Cheng comes over every few days. We’ve seen each other about four times. He keeps saying he wants me to fuck him next time, but that hasn’t happened. I like that he likes to be inside me. I like that he wants it, that he’s persistent, that even when I say no he keeps prodding, keeps trying, keeps letting me know what he wants. There is something about being wanted like that that turns me on, that makes me feel safe. I see myself in that persistence, that feeling of being with someone and you want to fuck them, nothing else will do, you want to be inside them and nowhere else at that moment will do.

You see, in the background of all this there is a man I’ve been fucking for the past two months. His hunger for cock is great, but he is not that interesting in bed. Some men like to be fucked and sometimes that desire is enough to turn you on, that insatiable hunger is the aphrodisiac. This man is also completely silent in bed. Don’t ask me questions, he says. Which is hard for someone like me, who likes to know what the other guy likes, if he likes the way I fuck him, if he likes the way my cock feels inside him, if he likes sucking my dick, if he wants more kisses.

“Don’t ask so many questions,” he says.

He is a man who is silent in bed, tight-lipped, even. I should have read the signs. Tight-lipped is tight-lipped. Just because your arsehole is easy to fuck, doesn’t mean you’re going to be generous when it comes to emotional openness. The thing is that outside the bedroom, we have a lot to talk about and our conversations flow. I am not the kind of guy who encounters many people with whom he can have flowing conversations – sometimes it feels like years, and hardly ever in the years I’ve lived in this city, this cold, cold city, the coldness of hell. And yet with Cheng there is hardly anything to say. What do we talk about? Don’t make me bore you. But with the skinny taciturn guy I talk. We talk about stuff, about hiking, about going away to somewhere sunny, about a cabin by the sea. We talk about family and lovers. It’s not what we talk about that excites me – although I do like what we talk about – but it’s how we talk, and the ease I feel with him. Though when it comes to talking about feelings, he clams up, refuses to talk, as if it’s a foreign language, as if he has never made the leap from feelings into language. Isn’t that the challenge of being a human being, or at least being a human being who writes, a human being who relates.

There’s something so profoundly simple about being fucked. About lying there for your own pleasure and for the pleasure of another. To just give you hole to another man and for him to be happy. It’s a strange feeling. I like to move around a lot when I fuck – this position, that position, on the table, on the floor, over the edge of the bed. In my twenties I moved around even more, behaved like a fucking acrobat. But my god, what a relief to lie back and take it, and for Cheng to be happy, for me to be happy. I can see how someone can think that that’s enough, that giving up your hole is enough, that that’s all the relating one needs to do to feel connected to someone.

.

The old cliché that good things come in small packages certainly apply to Michael Wynne’s tiny tome, a breezy but thoughtful collection of stories that read more like diary entries of the authors sexual exploits across London. Indeed, these are wonderfully frank and self- effacing fuck stories, but the tales of Wynne, those of his Jamaican lesbian painter friend McKenzie, and the larger exploration of how gay men relate to each other, if even briefly, make for addictive reading for even the prurient queer lit lover.

“I’m South African,” he says, in a tone that implied that he’d clocked that I was.

Oh,” I say, because it’s always nice to have something in common with a man we’re having sex with, and we think – like knowing someone’s star-sign – that we know something about him just because we know where he’s from, especially if he’s from where we’re from. But he is from Joberg and we are not. We are from Cape Town, for example, or Durban, somewhere on the coast, which is different from Joberg. A couple of years ago, we met a guy from Durban and felt we had more in common with him than a guy from Joberg, despite the fact that he was a Muslim and we are not.

And as we talked – me and the guy from Joberg – I realised that what I’d thought of as tentativeness or shyness or him being the tough-silent type was in fact a mixture of guilt and stupidity. His boyfriend back in Joberg didn’t know that he was, in his words, being naughty. He had that kind of dimness, a country-bumpkin quality that I’ve noticed in white South Africans, especially when they’re abroad. They have the cash to travel outside their comfort zone, but they are, on the whole, villagers, plaas-jaapies.

His head was small, too small for a body so tall – about 6’3″ – and well-formed.

“How old are you?” I said.

“Oh…” he said.

“Because you’ve got the body of a 25-year-old,” I said.

“Add about twenty years to that,” he said.

And for a second, even though he did have the body of someone much younger, I’m a little taken aback, for I’ve never liked older men, even if just by a few years; it takes me back to my early twenties when I was having sex with men considerably older than me for the sole reason they wanted to and I found it hard to say no. My self-loathing and self-doubt were so out of control in those years that I don’t think I said no to anyone.

