pragmatic common sense approach to such matters, and a genuine concern that American (Puritan) notions of sexual shame don’t creep in through the back door via the 12-step movement. In Ireland, sexual shame is such a dense, ubiquitous, cultural fog that people have got used to it, and don’t know what sunshine is like. Or so I thought, until young Gregory blew a hole in the clouds.
Despite some similarities in the chutzpah of the characters to those in the book, I don’t think any of our gang could have written a book like G.A.A.Y 20 years ago, slap bang in the middle of the whirlwind, the late adolescence that practically all gay people go through in our 20s. It was a way of living that hadn’t been documented, that never appeared on TV; how we were living was too new, too fragile, too tentative. Too raw. We were peeking our heads above the parapet and hadn’t a clue whether our gorgeous crimped, kohled and highlighted heads would be shot at. As, indeed, they were, frequently. The queeny flair of Anto was on display everywhere in my world, but, evidently, it takes a few years, post-decriminalization, post-Brian from Big Brother, post-Shirley Temple Bar, post-Queer As Folk, for the feisty bravado of a pariah subculture to deepen from a showy defiant veneer, to the more robust inner certainty that enables a writer to invite us into his inner dramatic world, and not wince from the glare of inspection.
“Just don’t think this is a confessional. I’m way over the Catholic thing,” confides Anto. And I believe him. Our gang, way back then, spending all our Saturday afternoons in the Bailey flirting and bitching and strutting our funky stuff, would have applauded.

G.A.A.Y by Jarlath Gregory www.sitric.com