Dolan Wolf (3:58)
You look amazing. Thank you. Thank you. I'm in a dark room down a back alley in the bowels of Waterloo Station in London. I'm surrounded by about ten other sweaty men. The man in front of me removes the towel from my waist, drops it on the floor, grabs my hard cock. Yeah, it's on. I'm 25. It's three years since I graduated, bursting with enthusiasm and dreams of becoming a writer. But here in the summer of 97, things aren't going quite to plan. I'm a PR executive, a job I should never have taken. Which is about the one thing my boss, Samantha, and I can agree on. I don't care for her, I don't care for pr. And the closest I am to being a writer is composing a press release promoting the virtues of exotic meats like kangaroo and kudu. My headline is Kudu, use something different on your barbecue. To make matters worse, I've just endured a particularly galling rugby injury. I grew up among rugby folk, but I wasn't built for it. I was about 100 pounds lighter than I am now. I sucked at it and I went away to college. I. I gave rugby a breather. And just for the hell of it, I learned how to juggle. So I came home from college, dragged back to the rugby club, and all of a sudden I discovered that I had hand to eye coordination I'd never had before. So when the ball came flying towards me, instead of being terrified that I was going to drop it, and then dropping it, I plucked it from the air so all of a sudden I could play this game. And I really enjoyed it. And I scored a try. That's like a touchdown. And it was truly orgasmic. I was loving it. And six games into my newfound love of rugby, I snapped this arm in two. And 18 months of rehabilitation later, undeterred, I go back onto the rugby pitch. Twenty minutes later, I'm carried off with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament in my right knee. So I'm fucking miserable. My job's a joke, I'm broken, and oh yes, my love life is doa. So then two things happen. My friend Jackie gives me a copy of Jonathan Livingston's Seagull. Some of you may have read it. It's a story about a seagull that defies society's conventions to exceed his wildest dreams of mastering flight. The effect on me wasn't immediate, apart from making me cry, but it kind of acted like a slow release version of the Red pill from the Matrix, you know, the one that wakes Neo up from the machine reality. The other thing that happened is that Time Out London was circulated in the PR office where I was working and John the IT guy, thought it was hilarious to leave it open on my desk at the gay section. Now, up to this point in my life, the closet, I mean, closest I'd got to having any kind of gay sex was buying a few gay magazines. But that was just to check that I was normal down there. I lusted after women, I liked boobs. I genuinely enjoyed all five of the times I'd managed to have sex with women. And who would want to be gay in this world? Who the fuck would want to deal with that? So I knew how to deal with John's prank. I knew how to make him get bored of it and get over it. I just had to show him quiet disdain for the poor quality of his humor and not close the magazine too quickly. So as it lay open on my desk, I couldn't help notice in the corner of the magazine an advert for the Pleasure Drome sauna, including a coupon for £2 off. There were many reasons and fears why I hadn't acted on my homosexual curiosity before now, my Catholic guilt, the homophobia of the rugby culture I grew up in, HIV and AIDS headlines scandalizing George Michael for maybe being bisexual. So. But the main reason why I hadn't done anything was I was afraid that I would regret it for the rest of my life. Only at this point in my life, I was so fucking miserable, I didn't feel like it could get any worse. So I'm knocking on the door of the Pleasure Dome sauna and I'm beating back my fear with the thought if they didn't want me to be here, they wouldn't have advertised. And I'm asked for my name and I give a fake name and then the guy says, that's 12 pounds, and I quietly present my coupon for 2 pounds off. If this is going to be the end of my life, I'm going to get a good deal on it. So I open the door, I'm buzzed in, and I'm greeted with a scene of a couple of blokes changing, getting dressed in a changing room that is only remarkable for its ordinariness. It could be any changing room in a gym or rugby club. So I'm breathing deep, and I'm calming myself down and thinking, okay, this is probably just a place where men come to have a sauna located down the back alley of underneath Waterloo Station. And so I go and shower. And while I'm showering, I'm watching men come in and going to a steam room at the end of a corridor. And my brain is quietly freaking out, but my body has been hijacked by a part of me that's been repressed for so long, it's not letting go of the wheel. So I finish showering. I walk down the corridor. I'm being pushed deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole just outside the steam room. I see a notice saying sexual behavior in public is illegal. And I think, ok, that's it. Nothing sexy happens here. But then I think it seems more like a disclaimer than a prohibition. So I go into the steam room, and there's like eight to ten guys sat