“When’s your birthday?” I say.

“December,” he says.

And although I say nothing yet I’m thinking oh, wow, me, too, and because our star sign is the same I feel that perhaps I know something about this person, that he, too, is creative (aren’t all Sagittarians?) or, if he were a Taurus, strong-willed (isn’t that the case with all Taurians, and wasn’t my dad a Taurus and a couple of exes with whom I’d had fiery relationships, with whom I’d clashed, but in a good way; granted, not good enough to keep us together, but then I’ve never been together with anyone from any star sign for that long and at least with another free-spirited man [yes, why not, let's use that word - free-spirited! Isn't that what all Sags are?] I know what I’m getting into.) Anyway… in the past few years, I’ve kind of discovered that Capricorns are the ones I get on best with.

“And what do you do?” we say, always hoping for an answer that will coincide with our own.

Accountant?

Please. No.

I’m in banking?

Yikes.

A lawyer?

No! Though, of course, our inner eyes light up at the prospect of a boyfriend with a proper job, the kind of profession one can rely on.

“I’m an artist,” he says.

Or, better still: “A writer.”

And we rejoice. Even before he has elaborated, we see the tableau of him and us in a room working on our writing. Maybe he works on a laptop; we like to write by hand to start off with. We’ll write about different things and we’ll learn from each other, inspire each other, and over time, people will begin to comment on the impact his work has had on ours and our on his. We’ll collaborate on projects. We’ll be the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne of the gay world. We’ll be like Mark Doty and what’s his name. Gertrude and Alice B.

“I write for fashion magazines,” he says. “Articles, interviews, that kind of stuff.”

“That’s great,” we say, though in the last two seconds we’ve lost all desire to share our writing with him and we’re ready for him to leave (if he’s at our house) or to get up and go for a shower (if we’re at the sauna).

And because his cock is circumcised and he’s got a nice hairy chest – we’re thinking of a different man this time, not the one from Joberg – and he works as a consultant in the oil industry (yes, a proper grown-up’s job) we assume he’s Jewish and we like that, we like it because it doesn’t really happen that much that we have sex with other Jewish guys. We’re not sure why; it just doesn’t happen much in London, probably because there are less of us in this country, not like in New York, for example, not like back in Joberg or Cape Town, and often with our Anglicized surname, people don’t assume that we are either. We don’t seem to attract the yids.

The last Jewish guy we had a thing with was ages ago – years! maybe four or five – and that had started off well. Our birthdays were only days apart; four days between ours and his. We’d met a week or so after his birthday but the relationship didn’t last a full year, so we didn’t get to celebrate. We were the same height and the same skin tone; we could have been from the same gene pool, though his people were more from the Hungarian side of the gene pond. Anyway, there were other differences, too, more than just the ancestral ones, more than just the differences in character, like there was the nice fact that his cock was bigger than ours.

I’ve always preferred being with a guy whose cock is either smaller or bigger than mine. It’s rare that one meets a man with an identical cock to one’s own. As if the cock were like a face, always a little different one from the next, as if one could recognise someone by his penis. And yet, would you really recognise someone by his cock, by its length or girth or smell. (I feel like I’m rambling a bit, but let’s stick with it, see where this goes.)

Some men I would recognise by the smell of their penis. I would know their scent. The fox knows the smell of its own lair, as we used to say when someone farted… it knows the smell of its own den. The fox’s den. And his farts smell the same and that is reassuring because we think it means he eats similar food to us, has a similar diet, and maybe even better than that: his shit doesn’t stink. I have known one or two men like that.

“So,” I say, because I’ve lost interest and I’ve come already. “Do you want to come?”

“He’s disappeared,” he says, looking down at his cock which is now quite small and nestled in his considerable but beautiful bush of soft light brown pubic hair. “He’s not very reliable when you want him to stand up.”

“He’s very nice when he stands up,” I say.

But he doesn’t stand up again. We do, though. Him to shower, and me to get dressed and cycle home for a bath.

