A few years ago, for example, a charming man from Vancouver hired me every night for a week while he was in Las Vegas for a conference. By the time he went home we’d checked off every item on his wish list, and he was finally comfortable lying naked with another man. It was strangely gratifying to help a guy learn the ropes.

But nothing prepared me for Hector: Thirty-nine years old, handsome, stocky, with a full black beard. Born and raised in Argentina, he lived in Chicago and owned a seat on the stock exchange. He was successful but lonely, and so intensely left-brained that he had carefully engineered a self-improvement plan: He took a sabbatical from work to get himself together. Among other things, he needed to admit he was gay and better understand how that fit into his life. That’s where I came in.

When I first spotted him I thought, “Damn, this guy needs new pictures.” He was much better looking than he’d led me to believe, and more socially adept as well. We clicked instantly. And I don’t know where he learned how, but he kissed like the devil himself.

We had a suite at the Bellagio and spent the weekend like a couple of princes. We went to the spa on Sunday, and then stayed in our bathrobes and ordered appetizers from room service while we watched the Oscars, like two teenagers pretending to be Hollywood royalty.

We also made practical plans, mapping out the next few months on a calendar, scheduling what we’d do and where we’d go. He came back to Las Vegas twice, and we traveled together to Washington (for the cherry blossoms), Provincetown, Montreal, Miami, Hawaii and – wait for it – Paris for the French Open. This was the best gig ever.

Now, I can be what my friends kindly refer to as “an acquired taste.” I have a classic Irish temper, I talk too much, and I tend to be too clever by half. I can also be moody, needing to go off by myself for no discernible reason. So while I wasn’t concerned I’d get bored with Hector, I was a little worried he might get tired of me. But we only had one serious confrontation.

I tried a little too hard to share my love of nude beaches, for which Hawaii is especially famous. He tolerated the one we found on Maui; it was beautiful, and it wasn’t crowded. But the one on the Big Island was another story. It required a treacherous climb to get to, and was filled with too much tie-dye and the kind of bodies no one wants to see naked. Long story short: We didn’t stay very long.

We were spending a few days in Hilo, which is not a town most people recommend. The best hotels haven’t been renovated since the ’70s and there are very few sandy beaches within city limits. As we were driving back, Hector grew quiet, and I tried to fill the air with idle chatter.

“Can we not talk until we get back to the hotel, please?” he asked.

Eventually we stopped for coffee.

“I’m really angry right now,” he started, “so I have to ask you this and hope I get an honest answer.” A beat. “Was that beach the whole reason we came to Hilo?”

I’m not usually very good with confrontation, and my knee-jerk response is to raise my voice. But Hector was calm and his tone was more inquisitive than accusatory, so I tried to follow his lead. “If you knew me any better,” I answered, “I’d be really pissed off that you asked me that question. I don’t manipulate people, and I really don’t like being accused of it.”

“And if I knew you better,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t have to ask. But I do.”

I understood where Hector was coming from, especially given the number of disappointments we’d already met with in Hilo. I explained to him that I didn’t even know about the nude beach until we’d planned to come here. I wanted to come to Hilo for the botanical gardens and the waterfalls we’d seen that morning.

“OK,” he said. “Makes sense. But we’re done with nude beaches.”

It was the only time he ever pulled rank, and within a day the story was a joke between us, the mere mention of Hippie Hollow eliciting mutual groans.

The “Hippie Hollow Incident” was the most mature disagreement I have ever had – including fights with my parents, everyone I’ve ever worked for, and all of my boyfriends. The guy I lived with for four years? We’d have had two weeks of drama and a ruined vacation at the very least. Instead, Hector and I grew closer because of it.  Was this because this was ultimately a business deal and we weren’t arguing as much as negotiating? Or was it because we were especially adept at communicating with each other? Who can say?

Whatever the reasons, the rest of our time together only became more enchanted: sunset dinners on the beach in Kona, orchestra seats for “Follies” at the Kennedy Center, watching Federer’s narrow victory over Monfils from a box at the French Open. It was the kind of magic that would make even a chick-flick aficionado roll her eyes and say, “Yeah, right.” And yet there we were.

