Touchy-feely.

Rod Hagen's First Person column "At Your Service" [August 15] mirrors my own experience over the past 30 years. My medium is massage. I've been surprised how many men are starved simply for a kind touch, until I reflected that, aside from sex, a lot of males don't get touched, period, after about the age of 10. I've been surprised at the emotional baggage my friends bring to the massage table and how much they are able to leave there.

You're breaking journalistic ground with your frank consideration of sex workers, and you could do worse than take a cross-cultural look at all of the human needs that chive the business. There is an enormous distance between ending up dead in a ditch somewhere and the sorts of things Rod Hagen writes about and I have experienced, but it's all connected. I'm inclined to think the connection is that it's all something we keep in the dark because we don't know how to talk about it.

Maybe you can start. You have my admiration and respect for the work you're doing.

ROBIN WILL Portland, Ore.

Hagen really seems to think he's doing some great public service when actually he is fueling his own ego by engaging in sex with anyone with a wallet. He writes after his first trick e-mailed him, "I hadn't imagined how much better a little attention would make him feel." I think the idolization made Hagen feel better. Rod, you are not Mother Teresa with rock-hard abs.

TIM BENNETT Baltimore, Md.