All this nice weather we’ve been having has enticed the hot young guys out of their t-shirts and onto London’s streets – to my great delight, I must add. As I sit down to write this article there are two muscle-clad builders across the road who are lapping up my attention. Well, in my imagination they’re lapping up my attention, but in reality I don’t think they’ve noticed I exist. They’re not gay anyway, so what does it matter?

The fact is, they might be. It’s getting so hard to tell these days. The tanned one has some nicely trimmed, ‘designer’ stubble and I’m sure those are Ginch-Gonch boxers hanging over the other one’s jeans. Don’t only gay men wear those?

With the rising trend for straight men to be ‘metrosexual’, it’s getting harder and harder to tell who’s queer and who’s just out for a beer with the lads. Metrosexuals, these straight men with a passion for personal grooming (the sort of hygiene that comes naturally to you and me), have been growing in numbers for years. They lurk in the most inconvenient of places – my local Topman, for instance, used to be a great place to pull. Eyes would meet over the belt stand and sparks would fly … but now straight men shop there too, and it makes things so much more difficult.

Of course, I’m happy straight men are beginning to take pride in looking after their appearance. When it really takes off, it’ll save me a lot of shopping trips with girl friends of mine whose latest boyfriend is perfect in every way – except for his appalling dress sense.

Flicking through GQ in the hairdressers the other day, I noticed straight men really upping their game. Not only that, but some of the adverts were exactly the same as ones I saw in last month’s GayTimes … the same cute guys glaring at me from the page, and the same slogans. With these sorts of boundaries being blurred how are us gay men supposed to pull, or try to pull without embarrassing ourselves? I can’t really see some straight guy in Topman taking kindly to me when I explain the reason I blew him a kiss over the belt stand was that I thought he ‘looked a bit gay’.

In some ways I wish they’d all go back to shopping in TK Maxx and wearing the socks their granny bought them for Christmas. It wouldn’t make them pleasant to look at, but at least the gay guys would stand out amongst the crowd.

It won’t happen though. The metrosexual army, which is epitomised by celebrities like David Beckham, will continue to grow. As they do, more and more conflicts of interest will arise – as gay men we can no longer assume that the guys we see in Topman, expensive hairdressers and sun bed shops are always going to be gay.

I’m going to stick to Soho for finding my next manand just take pride in the fact that, over ten years after the word ‘metrosexual’ was first used, London is leading the UK in the revolution. I live in Carlisle for two thirds of the year, and god knows the straight lads up there have got a while to go before they discover moisturiser. I’m pleased for the straight men who have found it in themselves to be just that ‘little bit gay’. It can only mean they will be more accepting of the gay community and, like my two builder friends, very easy on the eye