See Me
There was a time when being sexual required very little explanation.
When I was young, I looked like I might have wandered out of a Duran Duran video: thin, somewhat androgynous, conspicuously styled, and young and pretty enough that simply entering a room could easily make people look. Desire was something I could encounter almost accidentally. I did not necessarily have to ask myself what made me desirable or what kind of sexual man I wanted to become. Youth, and a time and place of forty or more years ago, answered parts of those questions for me.
Nor was I sexually conventional even then. I was a club kid. I could get past the velvet rope to the VIP section. I could wear a raw-silk suit, or even gloss-black PVC fetish wear in the right setting, and it was perfectly natural for me to look like that. Again, I could turn heads. I spent time around BDSM scenes and kink nights. I had threesomes. Models, the girl-next-door types, what would now be called MILFs — though we didn’t have that term then. I even had sex with other pretty men as well as women. I went to a swingers club with girlfriends. None of these things belonged entirely to fantasy. I had already crossed many of the borders of a neo-libertine.
But, as with all youth, life happened.
Marriage. Family. Work. Responsibility. Age. Eventually, a long committed relationship that remains loving and affectionate even after it ceased to be sexual, but which itself was born out of some of those unconventional passages I explored.
Nearly a quarter of a century on, nearly eight years passed without partnered sex.
I offer this recitation of earlier times in my life to make clear that what is happening to me now does not feel like discovering some new realm of sexuality for the first time. Nor does it feel like an elderly rebellion against a conventional life I somehow regret having lived. I don’t regret that life. I value my marriage, my family, my home and the person I have become within them.
The better words may be reclamation, reinterpretation and integration.
I am returning to something that was always there, but I am encountering it from a radically different vantage point.
At sixty-two, I am no longer the young man who could depend upon turning heads simply by looking young, pretty, a little ambiguous — and as though I belonged in a young girl’s video fantasy on MTV. That fact could easily become a story about loss. Instead, increasingly, I find myself wondering whether it might offer another possibility.
What if being sexually visible now means something different?
I recently resumed partnered sexuality through encounters with professional companions. After the first one, something strange happened.
Later that Saturday evening I was sitting outside Mississippi Studios in Portland, having a late dinner and a drink alone in the perfect summer evening air. I remember looking at the people around me — couples, strangers, people walking past, those eager to get inside the live music venue — and experiencing both a faint echo of that earlier life and an almost intoxicated present sense of possibility.
I found myself wondering about them.
Which of these outwardly ordinary people possessed enormous secret erotic lives? Who among them had crossed some of the same boundaries I had? Who had looked directly at their own desires and decided not to apologize for them?
And, more strangely, I wondered whether any of them were looking back.
Was there some kind of radar?
Not a literal code by which kinky people or sexually unconventional people recognize one another across a sidewalk — oh, to have the “hanky codes” of long ago — but something subtler. A glance. Self-possession. A certain ease. The suggestion that another person might have examined the rules they inherited rather than simply obeyed them.
Perhaps what I was experiencing was the realization that the world had become erotically populated for me again.
These people had always been there. I already knew that. I had once spent time among them, in another city, in another decade, in another life. But after so many years without an active sexual life, the knowledge had become abstract.
Now I was one of them again.
That feeling has led me back to works of art, books and films that had spoken to me, but in a somewhat untranslated language — works that once might have seemed merely erotic, but now seem to be asking much larger questions. Works such as the film The Story of O and the novel Damage. Stories about erotic power, surrender, obsession and the frightening possibility that another person might reveal something about you that you had never been able to articulate yourself.
Josephine Hart describes such an encounter in Damage as the “shock of recognition” — the extraordinary sensation of meeting something outside yourself that suddenly causes an inner mechanism to fall into place.
I do not want the destruction that follows in Damage. I am not searching for an erotic revelation powerful enough to annihilate my marriage, my home, my family or my stable life.
But the idea of recognition itself affects me profoundly.
I wonder whether there are other people who feel it too.
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Not merely people who like kink. Not merely swingers, sex workers, bisexuals, people who attend sex clubs, people who practice BDSM or people who possess impressive lists of unusual experiences.
Something more difficult to define.
People who have looked at their own erotic nature without flinching.
People who understand that desire can be serious without being solemn, transgressive without being destructive, intense without surrendering responsibility. People for whom sexuality is neither shameful nor trivial.
People who have traveled far enough down their own road that they recognize another traveler.
Perhaps that is part of what attracts me now to sexual subcultures that exist partly out of ordinary sight: professional companionship, sex clubs, kink communities and other places where sexuality is permitted to become explicit rather than merely insinuated.
I don’t imagine everyone there must have achieved some enlightened sexual state. Transgression can become its own conformity. A person can attend a sex club and remain deeply conventional; another can live an apparently ordinary monogamous life while possessing extraordinary erotic self-knowledge.
What interests me is not membership in a particular tribe.
It is recognition.
And that realization changes the question I ask about desirability.
When I was twenty-five, perhaps some version of the question was simply:
Do you see me?
Do I turn your head? Do you desire me? Does my appearance register?
At sixty-two, I think the question has become both more difficult and more interesting:
See me. And let me see whether you are one of the people who understands what you’re seeing.
The second sentence matters as much as the first, perhaps even more.
I am no longer merely hoping to pass someone else’s test of desirability. I am looking back.
Do you see only an older man? A husband? An artist? A retired professional? Someone who ought by now to have settled quietly into a less erotic version of himself?
Or can you see the whole accumulation — the young man who once wandered through clubs, was invited into kink scenes, the bisexuality, the switch, the husband, the artist, the sexual appetites, the tenderness, the taboos, the history, the curiosity, the sixty-two-year-old body, and the person I am still becoming?
And if you can see all of that, what happens when I look at you?
Maybe that is what I am searching for now.
Not youth recovered.
Not convention defeated.
Not an escape from the life I have built.
Something subtler: the integration of an erotic self that I no longer want to leave scattered among memories, fantasies and isolated episodes.
And perhaps, somewhere along that road, another traveler whose eyes say:
Yes. I know this place too.
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