The blank page.
Like so much that reflects and symbolises our emptiness or the void within, the blank page – the writer’s bane – is a screen to kick against, on which we project our desires, our fantasies, our dreams, our fears, our loves and hates.

Facing nothingness, the opaque mirror, is one of the most challenging things we can do. Whether we are pursuing a creative path, or on a spiritual journey, which in many ways is the same thing.
We often go to great lengths to avoid it. We keep ourselves working or fretting or vegging out on TV or video games just pretending it’s not there.
We fall in love to escape it, which has more to do with our fantasy needs apparently coming true, a rosey-hued reflection of ourselves, rather than dealing with the complex reality of another human being. We drink and have sex and take E and throw ourselves into frenetic activity to keep it at bay. We get glimpses of that emptiness in that liminal state between wakefulness and sleep, if we haven’t drained ourselves enough to let sleep take over the moment our head hits the pillow.
If we stop for a moment to reflect, and peer into what is going on inside, we may have to deal with stuff we’d rather not face, feelings we prefer to keep buried, disappointments we’d rather not admit to, and face the incontrovertible fact that we can’t control what we’re feeling, no matter how clever we are, how many self-help books we’ve read, how many years of therapy we’ve done.
To feel in control is what drives many of us. It’s our primary purpose in a way, to master our feelings and environment and give ourselves the illusion that we can dictate our own fate. This applies particularly to men. We use every trick in the book to avoid the experience of losing control. We seduce, we manage, we bully, we play the little boy, we try to please, we lie, we exaggerate the value of intellect and sex, we pin our sense of self-worth on exterior things like wealth and status and reputation. We stick to ideology and conviction and sex roles and gender expectations and fashions and religious or tribal loyalties. When in doubt, we default to cool indifference, a pseudo-rationality, an icy prison which seems all the safer because it usually drives those on the outside to a maddening frenzy in response.
When we genuinely love another, open ourselves up to the chaos and confusion of needing someone else, the generosity of being kind to someone else, and fully realise we are not an island, that we can be nourished by letting go and trusting, we often falter and bolt at the experience. It is alien, it offends our solipsistic perception of the world, challenges our self-awareness, suggests that there is more than one truth.
If it hurts us, we resolve deep down never to let it happen again. We may not even be aware that we are doing it, but every time life offers an opportunity to step outside the known, to take in something that we haven’t experienced before, we turn away, keep to the familiar, stick with what is safe. And who would blame us?
When men befriend men there usually is a shared (but often unconscious, or at the very least unspoken) understanding of how important the issue of control is. Men have a very subtle radar for knowing what topics are safe to talk about, what is needed to keep things comfortable, easy and supportive. We use humour to keep things light. We steer the conversation away from intimacies, unless we’re drunk, and then whatever is said isn’t going to be remembered or mentioned the following day in any case.
Women “give us grief” which means women tend to bring the subject back to the personal, the emotional, the relational – which is not safe ground for many men. When we trust, it transforms us. hen we are betrayed, it can destroy us, and we lack the emotional language to recover, to explain it, even to ourselves.
Similarly, gay men, like me, who are intense and personal, who challenge that safety of male camaraderie, are treated in many instances just like women – too many times I have stepped over the line and questioned men’s motives and feelings, gone in too close for comfort, held a gaze for too long, demanded emotional connection.
When I try to make sex into something more, when I want to step outside the sporting rules of engagement, when I want to bring feelings and emotions into the experience, I often feel like I’ve blown it. I know I’m not going to see them again. Sex with men is about keeping things light and playful, creative and adventurous. It’s not making love – that’s what women want. The sex I have with men, of whatever degree on the Kinsey scale, is only sustainable when it’s done in the spirit of a bit of fun, nothing serious, just a bit of a laugh. It is the unbearable lightness of being a man, masking the possibility of a deeper connection. It is our Achilles’ heel.
It is this mentality that governs the capitalist free-market world; control over vulnerability, power over sensitivity, imperialism over mutual respect. In gender terms, in our society at least, individuals are bucking the trend. For every man who thinks like this, you will now find a woman equally attached to status and control, and for every woman who values emotional connection and vulnerability, there is an increasing likelihood of a corresponding man – but we are a bit thinner on the ground, I think. And, far from offering other men a model in how to balance both our masculine and feminine sides, we gay men seem to be parodying the worst excesses of stereotypical male behaviour – post-liberation. We are just shopping and fucking and to hell with all that relationship shit. Perhaps that is just my experience of having lived in London for half my adult life talking; Britain is still an imperialistic war-mongering country, and its citizens haven’t objected to it enough to change direction.
It goes against the grain of this commercialised exploitative society to dare to keep space open and blank – we seem to have a relentless drive to invade, to fill, to penetrate space, the skies, the wilderness, the ocean – to possess and own it. We just can’t leave it alone. We have no reverence for it. The capitalist mind does not see the Amazon rainforest or the Alaskan snowscape as anything but a resource to be mined, a wealth that has to be plundered, a route to manifest this curious thing called progress. We cannot leave it alone, we have to fill it up. Emptiness has no commercial value.
But its where soul resides. And if we stick with it, and do not flinch, we can maybe find something worth knowing, something worth saying, something worth feeling, and find words to fill up the blank page.