Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Desire, Desiring, Desired” by Brian Watson. Brian reviews nonfiction for Hippocampus magazine. Cutbank and Columbia Journal named “Unfolding,” Brian’s braided essay, a finalist for their respective 2023 nonfiction contests. Invisible City accepted “Privacy,” an excerpt from Crying In A Foreign Language, Brian’s memoir-in-progress, for publication later in 2024. Brian also shares their outlook on the intersections of Japan and queerness with more than 500 subscribers to Out of Japan, their Substack newsletter. Brian is less of a he than a they, and definitely much more queer than gay.
I remember the first time someone wanted me.
A stranger in Boston beckoned when I was 22. I’ll call him Rick; he introduced himself on a dial-up bulletin board service during the summer of 1988.
“Come visit,” he wrote, and after four years of unwanted celibacy at a tiny college in rural Massachusetts, I agreed.
In Boston, Rick squired me to a gay bar where I sat amazed, nursing my Perrier, as other men smiled in welcome. I felt wanted.
I first learned about the Greeks at age 12, in the Nyack Library, and Mary Renault was my guide. More recently, queer studies returned me to those Greeks. And although I was no beardless ephebe that day in Boston, I embraced the concept of an ancient Greek identity: that of the erômenos, he who is desired, the Ganymede in need of a Zeus. Late that June afternoon, amid a chorus of clinking glasses and winking gazes, I felt whole and powerful: my sexuality at last corporeal. When Rick led me to his bed and asked, “Can I fuck you?” I nodded.
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My father’s death when I was 14 triggered a series of sessions with counselors, ranging from diaconate friends of Daddy’s to a public welfare therapist to professional psychiatrists. The first meetings had started with my mother’s need for me to talk about death (with someone other than her, caring, as she was, for four children, alone), although she quickly realized that her presence in sessions only reinforced my silence. But I retreated inward for the first few months of treatment. Strangers frightened me, even, or perhaps especially, Catholic strangers (my childhood Father Confessor’s checklist for pre-teen sins began my lifelong distancing from the church).
At age fifteen, the inescapable fact of my attraction to other men—what had begun as sketches of naked men at age 12 had progressed to an obsession with gay porn magazines at age 14—resulted in worsening bouts of depression. My mother sought treatment for me again, and my new stepfather’s generosity landed me a true professional, complete with a carpeted office, high-gloss maple furniture, and gilt-framed diplomas. Doctor Hornstein learned as much about me as I was willing to teach, and although he helped me find answers to many of my angst-ridden questions—Why was I attracted to the captain of my high school baseball team? It’s normal to experience attraction to someone you envy, and those feelings will pass. Why do I feel so angry when I’m at home? It’s normal to resent a parent’s new life after another parent passes away, and those feelings will pass. Why don’t I feel anything about Daddy’s death? It’s normal to repress emotions that frighten you; the day will come when that fear will pass—I failed to ask the question I truly needed the answer to: Why do I want to be fucked?
Did I understand at 16, 17, and 18 the power of offering myself to another man as I so frequently, yet orally, did in cruising spots in both Manhattan and my local shopping mall? Perhaps I longed for the visible evidence of someone else’s desire for conjugal insertion, the sight of eyes alit with lust and (ephemeral) love. Cheap Trick clued me in: “I want you to want me.” My own awareness—wherein I might have realized that a lack of self-acceptance drove my hunt for men who would physically accept me—remained locked in a different closet, together with grief, fear, and all the other feelings that threatened to overwhelm me.
I had read about anal sex in gay porn magazines like Blueboy, Mandate, and Honcho since my first clandestine purchases at age 14, curious and excited at the same time. The words on the pages convinced me that I could master the mechanics. After all, story after story reinforced a key theme: the receptive partner’s job was easy. All I needed to do was to relax, breathe, and await the magic of orgasm.
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Boston Rick began just as the active partner in the magazine fiction of my youth had, by advising me to relax. He stroked the dimpled line where my ass became thigh. “Just breathe.” His voice, a soft susurration.
