Sex vs. intimacy: why do so many gay people head for the door when the sex starts to look like love? Two writers, a man and a woman, share their tales of hooking up, growing up, and facing up to commitment. (The Sex Issue).

Star-crossed romance An Internet date becomes a lesson in how to hook up without connecting

In May I moved from Provincetown, Mass., to Los Angeles. The move entailed both a beginning and an end for me. It was the beginning of research for a book I'm writing--about stars and fans and the strange, paradoxically distant and intimate relationships they have with one another. And it was the end of a six-month period of celibacy. (If you've ever wondered whether P-town is quiet in the winter, there's your answer.) In the process of it all, I met a guy who helped me see some uncanny connections between this beginning and this end.

Through one of the more efficient Web sites for arranging sexual hookups, I received an E-mail from a man with a jacked-up online profile composed of hairy-alpha-muscle-jock-type words: all of my hot buttons abbreviated and concentrated into one. "Let's get together for some powerfucking," he wrote. His pictures were impressive, but it was the neologism that really caught my eye.

I took a few minutes to work on an alluringly laconic response. "Powerfuck," I wrote. "Now, there is a verb."

A while later he sent a second E-mail, reiterating his invitation and clarifying his term:

"Powerfuck (pou * er * fuk) v. 1. a rapid, piston-like form of sexual intercourse between males characterized by passionate noises and heavy sweating 2. sexual intercourse whose subtext is the expression, celebration, and/or testing of male power, both dominant and submissive 3. sexual intercourse with a world leader."

Considering the grunt-stupid online lingo most gay men use for arranging sexual encounters--"'Sup? ... s2r ... Into?"--this guy--I'll call him Jeff--was practically Byron. The next day he came to my apartment, and, piston-like, we explored the meanings of my new favorite word. Definitions 1 and 2 anyway. Tony Blair was unavailable for number 3.

Afterward, Jeff took a look at my bookcases and kept making little noises of recognition, lingering particularly on the histories of Hollywood. When he asked what I do for work and why I'd moved to L.A., he brightened even more. He works in the film industry, and his mind is stuffed full of the same anecdotes and images of movie stars that lodge in the memory of anyone who's the least bit starstruck.

"I love stories about fans," he said, and the ones he told me were all about stars' weariness at being expected to play, in real life, their on-screen personae. The first was about Joan Crawford. On the set of a television show in the 1970s, when Crawford's makeup man brought a friend of his--a longtime Crawford fan--to meet her, she imperiously interrupted the introduction: "What would I want to meet him for?"

"And why would she?" Jeff asked. The relationship was only in that guy's head. Why should she be expected to be the woman she was on-screen?"

He was lying with his head on my shoulder while we talked. I was running my hand through the hundreds of little blond curls on his head, developing a bit of a crush on him. He was articulate, funny, attentive, and the sex was all-time top 5 list-caliber, easy. I asked some indirect questions to find out his marital status. He smelled my intentions immediately and took the offensive.

"Hooking up online is perfect for me because I can have completely anonymous sex and then disappear back into the city," he said. He didn't sound angry or mean. He was calmly warning me to expect nothing from him. "I have no interest in and am not at this time capable of being in a relationship," he added. "Any hint of romantic intent will send me fleeing. And you'll be surprised at how much of that you'll find in L.A. The way we come together and flee. You should write about that."

Thinking about the conversation later, I realized that there are some striking similarities between the subject he suggested and the one I'm working on. Gay men who play the urban game of sex for sport, particularly those who do it in the fantasy world of pic-flickering Internet chat rooms and message boards, experience an imitation of intimacy that has a lot in common with the satisfactions that fans derive from their fixations on stars.

Both the fan and the guy cruising the Net spend their free time seeking a sense of companionship from people they do not know in one-sided relationships forged on imaginary or superficial interactions. Reading People and hooking up online are not always just hobbies. If we're not careful, the casual pastimes of being a fan or cruising online can protect us from having to do much serious exploring of what we're interested in or who we love or what we want to do with our lives.

Before we got dressed, I played part of a CD for Jeff--a new release of a campy, hilarious, pitiful interview with Joan Crawford live at New York's Town Hall in 1973. When she's introduced to the crowd, Crawford's first words after the applause dies down are, "I never knew there was so much ... love." In the pause between those last two words, her voice catches in an overwrought, theatrical little gasp, as if the power of that last word could undo her.

After Crawford's line, Jeff murmured, "No, you didn't know," a little sadly and a little portentously. He said it to the stereo speaker, but he might as well have been saying it to himself of, considering the hopes I'd started fabricating from a "powerfuck," to me.

Before he left I said, as coolly as I could, "You're really just going to disappear back into the city now? Those E-mails you wrote aren't the kind of thing that comes from someone who's phobic about romance. It was romantic. It was flirting."

His answer came disconcertingly quickly. "I play off my audience. Writing those E-mails wasn't flirting," he said. "It was showing off."

