This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

The broad-shouldered, salt-and-peppered thirty-something stranger I recognized vaguely from an evening on U Street commanded me to open my mouth and stick out my tongue. More quickly than I’d come to expect in these situations, there was wrinkled plaid on the floor and firm, warm hand around my neck. A few minutes and fewer words later I found myself laying shirtless on a raised platform with a needle in my arm, cringing at the sound of a safety razor clearing hard-won chest hair off my torso in irregular patches like a Brazilian subsistence farmer at the edge of an especially musky tract of Amazon. The pain of submission would have been unbearable, were it not for the pills this same man had supplied me with a week before. Thirty unmentionable minutes later I was headed home, more relaxed and confident than I’d been in months and beaming an exhausted smile at the prospect of my next session.

By now you’ve probably guessed that, pursuant to TNG editorial standards, this is not a poorly exaggerated description of a kinky sexual encounter. It is instead a poorly exaggerated description of an EKG test I recently had done at my university health center. The affinities really are that striking, and that hot.

Unless you are a TNG reader who is (in order of increasing improbability) legally blind or straight, you know that gay men look at each other a lot. Really, like, a lot. And no small number of these glances have a loosely medical purpose: we’re checking out one another’s bodies all the time, making subtle judgements about physical fitness and immunological status in gyms, traffic circles, bedrooms, classrooms, and churches, and loving it all terribly. So what makes the clinical setting so different? If D.C.’s 17^th Street bars didn’t make you leave your tape measures, blood-pressure cuffs, and colonoscopes at coat-check, wouldn’t we all be using them to prod and probe each other in bathroom stalls and dark corners just to get a fuller sense of the bodies we were laying eyes and hands on? Or at least planning inventive colonoscopy video-lounge parties? (Shea van Horn, if you read this and run with it, I’d like free cover.)

A doctor’s office is so tricky because it’s one of the few places where you have to yield to another man’s (especially intense and critical) gaze, while being bound to neither return nor enjoy it. It’s the kind of disciplined space where your body is approached as a problem instead of a playground, where both you and your doctor have to look at and think and talk about your arms or bowels or ears or cock or whatever as if you were Cartesian eunuchs, floating minds coping with the faulty biological machinery you accidentally find yourselves trapped inside. Sex, being the most vivid reminder of the fact that this isn’t the case, has to be pushed aside altogether, or at least rendered in Latin terms to make it less sexy. A swollen vas deferens is manageable; any hint that you might want to get it unclogged the fun way is grounds for being referred to an elderly female urologist.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t any latitude for playfulness. But it has to be an especially coy and ambiguous kind, the sort you might indulge with a professor or a pastor, or with anyone you don’t know when CPAC is in town. I recall a few sincere attempts with the previously mentioned cardiologist: “You’re probably not used to having electrodes strapped to your chest” said (let’s call him- because we really have no choice, do we?) Dr. House, his proud silver mane radiating daddy-appeal in a way I thought only CNN production teams made possible. “You don’t know what I do on weekends” I said as seductively as an anxiety-prone undergraduate smeared with electroconductive jelly could manage (actually far less than you might think).

Gay men who do medicine seem just as reflective about this. A charmingly twinkish nurse practitioner (let’s call him – because we really have no choice, do we? – Dr. Howser) I saw for an earache and mistakenly cruised before I realized he would spend an hour putting cold metal things into the openings of my head broke down and giggled during the course of talking about my vaccination history. I can only assume this had something to do with how ridiculous the objectivizing medicalized gaze shows itself to be when horny young homos are on either end of it. That, or he knew that some shot I got in elementary school would cause debilitating late-onset autism by the time of my 26^th birthday.

To be sure, there are disadvantages to having people get to know your body and its problems before they get to know you. Dr. House knows that I have an occasionally leaky mitral valve,  Dr. Howser knows that I have almost dysfunctionally narrow eustachian tubes (indulge what diagnostic fantasies you may before consulting WebMD), and both know, for soundly medical reasons, that I have a relatively small penis for my height. They both might also know that some massive physiological defect of which I am blissfully ignorant could kill me at any moment, and for this reason would never be up for coffee plans, even if I worked up the courage to ask. This seems to me a small price to be paid for the opportunity to spend time, however briefly, with attractive, well-dressed, professionally successful gay men who regularly give me slips of paper which, in addition to bearing their names and daytime phone numbers, entitle me to prescription drugs (I imagine having older friends at HRC would be like this, but not covered by insurance).

Or maybe gay men have wildly satisfying sex with their physicians all the time, and I’m just unlucky . Patients, doctors – comment.

---

First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...

---