I knew next to nothing of anatomy’s rules and roles. Nothing about the second sphincter. Nothing about the curves in my colon. Not even anything about my prostate gland, aside from the Biology 101 fact that it made my semen wet. Some muscles knew enough to relax on their own, but I had always been a clencher of jaws, teeth, and, yes, sphincters. I struggled to will my exit, now entrance, into lassitude. When nerves within my colon took note of Rick’s condom-enrobed visitor, an alert sounded: I had to poop.
“Something feels weird,” I confessed, avoiding any mention of defecation. He exited me and, with a question in his eyes, pointed out the toilet. But because his visitor had already evacuated, nothing else remained to excrete.
Taking gentle note of my confusion, Rick let our lovemaking end. I apologized for the physical betrayal of my desires, not to mention his, but Rick smiled. “Don’t worry about it.” I drove away with a mix of relief and self-recrimination.
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Several months later, after I had moved to Japan to teach English (as I told everyone who’d listen) and to escape my fear of AIDS in the United States (as I told no one, including myself), the next suitor appeared: a man named Jun. In Japan, free from the fear of discovery within the everyone-knows-everything small college town I had inhabited, my need for seeking-out reanimated. I first met Cameron, another gay American teaching English in Japan, at a Ministry of Education conference, and his experience in gay Tōkyō during a study abroad two years before gave me the insider knowledge I had been thirsting for. Cameron escorted me to a meeting of the International Friends, a social event for gay Japanese men and their non-Japanese counterparts. It was there that I met Jun, and we exchanged phone numbers.
Jun called me and suggested we meet in Akabane, a stop on the train line that led from my home into Tōkyō. From there he led me to a love hotel, a crenelated building named Hôtel d’Amour. Anxiety reminded me I was still, anally, a virgin, but the ache to be desired overruled my trepidation.
When both of us, showered and naked, returned to the velvet-bedecked bed, Jun’s lust grew manifest; his hands began a reconnaissance mission, surveying my form and cupping my curves with eagerness. After groping for a condom and a packet of lube, he brought his soft lips to my ear: “Can I fuck you?” in Japanese was a gentler question: “Can I stick it in?”
I nodded, confident this would be the time that the heavens would open and allow me the joys porn fiction had promised. Had I boned up on technique since my misadventure with Rick? No. Boston had been a fluke, I wagered. First time nerves.
Jun massaged my coy first sphincter and urgently probed my even shyer second. Abruptly, I felt his sheathed manhood wriggle amid my ass cheeks, but I sensed no penetration. Perhaps the juxtaposition of my meaty hips against his very round belly prevented his key from finding my lock.
However, his member's friction amid my glutes warranted Jun’s full-throated appreciations and grunting release. I thanked him and dressed, embarrassed and therefore no longer interested in my orgasm. My second failure—even though Jun’s lack of penetration was more of a failure of geometry—weighed on me as I sulked on the train home. The remnants of my Catholicism made me feel guilty and, I only later realized, had constructed yet another closet: one that isolated me from asking for what I wanted, and from asking for joy, too.
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My first-ever Japanese personal ad—chubby Caucasian, age 23, 195 centimeters tall, 110 kilograms, seeks some fun and maybe more in central Saitama Prefecture—yielded two respondents. Tōru, the first of these, came to pick me up in his Subaru hatchback, a light of anticipatory desire glimmering in his eyes. I sized him up with a very American hug: Tōru was tighter and trimmer than Jun and might succeed where Jun’s dimensions had unknowingly prevented him.
At a levee miles from my home, Tōru parked within the embrace of a willow. He turned off the engine and gestured broadly. “No one else is nearby.”
I relaxed into his kisses, assured of the vehicular privacy. His radiant desire—the heat of his wanting present in his hands, his lips, his eyes—convinced me: this time, there was no first-time nerves. This time, there was no confounding geometry. This time, I knew: I could receive a partner’s insertion.
The Subaru’s cramped interior required careful coordination; Tōru choreographed with precision. Clothing slithered away, seats reclined, and my ankles took their repose on his shoulders. His deep voice and words of encouragement—“You’re so sexy. Do you want this? Are you ready?”—deepened my relaxation. I sighed. In that moment, my first sense of belonging arrived. And then he was within. I gasped as he reached my prostate; the fiction all at once true, my pelvis shivering with new sensations.
Success! I laughed a farewell to my virginity as he climaxed, the very tip of him swelling with the release. My suddenly hyperactive nervous system prompted a gleeful orgasm for me, too.
