]]> http://theconfessionsofasexaddict.com/2013/04/02/romantic-interlude-every-question-answered/feed/ 4 thecoasa http://theconfessionsofasexaddict.com/2013/01/20/men-and-fucking-and-a-room-of-our-own/ http://theconfessionsofasexaddict.com/2013/01/20/men-and-fucking-and-a-room-of-our-own/#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2013 13:01:22 +0000 Michael Wynne http://theconfessionsofasexaddict.com/?p=627 Read more]]> After a long time of not seeing him he was there this week and I was sorry I’d already come and was thinking of going home because I would have enjoyed being with him again, as I always do. He was looking well. So well, in fact, that for a moment I thought it might not be him, Ong, the first man I ever had sex with in this sauna – in any sauna – and with whom I’d gone out to dinner immediately afterwards, back then, to one of those Vietnamese places on Kingsland Road, a place I’ve eaten at since then with two other men, both of whom I’ve met on my visits to the sauna over the past ten years.

I very rarely meet up with men afterwards, though I sometimes find myself looking for them online, turning to Google to track them down, based on the facts I’ve gleaned from them in the hour or so together in the sauna. You don’t need many facts nowadays to find someone. I did it with Dixon, although he never responded to my email, which could mean he didn’t got it. I did it with B, too, who did respond to confirm that he really did have a lot going on in his life and wasn’t in a good space to get involved with anyone. A year or two later, when we met again by chance and did get involved, it lasted for a very short time.

Recently I googled two of the guys I met in the sauna, both of them on the day I saw Ong in the dry sauna room; by “recently” I mean the day before yesterday. Of the two men, I would have been happy to see one of them again, though my searches came up empty-handed.

Ong is from Singapore and used to be a dancer; he still has the body of a dancer: tall and lean and, in his case, entirely hairless, so smooth he gives the impression of being effortlessly penetrable. It’s his body, yes, but men on certain types of drugs are like that; there’s nothing to stop you from using them for your pleasure – and whatever you do to them seems to please them. They have no resistance. Ong is always on drugs, or at least he seems to be, flitting from one guy to the next, tactile, affectionate, open. I’ve heard people say that Asian men are bottoms, and that they’re “the closest thing” to fucking a woman. I wonder if the men who say this – gay men, in particular – have ever had sex with a woman, or actually had that much “bed experience”, as Janet Frame calls it, with men from China, Japan, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines. From my experience, I’ve discovered, if I’ve discovered anything…

What I will say, though, is that the best top I’ve been with was Malaysian, and the man with the biggest cock I’ve had sex with was from Taiwan. I’ve known tops from the Philippines, China, Mongolia, Japan, though on the whole, most of the Asian men I’ve had sex with have been bottoms, but that could be said of most men I’ve been with: the Poles, the Spaniards, the South Africans, the Brazilians, Columbians, and the North Americans. I don’t meet many Northern Europeans, as in the blonde Viking-y types. English men, yes, but less of the Scandinavians, Slavs, or men from the Baltic states. Which is surprising considering where I am, here at this bookend of Europe. There’s probably a general statement to be made about men who go to saunas, a statement about sanctuaries, and spaces in which language is not the primary means of communication. But this argument, as with many arguments about generalisations, is too multi-faceted and complex and in its current format is neither interesting nor useful. I will say, though, that I do very much like the bodies of men from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.

Only later will I learn that the guy’s name is Fuad-Alfredo, but for now we’re strangers in a darkroom, kissing. You’d have thought Google would make it easy to find someone with a name like that, but apparently he’s not the only one. Anyway… I hadn’t been at the sauna long, maybe close to an hour, but I’d already had sex with a couple of guys and was feeling good about walking around, chatting to people, making out, fucking, getting my cock sucked. I’d had my chest trimmed and I’d been working out more than usual, and I knew that my body was looking good. There are days at the sauna when things go my way. It doesn’t always happen like this, and the last few months have been pretty fucking miserable. It’s been two months, padre, since my last confession.