The boy is a faggot, a nothing. He’s bored and small and humiliated by his non-job, this sitting here and handing out tickets to strangers, tourists in the city he thought he was coming to to have a better life in, to fall in love in, to be loved, to make, he thought, a good living. He thought this city would give him everything he couldn’t get back home, back at home, back where he was as much a nothing as he is here, but at least there he had hopes of moving out and becoming a something. He wants to be a manager, to be in charge of ticketing at the gallery. People beneath him will come to him with requests and questions, he will have to make the kinds of decisions that will affect people’s lives. They will have sick parents and need time off and he will give it to them. He will be like the Pope. His mother will be proud. Look, Mama, these people look up to me, they rely on me. It’s only a matter of time before they give him the manager job, so from now he will do what he has to do. He will sit and be beautiful. English people like his look. He has olive skin, and he knows how much they love olive skin. He has good hair, thick and dark and curly. He has brown eyes. He is wearing his favourite scarf. You look good in that scarf, his flatmate says. Very European. People love that kind of look. She says: I wish more people dressed like you. And he must agree – he wishes people dressed better in this city. Less of that scruffy thrown-together look. Sometimes he looks at these people and thinks: Disgusting. He stands out. And because he stands out people in the gallery notice him and it’s just a matter of time before they put him in charge. Just a matter of time, because he sticks out. It’s not always a good thing, his flatmate says, to stand out. Not in this country, she says. He knows this. He knows this, because… what happened? Someone complained. Someone complained about the little faggot and his bad attitude.

)

2. The Scandinavian Guy, Wagamama Southbank, 13:00

Things get going and I love it. Straight from the gym and everything feels slick and tight and fits just right. I love my job. Even before I get here the place is buzzing and I just slot in, like we’re all dancing together, every single one of us, playing their part, like this place is some fucking musical and we’re on stage, dancing, and the audience – they’re the ones at the tables eating their noodles, their deep-fried prawns, their cha han. And I want to run around and hug every single one of them, let them know I am here, that I’m loving it and loving them and all I want is to make them happy, to bring them what they want, to take their orders, to serve them.

“What can I get you?”

They’re cute. Asian girls. Korean, perhaps, and I’m like – what am I? – this fucking Norse god. Thor. I can tell they’re happy to see me, and let me tell you, ladies, I am so fucking happy to see you, too.  It’s what I love about this city. Here’s me, little Oslo boy – okay, not so little, 1.90m is not little, and there they are, three Asian girls from Korea, and we’re here in this city, on this island, smiling at each other. I fucking love taking orders.

I know that, my boyfriend knows that – not just him, but quite a few other men, they know how much I like an order. I respond well to orders. I’m going to show these girls how good it feels, how much fun they can get out of ordering a cute Scandinavian boy around.

)

3. The Malaysian Guy, Chariots Sauna, 18:00

Believe me, you were the sexiest guy there, everyone else was so, how you say, not very masculine. I like hairy guys, men who look like men. In my country you don’t find any guys who are that hairy. Everyone looks the same, like me, skinny and smooth. Not very masculine. Some guys are tall like you, but mostly we’re all the same. About one metre seventy. Max. Men and women are the same. My father was even shorter than me, and my mother even more. Do you like Asian guys? I saw all those guys looking at you. You must have noticed it. Some guys who are big like you only like to be with other big guys, like the bears. Bears only like other bears, so I don’t go to places like XXL very much anymore.

You want to stop for a drink here, or we can keep walking up to one of the Vietnamese places. It’s good weather for summer rolls. Have you ever had summer rolls? No, me neither. Only when I came to London did I try them – back home we don’t have such things. Almost everything is cooked – lots of rice and sauces and big chunks of meat and vegetables. You like walking so fast? Everything happens so fast here. It’s because the sun never shines, people never get hot – its like they have to move fast so they can heat up. In my country you have to move slowly so you don’t explode from the heat. Yes, you can overheat. We all move slowly in my country.

I like this cafe even if it’s a bit dark in here. I can hardly see in this light, but I know what I want. You can browse the menu, if you like. I’m quite happy to order for both of us – it’s mainly the summer rolls I wanted to introduce you to, but it’s fine if you want something else. You know, my brother used to go out with this Vietnamese woman in New York. Well, she was American, from a Vietnamese family. Vietnamese-American, as they say, because everything has to be something-American there, except for the Europeans. Except for you people. No one ever calls themselves English-American. Or French-American. Italian is about the only one you get with the American at the end of it, and that’s probably because they’re the darkest of the lot, except maybe the Spanish, but then they’ve got South America.

