I recently relocated to New York after years as a gadabout abroad. While somewhere specific globally, I would find myself in some elusive elsewhere experientially, as my world became one photo op after another by some famed monument, supported by a hoard of whoring.
Somehow, in the wake of prescribed want and perpetual movement, I landed in Hell’s Kitchen, hell-bent on making meaning, less money-minded and more mindful of the man with me in a given instant. Here in my homeland, I have come to appreciate again and again the benefits of having been an outlander, a border-walker, one intimate with the margins, and the forbidden beyond – a man broadened by the perception of how he came to typify money as it relates to sex and, ultimately, how sex and money now signify his interpretation of well-being.
In the West, we tend to manufacture experience, treating currency as concrete, mindlessly multitasking while we discount that, under the surface, funds solely serve to current wealth around. Money abounds, though we frequently fail to accept that wealth – yes, well-being – is the multi-faceted outpouring we can all open-handedly access as it bubbles up from abundance to a momentary – monetary – exchange of meaning.
As with most sex workers – queer, male, white, American, or otherwise – I was reared in the lower classes. Like most people, I initially approached my profession as a pecuniary measure, then constructed my character around it. Now, superficially, I’m simply a stiffened product, another purveyor of stifling consumerism. But, of course, there’s more to the story than that.
Unlike the majority of sensual service providers, I approached this vocation as an idealist, motivated by the prospect of endless titillation. I enjoyed European forays of tender-but-soul-sucking bouts of illegal hole-fucking to finance vacations in Africa and Asia. But I gradually chose to channel the effort into working through my own previously disregarded shame.
Over these past five years, I’ve come to regard myself as more fitted for the task at hand the more I permit my craft to shape itself – and reshape the man I am. I have gone from having inherited a synthesis of advantages that facilitated cross-cultural, intercontinental vagabondage, just to wash back up on America’s shores and find my exchanges effortless and intensely connected.
An exile on the island of Manhattan, coming to know myself, my tribe, and my culture anew, I feel more a well-to-be man than well-to-do, in a historically proletariat profession. I principally go down on the upper classes, encouraging surrender during services rendered, all the while tucked away from the comings and goings of a gridlocked city. Opened up in a trade mired by exploitation, an inevitable mutuality of healing transpires as I cast myself, exposed, as each man’s equal. Here, he and I deferentially, desirously venerate our vulnerable selves in welcomed togetherness, embodying a cultural undercurrent of the transition from attachment to symbols toward oneness with the Source. Money, on balance, is not wealth. And sex, by itself, certainly isn’t love. Neither guarantees well-being.
And it seems to me that as we wage war against sexual actualization, we are actually raging in opposition to ourselves. And the more we position ourselves in a striving for money, the more we discredit our inherent wealth and drive ourselves away from the Source.
Paralleling the perception driving the bulk of financial dealings, the mass of my lovers truly believe they are coming to purchase what they lack, and are shocked to find themselves in an expansiveness of man-handling and soul-healing – shining a light on what they already have access to: their fractured, perfect selves.
Thousands of men have witnessed the presentation of “Simply Adam,” as I’ve branded myself for rat-race stopping points such as RentBoy.com, where gentlemen are further tipped over onto a frantic treadmill of hedonistic window-shopping, an erratic eroticism with promises of frenetic flings. A horde of men, framed as extraordinarily handsome common hookers, hustling in unnecessary competition, conforming to fit in uniformed boxes, boxed in an uncropped, photo-shopped premise of deposited fulfillment, all promising to cater to a craving for action, servants to the zealous siren-song of our zeitgeist, propelled and deposed by technological distraction. Yet, one by one, these seekers come undone as I guide their transcendence from consumerist options to inhabit an unprecedented aliveness with a safe man, in a contained space.
In surrendering any fear of financial scarcity, any personal identification with influence or power, I am empowered to welcome these men into an expanse that surpasses segmented longing, fiscal lust, and the repressiveness of pride as it all crumbles into a sweaty clump of humbled humanity. Here, under the covers, presence takes precedence over productivity, and purpose triumphs over a proclivity for Ponzi profits. We open ourselves up to take lip-locked charge as we flip and flop into chanced contact with all that lay within us, and beyond the bedroom. In a cancellation culture, where plans can change on a dime, time with each other highlights the going-nowhereness of hedonism, and points a man to the chosen somewhereness of a provoked happenstance that evokes the someoneness of our uncommodified, undeferred selves.