Sin may drive people to confess; for me, these “confessions” are inspired by joy. A good day at the sauna impels me to write. It’s not just about men and fucking. It’s about a sense of freedom and surprise and, as Zadie Smith says, “that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy.” The pain is something we carry from the past, the terror is the unspoken, unconscious, hidden dread of what might happen to us in the future, and the delight is what is happening now, a sense of exhilaration greater than the terror and the pain, but not entirely immune to their echoes. Being this close to Fuad-Alfredo was joy. The darkroom’s big and I’d watched him with someone else but had walked past a few times and brushed against him, touched his hand, pressed it for a second, confident that I’d take him away from the other man – so old! so unattractive! – confident that he’d be mine.

He’d come after me, found me here against the wall facing the entrance to this dark room in which we are all silhouettes.

He says: “Let’s get a room.”

“This is a room,” I say.

“Somewhere private,” he says.

“Private?” I say. “What’s so great about private?”

“Too many people here,” he says.

“I like people,” I say, never letting go of his arse-cheeks, grinding my cock against him. “I like an audience,” I say.

He laughs.

“I think you do, too,” I say, and I’m right, because in a while he’ll be bending over in this darkroom that’s not entirely dark, and, in full view of the men walking around, will offer his welcoming arse to me.

Sometimes I like a room, but with Fuad-Alfredo I wanted an audience. A room’s so final, limiting; it’s a commitment. Just you and one other body. Earlier, I’d been quite happy with just one other body, a body so perfect that now that Carlton has gone, back home to his flat in Boston Manor, I’m quite happy to do my business out here in the open for all to see. With Carlton I wanted a room of our own. You can often gauge the extent to which you want to be with a man by the type of room you want to be in together.

Some phrases seem like clichés until you experience them. Like: My heart jumped a beat; like: he took my breath away; or: we locked eyes, which is what had happened upstairs near the showers with Carlton. We’d locked eyes. It’s a certain kind of eye contact that signals intent more than just mere clocking. Something clicks into place and if not pursued, you know you’ll regret it. I don’t always trust my instinct, but I was feeling confident that evening and I held his gaze for an extra second – that’s all it takes; one Mississippi – and he kept his eyes on mine. Bam! Got you.

That’s how we met, in the passageway that runs the length of the sauna and steam rooms, that connects the Jacuzzi to the showers. It’s that section called the Wet Area. The dry sauna room is there, and the two wet saunas, the basins, the showers, the Jacuzzi, a drinking fountain, a couple of urinals, and behind it all: a swimming pool. It looks a little something like this:

x marks the spot where Carlton stood when I walked past the first time on my way from the basins to the steam room. We locked eyes, but he didn’t follow me into the steam room. But then, a while later, when I went to shower, he was still standing there, talking to someone else, some little guy, or maybe the little guy was talking to him – it wasn’t clear – but we checked each other out again. I’d been making out with someone in the steam room so my cock was nice and fat and I was happy to show it off. All evening I’d been feeling like a hunter. Now was the time to lure my prey. He wanted me to be predatory, to seduce him.

Mating rituals are a turn-on. If the process isn’t going to make you hard, how will you be ready to fuck when your mate is in your hands. With Fuad-Alfredo it was like his arse was ready to be fucked the moment we touched. With Carlton it took a while for him to open up, and even when he was open, he held nice and tightly onto my cock. He had that long lean smooth brown body you find amongst many North African men, though he didn’t have the thick cock that often seems to go with men of that build and origin. For a long while I assumed he was North African – Moroccan, perhaps, or Algerian, maybe French but with North African parents – and I kept wanting to say stuff to him in Arabic. Though when we did speak, when I was inside him already and finally asked him his name and where he was from, we discovered that we grew up in cities not far from each other, back there on the southern tip of Africa.

