PREVIOUSLY...etc etc, yada yada yada...nothing of any significance to the following..         ONE FINGER, ONE BUM, KEEP MOVING...       There is a gay website called OUT.  A few weeks ago people there started putting up notices about their intention to attend the second night of something  called "OI!", a fortnightly event to be held at a gay bar in Liverpool called the Escape.  The descriptions and enthusiasm from those who had attended the first night were intriguing to say the least - especially because of all the 'nudge nudge' hints about going "upstairs".  I know smut when I smell it. What could it all mean?  Then the local paper mentioned  "Oi!" and told how they were to be laying on coaches to bus people in from Manchester's gay village to this men-only event.  Really??  The night in question passed and the first notices went up on OUT about the next one. And with them, from the main fan of this place - a chap called Nyc - the first revelation of what all the fuss was about:  "And best of all they open the upstairs where there's a darkroom!"   A dark room?  In Liverpool???  "Mother!  Fetch my best leather jock strap  - I may be going out!"       The more I found out the more intrigued and confused I was.  According to it's own website OI exists in a few other places - namely Birmingham -  and is for "men who like to shag men", and who are sick of straights (read: women) taking over gay places, or who are  not into the gay scene with all it's pretentious Kylie/Steps-loving queens.   The words "for REAL men" didn't actually appear, but that was the inference.  The whole image on the site was of bovver-booted skinheads in braces and bomber jackets - and the front page photo was of a vicious  thug looking like he'd just withdrawn his boot from a black man's face.  The people on the inside photos however were altogether less convincing - I don't imagine your average National Front member stands at a bar swigging beer in nothing but his coat and jockstrap.  Oh dear.  And if these type of gay people exist in Liverpool, Christ knows where they'd been hanging out till now!  Far more interesting was the reference to "cruising in our play zones"....Dark rooms?  Play Zones?  I decided to put a message or two on OUT to find out more and was told "a lot more than nudge-nudge goes on upstairs, believe me!". Someone else told me it was "scarey for campy queens", and since Darren (You know - Jude Law/ex-shoe salesman, and not to mention a campy queen) declared a desire to accompany me and wear his leather Gucci outfit  I knew it was my sacred duty as a journalist and public servant to go and report back.  O yes indeed.  Then I heard Phil of Chester (who'd heard it was a "shagfest" with "a maze and stuff") was going too and bringing a newly expanded group of friends.  The possibilities for comedy and embarrasment were multiplying at a fabulous rate.  God is good to me.       So naturally they all - Darren included - backed out at the last minute.  Has it ever been otherwise?  Which would normally be the end of my plans, given my status as number one wuss and big wet nelly whose afraid of going anywhere on his own without people he already knows.  Except on the previously mentioned OUT website something very odd happened.  Last time dozens of people declared their intent to go.  This time  - perhaps because the others had learnt their lesson - there were only ..er..3 or 4 of them.  What's more they all declared the people they were going with had backed out and..and..and blow me if I didn't find myself arranging to meet a group of total strangers (to each other as well as to me) in the Lisbon pub at 9pm. I think I deserve a gold star. Our venerable leader and Oi's number one fan Nyc would be identifiable by his wearing of an orange badge.  I had visions of the disabled wanting to park in him.  Or certainly that he'd look like some kind of holiday tour rep with a big orange sign on his chest and a clipboard bearing our names.  The badge as it turned out was about the size of a Smartie and part of the zip on his jacket.  Very helpful. But somehow I found him.  Then we ourselves were found by a third participant - Steve.  On Steve's website, which I checked out and on which he displays an abnormal interest in "frottage", he showed himself to be a scarey-looking  shaven headed chinese boy weilding martial arts weapons.  He looked like an assassin ready to strike a swift and deadly blow at any White Devil who might dare criticise his curtains.  The reality was altogether more delightful and, like Nyc, he was a lovely young bloke.  The fourth was someone Steve had already met, also through "OUT"- an Indian called Ramesh of indeterminate age, but much closer to mine than theirs.  He spoke in an often indecipherable accent which I had always beleived was copyright of the late Peter Sellers.  I asked what he did:  "I'm a vetnrywrker"  O, you're a vetinary?  "No, no - I'm a vlntrywrker".  A voluntary worker?       He was a Web Designer.  But you already knew that, didn't you?  You understood him the first time.       I know what it's like to go through life being asked to repeat the last thing I said (..and for that matter being DARED to repeat the last thing I said...) , so I mention this not to mock but to emphasise my double uncertainty at what I was hearing from him. He somehow got to telling me by-the-by that he quite liked the idea of leather - not that he ever tried it - and, when pressed, S&M - not that he ever did it - and er, certain sex clubs and saunas and er - not that he ever went.  