Gay men in sauna

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Re-published with permission from The Inkling. Follow the author on Twitter here. My time at Cambridge is teaching me to analyse everything around me: the unquestioned peculiarity of language, the invisible codes of social behavior, the gross ethics of sexual intercourse, the unwritten laws of friendship… you name it.

For those not in the know, a gay sauna is as an underground complex of showers, saunas, steam rooms and sex booths where gay men go to relax and have totally anonymous sex of all sorts. So why did I go down in the first place? Desire just fuels more desire, which accumulatively fuels more and more.

This is how one might explain episodes of Bestiality, say, or orgiastic festivals occurring from the time of Dionysius to the literature of Marquis de Sade. And how wrong I was. I have never been so turned off and un-aroused in the entirety of my human existence.

I left completely untouched and totally unsatisfied.

Uncloaking Desire: Experiencing the Gay Sauna

All signifiers of desire are dispensed with for a very literal, non-suggestive-experience. And quite frankly, I missed the suggestion, the sexual politics, the pre-amble that comes before actually going to bed with someone. Always makes one giddy to flirt indirectly through a discussion of music or literature before you eventually get to have sex?

Every signifier of personality is also chucked away with at the door — the cloak we are so used to sauna everyday, signifying the kind of person we are through choice of clothing, gesture, accessories, idiosyncratic vocabulary etc… is incinerated the second you pick up your towel. While for some this is potentially men — no longer having to depend on external signifiers to seem or feel attractive — my problem was that I totally missed the cloak; it really is what I find most attractive in someone.

And entertaining the idea of sex is sometimes just as great or even more so than the phenomenological reality of actually having it. On the same topic, however, I personally tend to feel gay attractive when in control of my sexual signifiers — using the art of conversation, sartorially configuring my appearance etc. This may all sound totally contrived, but I genuinely think everyone does it on some level.

I just think there should be SOME sort of imaginative delay before it completely comes off. And was I happy or saddened by my experience at the sauna? Have I just watched The Notebook just one too many times? Search Icon. Search for:. Arrow Icon. Breaking News. General News. Box Office.