The Intrigues of Life
I recently got an email notifying me of a new MeetUp group based near me and titled A Dark Room for Gay Men. I caught my breath for a moment, and then felt the warmth enveloping my face. It was as if I had looked myself in the mirror and saw a face I had never known before, but the warmth in my chest and my gut told me that there was a darkness within me, even if I had never opened the door to that space. Sure, I had cruised for porn, but I never found any of it really resonating within me, and I realized at that time that I had been looking for that space without knowing it.
Maybe we’ve all had subconscious fantasies. Fantasies of what we wanted to do, fantasies of what we wanted to receive, fantasies of the verbiage we wanted to hear, fantasies of things we wanted to say, while our eyes were locked on those of a lover, fantasies of giving-in, or having a lover beg for what he wanted to give-into himself.
As I thought about this more, I realized that these were the issues I had explored with the fictional characters I’ve created. Each of them has a secret, each has a hunger he’s hidden, too. One of them actually meets a guy in a gay pub who asks him the question “which man in your life brought you to the peak of the Matterhorn of your sexuality, or is that perhaps something I’ll have to do?” Needless to say, it’s not a question the character had ever heard before, but neither was it that man who brought him to his peak.
People talk about the concept of a partner feeling betrayal when a lover seeks satisfaction outside what had been thought to be a monogamous relationship, but is that exploration anything more that a partner seeking the possibility of a new fantasy-relationship, even if it’s just a fling? Aren’t all men and all professional women encountering other adults of one or the other gender who stir a friskiness within them? A stir of the “what if” question of “what would it be like with him (or her)?” Is it only the Swedes who accept “polyamorous” relationships, or at least accept that a partner may have a fling from time to time?
Maybe lots of us would benefit from visiting a dark room from time to time.