The Long Night Out

1. So You Want To Go To The Gay Sauna

What is a sauna?

A sauna or baths in gay parlance is a public sex venue. Superficially, it operates as a spa, health sauna or public bath. But it is known as a place for having anonymous, casual, public sex. Some saunas have a social component - even a dance floor - and most will have a steam room or jacuzzi. There is a warren of rooms of different sizes, and sometimes BDSM equipment like benches.

sauna is a kink

Sleazy, dirty, scary, dangerous, risky, unknown, degrading, pornographic, retro, vulnerable, voracious, wild, disgusting, thrilling, daring - if these are also erotic emotions for you, you can lean into them. Part of me feels like, this is probably the state of mind in which sauna is most fun. It's not just a sex club or a public sex venue, it's a very specific sexual experience.

If you're resistant to what sauna is, you're going to have a bad time - for example, if you're grossed out by chasers or men who are cheating on their wives, if danger feels actually dangerous, if disgust means actually disgusting to you, if a higher-than-usual risk of picking up an STI is stressful and a turn-off...there are other sex clubs which might suit you better.

you will have most fun at the sauna if you are turned on by what it easily provides: undersocialised old cis guys. If you love sucking dick, there will be dick. if you want to be watched, there will be onlookers. It's more challenging to have fun the more particular you are - it's no bad thing to be particular - but some people need to be touched just so, or have safety/emotional guardrails for sex to feel good. This is not for the sauna.

Know what you can and can't get from the experience, and compare it to what you do and don't want.

on being what you appear to be

Crusing culture is contextless - the pure male id of wanting a body you know nothing about. It's anonymity and mystery, an eros of the infinite scroll.

This is a bit impossible for trans people. Your presentation can never explain all things - you need to have at least one conversation, which is that you are trans, and for me that tends to kill the fantasy right off, because i am old and not brave.

but the objectification of cruising is participatory: throwing on a cowboy hat and playing pretend. With strangers, you choose how you are desired. You can pack like Jagger and be wanted as well-endowed. You can butch up and play with masculinity. You can be strong and silent. You can be the belle of the ball. Nobody needs (or wants) to know about your disco records. Picking a persona for the night is a piece of fun you can bring back into your waking life, and embodying it is also a private-sexual-fun-for-one you can enjoy regardless of others. And people you meet at the sauna are happy to play along, because they are entering into this fantasy with you.

these total strangers will believe anything you tell them, so have fun with that.

Know Thyself

You have nothing to prove.

What you do at the sauna is not a mark of being 'actually' gay

(for all that the sauna can be a liberatory space, there's a counter-tradition in gay politics written by men who hate it and all it represents, of which Faggots by Larry Kramer is probably the most famous).

It's not a test of how liberated or far out your sexuality is.

It's not a line you cross to get out of the closet.

it's a place you go to shag just as sainsbury's is a place you go to buy your lettuce.

don't over-politicise or over-romanticise the thing.

the unscratchable itch

Sometimes you meet someone for fifteen minutes and it changes everything.

Things To Do At The Sauna Aside From Having Sex With Strangers

on saying what you want

sauna sex is the lowest investment relationship you will ever be in. It truly does not matter if they never speak to you again. That's no excuse to treat people with cruelty. But in your ordinary relationships, you probably hold back from a sense of 'what if they judge me, what if they don't like me, what if they think less of me, what if they feel pressured because they do like me' but at the sauna, no one gives a shit. It is truly, the ideal place to practice:

this is genuinely, the best thing. and the secret to good sauna sex is also in your ability to articulate clearly what it is you want and how, a total stranger with no context clues at all reliant totally on what you are communicating. There's no reason not to be bold, specific, and demanding; only you lose out by silence. And this is true for the rest of your life as well.

you can and should be VERY direct

Recently someone told me if a grindr hookup comes over and isn't quite how they presented themself online, they WILL get sent straight home, often in a state of total shock that a person they view as lesser has enforced boundaries. I love that. The sauna is a great place to practice if you're not carrying that confidence in the world outside.

