This move to switching sides was a long process in coming, and it was gradual enough that I didn't see the inevitability of it for a long time. I certainly was slow in seeing that it was what I wanted. I fought it for years—but not so consciously that I realized for some time that it even was a fight. I thought it was something just there as a choice I wasn't making because I wouldn't like the consequences. My life was fine without complete sexual satisfaction—or so I thought for the longest time.
The inkling that I was aroused by men—more so than by women, who, I'll acknowledge, I didn't have much trouble getting it up for as well—came in the years that I transitioned in New York from commercial ad photography of all varieties to fashion photography, first of women models and then, increasingly, of men as well. Slowly, nude photography drifted into this as an aside and, because it paid well and aroused me, I also photographed, tastefully posed, of course, sex acts and couplings for private collections. Initially these were of heterosexual couples, but they drifted into poses between women. Increasingly these became couplings between men. If I was aware that the solo and coupled poses of men aroused me more than others, I sublimated that. I managed to put that in the background for as long as I worked in New York. And, eventually, because there was a market for it, I was photographing only men.
I never, in New York, though, advanced to including myself in the photo shoots. I may have masturbated to copies of the photos later, but I'd done that with the photos of heterosexual couplings as well, and when I was working I was concentrating on the sensuality of the poses and acts themselves rather than the genders—or so I told myself.
That was where I met Caroline. She was a model who was really easy on the eyes and who had a husky southern accent—she was from a wealthy family in Charleston, South Carolina—that sent chills up my spine. She was somewhat of a Martha Stewart type—she had a highly successful southern-style interior design and culinary business—and had entered modeling as well by being her own spokesperson in commercial ad layouts and being encouraged to go from there into fashion modeling on the side. The modeling enhanced her home accents consulting business.
I first photographed her for the commercial layouts and then moved with her into the fashion model photography and then, at her invitation, into the more intimate poses. She let me know in no uncertain terms that she was available to me, and we started sleeping together somewhere along that route. She wasn't the only photographic subject I slept with, but they were all women. No matter how, eventually, I found I was aroused by men as well, I was so far into denial that I only slept with women during my years working in New York.
Caroline was the only one from that period of my life who I married as well, and, both of us seeking a change in our lives, we moved out of New York into a new, shared life. We bought a B&B in the long-time seaside resort town of Cape May, New Jersey, where I took on restoring an old six-bedroom Victorian mansion on Decatur Street, three blocks off the beachfront. I handled the management responsibilities, and Caroline decorated it, including furnishings and décor that was for sale, and took on the breakfast duties.
Cape May is a pretty gay town. The Realtor who sold us the Decatur Street Inn, Michael Beard, was gay—and made that obvious in catering to me more than Caroline while we were shopping for a house we could turn into a B&B. The local travel agent, Peter Philips, we connected with to help link the B&B with tourists was gay. He obviously was a couple with his assistant, Ergon Seljek. Even the couple who ran the B&B next to the one we opened, Alex Renard and Sean Temple, of Gaylords Inn, were gay—and they openly ran their small hotel as a gay-insistent facility, and almost to the point, maybe beyond the point, of being a gay bordello. This wasn't a change from the commercial art community I was involved in in New York City, but it was more pronounced here because it was an obvious subset of the Cape May community, and it was only here that I was welcomed into this circle and treated like one of them.
I was treated like one of them despite not having engaged in homosexual relations the whole time I lived in Cape May—or before that for that matter. But I obviously had progressed to the point that they were comfortable about my fundamental interests even if I wasn't. But even in Cape May it was nearly two years before Peter Philips slapped me in the face with reality and moved the issue to the front of my consciousness.
"I'm not telling you this because I want to have sex with you, Cliff," he'd said as we were sitting at the Avalon Coffee House on nearby Gurney Street, sipping beer and watching the people on the Cape May beach—the young men in their skimpy Speedos mostly. Peter was assessing them and I wasn't being committal. But I was ogling them as much as Peter was. "Unless I'm quite mistaken, you are a top just as I am, and so you're not for me. But you are aching for it, I think. And it's time for you to admit that."
Perhaps I'd had too much beer, because I opened up to him then. Life hadn't been good with Caroline for some months. We still dutifully had sex twice a week, but it seemed to be on a routine schedule now and to be more a form of physical exercise than ecstasy. Where once we'd readily agreed to any ideas the other had on running the B&B, we now both seemed to go out of our way to object to what the other one suggested. She didn't come out and accuse me of fucking men, but she'd stumbled on my photography "special" portfolios and seen how extensive they were, she knew I was comfortable with the likes of Peter and Ergon and Alex and Sean, and she dropped a jab or two here and there. In turn, I suspected she was having it off with a local restaurateur. We both realized, I'm sure, that we were headed toward a split, and our attitudes toward the B&B business now seemed more like holding our breaths and managing a holding action rather than thinking of building what we had into the future.
I told Peter about what weighed most on my mind. I told him of my visits to our attic and to the circular window overlooking the terrace and pool of the neighboring property, the extremely gay-male-friendly Gaylords Inn owned and run by Alex Renard and Sean Temple. The place was a tourist B&B, yes, but it went beyond welcoming gay male couples to providing paying guests with company, if they so wished and paid for it. I could only imagine what went on inside the blue Victorian mansion trimmed in pink. But out at the pool, everything happened, from full-body massage by a male masseur in the open-sided pool house to nude sunbathing and swimming . . . and sex . . . in the pool area—not only by couples but in multiple groups too. The proprietors, both hunks, helped provide the extra services.
That didn't put me off either Alex or Sean. Like Caroline, they mixed antiques in with their B&B décor that was for sale. If someone was looking for something in particular that they didn't have, they were quick to send them over to us. Also, if someone booked in their B&B who hadn't expected it to be exclusively for gay males, Sean would redirect them to us. Alex was the chef and he and Caroline got on famously and exchanged breakfast recipes. Sean was the manager, and if it hadn't been for his help with tips on running a B&B, I don't know how the Decatur Street Inn would have managed to stay in the black our first year.
For all that I could see, Alex and Sean were a happily married couple and balanced each other. That's more than I could say for Caroline and me, and I admit that I envied them. The truth was, though, that I envied them their setup over there next door even more. I didn't declare my interests to them—I admit to fantasizing about the tall, redheaded, burly, French-Canadian-extraction Alex, who obviously was the top of the couple, Sean being a breezy, laid-back California surfer type. Indeed, even to that point I was avoiding declaring it to myself. What I fantasized, though, was being Alex, with Sean submissive to my desires. But I think they knew I was attracted to them and they treated me like family. Being in denial didn't prevent me from going to the attic whenever I could and watching the activity in the pool area of the B&B next door.
"I have fought the urge to take my camera with me and to photograph the young men next door and what they were doing," I told Peter. "I still have the contact information for the private clients I photographed young men for in New York. They still would pay well, I know. But the men I photographed in New York were aware of what I was doing—and why—and they were paid well and signed releases. It would have been an unforgivable intrusion on Alex and Sean and their guests to photograph them. I could rationalized that the photos were just for me, I suppose, but . . ."
"But you still don't want to admit that you are aroused by this—seeing men with men live and in photographs."
"Yes, I suppose."
"Caroline? Caroline doesn't—?"
"No, she doesn't know. Not that she cares anymore. I think our time together is drawing to a close, Peter."
"That's a shame," he said. "But if the marriage is on the way out, there's no reason not to be moving toward where we both know you want to go. You're a handsome man, Cliff, and easy to be with. You deserve to turn to your natural inclinations."
"I don't know. I—"