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Bottom had not been in my vocabulary, nor had a top/bottom binary ever been delineated. In Japan, however, I quickly learned about tachi, the active, insertive partner, a word derived from the verb tatsu, to grow erect. The counterpart was uke, a shorter form of ukemi, meaning recipient or passive partner. I had assumed I aligned with the latter even before I had the words for it.
Or did I? Leaving aside anal intercourse (while acknowledging the difficulty most gay men have in shifting the focus away from said intercourse), my emotional and physical experiences were far from passive. I energetically sought opportunities to fellate or manipulate (the perfect verb, by the way, derived from manipulus, the Latin word for handful).
As had been true for me as a teenager, I wanted to embody someone else’s desire, in precisely the sense that words like embody and its Latinate cousin, incorporate, mean: to take what is someone else’s, be it desire or genitalia, and embrace it within me. I also continued to sequester my emotions but needed to fill the void created by their enforced absence. Now I craved moments of physical love; that craving surpassed any questions or answers Doctor Hornstein might have offered. The desire in someone else’s eyes brought me something far beyond therapy, something unique, something I could not offer myself: a physical wholeness to distract from the hole where my emotions should have been.
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The second personal ad respondent arrived at my apartment barely a month after Tōru and his Subaru. I opened the door to a sweetly shy Wataru.
The ill-fitting Jun had been my age, Tōru had been older, but Wataru was younger. Before I could mentally review my Japanese psychology notes—would a younger man want me to take the lead?—Wataru found the door to my bedroom and looked back with a smile. “This is where you sleep?”
The desire in his eyes gleamed differently than the lust both Jun and Tōru had evinced. Wataru’s glance shone with a gentler excitement, although his eagerness was undeniable. When our horizontal gymnastics began, two revelations happened in rapid succession. Short and stocky Wataru had a long, girthy presence within his boxers. No sooner had I begun to question whether I would be able to incorporate him did Wataru make his objective, my second revelation, clear: “I want you to fuck me.”
“Really?” I blinked.
Wataru took the most rigid part of me to hand, using his palms to measure from base to tip. “At least twenty centimeters.”
I sputtered in confusion. “But your dick is bigger than mine.”
“Fuck me.” His smile emphasized his insistence, and he pushed my shoulders back into the mattress, rendering me supine. Any hesitations my lack of insertive experience engendered vanished into pointlessness. My assumptions about being the erastês—the one who desires—and not the erômenos—the one who is desired—flew from my mind as Wataru lowered himself onto me.
It had taken me three partners—Rick, Jun, and then Tōru—to understand that the receptive role needed more from me, educationally. Within his small Subaru, Tōru offered a paradise by his dashboard light, and doubts about my ability to viscerally honor someone’s desire for me finally vanished along with my virginity. Wataru illuminated a different truth upon my mattress, however. The erastês need not be the insertive partner. Wataru embodied eros, the physical manifestation of love at the, pardon the metaphor, root of both erastês and erômenos. And his desire for me was wholly receptive. The this or that I had believed to comprise sex began to melt into any and all.
The embodiments of erastês and erômenos are not binary states, nor are insertion and reception. Wataru’s gift to me was a different vision of sex, where partners exist as fluctuating combinations, as spectra of loving and beloving—desiring in one moment, honoring desire in the next.
For multiple reasons, and as had been true for Jun and Tōru before him, Wataru and I never developed a relationship beyond what would now be known as friends with benefits. And despite my realization, despite Wataru’s gift, for the next three years, wherein I dated aggressively and adventurously, I settled into a sexual role that centered on insertion. The gay Japanese men who made my acquaintance were patently curious about Caucasians, and when they asked after my centimeters, I met the market demand.
The American Pharmacy in Tōkyō’s Yūrakuchō neighborhood kept me supplied with condoms, and I hosted regular, if not repeat, visitors at my apartment. Gratefully, my neighborhood assumed I was offering English lessons: “Repeat after me: sixty-nine; blow job; rimming; fuck.” However, none of my guests needed tutoring in the use of that last word.
