Six—Arriving
Men reach for different words for what this is. None of them fit exactly. All of them fit partially. That’s not a problem with the words—it’s a problem with the categories, which were built for other things and don’t quite stretch to cover this.
Some men call it sex work. Two naked, aroused men on a bed, fondling each other—yes, that’s what sex work looks like in their experience, and they’re not entirely wrong. Three decades as an m2m sex professional taught me most of what I bring to this room. The ease with male bodies, the absence of alarm, the patience, the willingness to be present without agenda. That’s not nothing. That’s everything, in a way.
What it doesn’t reproduce is the transaction. The session with its clean edges, the service rendered, the provider and the recipient. What happens here is reciprocal. Both men are present. Neither is performing for the other. Or rather—one of them arrives performing, and somewhere in the first hour stops, and after that it’s just two men in a room being honest with each other.
Some men call it a boyfriend experience. The warmth, the physical ease, the sustained attention of a relationship offered without the relationship’s weight. There’s something in that too. What develops between two men who meet honestly over time has a quality that a single encounter never produces. It accumulates. It becomes specific. The second session knows things the first one didn’t. The third session knows things neither of them did.
It is not a relationship. I don’t want it mistaken for one.
Some men call it friendship. Because what they feel in the room is the ease and honesty they associate with their best friendships, combined with a physical closeness most friendships don’t include and never will. This is the closest of the available words. But friendship implies a symmetry—a reciprocal claim on each other’s lives, an account that needs to be kept—that this deliberately doesn’t carry.
A man can vanish for a year and come back to find me exactly as he left me. No explanation required. No absence to account for. He doesn’t owe me the year and I don’t need it. He comes back when he comes back and we pick up where we left off because where we left off is still there, waiting, exactly as he remembered it.
The truth is that this borrows something from each of these things and reproduces none of them exactly.
It is warm without being romantic. Physical without being purely sexual. Ongoing without being a relationship. It involves genuine care without involving obligation.
I’ve never found a better way to say it than that. I’m not sure one exists.
You are here: Naked But