From the massage table to the mattress pad, I supply men the Almighty Dick as a model of mannish passion as they relinquish any demand for that which they initially wished to receive with the Almighty Dollar.
We renounce all that old shame in our shared “otherness,” and all the socially established blame placed on sex and money, as one recounts the other; he enters me, and we intertwine, freely exploring our common queerness, wielding well-being in yielding to our sensual selves.
Money is not wealth. Sex is not love. They are expressions of the Source and evidence it when set in motion with intention.
And, far from flat out getting paid so another can get laid, I act as one measure of a general testament to a technology-based action that enables people privileged to be within prosperous societies to encompass what they love, inhabiting a newfangled honesty that untangles old traditions that dictate what belongs where and who can do – and have – what.
Long perceived as an emasculated outcast on my knees, I recast myself within the continuing narrative of the world’s oldest profession, freely applying my ability to be fully present in pleasing and being pleased by my fellow man. I am not a golden boy to my clients, but rather a human being who mirrors a queer, masculine distinctiveness. And I’m not working for the money that allows me to do what I already am called to do (promoting whole-humanness in a society that objectifies and divides). Contrarily, the money merely creates the space I need to heed the call.
In our collapsing economy of specialization, what I do is more integrated than it outwardly appears. I am not a slave seeking to save, trading up a belabored today for some belated someday. I reject this inhumane severing of any reverence for whole-beingness!
Man after man encounters himself through me, and he gladly swipes plastic after I slide myself in, handing him over to ecstatic stupefaction. In such heated positioning, I serve to support mankind in this full-throated advocacy for the acquisition of prowess, be it bodily, budgetary, or for the betterment of some other sphere of a well-rounded life. Erotic empowerment proves to be one mighty ripple in the wellspring of well-being, and I sell personal wealth in the form of myself! Backing this new norm, I teach each man to buy more firmly into the belief that he is enough. Indeed, that we, as a queer collective, are enough.
As time passes, it becomes increasingly apparent to me that sex and status and stuff are being used less for the greater good and more as counterfeits of passion and power and prosperity themselves. We think, “If only I can have that, then I can do that, then I can be this!” when we already are the things we seek. There is no “do” or “have” about it. We’ve simply got to be it!
Perhaps in this commoditized age it’s time to wake up to the reality that time itself is our only true reserve, and that we are best off employing life as a space-provider, co-creating waves of wakefulness within it. Giving more than we receive only to accept ourselves in unforeseen ways. This flow is our moral obligation to ourselves.
When sex is seen through the lens of a puritanical striving for blamelessness, it is flaccid at best, and money as a mere byproduct of specialization falls short. We conflate them with what they represent, and in doing so reject a ready awareness of steady well-being.
And in an aberrant era that so fearfully designates what money can and cannot be used for, and how sex should and should not be come upon, we are attempting to dignify ourselves through outdated standards of what we cannot do and have as opposed to having faith in all that we are. What does this say about our understanding of ourselves as fundamentally wealthy, sexual beings, embracing what we can do and have as it makes sense to us as individuals and as a cooperative? When the body-feeler and soul-healer are pushed on the periphery, we’re only pulling away from the Source.
I, for one, would be remiss not to admit feeling soulful with my holes full, treasured for the wholly immeasurable man I am with the men whose spaces I fill.
I am wealth itself, a living embodiment of love, emboldened to serve my community in service to myself. A sex symbol serving as a body-mind-soul figure who points men toward the potentiality of presence amidst a habit of grabbing and groping, selling out and buying in, as he and I…and he and I…hope to consume and produce consciousness in a conscious way.
In a society where prestige too often trumps purpose, I consider myself the flushest man on earth as, with flushed flesh and heart enlarged, I steer queer men to their higher selves as opposed to lowering myself to meet them at some base, socially-imposed level. Giving these guys what they need in the guise of what it is they think they want. Teaching them what to desire, and how to be desirous and desirable as I make capital in the momentary, monetary “Capital of the World.”
I believe the work I do is monumental in that it navigates what has historically been on the fringe and impinges it upon an everyday, everyman’s knowledge of the Source. On the edge of the status quo, I work with excited parts to wondrously incite the whole as the journey goes inward.
I am what I do, and I do what I have. And it all comes back around. I am love abundantly expressed and experienced. I am enough. He is enough. We are enough! And there you are. And here I am.
Let’s employ life’s symbols to better approach the Source.