Anyway, it was a wet and wild weekend, featuring lots of winking and staring and perving, and people being pushed fully clothed into swimming pools. So the idea of sitting down to write a rabid appreciation of a new play which is something of a scathing criticism of certain aspects of the Gay Life would appear to be hypocritical to say the least. The problem is that I love, love, love the gay male lifestyle, as lived by young metropolitan gay men, and I love so many of those men as mates — but I am extremely turned off by the sort of po-faced smuggers who hold it a beat too long and insist that anything gay is good, even when they’d think it was offensive/tacky if breeders did it. I’m thinking of a few things in particular; gay “leaders” who on one hand talk about “community” and “respect” and on the other think it acceptable to use public spaces — be they toilets or parks — for private acts. “There is no such thing as society,” eh boys! Yet straight dogging is, quite reasonably, seen as the antics of sad pervs.

When straight people are obsessed with cooking and babies, we all accept that they are crashing bores who need shooting — but when gayers fetishise domesticity, we all go, “Ahhh!” and get all misty-eyed over their red-faced, screaming “gaybies”. We call straight discos meat markets — yet gay discos, with their copious copping off, are meant to represent a new, clear-eyed approach to the pleasures of the flesh. Kids screaming at boybands are cretins; gays screaming at boybands are slyly subverting the “system”. Appreciating women for the youth and firmness of their bodies is sexist and outdated; appreciating men for same shows a healthy acceptance of one’s physicality. Men who love women in uniform are kinky; women who love men in uniform are tragic — men who love men in uniform, though, are artfully undermining the military-industrial complex.

A quick look at the back of Attitude will reveal an attitude to the sticky issue of sex through the class barriers that is both funny and saddening, and says far more about the gayers who respond to them than it does about the “lads” — they are always lads, as “men” would make them too threatening and “boys” not threatening enough — who are completely “straight”, yet apparently can be had, on film and on phone-line, for the price of a pint. These are the newest pretty boy pin-ups: the “Triga” lads who feature in videos such as Paramilitaries, Council Estate Europe and Scally Boy Wankers. Or you might prefer hanging on the telephone to such socially aware mashes as “Three prison inmates give me a good time”, “Soccer thug sex” or my particular favourite, “Let DSS bloke shag me for a crisis loan”. What next — shagging the homeless?

You don’t have to be a politically correct cretin to find this sort of thing repulsive. In addition to this, the new video and phone-sex obsession with the haveability of all “STR8” men indicates gay male self-loathing, hostility to women (anything you can do, girly, I can do better!) and a level of self-deception to rival Vanessa from Big Brother when she claimed that she could “turn any gay man”. (A letter-writer to Heat magazine inquired innocently whether she had got those last two words the wrong way around.)

This is only the latest manifestation of a desire for a bit of rough that goes back to Oscar Wilde. But while a straight couple who went trawling for a third party for hire and fetishised them on the basis of their poverty — of income and aspiration — would be rightly repulsive to us, gayers who go in for this sort of behaviour seem to have made an unacceptable impulse in any language — the eroticisation of another person’s misfortune — into a hobby, like DIY.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence or something they’re putting in the gay water these days, but just about the best book I have read in about 20, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, deals with this issue — as does Matthew Todd’s brilliant play Blowing Whistles, in which two bourgeois benders get a little more than they bargained for when they ask a working-class hard-body back for a bit of three-way fun. Talking of twisting arms, this play is so fantastically tough and tender that it often feels as if someone has got you in a painful arm-lock — only to give you the sweetest, softest kiss. And that would be because Todd, like all reasonable people, neither loves nor hates himself, but instead thinks that he, and other people, tend to be equal parts splendid and silly — as are many religions, and many sexual choices.

In the light of this, what use is the Pride festival, which will take place over the next three months in London, Brighton, Manchester and beyond? I’m afraid that for me, Pride is a bit like Respect — even though some supporters of the latter would happily string up gay men from the nearest Tower Hamlets lamp-post, and YES, we all know which religious group I’m talking about, thank you! — in that whatever the virtues of the thing, the name alone sets off all the wrong bells. It sounds hysterical, for a start, and makes any healthy contrarian want to do exactly the opposite — ie, diss ’em till the sacred cows come home.

I will no more automatically respect someone whose religion dictates that the word of a woman in a court of law is worth half that of a man than I would automatically be proud of myself for liking to “take it” one way rather than another. Pride and respect should be a result of things we have earned — not accidents of birth. We should respect Muslims such as the author Irshad Manji and gays such as Peter Tatchell — both have put their lives on the line to fight for the freedom of humanity. But we should not go around feeling/demanding pride/respect in/for ourselves if we haven’t really helped out in a big way — because that’s just being up oneself. And that’s never a good look.

Blowing Whistles runs until June 26 at the Warehouse Theatre, Croydon (box office 020-8680 4060)

julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk