Thirty—Men Who Come
Men ask if it’s safe. They usually don’t mean what they appear to mean. Yes, there are the straightforward questions—about transmission, about risk, about what we do and don’t do and what that means for the life they go home to.
These matter and I answer them honestly.
The men who find their way here tend to be largely celibate, their lives organised around a faithfulness that has cost them considerably. What we do together carries no meaningful risk. I take my own health seriously and always have. That’s the short answer to the short question.
But the longer question—is it safe—is asking something else entirely.
Is it safe to want this. Is it safe to be here. Is it safe to say the thing out loud that I’ve only ever thought in private. Is it safe to be seen wanting something and find out that the world doesn’t end. Is it safe to go home afterward and still be myself.
Yes. To all of it.
What surprises me still, after all these years, is how little men know about their own sexual health. Not for lack of intelligence—these are often sharp, accomplished, worldly men. But the questions they ask, sometimes after the fact, are the questions of men who have never had a safe place to ask them before. Who have been managing their health and their wanting in parallel, separately, without ever quite connecting the two.
Before Covid changed the general level of awareness, the gaps were astonishing. Basic questions. Fundamental things that any honest conversation between two men could have answered in minutes but that had somehow never been answered in decades.
Because there was no conversation. Because there was no room for it. Because asking the question meant admitting the wanting and admitting the wanting meant—what, exactly? They were never sure. So they didn’t ask.
I take sexual health for granted the way I take discretion for granted—not because it’s unimportant but because it’s so thoroughly part of how I operate that it doesn’t require thought. It just is.
What I don’t take for granted is the man asking. Who has finally found somewhere to ask. Who deserves a straight answer without judgment or alarm.
He gets one.
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