But my sauna rule has always been to say yes to everybody unless I have a very compelling reason to say no. I think because if i get in my head, i'll be trying to make decisions when there's no way of knowing really - what i'm consenting to is taking the chance. I can't say if any of these people are good lovers or safe, I can only say that I want what it will certainly provide, which is a stranger, nothing more.

I've noticed men will pretty commonly communicate no by pushing me - pushing me off or pushing me away or simply walking off. Equivalent to how they express interest by copping a feel and seeing what happens. I think this speaks to a cis-male-coded inability to communicate what they want - they also find it scary and impossible to verbalise requests and rejections. Being where I am socially in life, it's never occurred to me that I could end an unwanted sexual encounter by pushing someone off and expect it to go well. I suppose that's the unearned physical confidence that comes with cisheteromasculinity. Nonetheless, you could try it - here, if nowhere else.

If you've been ~socialised female~, you may have absolutely no practice or confidence at going up to someone and asking them to have sex. It's actually very easy, and so is being told no. You only need to do this once or twice and it kills any fear you had for a lifetime. Really the hardest part is the knowing and owning your desires, and taking responsibility for making the decision.

if you're a shy communicator, you could take a night to the sauna with the intention of practicing your words - there's plenty you can try without taking your knickers off - disclosing a boundary, asking someone about sexual health, verbalising to a stranger what turns you on. If you get a bad reaction, you can practice not giving a shit. It's maybe a bit crummy to hook up with someone a little, with the secret intention of saying 'no' midway through and leaving the room, but only a bit.

the thing you're most reluctant to say is the one you have to practice.

(it may not be all that out there. i think for me, it might be 'you need to be more gentle than that')

sauna trips have helped me come into myself as definitely-not-a-bottom. The slow process of saying 'not with you, tonight' to 'i dont do that here' to 'actually no, always, to everyone and everywhere' was harder to see clearly in relationship contexts with everything to lose.

The best reason to have sex in public is that safety is no more than 5ft and a yell away. It may feel weirder and wilder, but it's infinitely safer than going around someone's house or having them round yours.

(Here's a story about the first time i walked into a strangers' house for sex: he immediately locked the front door behind us. I was fine! Cis men just have no situational awareness. But, you know. We had the trans conversation over the app on the way, but in a blur of post-coital clarity he then asked why i had facial hair, which is to say, i now had no idea what gender he was expecting, what he had assumed, what he had wanted, and how he was going to feel about any of this in 30 seconds. I got straight out of there. I was fine! But, you know.)

What this means is you can take a chance. You can say yes to snogging someone, and then no to sex, because the stakes are so so low. You can disclose transness to someone face-to-face and read their energy. You can do that five times in a night before settling on a partner. You can do that all night and go home unshagged, but confident that the vibes were all wrong. You don't get any of this with Grindr.

(i think too compared to the risks of getting entangled with someone. public sex with strangers seems so dangerous, but its opposite is a legal and economic union sanctified by church and state, an inescapable net of exploitative forces. is there anything i can do at the sauna that is more dangerous than to be a woman married to a man? i think not)

How to say no (if you can't say no)

Don't have sex at the sauna; but if you do it anyway, you might find these easier as stopgap phrases to pause an activity as a precursor to leaving a situation:

Another great one to have on tap is

if what you're trying to say is, you don't want spunk anywhere inside your body.

How to kiss your friends

If you've gone to the sauna in a group, the people you are with probably want to be seduced, and also they probably don't want to go first, and also they probably are open for experimenting with you cus feeling safe is a turn on and also they probably don't quite know what they want right now but they want more experiences to find out. Be brave, little one!