So you say you’re a writer. It doesn’t matter if you’ve not published that much. Who cares? I think the main thing is to do what you love, and I can tell you love writing, but you’re also a bit shy, no? Like it’s some guilty pleasure, and I know what that’s like. Not just because I feel guilty about being in the city, in this country, this place that I love living in, far away from where I come from, from where I can make a difference, the place where they need me. No, I’m not a big reader – not many people in my country are, but everybody likes listening to stories, and old people like telling stories. It’s not like here, people don’t talk a lot, and they never go on and on about themselves. Not like me.

But, my God, the men in the locker room today were very appealing. More so than usual, and I don’t think it had anything to do with my level of horniness, which was not particularly high. There was a guy in the shower when I arrived who was so stunningly beautiful, he had that super smooth skin that turns to glass when it’s wet. I stared. If a man is naked in a shower, exposed to everyone else in the locker room and he turns to let the water run the soap off his back and gives you the full frontal nakedness, his penis thick and heavy at the base of a sparse bush of brown pubic hair… what can one do but stare? So I did. In the pauses while searching for a 50p coin to put in the slot in the locker; while finding my iPod and taking it out of my bag; while taking off my jumper and putting it in the locker… every pause was a moment to watch. Beauty is my headlights.

I did my workout. I lifted some weights, did some machines, ran on the cross-trainer and the treadmill. I felt good. I felt sleek. My body seemed to be working well, and so as not to jinx it, I will not say that, lately, I am pleased with the way my body is working. I’ve been running more than usual. My clothes fit me better. I am noticing more appreciative glances. I like the way men and women look at me.

You probably know this already: I do not always like the way I am.

What I really want to talk about is my time in the locker room after today’s workout. It was one of those experiences that stays with you, that sticks in your mind like a dream you wake up from that is so intense, so disturbing, that it seems to linger for hours, a whole day, sometimes more, before you can shake it off. The locker room today seemed to be teeming with men and their sons. Beautiful men and their sons. Muscled, toned, smooth, slim men and their young boys. Helping them dress and undress. Moving around the locker room with towels around their waists while their young boys, naked, chatted away – Daddy this, Daddy that – oblivious to what was going on around them. Oblivious to my (metaphorical) weakening of the knees in the presence of their fathers. I had to stop myself from staring at their Daddies. Not just staring, but overcome the desire to sit on a bench as one would sit down in front of a television set or in the cinema and gorge on their bodies.

And I thought: These men are enjoying the attention. They’re enjoying being naked or semi-naked, their healthy fat dicks swinging about while the fruit of their loins jabbers away near them. These men are enjoying each other’s company, showing off, revelling in their evidence of procreation. And that was beautiful. There was something beautiful about that, about being amongst them, as if this were a room in which they felt safe and encouraged to be beautiful and open and adoring. This was a room without women, where the desire of other men was not a threat and the expectation of women did not bring out the warrior in them. It was a kind of privilege to be there. Their beauty was everywhere. Young men who procreate.

This is why we fall in love with beautiful straight men.

My father was one of these men. Beautiful. Playful. Adoring. Vulnerable. Physical. Desired.

The past is here. The past sticks to us and never relents. It binds our hands, it whips us. Our body is bad. Our mind is bad. Our desire is bad. And that never goes away, but we have been here long enough, in this world, in this life, to know what it feels like to touch bodies like these, to desire them and have them. So what if we cannot have the men in the showers, in today’s locker room? That isn’t the question. That isn’t what’s at stake. But there is still a thrill, a deep overwhelming thrill that comes with being in the presence of naked men in a locker room. Naked men in public. It is different to being naked with someone in private or in a place where we are allowed to touch. But that, too, is not it. It is about beauty and the proximity to it. It’s about being this close to beauty that is naked and moving and occupied and engaged… and I was going to say vulnerable, but it’s not that. It’s just beauty, naked. Some men are exceptionally beautiful. Men like those in the locker room this evening, after my workout and before.

No one knows how this works. The logic builds up over time, burns into us from that first experience, that moment when desire came into being, the shape of it, sculpted into our psyche, onto our flesh. That moment when we realised how much we adore beauty and that we want only beauty, and with that, the knowledge that we can’t touch, even though we cannot remember how we knew that, how we got to know that to touch was forbidden. And so we have gone through these years revelling in the touch, finding the kind of men we have always wanted to touch, and touching them. The shock of that will always stay with us. The shock, yes, but the hunger, too – the hunger that touching beautiful creates.

* the images above are not my own.

)

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done?” one of the girls asks.

“This,” he says.

