The Work Itself
You may have formed an impression by now of what I was and how I operated. I want to address that impression directly, not because it offends me but because it is probably inaccurate, and the inaccuracy gets in the way of everything else I have been trying to say.
The word sex work arrives with a set of assumptions attached, and those assumptions—about the kind of person who does it, the transactions it involves, the environment in which it takes place, the desperation or damage that must have produced it—have a way of settling over everything before a single fact has been established. I notice that even careful readers carry the image, or some version of it, and I notice that the image makes it harder for them to follow what I am actually describing.
So here is what I was, as plainly as I can put it. Before the massage work I had spent a substantial career in corporate management, working across publishing, marketing and communications. I found my way to the top of that field, which took time and effort and the kind of accumulated competence that senior management requires, and then I reached a point where I wanted to do something entirely different. That was, in its essentials, the reason. Not trauma. Not economic desperation. Not a drift toward something I fell into sideways. A decision, made from a position of professional security, to begin again in a different direction. That is not a dramatic story. It is also the true one.
What I brought into the new work was not, then, the background most people imagine. I brought a management sensibility. An ability to read a room and read a person quickly, which years of corporate life develop whether you intend them to or not. A comfort with ambiguity and with the kind of negotiation that takes place without being named as negotiation. A certain capacity for discretion, which publishing and communications require in abundance. And a complete absence of the moral anxiety about intimate exchange that I notice operating in a great deal of the public conversation about this kind of work. I did not carry the presumption that there was something wrong with giving pleasure in exchange for money, or with receiving money for something that came naturally to me. I still don’t.
I want to be specific about what happened in the sessions, because the word erotic tends to override everything else the moment it appears. Sex, as it is usually defined, did not happen very often. The massage was the primary structure of the work. It was attentive, thorough, and included the whole body without the surgical exclusions that characterise mainstream massage. That is what erotic meant in practice: not a euphemism for something else, but an approach to the body that did not treat certain parts of it as separate from the rest, or as requiring a different quality of attention. The purpose, if I had one, was to show a man that his experience of his own body could be extended well beyond what he usually allowed it. That the urgency he arrived with—what I came to think of as the blow and go expectation, the assumption that what was on offer was a quick and functional release—was not the ceiling. That the ceiling was much higher, and that what existed between the floor and the ceiling was worth spending time in.
Many of the men who visited me had never considered this. They had arrived with an idea of what the session would consist of, and the idea was brief and sequential and outcome-oriented, and it bore almost no relationship to what actually happened over the following hours. I found, again and again, that the adjustment from the expected to the actual was itself significant—that simply being in a situation that moved slowly and attended to pleasure as a sustained experience rather than a resolved problem produced a quality of presence the man had not anticipated and didn’t always have words for afterward. I wasn’t teaching a technique. I was demonstrating, by doing, that time spent in the body without urgency was possible.
The men who found me were, in the main, curious rather than desperate. I noticed this early and it shaped how I understood the work. Curiosity is a different starting point from need: it produces a different quality of engagement, a different kind of conversation, a different person at the end of the session. The men who came from curiosity arrived with questions, sometimes explicit and sometimes entirely implicit, and those questions were rarely about sex in the narrow sense. They were about experience—about what existed in their own lives that they hadn’t yet accessed, about what other men’s lives contained that theirs might be missing, about whether what they felt and wanted corresponded to anything they could locate outside their own heads.
I noticed that a significant proportion of the men who visited me described themselves as straight, were married, and had reached their forties or later before they turned up at my door. I want to be careful here not to draw conclusions I didn’t earn. I don’t know what those facts meant for any individual man. I noticed the pattern without explaining it, and I notice that explaining it would take me into territory that belongs to the men themselves and not to me. What I can say is that the combination of curiosity, discretion, and the particular kind of available privacy that a private session offered seemed, again and again, to produce a quality of honesty in a man that he found unusual. He could say things he didn’t say elsewhere. He could be in his body in ways he didn’t allow himself elsewhere. Whether that had anything to do with being straight or married or in his forties I genuinely don’t know.
My client base tended to come from professional and technical backgrounds. A notable proportion worked in information technology and telecommunications, which I attributed, partly at least, to the fact that I had a functioning website in 1997, when the internet was still a niche environment and finding anything on it required a level of technical engagement that most of the general public hadn’t yet developed. The men who found me in those early years found me because they were already online in a meaningful way, which in 1997 implied something specific about background and professional context. I noticed that this produced a particular kind of client: methodical, curious, comfortable with research, likely to have thought carefully about what they were looking for before they contacted me. They had usually read what I had written about the work before they arrived.
I had written quite a lot. The website was not a functional listing in the manner of a classified advertisement. It reflected something of how I thought about the work, which reflected something of where I had come from. Publishing and communications had given me a relationship with language and with the question of how you present something so that the right people find it and understand it accurately. I applied that sensibility to the website, which meant that what a man read before he contacted me was a fairly precise account of what to expect. I noticed that this had a sorting effect: the men who arrived had already self-selected on the basis of something more than a photograph and a price. They had read a description and decided it was worth investigating further.
I have never spoken to anyone else who did comparable work. I want to be clear about this because I have no way to compare my experience with anyone else’s, and I am wary of the implication that what I did was typical or representative of anything beyond itself. I have the same access to media coverage and published accounts that anyone has, and I notice that those accounts tend toward particular kinds of story—exploitation, desperation, trafficking, moral rehabilitation—which have their own validity and represent real experiences but which have very little to do with mine. I don’t tell my story to correct those accounts or compete with them. I tell it because it is a different story, and different stories expand the available picture.
What I did not bring to the work was the moral framework that most public discourse applies to it. I notice that framework operating in the discomfort many people feel when they try to hold my background and my career choice simultaneously in their minds. Corporate management, publishing, communications, senior positions, career success—and then this. The discomfort comes, I think, from the assumption that this can only make sense as a fall: from respectability into something that requires explaining or excusing. I didn’t experience it as a fall. I experienced it as a turn. A different application of attention and skill and interest in people. The interest in people was continuous. Everything else changed. That felt, and still feels, like a reasonable description of a career change.
I want to say one more thing about the purpose of the work, because I notice that purpose is assumed—that I must have been trying to achieve something beyond the immediate transaction, must have had a corrective mission, must have been filling a gap in society’s provision for men or making a political point about shame or demonstrating something about the value of erotic experience to male wellbeing. I was not doing any of those things deliberately. I was doing work I found interesting, with men I found interesting, in a form that suited a particular set of capacities I had developed over a career. The observations I have been sharing in these essays emerged from that work. They were not the reason for it. I didn’t arrive knowing what I would find. I found it, and then, much later, I started to write it down.
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