Do have a sneak peak at the profiles of people you're going with ahead of time, just to check their age is a match for you, and get a sense of what they're into (but understand that this is likely not fixed or prescriptive - peoples sexual selves can morph around partners, and maybe you're the person about to turn them on to something new, and especially if your friend is finding their way out of the closet)

Once the evening has become comfortable, turn the conversation onto:

These are normal topics you might discuss with a friend, but they'll also be understood as potential expressions of interest where you can both delicately set out your wares. If they are looking, let them know you are also looking; and if they name some specific activity where there's overlap, let them know. If they don't bite, but also don't change the subject, then it's on you to very bravely use your words and ask directly: "would you like to explore this with me".

Given that those around you may be trying to do the same thing, it's good to get in there early with hinting at what you're not up for. It doesn't have to be true. Sauna is situational. If someone might be angling for you, drop an 'i'm not planning on playing tonight' or 'i'm not in the mood to be tied up' as early and casually as you can.

Your friends probably want to be kissed as badly as you want to kiss them.

You know, I feel like I'm noticing a pattern where transmasc people find it easier to hook up with one another via a third, non-transmasc person as a kind of conduit. Perhaps a desire for cisness or because we in the early moments of cultivating a culture of desire for one another; perhaps because we have been socialised to mutually have no crusing skills and no confidence. Perhaps a sense that cis people are ten a penny, but trans men are special and cannot be treated so casually - either because our dating pool is such a puddle that the stakes are always high, or because we have a deep true sense that (for all we need to be kissed) we are to each other more essential as comrades than lovers and we can't put that at risk. Perhaps all I'm seeing is hookups which feel safer with a friend standing by.

How to kiss strangers

Be alone. People are most likely to approach you when not surrounded by a group of friends or obviously within a couple.

Help them out. They want to fuck. you want to fuck. If you have an unspoken rule or a worry, tell them what it is. Explicitly say what you want, and what you won't do. Tell them what words you use around your gender.

if someone approaches you to make small talk, they might be about to proposition you. Make an in-principle decision - yes or no - based on if you think they're hot, and take a moment to really imagine having sex with them to find out how it makes you feel. That way, you won't feel put-on-the-spot to when they do ask. 'Possibly, but can I ask some questions first?' is a good delaying reply to give yourself a little more thinking time. You're not obligated to go through with that feeling of 'yes' - you might chat some more and not be compatible, or you might get a bad vibe, or it not be the thing for this night. It's about taking a conscious, deep breath, to give a confident no from a true place, or to build awareness that you want to say yes.

If you want, tell your friends where you're off to, or ask them to sit outside the door for you.

If you want to be approached with some small talk, a polite invitation and some negotiating, hang out in the bar area. If you want to be groped and pull someone straight into a room no-questions-asked, hang out in a dark corner.

Let's have sex!

Unless you're a jaded sexual gladiator, my number one advice is: decide ahead of time not to have sex at the sauna on your first visit. find out if this is your vibe. it's a weird place. use the time there to imagine, in great detail, how you would feel if you were to...and then pay attention to what feelings come up for you. You can discover all sorts just through doing this.

Consider negotiating for a particular activity rather than an open-ended trip behind a closed door ('I would like you to suck my dick. Are you into that?'). That gives you a clear 'end point' to make an easy exit, a clear way to spot boundary-pushing, and it also forces you to have clarity about what you're really wanting.

Consider also snogging somebody in a public area of the sauna just to suss out their energy, and taking it somewhere private if they're doing the right thing with their hands.

Last month i saw a shibari tutorial where someone tied themself up, and the focus was about 'giving yourself consent' and doing 'self-check-ins'. I though that was a bit woo woo but i've thought a lot about it since, because i actually think i ignore and override my own consent all the time. i contain multitudes. moments where i am conflicted in myself are often the most revealing of something i need to resolve; but they're not for the sauna. it really the last place you want to be in flagrante and thinking, i dont know why i wanted this or what i was hoping to realise through it, because whatever feelings of sleaze, danger and filth one was enjoying punt you straight into the shame void.

it's the archetypal horny guy space, for simple emotions, like "I want to fuck. you want to fuck. let's fuck, together now".

