New Territory
A man reaches a point—and the point can arrive at almost any age, though I found it arrived most often somewhere past forty—where something he had filed away as settled turns out not to be. The filing was done years earlier, sometimes decades earlier, and it held for a long time.
The life built on top of it was substantial: a marriage, children in many cases, a career, a community, a consistent public identity that matched what he believed himself to be. And then something shifted, not dramatically, not in the way of a sudden revelation but more like a slow surfacing, and the question that surfaced was one he had either never asked before or had asked once and answered too quickly and moved on.
Why the question arrives when it does I cannot say with any reliability. I heard enough variations on the circumstances to stop expecting a pattern. A man would tell me about an experience in his youth that had been left unexamined—not because it was painful, necessarily, but because the life he was building at the time had no room for the examination and by the time it did, enough years had passed that the examination felt less urgent than it once might have. Another would tell me that he and his wife had reached some accommodation about their marriage that had left a particular space open, and the space had taken a shape he hadn’t anticipated.
Another would arrive having had no precipitating event at all—only a curiosity that had been growing quietly for long enough that it had become impossible to continue treating as background noise. Another had the specific and curious belief, expressed without embarrassment, that what happened with another man did not constitute infidelity in the way that what happened with another woman would. I found this logic genuinely interesting without finding it persuasive, and I did not say so unless asked.
What brought these men to me—and I want to be careful here to speak only about the men who actually arrived, not about the larger category of men who might share the circumstance—was rarely the thing they said first. The first thing they said, usually in the initial email or phone call, was that they were interested in an erotic massage. This was true. It was also a frame, a form of entry that required nothing of them beyond what they were prepared to name. Massage gave the visit a specific and bounded description: an hour, a fee, a physical experience with a defined beginning. The thing underneath the massage—the question that had been building, the territory that felt new and unmapped and slightly frightening—that required more time and more trust than the initial contact made available.
I noticed, again and again, that the massage was where these men began and rarely where they ended. The physical work created a quality of ease that the conversation could then inhabit. By the time a man was an hour into a session, something in his body had usually released enough that the question underneath could surface without requiring him to prepare a version of it. He would start talking about it sideways—mentioning something from years ago, or asking what I thought about a particular subject, or framing the question as hypothetical. And then, when the hypothetical didn’t receive alarm or judgment, the framing would shift and the actual question would emerge.
What I found underneath those questions, consistently, was not so much a sexual curiosity as an informational one. These were men who had spent time on the internet looking for reliable material and had found what the internet generally provides on such subjects: a great deal of content, almost none of it calibrated to a man who was arriving for the first time and needed accuracy rather than titillation or ideology.
The pornographic material told him what certain acts looked like when performed by people paid to perform them in front of cameras. The forum discussions told him what strangers thought they knew about each other’s experiences. The medical information told him about risk in the register of risk communication, which is the register of worst cases. None of it told him what he was actually asking, which was more like: what is this territory, is it meant for me, what would I find there, and how do I proceed without causing harm to myself or anyone else?
Those were questions I had enough experience to answer, not as a clinician or a therapist but as a man who had been in the territory for a long time and who had no investment in whether the person asking decided to enter it or not. I could tell him what the territory was actually like because I knew it from the inside. I could tell him about practical matters—sexual safety, what was realistic to expect from various kinds of encounter, how his body might respond differently from what he anticipated—because practical matters are learnable and the learning does not require a professional framework. I could do all of this without requiring him to identify himself as anything, or to accept a label, or to locate his curiosity on a map that had already been drawn by someone else. The map was his to draw.
I want to say something about the label bi-curious, because it appeared often in the emails I received from men approaching this territory, sometimes offered as a self-description and sometimes as a question about whether it applied. I found the label did a kind of work and also undid a kind of work.
The work it did was to create a category that a man could inhabit temporarily without committing to anything more permanent—it described a state of inquiry rather than a concluded identity, which made it more honest than most labels in this area.
The work it undid was more subtle: once a man had adopted even a provisional label, the label began to shape what he was looking for, and the shaping sometimes foreclosed things that the inquiry, left without a label, might have found. A man who arrives at new territory without a name for it is more likely to observe what is actually there. A man who arrives having already named it tends to find what the name predicted.
I did not supply labels. I also did not correct the ones men brought, unless they asked directly, in which case I would say what I have said here. What I offered instead was the specific and limited thing I was actually able to offer: time with a man who knew the territory and who would answer the questions as accurately as he could without turning the answers into a prescription for what the questioner should do next.
The men who came from the greatest distances—and some came from considerable distances, from other countries in some cases, and most commented that the remoteness of my studio was part of what made the visit possible—were often the ones for whom the territory had been most completely sealed off. The distance was not incidental. It placed the encounter outside the geography of their ordinary lives, which meant that whatever happened there happened in a space with no social consequences in the places that mattered. They would not run into me at the school gate or the office or the Saturday morning social occasion. The studio was in the mountains and I was someone they would never meet socially, and that combination of physical and social distance was, for some men, the precise condition under which the question could finally be examined.
Whether the examination changed anything, and if so what, I rarely knew. The structure of the work meant that I often saw a man once. He arrived with the question, we spent however long we spent with it, and he left. The leaving was always complete—there was no arrangement to report back, no follow-up expected, no investment on my part in what he did with whatever the session had provided. He carried it home with him and did with it what he chose.
I think about the quote I came across once and have not been able to relocate since: that gay men, by and large, do not visit sex workers because they don’t need to, and that if it were not for straight married men there would be no gay sex industry. I found this observation funnier than anything I could have invented and more accurate than most of the sociological material I have read on the subject. It points at something real about where the demand actually lives, and something equally real about the landscape of need that the demand reflects. A man who has access to the territory within his ordinary social world has less reason to travel to find it. A man who has no such access, and who has spent years treating the territory as something that did not apply to him, arrives at the edge of it later and finds the edge is not where he expected it to be.
Where the edge actually is, for any particular man, is not something I can describe in advance. That is what the visit was for.
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