When my boyfriend walks through the door of our apartment every night, he strips.
While I’m still on a Google Hangout with my colleagues, there he is — all of him — in our kitchen, hanging out. It would be pretty funny, or pretty sexy, if it weren’t 2020, and if he weren’t a new doctor on the Covid-19 wards at a hospital in New York City. Such a shame.
And so, we take care to avoid each other as he heads to the shower, miming attempts at small talk until his scrubs are stashed in plastic and his patients are rinsed off him. Only then, once that’s done, do we kiss. Those who may have infected his body, and therefore mine, can be forgotten until tomorrow morning. More or less.
Though my boyfriend recently graduated from medical school and is only weeks into his 12-hour shifts, and the scrubs and the stench of rubbing alcohol are unique to this pandemic-consumed spring, I’ve been here before: saddled with the knowledge that my partner’s body has been exposed to someone’s else’s. Proud — smug, even — of the ability to sanction this. But somewhere, behind the conviction, it stings just a little.
We were here on the eve of the new year, in fact: in those warm and fuzzy final days of 2019 when we could make silly predictions like “This year is going to be better — I can feel it!” and throw back enough drinks so that we could maybe, barely, believe it.
It was with this booze-addled uncertainty that we attended a bathhouse-themed party in Brooklyn. The event was a throwback to the glittering ’70s, when gay men across New York City would congregate and often consummate their desires, then taboo, at underground saunas, sometimes to the crooning of Bette Midler.
After two and a half years of monogamy (save for the occasional, permitted dance floor kiss with a stranger), my boyfriend was curious about touching other men’s bodies.
It was a discussion we’d had before, and one which I knew, despite my stiff upper lip, was something of a sore spot. To put it plainly, I was jealous — a very square sentiment for a liberal, cosmopolitan area. If L.G.B.T.Q. freedom means dismissing heterosexual relationship models that have combusted time and time again, why settle for monogamy? At the very least, why not settle for a night on the town, delighting in a little extracurricular fun that we could both, ostensibly, enjoy?
I had been there before in a previous relationship. My last boyfriend and I had sketched out our rules and started slowly. Unsurprisingly, we found ourselves scribbling way outside our flimsy little lines.
He saw something beautiful in the freedom, as many people do who thrive in open relationships. I respected him for it, and I respected us for trying. But, ultimately, I couldn’t see past the scribble. That was the biggest surprise.
Back when my ex and I first started incorporating other people into our sex lives, there wasn’t such a thing as PrEP, a daily pill to prevent H.I.V. transmission. There were only good old-fashioned condoms and caution, and we used both religiously. Still, each and every time one of us came home to our apartment from our increasingly independent trysts, we scrubbed up.
But condoms and soap suds can’t erase the sensation of someone else’s skin, or breath, or warmth, or presence. They linger long after goodbyes are exchanged, or lights are flicked off. And, I suppose, that’s the whole point: the electric tingle of the new, the endorphin rush of being desired by someone who won’t ever discover your insecurities.
From my own experience, I knew that the only way to satisfy the tingle was to tempt it. Which is why I found myself, last December, clasping my current boyfriend’s hand in the back of an Uber, hurtling toward whichever far corner of Brooklyn was game enough to convert an aboveboard sauna into an after-hours, clothing-optional party.
“It’s your Hanukkah present,” I said. And he accepted, gratefully, graciously, after a few dinnertime discussions in which I voiced my hesitations and we settled on our rules.
“Remember, it’s you and me,” my boyfriend assured me before we left the house that night, summoning me from my yearly attempt at situps. But besides the two of us, clutching cartoonishly tiny hand towels to our waists, there were scores more: beautiful, robust men ranging from their 20s to their 50s, indistinguishable beneath the steam.
There’s a reason this kind of undeniably sexy scene is usually relegated to fantasy, and that’s because, despite so many advances, it is. Sooner or later, a pathogen ruins the party. By the late ’90s, many of the storied gay bathhouses across the country had disappeared. And just when a resurgence seemed possible with the mainstreaming of miracle pills with names like Truvada and Descovy, the coronavirus came along.
The party went as I expected: He really enjoyed it; I really didn’t. True to his word, he made every attempt to beckon me from the bar to the back rooms, where we could explore the scene in tandem. True to my inability to shock myself, I deferred.
But we took a car home, showered and shared our experiences between bites of dollar pizza from around the corner. We fell asleep that night in each other’s arms, grateful for the chance to express ourselves fully.
Still, in less sure-footed moments at the end of last year, I sometimes conjured an alternate universe in which I was enough; in which the lovely, delicious life my boyfriend and I had built within our diminutive apartment was the be-all and end-all; in which I wouldn’t have to share his body with others for a little while longer.
And then, with the turn of the clock, it was 2020.
Now my boyfriend and I don’t have to negotiate another bathhouse party for the foreseeable future. That tangle of bodies, coursing with PrEP and pride and the perception that there was no reason to fear, belongs to another time. Just as that party was trying to conjure a moment before AIDS, in which men didn’t need to be medicated in order to stave off a viral enemy.
The freedoms won by the scientific gains of recent decades have been put on pause along with everything else.
These days, by order of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, I’m the only person my boyfriend is allowed to be intimate with. Until recently, nearly every waking hour was spent just feet apart from each other, recognizing the simple comforts of our home in light of the swirl of suffering around us. I’ll admit that there were times it felt like some unspoken fantasy, summoned under hellish circumstances.
But my little Eden of insecurity was short-lived — and good riddance. He’s now spending 12-hour days at the hospital, as one of the local medical students who volunteered to start their intern year early in order to swell the ranks of doctors fighting Covid-19. When he comes home at night, after the 7 p.m. clapping has subsided and the city is once again silent, he heads to the shower.
When I hear the slap of water on his skin, it hits me: His body doesn’t belong to me. It never did, and it never will. Even in a world in which I’m the only person allowed to have sex with him, his profession requires him to be closer to others than anyone else is allowed to be right now — and possibly for months to come. Sex traffics in fluids, but this virus deals in droplets, and he’s now well acquainted with them.
I’m aware how lucky he is to have access to personal protective equipment. And yet, it’s only a sheath. An N-95 mask can’t erase the sensation of someone else’s skin, or breath, or warmth, or presence. Their coughing, their sneezing, their pain.
There they are, all of them, on him. But until he washes them off, I can’t so much as stand six feet from him in the doorway. For all I know, they’ve already entered our bloodstreams. That’s the thing about sheaths: sometimes they slip.
But it’s a risk he needs to take. We all need him to take it, each and every one of us, and I’m unspeakably proud of him for doing so. Because, when this is said and done, we’ll all be able to touch each other without fear once again, in whichever circumstances make us feel most alive.
I’m ready for it.
Jeremy Allen is a senior staff editor in special sections at The New York Times.