Does he even know this clip is being thrown about on tumblr? And even though he says “You better not get my face in this” his face is very much part of the story, his bashful smile, his sense of pride and glee and a willingness to please. Don’t all young men want to please, to feel wanted. And he pleases with his accent too, doesn’t want to stand out for anything but his cock. And what is the accent? It pops out at odd times in the clip, mainly when he says “Oh, my God” which is usually when the girl who is filming asks him to do something that surprises him, or as a kind of externalisation at the wonder and the voices that are going on inside him, the sounds of his family, his friends back home.

“It’s beautiful,” the young white woman says when he first plops it out from his shorts. “Will you jump on the bed for me?”

“Jump on the bed?” he says, a tiny pause between each word. “I’m not jumping on the bed. You wanna take a shower?”

“Will you do a striptease for me first?” the girl says.

And he does, for her and for the other girls in the room, and now for us, for thousands of us, watching this boy with the indeterminate accent and the massive cock pulling off his white shorts that almost glow against his brown skin and step into the shower.

He could be Jewish, too. I have cousins on my father’s side who are as dark as him, even darker, who are spoken to in Spanish because people assume they are Latino. He is, whatever he is, Other. The academic essay would address that, and the otherness of his accent, an accent that exposes him as being from a place where people do not flaunt their bodies, where people are still getting used to the pornisation of everyday life. Like England, for example. His accent is English, or it could be antipodean. But it is not, as he claims to be, from New York.

“Stay far away so I can get all of you,” the woman with the camera says.

The place where I first came across the clip was in an online album of photos and videos for gay men. It’s called Naked (Hot) Gay Guys. This is not the source of the film, but it is where I first came across it, it is where the film is. The source seems to be Emma’s Wall of Fame. The woman with the camera could be Emma, but I doubt it. It is hard to say who is the source of anything on tumblr.

The young man says he doesn’t want to do it. There are certain things he won’t do.

“I’m not dancing” he says when asked. “You get the shower.”

“Get all soapy for me,” the girl says.

“Nah, come on with the soapy,” he says. “No, no more.”

“Do you know any tricks?” the girl says, and the camera stays zoomed in on his middle, on his trimmed bush (that he claims not to trim), and the big brown penis that looks like… like… itself, with the kind of girth and weight a penis would be that is 9.5″ when hard. It is not a serpent, not a trunk, though perhaps it is closer to a trunk than it is to a snake, but it is more abstract than that, it is reassurance and wonder and relief and a comfort. I am not a size-queen (have I said this before? Am I protesting too much?) but a particularly large cock, or is it just a particularly beautiful man, makes me feel like a pilgrim arriving at his destination.

“I bet that’ll fit all the way round your wrist,” the camera-woman says to the young man.

“No,” he says, “that is not happening,” he says, and as if protest and rising to a dare were the same thing, he curls his cock around his arm.

“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?” she says.

“This,” he says, his accent now relaxing into confession, for he is no longer talking to them. “This is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever done.”

And as the clip ends, for they have run out of things to say, for the fun is over and they must either fuck or press stop, which in the end they do, the girl says, “Alright, baby, you’re hot.”

And the boy smiles, too, as if this was his pleasure in life.

At the beginning of the day, when we do get out of bed -  there are days when, just out of inertia, we are up and at it as soon as the alarm goes off – we are hopeful. We’ve forgotten that only a week ago we considered killing ourselves. Suicide as a way to let people know they could have helped, could have done something, that we didn’t kill ourselves solely as a cry for help but as a way of saying: Why the fuck didn’t you do anything while I was around? Weren’t you listening? We wake up with a degree of hope because we’ve forgotten that only a few days ago we’d thought of disappearing. We’d thought of taking our passports, emptying out the cash still available in our overdrawn accounts, and cycling to Spain, or France. We had this fantasy – we did – in which wrote an email to everyone and told them this is the last email they’ll receive from us. Consider me dead, we wrote.

We struggled through our twenties, but never imagined the struggle would continue into our thirties, and beyond? Isn’t the nature of pain, we thought, to subside? Eventually. But some pain is chronic.

We don’t always like ourselves, and then we meet a man and we like him. There is a lot to like about him. If it were possible, we would put all our liking into him. This man would be the focus of all the love we have to give. He is beautiful and slim and he plays the piano, or the guitar, or he sings really well, or he is good at business – yes, he’s a consultant, travelling the world, working for some oil company in the North Sea.

