I have received an alarming number of instant messages from bumpy, tanned men interested in "cam fun" over the past few days. What at first seemed like an increasingly improbable coincidence has at last been explained: someone has posted my AOL Instant Messenger screen name on a gay chat web site, iChatGay.com (NSFW).

Though I know and love more than a few gay people, once upon a time I was very naïve in this department. Back in my early university days in Newcastle, for awhile my friends and I would get together every Thursday night at a bar called The Barracks to see FABBA, an ABBA tribute band, do their thing.

I suppose I must have been peripherally aware of the number of same-sex couples dancing at The Barracks, but somehow I just assumed that that's what people did when listening to ABBA, and bopped to the music with my doubtless wiser friends in blissful ignorance.

One night at The Barracks, I found myself dancing with a girl who must have been a friend of a friend. When the small-talk was done, she smiled coquettishly and asked, with a certain weight, "So, which way do you lead?"

Now, I am familiar with the concept of metaphor, and it wasn't too long afterward that I realized just what she meant, but I must have been blinded by the Super Trouper Beams or something because the best response I could muster at the time was a dumbstruck pause and then:

"Um, actually I don't dance much."