Two weeks have passed. You start writing about people because you want to record what has happened, to write about the things that brought you great joy, but then you get distracted – classes to prepare, a spin class to go to, a friend calls, or just a general loss of purpose – and then when you come back to it all, there’s much that you can’t remember. Fuad-Alfredo blurs with another man you’ve been with since, a Turkish-Cypriot guy whose name you can’t remember, but who wanted to fuck you and was gentle when he did, and because you’re not used to being fucked, only some of his cock went in, but you enjoyed it, and it did make you happy. What made you happy was his desire to fuck you, his unambiguous need for that, and his tenderness, and the way, when you were fucking, he told you that you were making him crazy, and you recognised that feeling, that feeling when you’re fucking someone, or wanting to fuck them so much that you feel demented, crazed, that you would do anything to be inside them.

You remember now. You remember fucking Fuad-Alfredo, banging into him while the other men watched, how he kept saying no, no, let’s get a room, but you insisted on staying out there in the open for everyone to see, and you’d held him from behind and put a condom on and lubed his arse and slid quite easily into him, and he’d let you and pulled you into him, and eventually he’d leaned over, so that he was bent double, his hands on the floor, and you’d fucked him selfishly, playing with your nipples, both of you like animals, caring only for your own pleasure.

You remember fucking Carlton in a room of your own. You remember how smooth his body was, the kind of smoothness you’ve encountered on Asian men when they are lean and still in their twenties. Carlton was like that. Ong was like that, but you didn’t do anything with Ong, not that time when he came to sit next to you in the dry sauna, and not two night ago when you saw him again at the sauna and he smiled at you every time you passed each other in the corridors, and a couple of times he even tried to get you to join him in a room, but you just smiled back and kept walking.

“Yeah,” I say. “Since somebody died in there.”

“You serious?” he says.

“About a month ago,” I say.

We imagine that the body must be decomposing, or that the management just can’t be bothered to clean up the place, or maybe it’s still a crime scene, but there’s no police tape or anything, just a plastic table and a couple of chairs blocking the entrance to the upstairs darkroom and video area.

We’re standing close together in the other upstairs area at Chariots in Shoreditch. We had sex earlier, only minutes after I’d arrived, and only minutes after that I was inside him. It was what I needed. I’d been holed up in my flat for too long without a hug. I needed that connection that comes with being inside another person. He was a good kisser. He complimented me on my fucking skills. I complimented him on his lovely soft hole and his very firm arse-cheeks. He was not my type, but we did everything we did with humour and kindness.

I tell him that earlier this year, for a while, I dated a guy who used to work at one of the other saunas. This guy had told me about the young guy they’d found dead in a cubicle in the morning.

“Twenty-three,” I say. “All of these guys: babies.”

“It’s fucked up,” he says.

His name is Paul. He’s from up North somewhere, maybe Manchester. Eventually we start making out again, this time in the dark room, just standing up, me playing with his arsehole and whispering into his ear that I’m going to rape his arse. He likes that. He moans when I say things like that, encourages me, kisses me, jerks his cock off until he comes.

“Oi, that’s my towel,” I say, thinking: it could have been worse. It could have been all down my leg.

“Take mine,” he says. “It’s still clean.”

We kiss. He says he’ll see me again – “See you again” – and then he leaves.

It was okay. It was kind of nice. I like being desired. I liked being able to turn other guys on. And after he’d gone, I stood for a while watching the men coming and going, wandering in and out of the barely-illuminated darkroom, many of us in our sixties and seventies, but some of us still with the smell of high-school locker-rooms on our skin. Some of us lean against walls and others go down on all fours on the thin black mattress in the middle of the room with our arses in the air, hoping to get fucked by men we’ll never see or speak to, men we won’t have to touch.