“That’s very butch,” we joke.

And he says something like: “It can be.” Or he says: “It has its moments.”

We are so happy to meet someone like him and we don’t spend too much time pondering whether we do actually like him. Are we bothered that he’s a bit sissyphobic, that he makes some odd remark about our earrings, our tattoos? We like him. We like him and we want him to like us. We want him to like us more than we’ll ever be able to like ourselves. We lie in bed naked with him and we want nothing more in our lives than for this moment to stretch on into eternity. If he does want to get up, if he does need to go to work, well, then, we’ll keep lying here naked until he comes home to us in the evening.

But by the time we get to the end of the day, things are worse. We haven’t done much work. We haven’t written or painted or sold anything. Late afternoon, we texted some other man who liked us a lot and he texted us back – immediately, yes, right away – with some inane response, devoid of genuine enthusiasm. So we ask ourselves if we’re just being paranoid, but we know deep down that we’re not, that we’ve encountered this before, men who’ve been enthusiastic at the outset, because we’re good in bed, we know how to fuck and kiss and make them feel special, but then they cool off. And to be honest, we’re not really sure why. Can they tell we’re needy? Can they tell we don’t really like ourselves? Do they get tired of being the centre of our attention, the subject of our curiosity, the reason for our existence, our source of oxygen. Do they need some space to hate themselves?

Sometimes we ask ourselves rhetorical questions.

We try to keep it light. We try not to wallow. We go out. We leave the house and go out for sex. We’re not feeling desirable, but we figure that if we can find someone to touch us, we’ll feel much better. Human contact helps. We come home disappointed. In a city that is usually very generous in providing us with men who are happy to get naked, we have returned empty-handed. Yet, as we’re opening the door to our building, trying to manoeuver our bicycle up the stair to lock it in the little room, one of our neighbours comes home – she is returning from the Brit Awards, smelling wonderfully of alcohol and perfume, beautiful in a black dress and black tights and black high-heeled shoes and a new haircut that makes her look even younger, even more glamorous than she usually looks, and she asks how our day has been and we say fine and she says are you sure?

“I’ve had better days,” we say, because what else can we say?

And we stand there in the entrance to our building, the neighbour and us, and we talk about the Awards and about her job (she’s a banker) and about the price we pay for the paths we choose.

“What’s wrong,” we say to her, “with selling your soul to the devil? At least you have money in the bank and go on holidays to warm places.”

We have no doubts whatsoever that we would so sell our souls to the devil for those two things.

We talk for ten minutes, fifteen perhaps, about her new boyfriend, about the maintenance that needs to be done in the building, about the other people in the block, the old hippies and the new hippies, and how nothing will ever get done with them around. Then we lean in and hug each other, kiss each other on the cheek. We are worlds apart but for that moment there is nothing separating us. All we want is for the other to have a good night and a good day and be happy.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in love” he says. “How do you know if you’re in love.”

We’re lying in bed after sex, after good sex – we always have good sex, which mainly involves me fucking him, but also a lot of kissing and rimming and cocksucking (he likes to force his cock down my throat) – so we’re lying there under the duvet, him on his back, my arm across his chest. He tells me his friends say he’s built a wall around him, a wall so high no one can climb over it. He’s adamant he’ll never love again.

“It has to do with light,” I say. “With the amount of light the other person brings into the room.”

“Yes,” he says. “But what if the lights are on already?”

“Have you ever seen your father cry?” I say, unfazed by cynicism, going deeper, to the heart of something, perhaps.

“Never,” he says, adding that he can’t even remember the last time he cried.

But then he does. Six years ago when he went to see his boyfriend in Vegas and discovered that the guy was cheating on him.

“I cried like a baby,” he says.

I tell him hardly a week goes by that I don’t cry: movies, books, the news, listening to writers read stories on the New Yorker’s Fiction Podcasts, especially Aleksander Hemon reading that Bernard Malamud story. It kills me every time. I’m in love with Aleksander Hemon’s voice. I remember the first time I heard him read. I cried tears of joy, I really did.

“You’re lucky,” Stefan says, though he says it in a way that is entirely unconvincing. You can tell he does not want to be the kind of person who cries once a week, to be vulnerable like that, sentimental. He’s the kind of person who’s happy to meet up and get fucked once a week, and then leave after minimal conversation, minimal cuddling, minimal sharing of personal details.

That was almost three weeks ago.

