The most sexual moment

of my Toronto day comes upon the insertion of my debit card. I had my card changed from ‘tap’ to ‘insert’ for this very reason; I watch very carefully the expression on the young clerk’s face when I ask “Shall I insert?” I’m careful not to say ‘can I insert?’ as it might be misunderstood, and I want him to know that my ability to insert is not in question, it is simply his permission which is required, especially for it to be a fully consensual act. The mask puts me in a quandary; I can only see his beautiful eyes, and I would need the mouth and particularly the muscles around the mouth to tell me the whole truth about his response. At any rate, it is an exciting moment and virtually all that’s left. We now live in a culture which forbids, nay denounces, intimate contact with strangers. Recently Anthony Fauci revealed, in a not-so-startling personal confession, that his skin literally crawls when he sees people gathering in bars for a drink. It isn’t the act of drinking that is COVID related, of course, it is the loosening of morals around it, the freeing of inhibitions, the fact that liquor, God forbid, will facilitate the proximity of strangers -- their boldness, and let’s be frank about it, their promiscuity. And the Toronto powers that be are recently quite hysterical over the possible transmission of COVID-19 at The Brass Rail. This is the modern reality. The tide is moving against bars and strip clubs, and if they are not made illegal (it is illegal to get closer to a stranger than 6 feet in Hamilton where I live, where we have had 45 ‘COVID-related’ deaths, 34 of them in a single senior citizen’s home) then they will simply be frowned upon. A person who frequents such establishments will be socially shunned and discouraged from publicly speaking of it  as ‘pleasure.'  I would suggest circumventing the subject of pleasure as a topic of conversation, since most pleasures involve other people who one is not married to, or co-habiting with, and we all know that mentioning such transgressions will make social intercourse at the very least slightly uncomfortable. All this is a trial for me, for I have always depended on 'the kindness of strangers’ — to quote Tennessee Williams -- at least when it comes to my sex life. And let’s be clear about it, Williams was talking about his own and Blanche’s sex life when he invented that phrase, and we were meant to be confused, titillated and somewhat disturbed by the purposed imprecision of his diction. Kindness means many things to many people, and to Blanche, and I -- and Tennessee -- it may very well have mean the joy of achieving sexual satisfaction in relationship to the smooth and tantalising young body of a stranger. Why must the body be that of a stranger? We won’t go into it now. There are ten thousand reasons why a prefer a stranger’s intimate touch to the touch of a known lover. Many would call it my psychosis. But it is a reality for so many people that I think I should at the very least, bring it up.  So putting aside for a minute your judgement of this personal choice, and the in depth psychoanalysis that such an admission seems to call for (there is after all, no couch handy!),what is it that makes a stranger so special? Well, there is simply the lack of expectation —  it is not unlike Jauss's aesthetics of reception. People, like genres, have certain expectations attached to them; the first joy for people in discovering Cervantes Don Quixote was in his shocking perversion of the medieval chivalric romance; suddenly it was comic, even grotesque. Cervantes turned the medieval heroic knight into a stranger; readers were excited by the novelty of encountering him now, again, for the very first time. Similarly one knows what to expect from someone  you love, and that is both  reward and that punishment, whereas with a stranger one knows not what to expect, and there is suspense and even danger, never mind transgression, which dare I say it for people like me is part of the joy. We want to do something wrong, something that no one else is doing, and the fact that intimate contact with strangers is presently demonized to such an extent just makes it simply more tempting. Nothing can compare of course with AIDS — we were not then worrying about  34 strangers who had died in a nursing home (people who were mostly very sick and old already) no, this was a case of your young healthy friends suddenly dropping dead in short order, and you not knowing why really, except that the powers that be had made it very clear that close proximity with another gay man might most certainly mean death from the ‘gay disease.’ Yet we still went out in search of strangers. At least I certainly did -- and discovered condoms eventually, but nevertheless encountered strange mouths, hands, and strange nether regions, which are often the most exciting strange thing of all. I can’t explain it except to say that all this is ineluctably human; and we can’t stop humans from being human, though it does amuse me and make me laugh --as well as cry -- that is, all recent attempts to do so. I must warn you that, as is my fashion nowadays,  much of what I have written here is lies. I would specifically warn you abut the first part of this little -- what shall we call it, piece of writing? — where I speak of cancelling the tap option on my debit card in order to facilitate the joys of insertion. I made that up. In fact I made up all of this, and you have no way of knowing whether it is lies or truth -- either about myself personally or about what is or is not 'human.'  But as Gorgias used to say (and I am paraphrasing) “he who is deceived is  much wiser than he who is not." I would urged you to be deceived. Accept my lies as truth. (See what happens!) It can only be as dangerous as having intimate contact with a stranger -- which may offer — especially those who have forgotten  — more joy than you might imagine. I don’t wish to lead you down the garden path, or maybe I do -- for who knows what one may find at the end of it? And that shameless pun was completely intentional, for puns make words strange, as indeed they are, too.