Sometimes I look at us and think we’re depraved, that we have been ruined and poisoned by a world that hates us so much, that fears us, that is so full of dread and ignorance that it’s not ashamed to continue debating whether we can get married, whether we can be bishops, whether we can teach in schools, whether we can adopt, whether we can be open about who we love. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Fuck civil partnerships. Civil partnerships are killing us. How fucked up are we that we’ll settle for second best. Second best is as good as shit. Personally, I’m not really interested in getting married, but if two men want to get married let them get married. Not fucking civil-partnershipped. The fucked-up things we agree to and tell ourselves that it’s good. It’s a step in the right direction. Bullshit.

From cradle to grave we are told that we’re nothing. That we’re worthless. That we might as well be dead. To hold onto the belief that we are human beings who deserve to be loved is close to impossible for most of us.

So it’s no surprise that my libido is very soon in a mess, twisted and contorted and whacked out of shape by anger and crazy thoughts of what has become of us.

I have had sex with men who’ve been in the sauna for forty-eight hours. I’ve had sex with guys who were on so much drugs that when I saw them, by chance, at the gym a while later, they had no memory of who I was. I’ve had sex with guys who’ve asked me to sit with them so they didn’t fall asleep and die, or one guy who let me fist him and kept saying “Is that it? Is that it?” as if not even that could make him feel anything.

Most weeks I go to the sauna at least once. I’ve never taken drugs in my life, so I can’t imagine what it must be like to be so off your head that you can’t feel or remember anything. In the days when I drank a lot, I did a few stupid things that could have got me killed. Is that what drugs are like?

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. I think what I want to say is that the radical thing to do would be to care for each other. To really look out for and after each other.

We’re queer and we’re different and we need to be our own family and our own tribe, because no one else really fights for us. Shame on all those people in our families and amongst our friends who dared to get married – and fucking invite us to the wedding – when we couldn’t. And still can’t. Enough of that! Be nice to yourself. It’s actually harder than being nice to others, but be nice to others, too. The only thing that can save us is the knowledge that our stories matter, regardless of what society tells us. As much as I love going to saunas, and as much as they have helped me to love my body and to feel more desired than I ever felt in my twenties, they are a place of silence, a place where people gather so that they won’t have to tell their stories, because if the world had to listen to those stories, to the stories of how we have hated ourselves and harmed ourselves, and the stories of how we have silenced ourselves, and the stories of what we do with each other in the saunas and sex clubs of the world, they would fucking die. And instead we do the dying for them.

It’s up to us to talk about what we do and about who we are. To talk about that with each other. The radical thing would be to make the sauna a place of stories, the way any sweat lodge would be. The most profound moments I’ve had at the sauna have been when men talk to each other, when we laugh and are open and unafraid and there is the absence – as if we could ever forget! – of society’s wish to see us annihilated.

My manifesto would be: Talk to strangers in the sauna. Ask them questions about their lives. Don’t be scared of people. Everyone is scared, and if they’re not scared, they’re psychopaths. Stay away from psychopaths. Stay away from people who are not generous. Stay away from people who make you feel like shit. The best way to know if a person is the kind of person who makes you feel like shit is that they make you feel like shit.

And if you want to be inspired, watch Lana Wachowski make a speech.

The text is from The Confessions of a Sex Addict, and the voice is the voice of my good friend, Mr Kenneth Sleet.

Watching the Neighbours from Michael Wynne on Vimeo.

All the way from China to be fucked by you. Which is kind of what he says when you ask him what he’s doing in London.

This, he says.

In your mind he’s a banker. There’s something in his sleek body, toned, so smooth, so, yes, unbelievably smooth that you slide against him while you fuck. His body, his beauty, the way he moves all have the efficiency and focus of a banker, a hawk, someone on the trading floor (you only think all this because he reminds you of a man you were in love with many years ago who was in mergers and acquisitions).

He is darker than other Chinese men you’ve been with, taller, Mongolian, perhaps. A smoker, though that doesn’t bother you the way it did last week with the other guy who, let’s face it, was not as beautiful, not as smooth, not as young. You tend to forgive the physically magnificent ones things you’d never forgive the less beautiful.