The sauna is a bit of a weird place to experiment sexually. Maybe you've found out you don't like something, but probably all you know for sure is you don't like doing it in public with a strange guy you don't quite trust. But those moments in which you discover what you do like, tend to be golden.

Know your boundaries ahead of time, especially around the kind of sex likely on offer.

If a room door is closed, the scene is private - keep out. If a room door is open, they want you to watch, and possibly participate.

It's nice to say thank you and give a hug afterwards, but some people will just get up and silently walk off. It's a transactional thing, so make sure you get whatever you needed from it too.

How to have an orgy

Find at least one person to have sex with, and do it in a large room with the door open. Somewhat like a wedding buffet, no one ever wants to go first. Other people will gravitate to your location, like zombies at a whiff of brain.

Sauna orgies are not fun, and the reason for this is sexual health. People will walk up, run their hand up your thigh and then they're in, exactly as you dreamed it, but instead of the transports of ecstasy as you are rudely manhandled by a room full of brutes, you have to play at condom babysitter, for all of them, every single time, and try not to worry too much at who's rimming you and where that dick went and what actually is the risk level of a dick rubbing a vulva anyway and if the condoms are still there and good luck making this your day for promoting dental dams. It's so unsexy. Unless you've got some kind of, overworked med school supply teacher fetish. You're also trying to attend to the Mood and Narrative Themes, collaboratively in real time with a group of strangers old enough for gangbang VHS tapes but too young for Caligula (get your cock out of my face i only brought you in here to scatter the rose petals).

Rope in a friend to act as 'scene monitor', so you can enjoy yourself while they get rid of people who aren't handling you right, and enforce condom rules. That's my best advice.

if you walk past an orgy in process, stick your head round the door, but be alert to the mood in the room. On three separate occasions, i've seen women trying to have an orgy get fed up of boundary-pushing from onlookers, give up and go back to the bar. Friends have had people walk in on an orgy and get pushy; I've given someone a shove for trying to get past a scene monitor posted outside an orgy. Something about it brings out the worst. I think, specifically, it brings out the men who can't get laid through confidence and communication, hoping they can get in there. Use your intuition for whether you stick around.

on getting a bit crazy with it

Like going to a protest or festival, set your boundaries before you go in. The atmosphere can rapidly change your sense of self and what's normal. Deciding not to have sex on your first visit is a very wise idea. If at all possible, avoid drinks and other drugs.

if you're new to being on testosterone, you might find your experience of desire and sexual risk is now wildly out of kilter. T horny makes you stupid. It puts you into a state of mind which seems incomprehensible once you're outside of it. My first few months on T were marked by finding out how abruptly my boundaries had changed, walking into strangers homes and naked photos and only remembering mid-way-through experiences that it might have been a stupid idea. It took a little while to learn to pilot this new craft; the horn has not diminished, but I'm more at-home with my decisionmaking and boundaries.

(on a similar theme, and more worryingly, being on T makes it considerably easier to miss a partner's nonverbal cues - because i'm in the moment with my experience and having a good time - and that too is new habits to learn)

The sauna is a great place for bad decisions! It amplifies that strangemaking effect as a place outside normal time. If you turn up at 6pm and don't leave until 3am, thats nine hours immersed in horny weirdness - a holiday of the self. and you know, this can be pretty wonderful.

if sauna trips are kink scenes, think in terms of aftercare - aftercare which you will need to provide for yourself, alone, and after perhaps having very little sleep. Plan space the next day to decompress. Get the chlorine out of your hair. What works for me is woo woo - i need the energy balancing and aura re-tuning to feel my body is fully alone again. There's a distinctive feeling of being 'touched out', very different to the replete fullness or ongoing hum of pleasure one gets with a lover. For all this, they are experiences I wanted, had and cherish; i'm getting something out of it, although it's certainly not good sex.

a good aftercare plan is essential for handling shame. Sometimes I'll feel weird for days, to walk about in the ordinary world with all this in my memory. Checking in with yourself and doing the aftercare is essential to prevent weird becoming weird and bad becoming and violated.

getting chased

I'm at a place in my sexuality where I quite like chasers; I'm not sure if this is good or bad for me, it just is. Lucky for me, the sauna is PACKED with them.