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The corporeality of those three years of unencumbered, although sheathed, sex imparted a new lesson, aside from the realization that condoms do not protect against crabs (although gay friends willing to shave every hair from your body helped a lot): tops needed an education, too. Although the balance between insertive and receptive physical desires fluctuated continually, cycling together with my embodiment of both the erastês and erômenos emotional desires, I found that I worked best as a top when the bottom was willing to guide me. Wataru, for example, had excelled at such guidance; we created ecstatic rhythms as a result.
But just as reception did not—forgive my verb choice—come naturally to me, neither did insertion. To compensate, my foreplay skills accelerated in proficiency. Not only did partners compliment my kissing, but some even shared stories of my techniques with curious friends, granting me new popularities.
And yet, each guest considered the delights of foreplay as mere preliminaries. Porn had set my expectations: fucking was paramount! No doubt my passing paramours had had similar instructions from Japanese erotica as well. After all, billions of people find fucking both exciting and fulfilling, two adjectives that are perhaps too on-the-nose. I had converted my emotional avoidance into physical expressions of sexuality, and although that jury-rigging only worked sometimes, I didn’t yet have any other solution to consider.
This is not to say that I disliked either my endeavors or those who joined me. Something lacked, though, and an external force arose to wake me from the delusion that permitted me to repeat encounters (with non-repeating partners) without ever realizing the result I deeply wanted: a relationship that embodied not only all components of eros, physical desiring, but the embrace of emotional desiring as well.
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That external force? The friends who had increasingly considered my morning-after phone calls, my exultations of “at last, I’ve found the one!” to be naïf, shallow, and—cruelest of all—boring. One friend in particular issued an ultimatum: “No more sex on the first date.”
Surprising everyone, I agreed to that stricture. A dullness ensued, and I struggled to find enough work and hobbies to pretend I didn’t resent my voluntary celibacy. A coworker mentioned a late November Shintō market festival in Asakusa, one of my favorite Tōkyō neighborhoods. The festival, an excellent distraction, honored the Shintō deity, Ōtorisama, and the market sold amulets of good fortune called kumade, a rake in the shape of a bear’s paw, festooned with papier-mâché signifiers of luck and money. I logged onto GayNet Japan, the dial-up bulletin-board service for rainbow-dwellers like me in the greater Tōkyō metropolitan area, and I shared the festival details.
Eight people expressed interest, and I created a meeting time and location.
On the festival date, at five in the evening, I stood at the meeting location, bundled in a long wool jacket. The location had been carefully selected for its obviousness: a police box squatting beside the gate to Sensōji, the oldest Buddhist temple in Tōkyō. And yet, of the eight respondents, only one person arrived, a lankily tall young man, his gloved hands deep in the pockets of his pea coat.
“Brian?”
I nodded.
“It’s me. Hiro.”
I smiled. Hiro and I had chatted in that lagging way that bulletin board services permitted—only eight people could connect at once, and responses were only instantaneous if the two of you had happened to log in at the same time—but I hadn’t met him in person until that night.
The crowds coalesced into thick tides of Tokyoites as we approached the alleyways where the renowned festival amulets were sold. I glanced behind me as Hiro’s gloved hand clamped a handful of wool from my jacket.
What Ganymede had considered gnosis I now, in my fifth year in Japan, understood as satori: the arrival of a sudden clarity. The desiring I lacked went beyond erastês and erômenos, the children of eros. The sexual longings within me had siblings based on philia, the love to eros’ lust.
When Hiro’s eyes met mine amid that late November throng, when he rose up to whisper into my ear, “I don’t want to lose you,” the need to desire and to be desired expanded just as my concerns about that most pointless of binaries—topping and bottoming—vanished. What’s more, the closets that had locked my emotions away and had isolated me from joy broke open. I suddenly found myself home in Hiro, desired by him and desiring him, loved by him and loving him, welcoming grief and elation and all points in between.
In the years and then decades that followed, our coupledom crossed the Pacific—Hiro followed me to Seattle in 1998, five years after our first accidental date, and we married in 2013, nearly twenty years beyond his first whisper to me. We continued to build that home in him, that home in me, our homes becoming more whole than either of us had imagined, never lost.
I love that you found love through this deep discovery into your desires, Brian. That was so beautifully written. I'm so happy for you and your spouse!!
Wow, this was such a beautiful piece….Our experience with desire speaks so much to the deepest needs we have. And oof, that last line 🥹