Not long after that night (we haven’t seen each other since then; he’s been in bed with pneumonia) I met someone else. I met someone and I almost fell in love. I don’t think I did fall in love, but I certainly wanted to. He was the kind of guy I’d want to fall in love with. Not since October, not since Tariq, have I felt that kind of about-to-fall-in-love feeling. With Tariq I did fall in love. The new guy, Jacob, would be easy to fall in love with. He’s tall and skinny and plays the guitar and sings (like Jay Brannan, but better) and he kisses in a way I’ve not encountered before, in a way that might have turned me off if it had been someone else.

Jacob’s tongue is a thing of wonder. He licks. His tongue feels big, like a cat’s tongue, rough and comforting. He likes to lick and kiss and for the first time in a long time, we were having foreplay. When you have sex in saunas and sex-clubs, foreplay is very hard to come by. It’s anathema to the context. I want to finish this blog before midnight, before the Day of Love is over, even though I know that in some parts of the world – like New York, like LA – Valentine’s Day is in full swing. So I will conjure up three images of Jacob, who is now in Paris for the week with some music friends.

1. Jacob comes round late in the evening with his guitar that he’s just picked up from a friend’s flat in South London where it’s been in storage. He hasn’t played for a while. I run a bath before he comes and while I sit in the bath, he sits on the toilet seat, naked, and plays and sings. I watch his fingers move across the strings, along the neck of the guitar. I watch his mouth. I close my eyes. I think: My dad would love listening to this. I miss my dad.

2. We manoeuver around the kitchen eating breakfast. We eat bagels with jam. We drink coffee. We touch each other and kiss. He’s wearing jeans, nothing else; I’m in a T-shirt, nothing else. We stroke each other. I sit at the table by the kitchen eating cereal. He stands at the window smoking a roll-up. I want our conversation to be easy, effortless, but it is not. We are 15 years apart. I am not used to waking up with other men. He comes to sit and the table and picks up his guitar and plays something. It is gentle and mournful and beautiful. A sticker on his guitar says Please Don’t Smoke.

3. We sit on the sofa and make out.

* I don’t remember whose tumblr I got these images from. If you know, please let me know so I can put up a link.

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This is how it happened: I went to the sauna out of a compulsion. I was compelled to go. It was one of those times when the voices say go! go! and one must obey. I’m not usually a fan of the sauna on Sundays – too many men walking around hoping for Mr Right, too much desperation and coming-down-from-drugs in the air – but I went anyway. I’m glad I did. I must stop being so dogmatic about things. The sauna was packed. When I got to the reception cage, there weren’t even any available locker keys so I had to wait until someone left. Someone is always leaving, so I on;ly had to wait a few minutes. And then I was in. It’s a nice moment that moment when you pass the door and walk down that corridor to the lockers. Everything from that moment on is possible. Love, passion, surprise. I am always optimistic when I walk down that corridor. It’s one of the few places I am.

I saw him as soon as I got to my locker. He was already in a towel, standing by his locker. Later I’d find out that he was sipping from his can of Red Bull, snorting tiny spoons of coke. But I didn’t know that then, and even when I did know, when we were making out in a cabin, it didn’t really bother me. I’ve never snorted coke, but for a moment I was tempted, for a brief flash I thought, why not, isn’t it time you did stuff like that. Everyone else is. Why must you keep yourself so aloof from the herd? Etc, etc.

He was just what I like. Tall and very skinny and smooth. He was sculpted. His skin was brown. He looked something like the guy in the picture, only skinnier, and darker. But the face was similar, the look in the eyes, that slightly lost gaze, almost innocent, and the mouth, made for kissing.

We passed each other upstairs and our eyes were on each other and when I brushed my hand against his side he turned and looked and followed. The room was at the end of the upstairs passageway, a large space, darker than the cubicles. I leaned against the wall and he was right there, standing in front of me. We bowed our heads towards each other, our hands already on nipples, our backs, gently touching. In some settings – a beach, a cafe, the bedroom – this would be almost romantic, two men about to kiss, exploring each other with profound tenderness. Licking first, brushing lips, breathing, turning away, soft halting breaths. I love the beginning of something, tasting each other, testing.

“What’s your name?” I say, my mouth close to his ear, wondering if it’s too early for that.