I find I can't relax with straight women and gay men, no matter how much I crave that validation. In contrast, chasers want transness, so I feel confident and at peace that they are hot for what I am, and if they get a bit of a shock that I'm not trans in the way they expected, that's on them. My transness is hot to me, and I want it to be hot to my partners too. I want partners who want to touch my body, who don't handle it like the site of an accident.

Cis people know fuck all about trans stuff, but most of them are decent people and embarassed about getting it wrong. You will likely be the first transmasc person those around you have ever met - develop a little elevator pitch to explain to a potential trick what it is, and what they need to know to treat you right. Then they'll get it wrong some more and you have to decide if you can tolerate it for ten minutes to get your rocks off. They'll also give you feedback on how they are experiencing your gender, whether you like it or not.

The sauna is a straightforward, anonymous, low-context sort of place - people go after what they like the look of, motivated by novelty, without thinking too deeply about what it 'means' for their sexual orientation. This can be a problem for you, a transsexual who cares very deeply about how your gender is experienced. I think they often don't know, and certainly don't care, that I'm not a trans woman. It's never environment in which I have felt affirmed as gay as part of a cosmic love vibration mirrored by the men around me, unless it's the men I've brought with me. I have happy memories, but sauna sex rarely feeds the soul.

the most common chat up line i have recieved - five or maybe six times by now - is 'i like your boobs, how long did it take you to grow them'. unfortunately, i'm a slut for compliments, no matter how outrageous.

In other ways, it feels freeing - to just be a body, to not have to talk about transness, to exist in the moment, to not bother policing what it all means.

All this can work for me, specifically, and the genderfluid patterns of my desire; but if you don't like being misgendered, it's pretty crushing. And in tolerating it, I worry if I'm letting myself down. I worry that a feminine persona just feels comfortable, or something habitual; or that I'm drawn to femininity as a wider pattern of being-desired and being-done-to as a way to not look too closely at my own agency, a way to not think too hard about what my sexuality and sense of self might look like had I been cis. And then I worry that those worries are just naturalising masculinity as something that exists and is innate in men. I can't tell if being a fem for cis men is me transcending cismasculinity, or giving up on something. Transness is closets all the way down.

I find it harder to pull when I'm at the sauna with a group of other transmasc people, I think because I'm no longer the most-proximate-to-female-and-obviously-young-and-looks-nice who might say yes, and that's a gross idea to meditate on.

I can't recommend exploring all this with other trans people strongly enough, unless you do specifically have a thing for cis people (my condolences).

Consent

The sauna is an outside place; they do things differently there. If you're used to consent norms in kink or feminist spaces, it will strike you as outrageous.

I think of sauna as immersive theatre consent - you're consenting to an experience, not a clearly negotiated list of what with who, but consent to uncertainty. It's somewhat akin to the consent given by mountain climbers and scuba divers - you have the right to consent to risky things beyond direct control. You are not obligated to only consent to safe and easy things. Its your life and your body. You get to choose the trade-offs that define you (you're trans; you already know this intimately). Walk into a room and you have no idea what you're going to get, and that's thrilling.

You have the right to decide what consent means to you within any given context. Sauna is perhaps closest to negotiating a consensual-non-consent scene or polyamorous relationship in which you decide is and is not consensual behaviours within a chosen, agreed framework, a framework that is different to the one you use in other contexts.

This is a lot of words to say, consent norms at the sauna are weird and bad, but you might still have fun with that.

