Twenty-Four—Men Who Come
The men who come here have usually had sex. Some of them have had a great deal of it, within the narrow corridor available to them—monogamous, heterosexual, private, the same body for years or decades. They think they know what sex is.
They learned to ride the bike and they’ve been riding it ever since without particularly questioning where it goes.
What they haven’t had is this.
Another man’s body in the same room, unhidden, unremarkable, just present. Another man’s wanting visible and acknowledged and not immediately translated into a transaction. The simple fact of male bodies together without a script running, without a conclusion scheduled, without the bike and its familiar route.
Some of them have never seen another man’s erection. Not in person, not outside of pornography, not in any context that was real and present and mutual. They say it plainly, with a kind of wondering embarrassment—yours is the first erection I’ve ever seen apart from my own—as if they’re only now realising how extraordinary that is. How narrow the life. How much has been managed and avoided and kept carefully separate.
They don’t know what to do. Not because they’re inexperienced in the way the young are inexperienced—uncertain, unformed, still finding their way. But because everything they know about sex has been learned in one room and this is a different room entirely. The procedures don’t apply. The script doesn’t run. The bike is useless here.
Which is precisely the point.
This isn’t about sex in any understanding they arrived with. It’s about something that precedes sex and underlies it and has been missing from their lives without their quite knowing what was missing. Presence. Honesty. The body as something to inhabit rather than operate. Another person who is genuinely there, genuinely curious, genuinely unbothered by any of it.
They’re not gay virgins exactly. They’re men who have been living in one room of a very large house and have just found the door to the rest of it.
Most of them stand in the doorway for a while before they come in. That’s fine. The door stays open.
You are here: Naked But