The VIP room, tucked in the back of a large nightclub. People coming and going, making deals, hanging out. A very tall and narrow space with spot lighting that, due to the heat and cigarette smoke, generates a milky haze. I am standing in this room, shirtless. A club promoter, who I had only just met that evening, pulls my pants down, lowers himself to his knees, and takes me into his mouth. He works on me with quiet determination. My skin, slick with oil and sweat, shines under the spotlights. I spread my arms straight out to my sides in a gesture of surrender, or of heroic conquest — though with my pants bunched at my feet, I hardly look like a champion. Yet somehow I do seem privileged: the chosen one, anointed. The promoter kneels before me in a position of subservience, and this offers me the feeling of dominance. Yet, at the same time, I am the one who is vulnerable, weakened though the public display of my nakedness and hardness. Strength and weakness, private and public, back and forth: the promoter works on me with the regularity of a machine. Five minutes? One hour? Awash in the moment, time and space are warped. The volume of the room expands. The pleasure spreads through my body and into the social space around me; or rather, it comes from the outside in, circulating through me and back out into the social environment. If identity is social, coming from the outside, then perhaps pleasure is too. Is that why masturbation is never enough? One always wants a stage. Sometimes it is onset through the simplest means: a lens, a text message, a glance. Desire requires an architecture, whether real or imaginary. Secret spaces, performative arenas, labyrinths. Ways of looking, ways of attracting, ways of belonging. The nightclub is one such construct. One might go there for the possibility of sex, but after a time, the sexual act itself becomes pointless. It is public-ized, promoted, distributed throughout the connective space that the architecture creates. And this is ultimately why we sign on.
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The texts in this column were written by Jordan Crandall.