Mourners will no doubt one day talk about where they were when they heard that David Bowie had died. They shouldn’t, though. Today – and in the days and years to come – they should recall where they were when they first heard him, saw him, felt him slip into their lives.

I have two brothers who are a decade and a decade and a bit older. When I was very small, they owned a few RCA singles: Jean Genie was one, another was Sorrow. I flipped these and heard ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Amsterdam’, which later led to a love affair with Jacques Brel. In an ordinary bungalow in Lancashire, Bowie was opening up secrets unimaginable for a boy too young to know better.

I’m not sure what that date was. But I think that those early hearings were the splitting of an emotional atom. I must have been seven or eight, and I was still subject to the whims of parents and Radio One. Our family bought disco, The Three Degrees, MoR, country. I got on with those, too.

Then, in 1980, when I was fourteen, it happened. Bowie released Ashes to Ashes, simultaneously sealing and killing off my early-teenage relationship with punk. Ashes to Ashes was another planet to the shouting, balling, angsty sound that I'd pogoed to around the church hall. It was poetry. It was video. It took the Goth scene and made it subtler, brighter. It was art.

That the single rocketed to number one was a bit of a problem at first, but I suppose it was a lesson that something really cool can also be extraordinarily popular.

Sexy thing: David Bowie, pictured in 1985 Credit: Rex

For Bowie analysts, that phase – the Ashes to Ashes/Scary Monsters period – is part of a progression from Bowie’s time in Berlin to the blonde bombshell who would charm the world with Let’s Dance. But in Bowie time, there is only an eternal present. When he strolled along the solarised moonscape interring Major Tom – or something – he was giving birth to another generation of obsessive fans. I was one of them.

"Bowie knew about the power of icons. He used his own body like artists used saints and virgins, like film stars used theirs on celluloid and on the red carpet, like photographers used models" Chris Moss

‘Ashes to Ashes’ was released – as far as I was concerned – to chime with my growing sexual self-awareness. Moved by the beauty of the music, I proceeded to con my dad and granddad into buying the whole Bowie back catalogue for me. How many millions of boys will have done the same, on each Bowie reincarnation?

I wonder if the order in which you buy the older discs in some way gives you your own little Bowie DNA? The sequence, as I recall, was: Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, The Man Who Sold the World, Space Oddity, David Live. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that I was learning to worship a man who could get away with feathery hair (Young Americans), who could wear what looked like a glittery sock, who occasionally relaxed in a dress, who could be sexy as a frigid alien (as in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth), who could look beautiful even when most of his body was made up of dog.

The music burned into me. But the visual experience was just as life-changing. Bowie knew about the power of icons. He used his own body like artists used saints and virgins, like film stars used theirs on celluloid and on the red carpet, like photographers used models. Like girls used their bodies, under the cricket pavilion, standing along the back wall of the disco, in the bus shelter.

"Although he probably hated the term, in many ways David Bowie was a late 20th Century, highly avant-garde prototype for metrosexuality" Mark Simpson

Somehow this new religion had merged deliciously with my discovery of the opposite sex. Bowie feminised himself, which in turn made it cool to adore women.

For men, he also made us aware of our own male body. So often – as on the cover of Pin Ups where he is as nude and bony as supermodel Twiggy – you’d catch site of Bowie’s naked shoulder or slender neck. In the stage shots from the Ziggy tour, his muscular thigh dangles out of the sock thing. On the cover of Stage, he seemed to strut even when standing still. Every pose was considered, every revelation intentional.

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Debates about Bowie’s ‘gayness’ or bisexuality were missing the point for straight boys. We all fantasised about him in bed. We all idolised his face (it was his face that he used more than any other part of his body). We all stared into his two-tone eyes. Admit it or not, we all masturbated over our mental image of him, probably before we did it with anyone else. Somehow, he liberated boys from stale dichotomies: boy-and-man; boy-and-girl, straight-and-gay, black-and-white.

Fashion-wise, Bowie always sent men in new directions. My brother’s generation sported lightning flashes, silvery moons on their brows and mad mullets. In mid-1980s Edinburgh I saw dozens of Low lookalikes – some using smack to nail the gaunt look. I put on mascara and lipstick and was berated by the landlord at the Elm Tree, our local pub, for lowering standards.

But – this is important – Bowie's influence on men’s sensuality extends beyond then and deep into the now. Here's Mark Simpson, the man who coined the term “metrosexual” in 1994: “Although he probably hated the term, in many ways David Bowie was a late 20th Century, highly avant-garde prototype for metrosexuality, paving the way for another glam working class DB from London who was a footballer rather than a singer.

David Beckham took the metrosexual baton from Bowie in the 21st Century Credit: Diageo/Haig Club whisky advert

“He gaily refused to conform to 'masculine' expectations and provocatively appropriated ‘feminine’ styles, fashions, cosmetics and sensualities – anything that would make him look and feel fabulous, and piss off 1970s dads. He understood perfectly that the world was an increasingly visual culture and sired the New Romantics, who went on to invent the 21st Century.

“The glamorous seeds he sowed back in the Seventies have borne strange and wonderful bisensual fruit, enjoyed by everyone, regardless of gender or orientation.”

Quite.

A still from the documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Credit: Rex

Anyone who witnessed Bowie in his prime will be around sixty now. I was “lucky” enough to catch him on his Serious Moonlight tour. I was 17, old enough to be allowed to travel to Milton Keynes with my mate Mike. The gig was all right, certainly not as good as concerts we caught around that period by Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, his stablemates. But that wasn’t the point. Bowie was always more important as an idea that stretched beyond the highs and lows of his career and survives, even, his death.

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At the core of almost everything he did was a wondrous celebration of sexuality and gender-irrelevance. A tiny troupe of musicians continued and continue to bang the same drum – Marc Almond, Boy George, Grace Jones, Lady Gaga perhaps – but all would openly admit that they were only ever following with the other acolytes in front of that bulldozer in the Ashes to Ashes video.

What people are teary over today is the loss of a star and the end of their own youth. But men have also lost a role model who makes a mockery of that very term. In a Bowie world, men would be freer than they are in this one, and cooler, and having a lot, lot more fun.