You could think of it as: a space in which people are consenting to enter in order to have certain kinds of encounters. Typical sauna behaviour is within my parameters for what I am consenting to when I enter that space. A stranger will run their hand up my leg while I'm having sex with someone else, or I'll be groped as I walk down a corridor between rooms, or I'll be in a pile of people and suddenly discover I'm being rimmed but without knowing who by. These are experiences I go to the sauna for; it's also sexual assault - these guys are taking a gamble and getting lucky.

Men at the sauna will generally know how to behave towards cis women, especially if they've been socialised into Swinger subcultures. In the bar area, everyday consent norms are in place - expect to ask and be asked politely. If you're off on your own somewhere, and especially if an orgy has broken out, you might be in a place where this other set of norms creep in.

Can you enjoy the sauna without buying into this framework?

It's always your right to say no. But I think you have to be the kind of person where, a stranger touches your bum, and you say 'no thank you' and it doesn't ruin your night. You don't have to have my kink for being manhandled, it doesn't have to be the goal of your sauna experience. But you need a sense of humour about it. If you're the sort of person who's going to feel on-edge, threatened, disrespected or violated by casual touching and being stared at, the sauna is not the sex party for you. This too is consent - to opt out.

For all that this is weird, people at the sauna are typically pretty great at hearing nos when given explicitly. Nobody wastes time. It's a paradox. I guess it's about clarity of communication. Off on the real world, consent can sometimes feel murky or like you're being herded into a position where others can pretend there was ambiguity; relationships are uncertain ground; i'll check in with a lover then have to play 3D chess to unpack what they actually want from what they think i want to hear, developing an intuition for the 'maybes' that mean yes and the 'maybes' that mean no. But you can't miss someone touching your bum, and they can't miss you batting their hand off. It's like the opposite of a situationship. In this sense, consent norms are really very good, lower stakes and easier than anywhere else in your life.

The sauna's consent model is ideosyncratic - but it does still have one. Generally, if someone squeezes your bum, that's an acceptable norm to ask if you're interested. But if you shake your head, say 'no' or walk off, they should and likely will buzz off. If they're persistent, THAT is absolutely a violation of consent within the norms of the space. You can and should raise a stink, and also raise it with management straight away (there's no way you'll be able to identify the person later on). A decently run joint should recognise dangerous people are bad for business.

Just as it's a great place to practice asking for what you want, it's also the perfect place to practice saying no very forcefully. I've never done this for myself, but on the couple of occasions I've done this for others, what has felt right is getting my body in the way and then blocking their movement with my arm. I suppose it responds to the physicality of the space, if we're all going to be men there and talk with bodies because words are too hard. It makes the situation clearly visible to onlookers, and demonstrating a gentle willingness to get physical puts the onus on the other person to back down or commit to actually thumping you, and they will back down because a creeper wants an easy, quiet, unobtrusive kind of violence.

on sexual health

Building on this model of consent, sex with sauna strangers means a readiness for your sexual health risk to go up by really rather a lot.

You have the right to make this choice. You are not obligated to remain able-bodied or optimise yourself for health - there's some fascist undertones to the importance of a 'healthy' citizen, ability to do war and raise strong children. STI stigma straddles ableism and sex negativity, amplifying ideas of sexuality as corrupting, and disease as moral failure. Minimising health risk means missing out on wonderful things, important parts of your sexuality and flourishing, people you will be happier for kissing, and new discoveries. Sex is important, and life is risk.

At the same time, illness and disability can suck to experience, especially at a moment of underfunded health and disability systems. You probably want to be more risk averse if you or someone else in your network might get pregnant, is immunocompromised, is already quite disabled and doesn't want more to deal with, or if you're part of a big poly network where you're raising the risk level for more people than you can directly negotiate with.

Sex positive scenes promote the idea you should get regularly tested - maybe once every three months - and additionally before new partners, just in case. This model is based on an imagined person having sexual adventures at an average frequency, with a mix of committed and new partners all of whom are also within a sex positive scene doing likewise.

