Two—Arriving
I should say something about who I am, because it’s not incidental to any of this. Not a label—I don’t have one that fits and I’ve stopped looking.
What I am is a man who has always been comfortable in male bodies, trained early in the arts of sex by men who knew things and were willing to pass them on, a nudist since before I liked my own body, genuinely curious about men and their desires, which turn out—underneath everything the culture piles on top of them—to be fairly simple.
Sex, in the world I’ve inhabited, is just something you do. Readily available in the right circles, honest, uncomplicated, no larger meaning required. Anonymous when that suits, intimate when that suits, always just two people in a room who want the same thing and are willing to say so. I didn’t construct this world. I just grew up in it and absorbed what it knew.
Which gave me something I only understood the value of when I started spending serious time with men who didn’t have it.
Not gay men. Gay men, broadly speaking, already have what I’m describing. They’ve built entire communities around the ease of male wanting—spaces where desire is straightforward, where the body doesn’t have to apologise before it’s allowed to feel anything, where another man’s body is just a body, interesting and available without metaphysical weight attached. Gay men have rarely needed what I offer because they already live inside a version of it.
The men who find their way here are different. Not straight in the uncomplicated sense—or if they are, something in them has outgrown the available script. Not gay in any self-identified sense. Somewhere between categories, which is an uncomfortable place to live, made more uncomfortable by the fact that the culture doesn’t have a comfortable name for it.
What they share is this—a wanting that has nowhere obvious to go. No community built around it. No language that fits without either overstating or understating what it actually is. Just the wanting itself, managed carefully, expressed privately, carried for years sometimes decades with a low-grade patience that looks from the outside like contentment and feels from the inside like something else entirely.
These are not men who are missing out on gay sex. They are men who are missing out on the ease of honest wanting. On a body that doesn’t require justification. On the simple animal pleasure of being present in a room with another man without a performance running.
That’s what the room offers.
I didn’t invent it. I just kept the door open for men who didn’t know doors like this existed.
I’m sixty and the door is still open.
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