around a ceramic bench built into the wall. And I find a space not too close to any of them, and I sit down. And I'm trying to act like I do this kind of thing all the time. I can hear my heart beating in my ears, and I'm trying to survey the room subtly. And again, I'm struck by how very not gay looking any of the guys here are. I mean, apart from being half naked in a gay sauna. And I'm watching men coming and going, and one man will look at another, and then one of them will leave. And then after an appropriate pause, the other one will follow. And I'm witnessing cruising for the first time, and it's kind of hot. And then this guy comes in and sits down, and he's kind of like Colin Farrell, but a bit, you know, thicker set, maybe a couple of shades less pretty. Not wildly muscular, but firm. And he's looking at me, and he smiles. And despite the heat, my face is frozen with fear, so I can't smile back. But I'm kind of getting an understanding for what's going, how this works. So somehow I'm able to operate my legs, stand up, walk over and sit beside him. And initially, there's about 2 inches of air between us. And then almost without either of us having moved, our feet are touching, but I'm still not sure if it's on. And even if it is on, I don't know what that means. And now our hands are touching on the bench. But maybe I'm imagining this. Maybe I just want this so much. And he's only not pulling away because that would be rude. But now his hands on top of mine and our fingers are entwining. And now I know it's on, but I still don't know what that means. And the only thing I do know is that this is becoming a now or never situation. So I turn to look at him and he's looking at me. And then. And then instinct takes over and we both lean in and we kiss. And it's on. We kiss. We touch. Two men kissing and touching each other, each with our man cock, man balls, hairy, manly ass. It feels weird and wonderful and strange and natural. If my brain had escape pods, bits of it would be piling into them to escape the structural collapse that's surely about to happen. But it feels so fucking good. Clearly, this is my first rodeo. So I don't argue or, you know, I just. When this guy gets up to lead me out and into the dark room next door, okay. And it feels clandestine and it feels wrong, and it is wrong. There's a sign outside, clearly saying, so I'm defying Her Majesty's government, but it just feels so right. So we're in the dark room, our towels fall away. We grab each other's hard cocks. I've got a man's cock in my hand for the first time. And the space time continuum is not unraveling. And there are other guys in the room. And although it's dark, when your eyes adjust to the light, you can kind of see them. And that means they can see me. And think about it. When you've been so afraid to do something for fear of people knowing that you're doing it. And then you do it in front of people. Yeah. It helps to know that they want you to do that. But you're not just coming out of the closet, you're turning around and hammering the fuck out of the closet door. And you know the positive feedback loop that good sex has? You're turned on and that turns them on and that turns you on and that turns them on. Well, when you add an audience to that, an eager audience, anyway, they become part of that positive feedback loop and amplify it. And this guy was doing things with my nipples and his tongue that were just blowing my mind. I mean, like a double mindfuck on top of one already blown. I had no idea that, you know, aside from the pleasure, I Had no idea that I could get that much pleasure from my nipples. Up till now they'd been like the Kardashians, always there, but no practical use whatsoever. So the orgasm I had in that room was wonderful, but not nearly as important as how I got there or what came afterwards. We jerked each other off, we picked up our towels. David, the man who introduced me to my nipples, led me up the stairs to a kind of chill out space where we had some orange juice and he lounged in a bean bag while I sat in a proper chair. And I confessed that I'd never been anywhere like this before. I'd never had sex with a man before, never so much as kissed a man before. And he goes, sort of fakes a gasp and goes, what have you started? And I don't say anything, but in my head I'm like, I haven't started anything. And somewhere in my mind I can hear future me going, girl. And of course I had started something. I stumbled out of the sauna and I saw the world with totally different eyes. Now, any of the men on the street in front of me could have been like me or any of the men in the sauna. And before this, none of them were. Five years later, I'd be working for a gay men's sexual health charity. Ten years later, I'd be teaching classes in how to have better butt sex. And almost 21 years later, two years the day, give or take, I'm on this stage telling the story for you guys here at Bordeaux when I hear someone say to me, oh, I'm not the sort of person who fill in the blank. I'm compelled to say you're only not the sort of person who goes to a gay bathhouse or who winds up showing the world his shaved butthole on the front cover of a fisting dvd or telling your story at Bawdy until you are.