The thrusting stays with you, how open he is, the feeling of his chest and stomach against yours while you’re inside him, and the two of you are kissing in a way you’ve never kissed before, a way you imagine sea creatures might kiss, or like the suction cups on the tentacles of an octopus, so close and wet and inside each other’s mouths that you can’t tell whose lips are around whose. It’s like he wants – and you want, too! – everything to be connected, your cock inside his arse, his arse that is so soft and open that fucking feels like kissing, like banging your way into him, thrusting and fucking and pummeling and being, being inside him, and your mouths and when you come up to breathe, when you take your mouth away from his he keeps his open and you spit into it, spit into his mouth and he moans the way you’ve heard other men moan when you spit on them, the gratitude, the comfort, the sheer erotic thrill of, yes, being spat on and adored, transforming an act that in the playground, in the playground was a thing to fear, and on the street, and yet here, you are inside his arse and your spit’s in his mouth and you’re kissing again, and pushing into him and his arms are around you and his legs are around you and you just keep pushing and you think that if he keeps playing with your nipples like that and let’s you keep fucking him like this that you’ll come inside him.

Two types of hunger. His hunger, the hunger of the one getting fucked, the one who is relinquishing and open and being filled, and is responsible for nothing. All he has to do is let go. And the hunger just keeps growing, a hunger to disappear, to be consumed, and you know this, because only two days ago, Chen had fucked you so hard on your bed that you thought you would howl at him and order him to get his whole fucking body inside you. When you fuck it is different; it’s a hunger to be needed, to be wanted, to be welcomed and necessary to someone else, to provide. It’s a hunger for gratitude, to feel grateful, to feel accepted. You cannot imagine what it is like for men who don’t fuck. There are days when the hunger to fuck, when your whole body is wanting this, this ramming into someone, this act of pleasuring another person, especially someone as beautiful as Lee, all the way from China, to be fucked by you.

No, really, you say. What do you do?

Really, he says. This.

He gathers up your cum from his belly, licks it, then goes back for more, scoops it up off skin that is so smooth and brown and taut across his abdomen… then swallows that, too. When was the last time someone did that with your cum? He raises himself up so that you’re facing each other, you on your knees, him beneath you on his elbows. If one day in the future you could confess to having a type, this man would be it.

So you joke and say you’d pay him for something like this every day, and he jokes back, kissing you, says for you he’d do it for free.

Rees could be Rhys. A lime-green T-shirt.

He was the first guy who came to talk to me at the gym when I joined about a month ago. I could talk about his T-shirt for a bit, the way he leaves it on the chair by the computers when he changes into his black vest, the vest he wears when he does the GRIT class. Or, like yesterday, when he changed into a grey tracksuit top to box. The green T-shirt is one of those thin running tops, that fabric that is onion-skin thin, weightless, not see-through, but showing the curve of flesh, the points of nipples. It would be so easy to scoop up the T-shirt and put it in my bag. I think about that every time I see it draped over the chair.

Rees likes to talk. It’s unsettling. It makes me think that I don’t chat very much in social settings with straight men. Hardly ever, unless it’s in a shop and the guy’s behind a counter, or my brother, but with him we talk about the faggy stuff: feelings and fucking and family. With Rees I don’t talk about those things. None of the “f” words. Though it’s all I think about when we talk.

“No boxing today?” I said to him this afternoon, on my way to the cross-trainers.

He was standing nearby, waiting for people to turn up for his GRIT class. His boom box ready. His shoulders smooth and soft, his vest sitting lightly against his skin. The way he moves is like gliding, his steps small and unhurried.

“That was pretty intense yesterday,” I said.

There’s a boxing match coming up in the next few weeks; he wants to be ready for it. He’s not very disciplined. He works hard for a month, then lets it slide for a month. He’s 24, worried that he’ll be too old for the Rio Olympics.

“That doesn’t sound old to me,” I say. “I’m forty.”

