What Continues
The work has changed. Not ended—changed. I still work in the nude, because I found over three decades that this particular aspect of the work mattered in ways I have tried to describe in these essays, and I found no reason, when I retired from the massage itself, to retire from what the nudity makes possible.
The quality of attention changes when both men in a room are uncovered. Something in the managed self relaxes before it has been asked to. I have always valued that relaxation and I value it still.
What no longer forms part of what I offer is the sexual dimension—the erotic massage, the body slide, the extended bodily contact that made certain sessions what they were. The contact has diminished rather than disappeared: touch remains, in reduced form, present in what I do. But the specific work that this collection has been largely describing—the hour or several hours of sustained physical attention, the body-to-body contact, the particular quality of encounter that the oil and the bed and the long session made possible—that work is behind me now, and I observe it from the distance that time has provided.
I find myself wondering whether a man who reads these essays—who has followed the observations about bodies and touch and names and money and fantasy and laughter and the peculiar geometry of what two men can say to each other in an unhurried room—might feel discouraged from the idea of visiting me. Whether the observation itself creates a distance. Whether becoming aware that he might one day form the material for another essay would make the encounter feel different from the inside.
I think not. I have never identified anyone in these pages—not in particular, not in generalisation—and I have no intention of beginning. But more than that: what I write here is not a memoir in the sense of an account of my life, and it is not an autobiography in the sense of a self-portrait assembled from the years. It is a set of observations of small relations between men. The man who might visit me is not a subject I am preparing to observe. He is a man in a room with me, which is a different thing entirely. The essays live in the past. The meetings live in the present, and the present has its own separateness from what I have written down.
What I now offer, if a man chooses to come, is the thing I have always found most enduring about the work: the conversational intimacy. The opportunity for a curious man to explore himself in whatever way he chooses, within nudity and with touch, without the sexual component that once formed a central part of what was available. Something has been set down. Other things remain. I have found, in the time since the massage work ended, that what remains is not a diminished version of what came before—it is a different thing, adjacent to it, grown from the same root.
I think about the world a man navigates now and how it has changed, even in the last two decades, in ways that are relevant to what I have been describing in these essays. The connectivity that the current period offers is real—more visible than it has ever been, more various, more immediate—and the loneliness that coexists with it is equally real, and the coexistence of the two seems to me not a paradox but a consequence. A man can be present on screens, in feeds, in the continuous stream of other people’s curated lives, and be entirely invisible in the specific sense I have always been interested in. Not invisible to others exactly, but invisible to himself. The screen shows him what others see. It does not often show him what he is.
I have never had a social media account. I mention this not as a position but as a fact about my habit of privacy, which formed early and which I have found no reason to revise. My life is more private now than it was when the work was at its most active, and I notice that I do not find the privacy a diminishment. What I observe in the world I observe from inside it, in encounters with specific people in specific rooms, and I find this a more reliable form of observation than the aggregated noise that social media tends to produce. I am not arguing against it for others. I am describing what I have found useful for myself.
My original website remains live. It still receives many daily visits, which I find quietly remarkable given how long it has been there and how much the web has changed around it. The content has changed with me—quieter now, more sparse, reflecting the altered texture of what I offer. One part of it describes something I have called a “Practice of Peace”: a meeting between two men in which stillness is the point. No agenda, no expected activity, no pressure toward conversation or toward silence.
Two men in a room attending to the quality of simply being in the room. I created this offering out of something I noticed in the longer sessions—those moments of stillness at the end of a body slide when everything had settled and neither person was moving and the quality of the silence was different from any other silence I had known in the work. I found I wanted to create the conditions for that silence to exist without requiring the hours that preceded it in those sessions. Whether I have succeeded I cannot say from the inside. The men who have sat in that quiet with me have said little afterward, which I take as a form of confirmation.
What I am still most interested in—and what I suspect I will remain interested in for as long as I continue this work in whatever form it takes—is the meeting itself. One man with another man, in a room, with time that is not running against something. I have never found a satisfying name for this, and I notice that the absence of a name has not impeded it.
A name would give it a category, and a category would suggest it fits alongside other categories, and I have tried to attend to what happens between men in ways that resist the category. The meeting I am describing is not therapy, not companionship, not mentorship, not coaching, not any of the other available words that carry their own implications about what is expected to happen. It is two men talking about everything and anything, or sitting in something that is not quite silence and not quite conversation, or exploring—that word again, which I keep returning to because I have not found a better one—how one man’s observations of the world have shaped the world he sees.
Sometimes that exploration changes something. Sometimes it confirms something a man already knew but had not yet said to anyone. Sometimes it simply produces an afternoon that was different from the afternoon that would have existed without it. I find all three outcomes acceptable, and I find that none of them requires the afternoon to have been aimed at any of them in advance.
I am still curious. This is what I would want a man reading these essays to know about the person who wrote them, if he took one thing away. The curiosity that organised the work thirty years ago is the same curiosity that organises the quieter version of it now.
I remain interested in what a man brings into a room when he brings himself, and what the room—if it holds what he brings without taking from it—allows to surface. I remain interested in what two men can say to each other when neither of them is managing the conversation toward a predetermined end. I remain interested in the observation itself: the small relation, the particular sentence, the specific gesture, the silence that is not absence but presence in a different register.
These essays are that interest written down. They are not a record of a career or a memoir of a life. They are what I noticed, held up to the light, turned slightly, and set back down where I found them. Whether they illuminate anything I cannot judge from inside them.
A man who wishes to add his own observation to whatever this collection has been is welcome to arrive.
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