Until we weren’t.

The last time I saw Hector was in the Newark airport after we came back from Paris. We’d planned to meet up again in San Francisco for one last week before he returned to work. Instead, he canceled a few days before our meeting. His leave had gone terribly over budget, he said, and he wanted to spend time alone before heading back to work. We’d do a long weekend in the fall, after he’d readjusted to work. Sounded good to me.

I tried to arrange a rendezvous over Thanksgiving and then again over Christmas, but both times he demurred. I was on the East Coast for New Year’s and I asked him if I should stop in Chicago on my way home. He never gave me a straight answer until I pushed the issue. He said it wasn’t a good time.

So our story is unfinished. We send each other text messages several times a week, and I consider him one of my best friends. And yet, I still can’t help wondering what things would be like if we’d met under different circumstances.

Once, while walking along the Seine (you can’t make this stuff up), he told me how sad he was that our time together was drawing to a close. Half-joking, I suggested he take me away from my life of crime and make an honest man of me. He said he wished he could, and I believed him. I still believe him. But I also know that we live in a real world where people click and then discover all kinds of complications. We just happened to know the complications in advance, and then went on the honeymoon, only then to discover how much we liked each other. For now, I continue to mentor guys in the ways of love with other men. Hector has returned to work with confidence, and he has no trouble meeting guys. I encourage him to date. If I know the way Hector’s mind works he won’t even think about embarking on any kind of serious relationship – with me or anyone – until he’s had more practice. In the process he might meet the one guy who’s perfect for him, and good for him if he does.

I know nothing serious could grow between us until I retire from the skin trade. I certainly couldn’t date a hooker – I’m way too insecure for that – and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to. But I’m not planning to escort for the rest of my life. I expect I’ll leave Vegas eventually too; there’s way too much world out there for me to stay in the desert. I don’t expect anything as widescreen as a limo or flowers or being “saved” by anyone (with or without a lot of money); I gave up on that fantasy a long time ago. What’s different for me now is that I’m able to imagine somebody else – maybe Hector, maybe not – in the picture with me on whatever comes next. And that means seeing things through a whole new lens.

I’ve had a few dreams where I orgasm in my sleep while fantasizing about gay men having sex. Even more disconcerting is that in one of those dreams I was a “bottom” gay man who had female parts. I’ve also had deviant dreams and fantasies where I orgasm and they also do not involve straight men. I don’t fantasize about females either because it doesn’t do anything for me.

I am very confused. Am I normal?

– Confused Woman

All right, Confused Woman, we have two concerns here: Your lack of orgasms during sex with your boyfriend and your fantasies about being a bottom gay man with a vagina. First, to the issue of climax, just consider the feverish search for “lady Viagra” and other magic fixes to increase desire and orgasms. When Big Pharma goes after something it’s because there’s big money, and there’s big money because lots of women struggle with this issue.

Elisabeth A. Lloyd, author of “The Case of the Female Orgasm,” surveyed research on orgasmic frequency and found that, when it comes to penetrative intercourse without clitoral stimulation, only a quarter of female respondents regularly climaxed during sex; and five to 10 percent never orgasmed. (Including manual stimulation, Alfred Kinsey reported that 39 to 47 percent of women orgasmed regularly during sex.) We also know that women report having more orgasms as they get into their 30s and 40s. As sex researcher Debby Herbenick puts it in her recent book, “Sex Made Easy,” “learning to experience orgasm takes practice.”

It’s probably easier to orgasm alone because there is less pressure, self-consciousness and concern about your partner’s experience. (I could go on and on about how women are socialized to put men’s desires first, to prize our partner’s pleasure over our own — but I’ll leave it at that.)

Now, to the issue of your “troubling” gender-bending fantasies: Girlfriend, there is no cause for concern. Russell Stambaugh, a clinical psychologist and board member of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, explains, “Fantasies have many different tasks to perform, so it is very common to report ones that seem strange.” (And, honestly, yours isn’t even that strange.) Stambaugh says that one of those tasks is “to compensate for things we can’t get in reality” — others are “to let off steam,” “to reassure us” or to “provide novelty, which often intensifies excitement.”