“Forty?” he says. “You don’t look forty.”

I feel like something out of Gods and Monsters. He is so beautiful, so open, so unguarded, it’s disarming. I’d wanted to stare at him boxing yesterday, the way he moved nimbly, like one second he was on this side of the floor, then the next, in a couple of steps, he was five metres across the mat on the other side of the floor. He bounced. He weaved in and out of shadows. He danced. He was there and then not there, somewhere else. His feet were trampolines, something to bounce off, to propel, not to land, never to land.

We stand and talk and I want to kiss him, to taste him, to hold him. We are the same height, and he is the kind of man I like: young and enthusiastic, funny, slim, smooth, agile, passionate about what he does. And what does he see when he looks at me? Souls speak to each other; he must know who I am, what I want. He smiles without fear, without caution. He jokes with me, enjoys the role of some army nutter when he helps me with my weight exercises, my chin-ups. You can do it! Come on, one more. He stops to chat whenever I’m there, smiles when we pass, asks how I’m doing. It’s weird. If I let myself, I could become quite infatuated, obsessed.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to box, to learn how to fight, to defend myself. I’m not sure where all this is going. It feels like a story, like there’s something there to explore, a lead to follow, a scent to pursue. Ah, if only you’d pick up that T-shirt, you would smell him, you would know what he tasted like in the vulnerable softness of his armpit. Rees.

In the sauna recently I had sex with a guy whose family was from Vietnam, though he’d grown up in Switzerland and had a strong Swiss-German accent when he spoke English. His body was beautiful and warm and brown, but he had a very tight mouth and a tight arsehole, and he left the cubicle as soon as we came, me on his chest and him on him stomach.

There must have been someone from Wales, though no one springs to mind at the moment, except this cute hairdresser I met in the Waterloo sauna a couple of years ago. We had a nice conversation about New York and tattoos and he was just my type, but for some reason we didn’t have sex. The only other country starting with W is Western Sahara; it’s a proposed state, not recognised by everyone.

In my early twenties I dated a guy whose mother was from Yemen. His dad was Roumanian, I think. He was tall and smooth and gazelle like in his movements. He seemed to bounce around a lot. He was a singer and an actor and I was deeply in love with him. I’ve been in love with quite a few tall, lean, smooth men who were younger than me. If I had to commit to a type, that would be my type. He had thick curly hair and I seem to remember him being a bit obsessed with straightening it. I loved to watch him draw and I loved to fuck him. In those days, even more than now, I communicated with lovers through fucking.

The Zimbabwean guy lived not far from where I used to live in Hackney. He had the same name as me. And a strong Southern African accent. I hadn’t been in London long, so it felt good to be with someone from the same part of the world. We drank rum from shot glasses. He was one of the first black guys I had sex with. We were both Luther Vandross fans. Once, after sex, we lay in bed and watched music videos and sang along to the duet Luther does with Gregory Hines.

Mustafa and I hit it off immediately. About 6′, chunky, a bit of hair on his chest, Bengali dark, and he was a good kisser. He had those soft lips; lips that just let go, compliant lips, lips that you know will feel good on your nipple, good around your cock. He’d made the first move, reached out a hand and touched the tip of my nipple. He did the kinds of things that make me fall in love with a man, as if snogging and tit-play were synecdochal to the overall care and seeing-to-my-needs he would provide. If only he’d wanted me to fuck him, things would have been perfect. We’d both just arrived, which meant we weren’t focused on coming, so we locked ourselves in a cubicle (standing room only) and kissed and held each other and sucked cock and worked the nipples, and laughed here and there. Two big men, thick fleshed, chunky, him darker than me, less hairy, and with a beard (only the day before I’d been thinking I was over beards, that they turned me off – in much the same way ex-smokers can get all pissy when someone near them lights a cigarette).

