The Men Who Buy Me

The first message that stayed with me wasn't about sex.

It said: "Can we just hang out?"

No fantasy. No list. Just that. I read it twice, sure it had been meant for someone else. Then I understood he was asking something harder than it looked. Can I need this and not feel stupid for needing it?

People hear "escort" and picture something that starts and ends with sex. Sometimes they're right. Mostly they're missing everything else the men want. The parts that have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with not having to perform.

Because it isn't the men you'd assume. It's the dependable ones. The ones everyone else counts on to be fine.

Most of them are gay. Some out for decades. Others have spent a lifetime making sure no one will ever know, and gotten so good at it that the hiding stopped feeling like hiding and started feeling like who they are. More are married than I expected. Not because they don't love their wives, but because a life is rarely as tidy as the story a man tells about his own.

One was a priest. Seventy-two, Catholic, and he told me plainly he'd never believed in God a day in his life. He became a priest because he knew he was gay as a young man, and the collar was the one thing that would stop his family asking why he never married. It bought him seventy years of not having to explain himself.

He didn't want sex. He wanted to be touched. So I gave him a massage, and that was the whole booking. A man who had spent seven decades making sure no one ever put a hand on him, paying, finally, to be touched by another man.

The next day he booked me again, back to back, and cooked dinner for me. That was when he showed me his photo albums. Old photographs, some of them fifty years old. Boys he'd had crushes on in seminary, their names still right there on his tongue. He'd carried them that whole time. He was shy about it, and then he wasn't.

That's the thing you learn quickly. A man can build an entire self around the version everyone knows. Husband. Father. Priest. The dependable one. Then he lets the act drop for a little while, exhales like he's been holding that breath for a lifetime, and starts talking. Not because I'm special. Because for once he doesn't have to edit himself.

The skill it takes is worth something. Not because it fixes anything. Loneliness doesn't get fixed. But it lets a man set it down for an hour and remember he's allowed to put it down at all.

The bookings are stranger and gentler than anyone imagines. One man hired me to sit beside him at an Anglican service. Two and a half hours. I'm not of that faith and told him so. It didn't matter. He just didn't want to be the one man there with no one beside him. So I sat beside him, and that was the whole job.

Another booked me for a night and took me to the best dinner I've ever eaten. Afterward we went back to his hotel, talked half the night, and slept in the same bed. No kiss. No sex. Just conversation and another person there.

He was early forties, successful, the kind of busy that eats a man's whole life. This was his first vacation in years, and he'd spent it on a two-hour drive to a city he barely saw to sit across a table from someone he didn't know. I found out later, from another escort, that he'd booked him the next day too. They spent it eating Taco Bell in the hotel room and talking. No sex. Two escorts, back to back, and all he wanted from either of us was company. I don't think he knew another way to ask for it.

Then there was the one who booked me for two hours and knew exactly what he wanted. Mid-fifties. Handsome enough that he could be selling sex, and I told him so. He said that was the point. If he hooked up, the other person might fall in love. He'd been in love once. His husband. Nine years gone. He booked escorts so it would stay a transaction. So no one could reach him.

Early on, I kissed him, and he went completely still. Not uncomfortable. Somewhere else entirely. He hadn't been kissed since his husband died.

We never got to what he'd booked. We spent the two hours talking, kissing, holding each other. When it ended he didn't ask for the money back, and I wouldn't have given it. I never saw him again. I think it scared him, getting the thing he'd paid to avoid. I still think about him. About how much a man can carry for nine years while everyone agrees he's doing well.

Every booking has a moment where the performance falls away. Over dinner, or on a walk when he's in no hurry to turn back, or in the pause after he says something he hadn't planned to say. Then the reason we met stops being the point. He stays longer. Some evenings end with a hug and a thank you and nothing else, because somewhere in the middle he found something he needed more than the thing he'd booked.

That's what people miss. They think it's about sex or being wanted. Sometimes it is. Far more often it's about permission. Permission to want another man without explaining it. To be held without earning it first or feeling ashamed after. To be young at seventy, or kissed after nine years, or simply not alone in a pew for one afternoon.

They think they're buying a body. Mostly they're buying relief. A break from performing, from hiding, from holding up a version of themselves that got too heavy to carry alone.

The evenings almost always ended the same way. A hug. A quiet thank you. Sometimes a message the next morning saying he'd slept better than he had in months. Then he'd go back to a life where no one knew he'd come at all.

Not every man is one of these four. Most who write me only say what they want done to them, and never ask who's on the other end. Those I turn down. I take the ones who want to know who I am as much as they want anything else. That filtering is most of the work, and the part I'll be glad to put down.

I think this chapter is closing. I don't say it with certainty, only that I feel it the way you feel weather change before it arrives. I'll miss it more than I expected. Not the bookings. The men. The four, and the ones like them, who let me see what they show no one else.

And I'll miss who I got to be. The one person in their life who wasn't asking them to perform. Who took care of them and asked nothing back but the fee, and sometimes forgot even that. It's a strange privilege, being trusted with the version of a man everyone else in his life has been denied.

People think the performance is the sex.

It isn't. It's everything these men do all day to avoid needing any of this. The hour they buy is the one time it stops.