Names
A significant number of men who visited me gave their name as John. I noticed this early and went on noticing it across the years without ever arriving at a satisfying account of it.
John is a common enough name for the generation of men I saw most often—men in their forties, fifties, sixties, of an age when John was a name parents reached for without much ceremony. But John is also what certain circles call the client of a sex worker, and I found myself wondering, when the third or fourth John of a given month arrived, whether any of the Johns knew about the other meaning, or whether any of them used it deliberately, or whether the whole coincidence was simply that—a coincidence, amplified by the genuine frequency of the name in a particular demographic.
I never found out. There was no way to find out that wouldn’t have produced a different awkwardness from the one it attempted to resolve. And in any case, it didn’t matter in the way that it might have mattered in a different kind of encounter. During a session, I had almost no occasion to use a man’s name at all. He was lying next to me. He was not across a room requiring me to get his attention from a distance. Names serve specific social functions and most of those functions were simply not present in the room. If a man wanted to call himself John, or Stuart, or something he had chosen that morning on the drive over, it altered nothing about what happened between us.
Plenty of men used a name that was not their own. I inferred this sometimes from the slight quality of recollection that appeared when I used the name—the brief adjustment, the fraction of a second before the response, the face remembering what it had decided to be called. Other times I had no idea at all. A man who had given a real name and a man who had invented one looked and sounded the same if they were both paying attention. I held whatever name was offered and used it as lightly as the occasion required, which was lightly.
I used my own name. This requires a small explanation, not because the decision was complicated but because I thought about it enough that the thinking is worth sharing. I considered using a different name. The reasons for doing so were not obscure—workers in many fields maintain a professional persona that sits at a remove from the private self, and the reasons for this are various and often sensible.
But I noticed, when I imagined the alternative, a specific problem. A man would say something—would address me by a name I had invented for the purpose—and somewhere in the split second between the name landing and my response arriving, there would be a moment of locating myself in the alias. A breath’s worth of delay. A whisper of distance. I didn’t want that in the conversation. The conversation was the work, in a real sense, and the conversation depended on a quality of presence that a half-second of self-location would have interrupted. I preferred to simply be myself.
There was also this: I was not ashamed of the work, and I did not need to do it in the way that necessity sometimes makes the fiction necessary. The alias was available to me and I declined it, and the declining felt consistent with how I tried to approach the work as a whole—without the management of appearances that most social situations seem to require. A man in my studio could use whatever name he wished. I would offer him my actual one.
I have thought about what a false name does, and what it does not do, in the specific context of a first visit. A man arriving to see a sex worker for the first time has already done something that required some kind of decision about exposure. He found the website, made the enquiry, arranged the appointment, got in a car and drove toward an address. Each of those steps carried a small risk of some kind—social, physical, the risk of discovery—and he had taken each one anyway. By the time he knocked on my door, the exposure had already accumulated. Adding a false name reduced one element of it without eliminating the situation itself.
I found I respected the false name for exactly this reason. The man who arrived as John, or whatever name he had decided upon, had made a calculation about what he was willing to have known and had tried, in the one way immediately available to him, to keep some of it back. That seemed reasonable.
It took a particular kind of courage to arrive at all, and I saw no point in requiring more exposure than the situation already involved. If a name gave him something to hold onto, let him hold it. The session did not need his real name to proceed. It needed him to be in the room.
What the name did tell me, occasionally, was something about the quality of caution a man had brought with him. A man who arrived with a very obviously invented name—Steven Brown, let’s say, delivered with a very slightly over-definite quality—had arrived in a particular kind of alertness, and the alertness was present in other parts of the session too, at least in the early part. The alertness had a recognisable texture: the slightly managed quality of someone who is monitoring for things they might not notice if they were less watchful. I did not draw attention to it and I did not try to dissolve it. I let the session do what it did, which was to make monitoring less necessary as time passed and nothing happened that required monitoring.
The question of names extended in an interesting direction when it came to regulars. A man who had visited once, and then again, and had been John on both occasions, had created a consistency—he was John, across time, which gave the alias a kind of persistence that almost functioned like an actual name. I would find myself thinking of him as John between sessions, in the same way I thought of anyone by the name I had for them. Whether the John I was thinking of corresponded to any John that existed in the rest of the world I had no way of knowing. He was John in the studio, John in my memory of the studio, and whatever else he was outside it was simply not my information.
This is something I found consistently interesting about the work—the way it produced a set of people who were real to me in the room and real to me in memory, but who existed in those forms only. I had my experience of them, which was genuine, and no other access to them. They had a life outside the studio that was as complete and complicated as anyone’s life, and of which I knew, in most cases, essentially nothing. The names were what I had, and I held them as what they were—names given in a particular context, for a session, to be used as lightly as the session required.
I used my own name throughout, and I find I cannot say with any certainty whether this made a difference to any of the men who heard it. Some men asked whether it was my real name. I said yes. Some of them seemed to find this worth something—a small symmetry, perhaps, or a gesture toward the quality of directness I tried to bring to everything else in the work. Others asked and received the answer without any visible reaction. Whether a man went home knowing he had spent the afternoon with someone who had told him his real name, and whether that mattered in the way I had vaguely imagined it might, I never found out. The names stayed where the sessions stayed. In the room, in the hour, attached to whatever the encounter had been.
John remains the name I turn over most. I expect it always will. Not because it means anything—I am no closer now to knowing whether any of the Johns were really Johns—but because the question it presents has no resolution available.
And the absence of the resolution is itself a kind of information about how much of what happened will simply remain exactly what it was: encountered, held, and unknown in the ways that mattered most to the men who arrived and left.
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