Twenty-Three—Men Who Come
There are men who arrive already knowing what they want. They’ve known for years, possibly decades. The wanting has been there so long it’s become part of the furniture of their inner life—present, unexamined, never acted on.
Not because the want is wrong or dangerous or even particularly complicated. Simply because there has never been a place safe enough, a person trusted enough, a moment permissive enough for it to become real.
One man came several times before anything shifted. Mild, pleasant, curious in the way most men are curious—looking, touching, asking the questions that float to the surface once the room feels safe. Nothing that suggested what was underneath. Or perhaps everything did, and I simply waited.
Then one afternoon, without preamble, something changed in him. He looked at me differently. And in a voice that was nervous and commanding at the same time—as though he’d decided and was going to say it before he could decide not to—he told me to kneel on the bed.
So I did.
What followed was straightforward enough. What interested me was his face afterward. Not relief exactly, though there was that. Something more complete than relief. The look of a man who has wanted something for a very long time and has finally, simply, had it. The wanting and the having, both present at once, neither cancelling the other out.
For me there was pleasure in it too. The particular pleasure of giving someone something that costs you nothing but means everything to them. Of being the person—perhaps the only person in his life—who could be trusted with what he actually wanted.
That’s what I mean by wanting.
Not desire in the abstract. Not sexuality as a category or an identity or a problem to be managed. Just a man, in a room, finally doing the thing he came to do. Finally knowing, from the inside, what it feels like to want something and be allowed to have it.
Most men don’t know what that feels like. Not because their wants are impossible or shameful or too large for the world to accommodate. But because wanting itself—open, admitted, acted on—has never quite been permitted. The wanting went underground early. It learned to disguise itself, to wait, to surface only in private where it couldn’t cost anything or reveal anything or require anything of anyone.
Nudity accelerates all of this. You can’t be naked and fully defended at the same time. The body has its own intelligence and its own honestly and given half a chance it will tell you things your mind has been successfully avoiding for years. Three sessions, four sessions, spread across a year or two—not to complete a programme or achieve an outcome but to give the wanting enough air and enough safety to finally show itself.
And then—this is the part that still interests me after all these years—to find out that the wanting was fine all along. That it didn’t destroy anything. That the world didn’t end. That the man on the other side of it was still himself, still intact, just—lighter. More legible to himself. More his own.
That’s what this is. Not therapy. Not a service. Not a cure for anything.
Just a place where wanting is allowed.
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