It’s kind of sexy making out in a cubicle that you can’t lie down in. Clandestine, a stolen moment, as if you could be in a bathroom cubicle, and maybe these were the toilets when this dive bar was something else, before it became a safe-haven for us sodomites. It’s hot, in more ways than one. We sweated and kissed and pushed against each other and I spat into his mouth and him into mine and we swallowed it and kept kissing, drinking each other, digging our hands into each other’s backs, holding each other’s heads, every now and then being gentle, him stroking the side of my face. You’re a romantic, I said to him when he did that, and he agreed. He wanted me to suck his cock, but I’m reluctant to do it in places like that; you can’t know where a cock has been, how many mouths and arseholes have enveloped it, so my official policy is to say no. But we’d only just got there – him, too – so I was the first to suck it. When he leaned over and took my cock into his mouth, I stroked his back, the bigness of it, and made my way down to his crack.

Later, after he’d fucked some guy in one of the small rooms, after I’d walked around somewhat detached from it all, while guys floated about in their underwear, fluffing up their cocks, or held onto them sternly for others to see, while guys got down on their knees to suck dick, while men peeped through the wooden slats into the tiny rooms where others were fucking… It’s a strange place. A strange place, but one where I feel so completely at home. A place I feel relaxed in and part of. It’s a bit like when I find myself around ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, and for those moments that we’re in the same place, we are the same, all Jews, no differences. For those moments in the sex club, we’re all just homos sucking cock. But it’s more than that, simpler: We are men together. It’s also more complicated, deeper: We are safe from society, free of danger, and the room is full of the potential for love. That’s what it’s like. And I thought: If only we could be kind to each other all of the time, the world would be a good place. And then I saw Mustafa again, and we hung out on the big leather sofa, his arm around my shoulder, his nipple in my mouth.

Sasha is a masseur I see a couple of times a year. He is beautiful in that Eastern European kind of way, his flesh solid, a bit of hair on his chest. He has bulk, is meaty. He’s wearing a tight white vest, navy blue shorts. His arms are thick. His body, his whole body, everything, the flesh, the chest, the cock, everything, just the thought of him, his skin, his face, hair, nipples, there to see, as he takes his vest off and I hand him my towel, my locker key, and he points to the massage table and the hole at the top end of it, for my head, and says something like: As usual.

His colour, his voice, his laugh, the sound of him, his touch, his hands on me, the way he… avoiding and coming close, teasing – is he teasing? – his sweat, because he’s sweating now. We’re halfway through and I am on my back. Can I touch you? I say. Where? he says. Pause. To utter this is not. To touch, just skin, that’s all I want, all I want from him, not cock, not love, not his mouth on my, nothing, just to touch me. I say: I don’t want to come.

A cock massage? he says.

How much will you charge me? I say.

Twenty pounds, he says. Only twenty pounds. Not one hundred and fifty.

We’d talked about him and me having sex with a pre-op tranny and apparently (he tells me this) that’s what they charge for a session, an hour. They might want double for a threesome. He’s up for it. He would do it with me. Me and him and the pre-op tranny. She-male, he calls her. It’s the best, he says. Something to lick and something to suck. His hands on my cock, oiled, up and down, gently, held, everything is this sensation between his palms, rise and fall.

Have you always been into she-males? I say.

Information is the aphrodisiac, knowledge given. You ask and you’re granted. No secrets. Nothing withheld. The thrill of the insurmountable unknown, of longing to know and never reaching the bottom. Desire ends when there is nothing left to discover, nothing to find out, the death of curiosity. And while he strokes my cock I stroke his back, gently, the way, earlier, he’d stroked my chest, standing behind me, pressing down from above onto my pecs, kneading them, his palms sliding over my nipples.

You like my tits? I say.

Of course, he says.

Would you like them to be bigger?

Of course.

