At 24, I moved from Cedar City, Utah, back to Germany. A gay Mormon was not just an oxymoron, but simply a moron. My hometown Kiel is known for being half the size of Hamburg’s cemetery, but twice as dead. All in all, this made for a strange journey into the gay world of fetish and SM that I found myself embracing. Without a map or a clue, I was baffled, though the images I pursued were as old as I could remember. How short is the distance between a Mormon temple and the sling in the piss damp basement of a bar? Contact ads abounded with enigmatic abbreviations – FF, TT, NS (what? national socialists?), CBT (what? cognitive behavioural therapy?), KV, AV, TS, TV… – I was gradually initiated into the language and the signs, which, at a time long past, gay men employed to recognise each other, to communicate their wishes, preferences and their identity to each other without risking prison. This language had been a secret code. When a stranger on the street asked me, “What does that red hanky mean?”, I replied, “If you need to ask, you don’t need to know”. It felt good!

I began to learn this language, as any gay man entering this darker, stranger, scarier scene does and I am a quick learner. After having lost everything I had built my life upon at 24 – my place at university, my scholarships, my imagined future in the US, my friends, my home in the Mormon Church, the picture I had so carefully cultivated of myself – I was comforted by this code, like a catholic is comforted by the familiar smell of frankincense or the sight of the cross. I felt a companionship in the company of men who knew this language. Shame turned into pride, being a stranger into an intiate, rootlessness into belonging. The language, its symbols and signs, became erotic in itself. TT? Oh, yeah, that turns me on! CBT? FF? Is that a red hanky? Tell me more! I started craning my neck in dark bars – was it a black or “just” a blue hanky in that bloke’s pocket? Hmmm.. a boot with white laces, and I had to see who it belonged to. Pumping heart, wet palms followed their owner into the dark corner at the back.

Contact ads in MR SM and TOM, which had previously puzzled me, became pornographic tableaux – a few letters, the mention of a few colours, the way a word was placed, a gloved hand – oh, fuck me!!

Now we are all fluent in that language. We click a button, we pull the credit card, we press ‘order’. Cruising for sex online or getting it off in a club or taking a bloke home boils down to a choice between delivery, take out and eating in. It could be Melbourne, Chicago, Paris or Berlin, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires or Nürnberg. Fetish sex is a sort of gay esperanto, spoken the world over. Whether hanky code, wardrobe – Wesco boots, Langlitz jacket, Rob waistcoat, Mr S muir cap,  Adidas trainers, CK underwear or Umbro football socks… – or the names of the clubs and bars – lab-oratory, the Hoist, Full Metal, Meat Market, the Eagle – or even the mention of recon, gaydar, gayromeo, barebackcity… we get turned on, we turn each other on, we understand each other. We know how to talk, to walk, to dress, where to go, who to look in the eye, what pill, what powder to have on which occasion. Every declination, conjugation, preposition, proposition, tense and conjunction we have mastered. “Experienced tops only, please!”

And yet, we still manage to connect… sometimes more so, sometimes less. We touch, we explore, for a moment or longer the whole world melts into one piece, we melt with it, no longer knowing where one ends or the other begins. We are all over each other, inside each other, saliva mixing, cum dripping, all men in the world obeying a higher order, a deeper impulse… oh my God! In a theme park of bars, beers, easyjet flights, clubs, shops and chests filled with toys we find ecstasy and belonging, abandonment and the promise to be “ourselves”. We are blasé about the most wonderful thing to hit us, and on occasion, we are ready to die for it. Our playgrounds are littered with the corpses of those who did.

I have no idea anymore what pictures I want to see or make. Another gleaming, steaming permutation of Tom’s or Robert’s? Another hunk, another perv, another cum whore, another stallion, another horny sesh? Be a sweetie, do me another line and see if I care. Whatever pictures they are or will be, I want the gaps in our horny fetish landscape, the parking lots, out-of-town shopping centres, the weeds growing in the cracks of our emotional pavements, the bus stops, the little old lady pushing her wheeled shopper home… Not sure what that is like translated into gay fetish sex, but I will have a look.