It's obvious almost immediately that this does not work for the sauna. If your sauna body count on a single night is higher than one, you're in violation of this principle. Consider: you need to sit out six chaste weeks to get an accurate HIV test result. End the night in a pile of bodies, and it obligates you to scrupulously abstain from anything with anyone for two months, factoring in the time required to get an appointment and for results to come back. Are the other men at the sauna doing this? lol. lmao even.

You can pick stuff up from skin-to-skin contact, you can pick stuff up from kissing. Not everything has a vaccine or cure. Some things are resistant to treatment or may become so in future. HIV was spreading about ten years before anyone began to get sick. AIDS shouldn't kill you nowadays, but who knows what healthcare access will be like in five years time.

Cis men at the sauna are a weird bunch. They often aren't keeping up to date with new developments, attending sexuality workshops, or developing shared community ettiquettes of care. If they are hiding their sauna trips from a partner, they might not have prep in the cabinet. They might not think of themselves as gay and, on some level, be percieving sexual risk as something that happens to other people. I've never met a cis man at the sauna who is carrying condoms, but they'll mostly put one on if you ask - this indicates they're not thinking about health risk. My sexual health doctor describes the local sauna as the most dangerous place to have sex in the country. Delicious!

You can ask them about their STI situation, but they'll likely say they're 'clean' without clarifying what that actually means (what activities do they do and with who? how often do they test?). You won't know if they're lying, and you will know they might have had risky sex yesterday, and also that no one has ever talked to them about 'clean' being dehumanising language.

You decide if it matters. You have the right to die on the world's tallest mountain.

Do take common-sense risk reduction precautions:

But be ready for it to happen, personally and politically. it truly is not the end of the world. accept it as a sportsperson knows their discipline might snap a bone. it's the spice girls principle - life is short, and it's fine to get an infection in the pursuit of what you really, really want, because the real risk is missing something you needed. My husband talks about replacing food-shaming logic with the idea of food that's good for the body, and food that's good for the heart and soul - so we might reframe sexual health in similar ways, that the pursuit of health alone is insufficient for human flourishing.

A study done in 1996 - more or less the last year where AIDS was a death sentence - revealed 40% of gay men used condoms for anal sex. The culmination of all that suffering and public health messaging was less than half. some people just really do not want to know. all power to them. but be wary if they're in your dating pool.

Should I go to the sauna?

probably not.

I can find it hard to explain why I love the sauna to people who have never been, when it's so obviously awful. Sitting at the bar, at times, i feel happiest and most myself, this giddy bliss at having made it. I guess it is there I enter into my fantasy, I am making real my read-about world (which i suppose speaks to the erotic as a learned practice, and as something we can therefore consciously shape). the secret to becoming a star is behaving like one.

last year someone described my job as 'travel agent for sex clubs', which i suppose is true. i dont know how this happened. most of the time i dont even like sex. during lockdown we all went a little mad, and i picked up a taste for disco memoirs and with it, a persistent feeling of moving forwards and backwards in time, and that also i would die if nobody was touching me. In the 1970s, bathhouses with dancefloors formed a center point of social, sexual, artistic and political life, an interplay of moving between the dance and the bedroom and the conversation that seems deeply right. sitting at the bathhouse bar having a cheeky natter is coming home.

what i didnt know last year but think on constantly now is that when we go out as a group, we turn wherever it is we go into a trans-majority venue. and that is powerful and delighting, a world within a world. Sexuality is dreaming, and what i wanted and still haven't quite found, but almost, was that possibility described in the disco memoirs in the network of bars, baths and clubs and everybody within them - to vanish into gay life, not as nostalgia but as now. disco never dies, and we can create our own cultures which are our own and better. im chasing that feeling and i find it at 1am, over toast at the sauna bar, as we make it our bar just by being there. the sex is secondary. i love patrick cowley, fisting, and i love my friends.