Except once in Berlin - and oh yes, in Amsterdam.  And Paris of course.  But apart from that..oh, except, what's that town in Italy?  ("No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition" immediately sprang to mind.  Except that's not true.  Some people not only expect it, they demand it - and are willing to pay good money...).  When walking down some dingey back alley he remarked "the rent is cheap here", and I instinctively doubted he was talking about property prices.  Young Steve who was already sweating in fearful anticipation at what he'd heard about "OI" was meant to be sleeping over in Ramesh's place that night. I wished him luck   As for my expectations?  Well as many of you now know there is no longer anything in the world left to shock me after my discovery last week of the website selling dildoes carved to look like Christ on the Cross, the Virgin Mary and - my particular favourite - the "Baby Jesus Butt Plug", which comes in such delightful shades as "Asphyxiation blue"  ("Jesus was a carpenter - now he's a power tool!")  Oi held no fear for me.....       Which is a good place to make one quick aside.  You'll recall my endless wail about the total absence of attractive or fanciable men in gay bars here.  In the Lisbon there were 4 or 5 young men who would each be enough to make me retract my words, and yet they all paled when I saw what I swear to God was the most stunningly goodlooking - damn it, beautiful! - youth I 've ever seen in real life.  He was with a large group of friends, very slim and could have been no more than 19 - and his face was breath-takingly  perfect, in the supermodel league.  Imagine being a schoolboy sharing his class and dreaming, hoping, wishing he might be gay like you,  but never daring to believe it.   I don't want to imply I swooned - for once it would simply never cross my mind that he could show the slightest interest in me (which is fortunate because as far as I know he didn't!) because I was old enough to be his..er...elder.  But let's not dwell on that.  Barely a week goes by now without me being presented with new opportunities to feel old - earlier I'd made a passing reference to Dean Martin and Nyc felt forced to ask in absolute sincerity what a Dean Martin was.  I still kept taking sneaky glances at myself in mirrors in darkened bars and feeling reassured that I was a stunner (shut yer trap), but in a brightly lit toilet mirror I saw myself close up and in the full glare of the light.  I saw the ageing pale, puffy face, I saw the blood shot eyes, I saw the creases and lines beside them that are engraved ever deeper when I smile and no longer disappear when I stop, I saw the face that countless once-pretty women see when they remove the makeup, I saw Bette Davis asking Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and one thought echoed through my mind:  "Nah, fuck it -   You're still gorgeous."   Some things never fade.       We'll ignore a brief, if not brief enough, excursion to a near-empty Curzon since there is nothing new to say about that place except that it remains spectacularly uncondemned by the Public Health authorities.   Let's move on instead to the Escape/OI!  We got there just before the 11.30 deadline when the price goes up.  I was immediately struck by the irony of boasting a dark room upstairs since the downstairs was far, far darker.  You can't see a bloody thing in front of you in there.  Except the absence of hair, which is as disturbingly obvious as a cum-stain on a wedding dress.  Shaven heads everywhere.  And not one of them belonged to a woman, which might account to the strange sense of emptiness in the place - especially in the more than half the room dedicated to dancing.  Without women or queens there was no dancing at all.  Indeed the Escape without women struck me as no more then the Escape with women - only without the women.  The vacuum, I mean to say, was left unfilled. It would be unfair in the blinding darkness to claim any particular ugliness on the part of the clientelle - how would I know? - but the thought crossed my mind that they were less likely to be bussing people in from Manchester than for Manchester to be bussing people out and changing the locks while they were gone.  In what brief glimpses the flashing lights afforded me  I spotted the occasional leather chest harness, several pairs of rubber incontinence knickers and an old man with a zapata moustache (Seth Armstrong from Emmerdale) in full army mess uniform (you know - red braided jacket and peaked officers cap etc.  I think he'd misunderstood the allusions to the place having a military look...).  The rest?  Who knows?  Shaven headed and present is the best description I can give.         Nyc assured us upstairs would be much better and where everyone would be.  It took a while for them to open it but sometime after midnight we ascended.  There was still barely anyone there, which at least gave us the opportunity for an embarrassment free tour of the so called dark room.  First point:  there isn't one.  That's to say if, like me, you understood a dark room to be a pitch black den full of squelching noises.  No, no.  What they have in OI! is in fact a narrow maze, no more poorly lit than the rest of the place, constructed of grey canvas "walls" pinned to scaffolding and twisting around into numerous dead ends and alcoves (one of which contained some kind of suspended harness) and a large number of  cubicles hidden behind curtains, like in the changing room of a clothes shop.  