It’s as simple as that.

This constant division of people into gay and straight is supposed to be exactly what you don’t want, and yet is exactly what you do.

People are people. A gay man who is in love will no more want his love-object to be out shagging all over town than a straight man does.

Gay women are not promiscuous because they are women. Gay men are promiscuous because they are men, and you have two men in the equation there, which increases the options.

A promiscuous straight man has to find the women to sleep with, but a promiscuous gay man doesn’t have as many problems doing that.

The two are not mutually exclusive, you know. It’s not either screaming queens or Saviour Balzan and Herman Grech.

As for why screaming queens all over the media give people a bad impression of gay men, use your head. It’s the equivalent of plastering the media with gay women who look like Polish builders in dungarees and then having people express astonishment when a pretty and well-dressed woman declares herself to be uninterested in men. “Maaa, did you know she’s a lesbian?” “U ejja, as if!”

The difference is that among gay women you don’t get the equivalent of all those flashy, camp, fey and in-your-face Priscilla-Queen-of-the-Desert types, who are everywhere right now, giving all gay men a bad press in the process.

Gay women are invisible because they’re normal and quiet. And because they’re Maltese women primarily, and the gay men are Maltese men primarily and operating in a Maltese environment, the gay women get shunted to the side by the gay men who take over.

Do you want to know why gay Maltese women are nowhere near as melodramatic as gay Maltese men about being gay? I’ll tell you why: it’s because they are PRIMARILY MALTESE WOMEN BEFORE THEY ARE GAY. They know through direct experience that the problems and prejudice and homophobia that you have to contend with when you are gay in Malta are nowhere near as great as the problems and prejudice and misogyny that you have to contend with when you are a woman in Malta.

No woman over 40 will tell you that she has had more problems being gay than she has had being a woman.

Maltese men are spoiled rotten, and that holds more true with the loudest and most spectacularly camp gay men. Because if you look behind the curtains you will find that the only woman in their life is their mother who adores them because they were the daughter they never had – or the daughter who is more of a daughter than their actual daughter is.

Then make up your mind. You’ve just contradicted your entire argument, viz. gay men are promiscuous because they can’t marry.

If you want to do this or that, it’s fine, but at least be honest about it. Men who have wild, unprotected sex with several other men do it because they enjoy it. Simple as that.

So do heterosexual men who have wild unprotected sex with several women.

Your choices are your own. You cannot blame society, the church or anybody else for them. The only thing which the law has, until recently, not allowed people to do is formally marry somebody of the same sex. Anything else is fair game.

The alternative to not getting married is not necessarily having random sex with lots of different people. You can have more responsible sex, you can be in a long term relationship, you can have a live-in boyfriend or you can be celibate (it is wrong to think that all men are sexually active; even some married couples have not had sex in years).

And if you wanted to be a parent, you could adopt as a single man.

Some of those choices might not please your parents, the church or whoever else you would like to please but they are still your choices to make. You neither need two Kens (how about Elton John and David Firnish instead?) nor the church’s approval to help you make them.

And you need to get that massive chip about women and marriage off your shoulder. It’s really ugly. Trying to belittle women for dreaming of white weddings, handsome princes and family celebrations does not help your cause.

The alternative to marriage is not as wild as the mental images of the raw flesh of strangers and drugs you are currently having. It is not celibacy as the Church so desperately, desperately wants. There is no one alternative. Many lie somewhere in between – dates, an occasional hook up. Probably with people you know a little bit, too, and not total strangers.