Fridae

I am sinner. I confess. Excommunicate me.

Take my Prada shoulder bag from my evil frame and put me in sock-less sandals for the rest of my days. I am over 30. Besides getting up before noon on a Sunday, this is one of the gravest sins a gay man in the third millennium can commit. And the reason I can get up before noon on a Sunday? Cover your ears, Sister Mary Pill Popper. That's right: I didn't go out clubbing on Saturday night. Call the Conclave to order! Pile up the faggots, unfurl the twine and bind me to the stake.

I must admit, I am partial to the occasional crazy night when I go out after 2am and have one more lager shandy than is good for me, but I don't do it every weekend. I simply can't be bothered any more. Don't get me wrong. When I was an impoverished editorial assistant living in breadline Britain in the 1980s, I somehow managed to go out to the pub and Revenge nightclub (there may be a few gasps of recognition from the readership here. Dear old Revenge - sweet memories) nearly every night of the week and get absolutely trashed. And still I'd put in a better day's work than all the breeders around me the next day. And the weekends, well then there was no work to get in the way of pubbing and clubbing. In fact, it's a miracle I made it beyond thirty after all!

When I was a bright-eyed teenager it was all so wonderfully different, so free, so new. And the gay clubs were different. I'm talking 80s Britain when Thatcher, Thatcher Milk Snatcher (she abolished free milk for primary school children among her many other evil deeds), sent in her rubber-gloved army of policemen to raid the AIDS dens she held responsible for the spread of the contagion.

But we were bad in those days. The mix of various human excretions that stuck to the soles of your shoes as you entered the naughty darkness was testimony to what had gone on the night before and what would go on later. You don't see many 15-year old boys getting fucked over the jukebox with black cherry yoghurt as lubricant in the club scene of 2002.

Let's not even talk about poppers, coke, pure MDMA, fabulous quiff haircuts, sharp-angled clothes (remember the New Romantics?), frilly shirts, Goths, punks, skinheads, and worst of all, snakebites (cider and lager - lethal!). And it was the era of all the outrageous gay protest music, classics that you still hear re-hashed today: Bronski Beat, The Communards, Boy George, Marilyn and spunk-guzzling Marc Almond. Fabulous as Kylie is, she just doesn't make your granny baulk the way the old groups used to.

You guessed it. I'm going to say the clubs are just not as much fun any more. I've seen it all before. Done that. I'd rather prop up my feet by the window light with a thick Dostoyevsky and a hearty Shiraz than watch some anemic beanpoles bob up and down to an earsplitting monotone that makes every molecule in my body scream in protest. Unless you also take a pill and become one of the wobbling amoeba on the crowded dancefloor yourself, it just gets on your nerves.

And call me even more old-fashioned, but what happened to the chat-up line? Don't get me wrong. Lines like this would work a treat on me:

"Wanna dance?"

"Fuck, yeah!"

"That would be my next question�" (Justin and hot shirtless man in the American Queer As Folk)

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But those lines only appear on TV. In the modern club scene, those that can focus on you when you get to the club will be so far gone an hour later they will leave a tongue smear of saliva across your T as they race to the bathroom for their next snort. If only they were taking cocaine, at least they'd be interesting to themselves, but the modern club scene is an ecstasy miasma where shadowy wraiths all share a secret non-verbal communication system that would have the senior officers of the Starship Voyager re-modulating their translation matrices for days.

And the ecstasy isn't even pure. If I wanted to grind my teeth and stay awake all night, I'd take speed. If I wanted to see the pattern on my best friend's awful shirts come to life, I'd take acid. If I wanted to forget I even existed, I'd take heroin. But the pills available now seem to be part of some weird buy-one-get-lots free economy drive. You never know from one second to the next which of the drugs in it are going to kick in.

And maybe it's all just sour grapes because I'm just that bit older now. Take it from me; once you get past thirty you will experience your first multi-day hangover. When that feeling just won't leave you until Tuesday afternoon, you get less excited about doing the all-nighter on a Saturday.

Believe me, kids, I am jealous. Enjoy it while you can. Being in Asia also doesn't help. A grande dame of the lush legion, a certain publisher from Lewes near Brighton, confided to my best friend that the worst hangovers in the world always happen in Asia. "It's the humidity, don't you know?" she gargled into a fresh Chardonnay over lunch to bid my friend farewell and good luck. And she was bloody right! I always make sure to alternate with a glass of water now if I'm on a real bender as it makes all the difference.

Of course another reason many of us over 30s aren't clubbing any more is that we've got married and there's one thing about marrying a good wholesome Asian boy: the club scene is a definite no-no if you want to maintain some level of sanity in the relationship.

To his mind the only reason you're going there is to have sex with somebody else as that is the reason the two of you met in the first place. I suppose you can't fault the logic, but it would grate more if clubs meant that much to me.

The fact is I'd rather curl up on the sofa with my book, my glass of wine and my man in my lap watching his favorite game show on the TV. I'll still go to the clubs when a friend comes to town to visit, but I don't miss them that much, and I'm sure with the flood of new faces, they surely don't miss me.