Discretion
When a man removed his clothes in my studio, he also removed his public identity. I noticed this early in the work and kept noticing it, across thirty years, without ever finding it unremarkable. It was not a metaphor.
The clothes went, and with them something else—the particular set of arrangements that organised how the world understood him and how he moved through it. He lay down and was simply a body. Whatever he was in the world outside had no obvious way to enter the room with him.
I sometimes knew who a man was. Not always. Some men offered names that told me nothing, and I did not press for more. Others arrived with names I recognised from public contexts, or with faces I had encountered in newspapers or on screens. The knowing altered nothing. I cannot say this simply enough. My hands did not change pressure or direction based on what I knew. The session was not shaped by the information. What he was outside my studio was, in the most practical sense, beside the point. The room had its own logic and the logic was indifferent to external rank.
What I found—and I want to be careful here to describe what I observed rather than what I reasoned—was that the absence of the public identity seemed to produce an absence of the posture that public identity requires. A man who held himself in a particular way throughout his working life would lie down and hold himself differently.
The held quality would ease. Sometimes quickly, within the first few minutes of the physical work. Sometimes not until well into the session, as though the releasing required permission from elsewhere in the body before it could reach the surface. I watched this happen in men who arrived carrying what I understood to be significant external authority, and I found myself wondering whether the releasing was the thing they had come for—not consciously, not named as that, but present underneath whatever they had named as their reason for being there.
The question of privacy arrives here and I want to approach it from the side, because approaching it directly tends to produce the language of professional ethics, which is not the language I want. I did not think about confidentiality as a rule I was keeping. I thought about the information a man had brought with him as belonging to him. The session was his. The disclosures were his. The particular expression that crossed his face in the second hour of a long session was his. Sharing any of that elsewhere would have felt, from inside the work, like taking something that had never been mine to take. The man had placed it in the room. I held it there. It did not travel.
I did not divulge specifics then and I will not now. If a man did not tell me his name, I did not know it and I did not find out. If he told me, the telling sat in the room and remained there. Three decades of sessions produced a volume of information about men—who they were, what they carried, what they said when there was enough ease in the room to say things they had not said elsewhere—and I never experienced it as something that could be used. It was his.
Men returned. They referred other men. Over time I realised this could only happen because the practice sustained itself across thirty years largely through that chain. The chain held because the room held what was brought into it. What I understood was that the alternative—carrying information about men out of the room and into the rest of my life—would have broken something I could not have repaired.
My own privacy was a different matter and it operated by a different logic. Sex work carries risks that other work does not, in both physical and social registers. I made decisions about who knew what I did with a care that was practical rather than principled—or principled, but on the basis of safety rather than confidentiality. Neighbours did not know. People who would have described themselves as knowing me reasonably well often did not know. The information sat with me rather than travelling, not because I was ashamed of the work but because I had made the judgement that the information was mine to share or not, and that sharing it opened conversations I might not always have the energy or the inclination to manage.
When I did tell people, two things happened. The first I had anticipated: the judgement, the slight recalibration in a face that is deciding what it now thinks of you, the conversation taking a different turn. This I could sit with. It was at least an engagement with the actual content of what I had said—a response, however disagreeable, to the fact of the work.
The second surprised me more, not in its existence but in its frequency and its texture. The prurience. The brightening of attention, the questions arriving too quickly and carrying too much appetite for detail. The implicit suggestion that what I had described was entertainment rather than work. I found this more amusing to sit with than the judgement. The judgement, at least, took the work seriously enough to have a position on it. The prurient response declined to take it seriously at all. It converted the disclosure into something to be consumed rather than considered.
The room did not know about any of this. The room was the room—bounded, held, the same whether I had recently disclosed the work to someone or not. What happened outside it did not enter it. What happened inside it did not leave. This was a philosophy I articulated to myself and to the men who visited. It was also the structure of the service, in the same way that a room has four walls not because someone decided to make it private but because rooms are built that way: it is a consequence of their construction.
A man who was publicly significant in some way, and who lay in my room in the second hour of a long session saying something he had not said elsewhere, was at that moment simply another man. The significance was real—I am not suggesting that removing one’s clothes negates external reality or that the title or the position or the reputation would not be waiting when he left. It would be. He would resume it at the door. But while he was in the room, the significance had no useful function. There was nothing for it to organise. And in the absence of the function, what remained was the person that the function had been organising.
I find I cannot say cleanly whether what remained, in those cases, was something he ordinarily had access to or something the room made briefly available. I watched the releasing of the held posture often enough to think something real was happening. Whether it was access to an existing self or a temporary absence of the self that the world required—I did not know then and I find I still do not know.
The man who left my studio resumed what he had left outside it. He put on the clothes and the identity returned, or he carried it back into himself, and he drove back toward the life that had been waiting. What he took from the room was the experience of having been in it, which was his as entirely as anything he had brought. I kept nothing. There was nothing to keep that was mine.
Whether the brief suspension of public identity changed anything in the life he went back to, I was not there to observe.
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