His back is smooth, he is sweating, and there’s soft hair in the curve of his back. I rub a small radius of flesh from my position on the table, on my back, my cock in his hands, one hand then the other, a kind of milking. God, I say, I love the way you touch me. What, he says, your cock? Yes, that, but also everything else, just your hands on me. I love that. Even writing this is like living it again, my cock hard, remembering and being and wanting, simultaneously. In the moment it is all true desire, all truth, nothing is done just for the moment, nothing out of greed or need. I don’t question anything, don’t imagine that the twenty pounds he’s charging me for a hand-job is anything more than what one should ask for and what one does ask for when one is giving someone a massage and something more enters the equation.

I’m enjoying my slight obsession with Sasha. I’ve been intrigued and turned-on by him for a couple of years now. I like his weirdness, the way he evades personal questions, but then softens up, become vulnerable and answers whatever I ask. I want to seduce him, to keep seducing him, for this to be about seduction, to never having him, for him to be someone to seduce, not someone seduced.

What we remember of men from different countries are the things we do and say with them that we have never done or said with anyone before. It might be an intensity that we remember; it might be a smell, a touch, or the way they kissed, like the guy from Trinidad who kissed without moving his lips. Sometimes he moved them, but on the whole he kept his mouth open and still; after a while, I got turned on by it. Or should I say, to be more precise, that it didn’t turn me off, and that was new, too. In fact, there was nothing about Federico that turned me off. He was taller than me, and skinny and his skin was soft and brown and his cock had this strange feature of being significantly wider at the head than it was at the base, which, I discovered, was a good thing when you’re sucking it. After a few years in London, he went back to Port-of-Spain, slightly defeated, but happy to be going home. Come visit me, he said. The island’s full of tall skinny brown boys. You’ll have a field day. Meeting Federico was a coincidence, too, as we had friends in common, and had actually been at the same event not long before we started fucking. He stayed over at my place a few times. That doesn’t happen much anymore; I hardly have guys sleeping over. Len from Taiwan stayed over a few times. There was even one point were he came to live here for a few weeks. That was not a success. I loved fucking him. He was tall and lean and had a genuine 8″ cock, which looked like this monstrous thing on him. He was a greedy bottom, and controlling, but at some point I realised he letting me fuck him so that I’d let him stay in my flat. Part of me found that a turn on, but only once, only for a very short while, only briefly did I get a glimpse of what it was like to fuck someone against their will. That’s the moment I will remember most from my time with Len. What I’ll remember most from my visit to Thailand is the French guy I had sex with. I’ve had sex with many men from Thailand and the sex is always good. I love slim smooth men and it would take something pretty off-putting to spoil the sex with a Thai guy. All the Thai men I’ve had sex with have been willing, and the willingness of beautiful men is a wonderful thing. The French guy in Bangkok was not willing to get fucked, and when I didn’t want him to fuck me and he said, Well, at least can I get a blow job, and I said, no, thanks, that was the end of that. He was so perfect in his beauty. That kind of regal beauty that French men can have, not an ounce of fat, tall and lean and smooth, with smooth arses and big cocks and healthy thick hair on their head. If I allowed myself to worship a man, he would be the kind of man I’d worship. A Turkish guy I used to have phone sex with liked to be worshiped. To be admired and watched. He liked to pose in a posing pouch, for me to see his big thick Arab dick pushing against the leather of the pouch. He liked to put animal skins on. He liked to show off his hairy chest, him and his brother, two real men, big fucking hairy Arab dicks that fuck pussy and like to show the young boys how to fuck. Him and me used to drive around in his van with our dicks out showing them off to guys who we’d pick up and take home and get them to show us their fucking arseholes and their big dicks.

I’m thinking, there must be loads of guys from the USA to write about, but at the moment I can’t think of many. The first guy that comes to mind is a colonel from the US Army who was based in Germany and who’d fly to London every now and again and we’d meet up in his hotel room and I’d fuck him. He liked order and rank and being in charge of others, but he also liked to be fucked hard and slapped about. He had the dirtiest arse I’ve ever encountered. This happened many years ago, when I first moved to London and Russell Square was still a popular cruising ground.

[to be continued]