Brian. He was hungry for cock. A need so all-consuming that he eventually led us to a cubicle where he could express that hunger fully. On his knees with his legs spread and his arse-cheeks at the foot of the slope of his back like two globes of… what? Like globules. Glutes. All those words. Perfectness. And for a moment I was Robert Mapplethorpe. I wanted to photograph him. Capture him. Hold that picture of him feasting on my cock. Sucking and sucking and sucking. He positioned me on the raised bed, my legs hanging over the side – a bit like a child about to have its knee bandaged – and he just kept sucking, doing this thing with his head, a kind of nodding gesture, like he was scooping my cock, over and over, into his mouth. If I hadn’t lifted his head for a kiss, I had a feeling he would never come up for air.

“Do you want to take a break?” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

“I want to play with you some more,” he said.

“We can do that,” I said.

“We’ll meet up later, yeah?” he said. “I want you to come in my mouth.”

“I can do that,” I said.

During our break – because we did meet up again later – I went to sit in the sauna cabin, the air hot and dry, penetrating the skin, heating the bones. There was a guy sitting opposite me who seemed cute. Pale, smooth, and because I didn’t have my glasses on it was hard to make out how slim he was. He seemed okay. The pale smoothness of him in the half-dark of the sauna cabin was nice to behold. I sat with one leg up on the wooden ledge, then he did the same. I massaged my neck; he copied me. I leaned over and rested my elbows on my knees; after I slight pause, he was in the same position.

Hey, I can read a sign!

There was just enough room to sit on the ledge to his left, and that’s where I went to sit. I reached out first, stroked his chest, played with his nipple, massaged his skull. He more or less followed suit. It was kind of sexy, and probably would have been more so if he was slimmer, and I was feeling more predatory. Thoughts of the skinny sculpted guy still lingered. This guy couldn’t compare. He laughed.

“What’s funny?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “This.”

“This?” I said.

“Life,” he said.

“Which bits?” I said.

He laughed again, put his hand on my thigh, moved in closer.

“Do you mean the homosexual bits?” I said.

“This,” he said, gesturing to the sauna cabin, the men who were sitting, other standing, some leaving, others peering in through the glass window in the door.

“You mean like the way you were copying my movements and I had to come over like some wild animal who wants you to roll over onto your back and put your legs in the air?”

“Oh,” he said. “So you noticed?”

“It’s an animal instinct,” I said.

“Is that what we are?” he said. “Surely we’ve moved on from that.”

“I hope not,” I said. “Have you?”

“I think I have,” he said.

“You must have a properer job then,” I said. “Nine to five, an office.”

“How did you know?” he said.

I said I could tell, that I could see he had lost touch with his animal instincts. It was fun making him laugh, easy, and that was pleasurable, a turn-on in itself, even though nothing else about him turned me on. We played him guessing what I did, and the first thing he said was: Artist.

“I am,” I said, enjoying being called that in a room full of strangers.

He ran his hand over my chest, his mouth almost on my nipple, like he was inspecting something, or admiring.

“It’s trimmed,” I said, referring to the little spikes on my chest. Just that afternoon I’d clippered the hair. “I’m curbing the animal instinct.”

“Not all animals get together just to fuck,” he said, and puts his head on my shoulder, nestled closer to me, whimpered.

“Did you just whimper,” I said.

“Whimper?” he said, the smile audible in his voice. “It’s very likely.”

“I think we’ve spoken before,” I said. “I recognise something.”

“Are you the guy with the blog,” he said, as if he’d known all along, as if he, too, had intuited our history.

“The blog?” I said.

“The one who has sex with guys and then writes about it?” he said.

I told him I’d turned some of it into a book, but – I apologised – I couldn’t remember what we’d done last time. To be honest, I found it hard to believe we’d had sex at all, but he remembered things like how sensitive my nipples were, and that I had a bike, so I guess we must have done it. Jim – that was his name – made a joke along the lines of, what does a guy have to do to get me to write about him. I said there has to be something that moves me to tell a story, something out of the ordinary, something that is more than just about the sex itself, that the sex has to have an existential quality to it, to inspire an insight into something, or feel metaphorical, representative of something bigger, more profound, or more basic. I said it’s not just about sex but about a connection, a touch, a breath, a feel of the skin, the way a man kisses, a new type of touch, a new kind of body, a bit like it was – but I don’t say this to him – with Brian, the Mapplethorpe model, the man, young, from Birmingham, new to London, revelling in his sluthood, who’d keep sucking on cocks, swallowing more and more cum, until his hunger was sated, until he’d gone beyond his true calling, beyond his animal insitincts and found a proper job.