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Max liked to be recognized. He enjoyed being spotted in the grocery store by an old friend. He relished receiving a nod of acknowledgment from a colleague, across the room, at an official function. While milling about in a theater lobby, during intermission, he took delight in running into a boyfriend from days gone by. Apparently, though, that same pleasure in being recognized didn’t apply when Max was spotted by our mutual friend, Richard, while Max was involved in an intimate moment at a bathhouse. “He turned whiter than the towel I had around my waist,” Richard related to me. “Then, he actually tried to ignore me.” Max and Richard were more than mere acquaintances. They had been friends for years. Yet Max proceeded to kneel there and give Richard the silent treatment. “I looked right at him and called his name. He didn’t answer me and it wasn’t just because his mouth was full,” Richard vented. While Richard tried to prompt an acknowledgement, the non-responsive Max called a halt to the service he’d been providing and ran to the locker area. He threw on enough of his clothes to ward off arrest for indecent exposure and dashed out of the busy bathhouse. Since their unexpected meeting, Max has refused to answer any of Richard’s phone calls or e-mails. I’ve learned from another friend that Max is overcome with embarrassment and shame and can’t bear to face Richard or anyone else who knows about the incident. We all know that Max is sexually active. Why would having his friends know that he’d been to a bathhouse be upsetting? Richard had gone to the same place looking to do the same thing he found Max doing. Admittedly, there are ways that Richard could have handled the moment of recognition more gracefully. He could have waited until Max was finished his business, so to speak, before initiating a conversation. He could have given a polite wave and moved on. There are certain protocol about chit chat in sex club settings and Richard has a habit of ignoring them in the same way that Max had ignored Richard. But Max would have been horrified to encounter Richard in a place he considered his private prowling grounds, whether Richard had spoken to him or just spied him out of the corner of his eye and kept his mouth shut. Is the shame in being caught in the act or in the act itself? Max is single and he gets horny. He wasn’t looking for a date. He wanted casual, condom-clad contact and he got it. Why is there any shame at all? Joel, a college chum of mine, took great pleasure in confronting the idea of shame and flaunting his unshackled (though, occasionally, handcuffed) hedonism in the face of anyone he thought was too puritanical in their view of sex. In our sophomore year, Joel’s roommate was a sweet but shy gay man. Frequently, the roommate would tell Joel that he was going out to a movie or for a walk but he was really cruising a seedy part of town looking for a sleazy encounter. One Saturday night, Joel followed him and found him packing meat, as it were, in the meat packing district. Joel was delighted to discover his roommate’s wild side but his roommate felt that Joel had invaded his sanctum sanctorum -- his carnal carnival. There was lots of drama and plenty of heated discourse. Joel explained that he hadn’t set out to spoil any private pursuits but wondered why his roommate had felt the need to lie about his whereabouts and activities. As they walked through the dorm lobby, Joel was still confronting his roommate. “Shouldn’t we reserve shame for people who do things like talking during movies?” he queried. “Shouldn’t we save our embarrassment for when we forget the names of who we’re sleeping with?” Ambushing a friend, while he’s hot on the trail of someone’s hot tail, isn’t the best path to enlightenment. Many of us have thoroughly internalized all the anti-gay and anti-sex messages that society foists on us. So, it’s often a challenge to understand that being discrete doesn’t need to mean being secretive or taking on shame. Safe sex between consenting adults with no cheating or lack of disclosure going on isn’t shameful. And neither is having a friend unexpectedly catch us in the act. Recognize that. |
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