I held the door open for him as he left. Without making eye contact he said, "Thanks for the hospitality," as he crossed the threshold. He spoke in that high, stilted voice you use when you're quoting from a movie, to cue the person listening that the words aren't really yours.

Gross has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly.

RELATED ARTICLE: Running from monogamy 

In the salons of Paris, a woman learns she's not as liberated as she thought

BY RENATE STENDAHL

My upbringing was rather puritanical, which was typical for the middle classes in postwar Germany. By the mid '50s, however, Germany had resettled into getting rich and respectable. A new moralistic terror reigned: That of "good manners" and cleanliness. The education of a girlchild was confined within the corset of sexual ignorance, fear, and shame. I remember earnest discussions with my mother and girlfriends about "waiting for the right man." I had no idea that there was anything like masturbation for a woman until I was 21 and peeked at the Kinsey Report.

By that time, my intimate relations with men and my unfulfilled yearnings for women had thrown me into an existential despair. I was part of a small group of mostly male intellectuals and artists who considered me their muse or possible lover, but never their equal. Sexuality, as I experienced it, was consensual rape, involving people who were clueless about anything concerning the body and its feelings. My compliance with the dictates of the feminine role was "perfect," as my entire education as a girlchild intended it to be, bringing me to the edge of despair. The denial of my truth as a thinking, feeling sexual human being seemed to mirror the entire country's denial of its own painful truth. I knew if I ever wanted to think and move and breathe freely, I had to become an exile.

When I settled in Paris, at 23, I met the first (at least to my knowledge) real, live lesbian I had ever encountered. We became friends, and a few years later, confessed our attraction. Literally overnight, my life began to make sense. In this first night of love I came to my senses in every sense of the term. It was the beginning of a long journey out of feminine sexual victimhood and into female sexual agency.

This voyage of awakening to my own body and self was soon shared by the many newly minted feminists gathering in Paris. Everyone suddenly was on a "voyage of women becoming," as the American feminists had taught us to call it. Paris, where I spent almost 20 years, provided the sexual challenges and sexual healing I needed. The city dazzled me as a place where women were comparatively "masculine" and men "feminine," and where sex was mythically romanticized and celebrated--among lesbian-feminists as much as among heterosexuals. The people I sought out were extroverted, uninhibited, playful; the women were astonishing in the agility of their minds, their verbal power, their sexual daring. If I wanted to be part of this glittering, brilliant, romantic world, I had to change from the inside out. Something in me resonated with what I perceived as irresistible freedom, even before the sexual revolution and the feminist movement broke the ground and created new concepts for this all-encompassing liberation.

After many years of directing my own sexual education in Paris, I came to see myself as a "liberated woman," or what some perhaps would call a promiscuous adventurer. There were times when I walked through the streets dressed as a boy, lining up with the men in front of Arabian bordellos to peek into a courtyard filled with women. In this disguise, I dared go to pornographic movies in the racy Pigalle district. I exchanged amorous glances with gay men in the Metro. I loved this role. I loved being followed by gay men through the streets.

The earliest days of the feminist movement had featured sexual orgies, and my interest in exploring threesomes (or more) remained consistent. Like most of my feminist sisters in Paris, I scorned monogamy. One of my passionate relationships had turned into a 13-year friendship, but I was convinced that one woman could never satisfy my needs; that even the best meeting of likes and tastes, temperament and intellect, creative endeavors and artistic visions would end up sexless and boring after about two years. I practiced a rigorous division between mind and body, emotional and sexual needs, convinced that they could never be brought together. Just before I left Paris, I was having a regular affair with an Italian woman whenever we happened to meet up. I had a long-term romantic liaison in Zurich, a dependable erotic friendship in Hamburg, and a postsexual life companion in Copenhagen. A number of us were planning to move to the south of France together to build a creative center for women.

Then a woman appeared: An American who laughingly claimed that I would never find life with her boring. I accepted the challenge and set sail for California--another culture and language--and plunged into the risks and perils of serious committed monogamy, in which French feminist culture had not particularly specialized.

As I write this, 16 years of this relationship have passed. Indeed, it has not been boring. I had to recognize that the consciousness-raising and emotional engagement needed to maintain a fulfilling monogamous relationship are all-consuming. It took intensive learning about myself and my lover, as well as persistent struggle, to undo my past and its false beliefs and skepticism. Many of my old inhibitions resurfaced now that I faced the risks of sexual intimacy. The same, of course, was true for my lover, and there were times when both of us engaged in serious therapy in order to understand ourselves and what we were going through with each other.

To sum up "where I speak from": I can say that my initial skepticism about monogamy has turned into an optimism mixed with persistent amazement about what is possible between two people who like and love each other, are a match for each other, and are committed to telling each other the truth to the best of their capacity.

Adapted by permission from Love's Learning Place: Truth as Aphrodisiac in Women's Long-Term Relationships (EdgeWork), [c] 2002 by Renate Stendhal.