Some people like gay men, some people don't, although, in my varied and spectacular experience, there are gals who so tremble at the thought of being seduced by straight aces, they make Doris Day look like a hooker. There exists in the weird demented dimensions of womanhood, a primal fear of being lusted after, steamrollered into submission, and eaten alive by the dragon of hot male sexual desire. We call such wimpettes fag hags. These are gay men's groupies, wannabe models, or actresses, or just dumb little hippy girls looking for a guru, who want to be introduced to something only slightly seedier than dinner for two. They titter and teeter, lock arms with Oscar Wilde's brethren, and explore the basements and dungeons of secreted bars and pubs, to pose in the drinking dens that always have a dance floor. Like their predecessor, the rich society hostess, they have an inordinate amount of

time for the brazen, bitchy, parlour chat of a gay man, because he is unthreatening. Gay men and fag hags. Simultaneously, the most retarded and liberated of all symbiotic social groups.

The interdependence of heterosexual women and homosexual men is as perverse a phenomenon as Lily Savage. She is the supreme hermaphrodite, a Greek icon of dual sexuality for the twentieth century. She is working class, hard and brash, she swears, she smokes, and is as quick as a cheetah. If Mother Nature is going through her menopause and cracking up, Lily Savage is the embodiment of her distress. Hard to say whether her onstage wit and charm are the result of PMT or steroids, a hormonal imbalance taken to the extreme.

I love Lily Savage, as I love some gay men, for their addiction to and worship of strong, matriarchal figures, for their style, their patter, and their lachrymose sensitivity. I envy the brutish nature of their existence, more gladiatorial in its expression, than camp. And although they make me feel repressed, for sometimes gay men think there is no such thing as tomorrow, and they are right, of course, I admire their willingness ruthlessly to pit themselves against society and its moral constraints, to forge communities of their own. I like their willingness to evolve, and their bravery in admitting they are radically different.

The first casualty of our move toward a society where all sexualities are embraced has been religion and, to a certain extent, tradition. The individualism of gay men is a

triumph against our grey, predictable, and smug normality. And although I've had to challenge a few to a song to earn their respect, I'm on their side.

Gay men are the sons of Dionysus, a rainbow riot, some are exceptionally able people, with a reputation for talent which is almost Jewish in its mythology, while others just want to disco. It may seem unfair of me to draw such generalisations, if not wholly politically incorrect, and no doubt I have succeeded in offending at least one trouser browser. Nevertheless, I believe that gay men occupy a unique place in our culture. They are a reminder of a true pioneering spirit; the desire to break down convention, they are tokens of the power

of self-regard; contrary to popular opinion, being a slave to your ego

is fun, and is to be tuned into a searing aggression, which makes you feel alive.

I don't hang out with gay men. I'm not a fag hag. Fag hags are emotional and sexual cowards, in total fear of the cataclysmic attraction between a man and a woman. They want a best friend, preferably a girl, but they're too shallow and anti-feminist to bother dealing with their own sex. In patronising a clique of gay men, a woman is vain enough to believe that she is special by association, and can shake her la la as vividly, too. Sadly, she fancies herself as non-

conformist as her prey. Gay men attract not the steadying influence of a fun, unprejudiced woman, but the tormented approval of the empty and narcissistic. They are the focus of female neurosis.

Despite the potency of creativity, for which some are famously renowned, homosexuals are also sometimes crazily and sadly suicidal, immersed as they are, in the murky mysterious waters of a pure and a dangerous testosterone. In their largely hedonistic pursuit of success and pleasure, they can be self-destructive. In the entertainment world, idols come and go, shine and fade, the enigmatic Dean, Versace, and Fashanu come to mind.

Interestingly, when Aids was recognised as a killer in the seventies in the United States, the gay intelligentsia urged the closure of bathhouses, in order to restrict the level of casual sex, and so protect their communities from the spread of the disease. They met with resistance, not least because the possibility of death through sex was dismissed as political hokum. The communities had fought so long and so hard for venues of their own, campaigners were told that to close off such areas was a climbdown of Zeus-like proportions, and frankly not on. Self-expression, to a gay man, is everything, a principle worth dying for or, in one pop star's case, wrecking a millionaire career.