This fact wasn't obvious to me until Nyc and I returned to it a little later for a second time (and a third and a fourth!) when the milling crowd got larger and larger.  Sweet Jesus.  What was behind the curtains - well, only two or three of them - were  couples cleaning each other's back teeth without the aid of a brush.  I don't know who it first occurred to that you were free to pull back a bit of the curtain and have a peek at the action (I don't think that was the original idea), but once you did it was quickly found that the worst response you'd get would be a discrete tugging of the screen back into place by one of the inhabitants.  Such discretion was admired and totally ignored.  More and more people filled the passageways, without any obvious increase in the number of people actually doing anything.  In short the crowd weren't there to have sex but to try and catch a peek of other people having sex - it was a public zoo with everyone gawking at the exhibits!  It reached the zenith for me when one winding path into a dead end alcove (without curtain) was packed with half a dozen blokes just standing there watching whatever was around that corner.  I felt it was my duty to surge forward and investigate. What they were all so casually spectating was two naked men in the throes of a blow job with no concerns about doing it for an audience.  I have to say I was much more intrigued by the nonchalance of the audience, some of whom were casually smoking as they looked on.  I could just imagine someone sitting down to a cup of tea and plate of Gypsy Creams.       Meanwhile back in the main corridor lined with the curtained cubicles, we found ourselves in the company of the typically hysterical leader of an advanced  invading party of screaming queens - the very antithesis of what they wanted in here and a damn good laugh.  "Oh my god - what's it like!" he shrieked, and as one particular curtain was pulled backed to reveal two men with their trousers round their ankles and having a damn good time he offered encouragement "OO- you go for it, girl!". The men in question seemed not particularly perturbed and the curtain went back down.  At this point I want to apologise to my mother, my father, my anscestors and anyone who pretends to know me.  I'd blame the drink but I  honestly wasn't staggering  this time.  Maybe I was drunk on the atmosphere...I can't even remember what I said as I did it, but I reached my hand behind the curtain to grab the nearest bloke's tight arse.  It was meant as a joke...but my middle finger had a mind of it's own.  Now please don't misunderstand that!  My finger pointed toward the ground at all times, in accordance with my strong moral code, but having falling between his buttocks in mid-clench it became, shall we say,  more a hostage than a housebreaker.  I'd like to tell myself in retrospect that the strange moistness I felt was just sweat.  All I know is that as I retrieved my hand with a squelch I declared "Ugh! It's greasy!" and was met with shrieks of laughter and horror from the queens around me as they recoiled.  I wiped my finger on the head of the nearest bald man.  Which was handy because the nearest man was always bald....Then things got worse.  Whatever caused the fixation with this particular cubicle/couple the enemy invaders seemed to gather around it out of nowhere like rats in a horror movie pawing at the curtain, glancing at each other in a "dare we?" way and I knew what was coming....In the blink of an eye the curtain had been torn down completely leaving the two oral technicians completly naked and exposed.  And I have to say with a swell of patriotic pride that they were terribly British about it.  They just finished what they were doing (or not) and casually pulled up their pants and left without saying a word.  How can I convince you that none of this - not one bit of these sexual shennanigans seemed remotely as odd, unusual or unlikely at the time as they do in the cold light of day?  It's was so casual - and perhaps so dimly lit - that there was nothing sexually arousing about it either.  We moved on.  'King Queen', if I may call him that, moved with us and again broke the silence by commenting on the atrocious decor of grey plastic canvas "Where's Changing Rooms when you need them?!".  "Oi!" came a masculine voice from one of the presumed staff "behave yourselves!  If you're not gonna behave you can get out!"  Having weighed up his choices he must have stuck to his principles since we didn't see him again......       Soon after and with a pocket jammed full of free condoms and lubricant which I'll never get to use but which will make a fine decorative feature for my bedroom, I took my leave.  I came for comedy and finally found it.  I wasn't coming for anything else - least of all a round of applause. Nyc, I'm lead to believe later had a fumble which came to a swift end due to unwanted  audience participation, and Steve and Ramesh were probably cowering in a corner and taking photographs respectively.  Who knows?  But when I returned home to my lonely bed and considered the idea of it, the shapeless, faceless thought of what I'd seen (and with a little help from the boy in the Lisbon) I reflected that at least the free lube came in handy.  And so, you might suspect, did I.........       Which is, perhaps, more than I needed to tell you.