Fantasies are by definition fantastical. It’s incredibly common for people to get off on either impossible or entirely unrealistic scenarios. “Just look at genre fiction: historical romances, science fantasy and police procedurals, for example,” says Stambaugh. “Many recreational readers are consuming well-crafted, bizarre and elaborate fantasies they could never actually experience in reality. Some fantasies are much more fun in the imagination than they would be in reality.” You seem to have zero desire to make your fantasy come true, which is lucky because it would be hard to do so, short of gender reassignment.

Plenty of straight women fantasize about gay men. When another reader asked me about her taste for gay male porn, I wrote that the genre “is an erotic vacation of sorts for hetero women where the usual gender baggage is left behind. Guy-on-guy scenes don’t automatically call to mind real-world power dynamics between the sexes or the social and political history of male-female roles.” That’s not to mention that gay porn luxuriates in, and lingers on, the male form in a way that straight porn does not. These same explanations might apply to the personalized porn film playing in your head.

The only real problem in your letter is your concern itself. “As long as you accept that [your fantasies] don’t mean that there is anything wrong with you,” says Stambaugh, “you needn’t feel confused, and enjoy them for what they are.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.

“You did?”

“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”

“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.

Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.

In our small Cape Cod junior high school, I didn’t know a single openly gay teenager. As a 13-year-old feminist who didn’t shave her legs, I was the closest thing most people got. Before my best friend, Jessica, and I started kissing each other, most of our classmates assumed we already were. In truth, all of my early sexual encounters were with men: thrilling and frightening interactions, marked by my inability to say no. I had the body of a 20-year-old before I even got my first period, and being mistaken for sexually precocious by my peers became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My early exploits with older boys garnered me a reputation as a slut in middle school. Compared to that harassment, it was easier to let people assume I was gay. Being a slut implied an unwieldy desire, an essential vulnerability to sexual need. Whereas being gay just implied a rejection of men. But kissing girls came with its own complications

Bisexuality made sense to me, in theory, before I ever kissed a girl. And this was pre-Madonna kissing Britney Spears, pre-“Girls Gone Wild” (at least in my house, where we watched only PBS). My conception of girls kissing girls was not defined by a male gaze; I grew up with books like “Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism” on the shelves. My mother was a Buddhist therapist, and I had known before our landmark conversation that she not only identified as bisexual but moreover understood that being one was largely unremarkable. It seemed logical to me that people were bisexual until proven otherwise.

My brother and I lived in a house where sexuality was treated with no aura of shame, no tinge of the illicit. There was never any reference to the proverbial “birds and bees,” but our lexicon did include words like “fallopian tubes” and “ovulation.” We were both born at home, and I was even present for my brother’s birth. If I had been a different sort of 4-year-old, I doubt my parents would have allowed this, but in the pictures, I am far from traumatized by my mother’s cries. I am strutting around the birthing room, a toy stethoscope dangling from my neck, and perched between the midwives, attempting to take my mother’s pulse.

Unfortunately, this wholesome experience of the human body couldn’t prevent me from hating my own. By fifth grade, the attention that my precocious figure attracted from men scared me, but it was better than feeling freakish and fat, which was how I’d come to see the C-cup chest I’d exhibited before any other girl my age. And my pulse whirred to the feeling of breath on my neck, hands on my waist; I liked being wanted. Everything that followed those flirtatious entreaties, however, left me numb and ashamed. After a year of crude gestures and loud whispers in school hallways, exploring my nascent attraction to girls seemed a safer path.

In junior high, instead of Katy Perry’s early ’90s equivalent, I was listening to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Like Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics — Rebel girl you are the queen of my world … I know I wanna take you home / I wanna try on your clothes — my desire for girls was, at first, more romantic than erotic. My lust was meshed with other kinds of longing, with the devotion of friendship and admiration. Jessica and I had a more intimate relationship than any I’d known, and I’d always had intensely intimate friendships with other girls. Kissing seemed, in some ways, not a far leap from cuddling.

And when Jessica kissed me, on the sunlit bedspread of my childhood room, I felt the same delicate churning in my abdomen that I had when the older brother of a friend pressed his lips against my bare shoulder and squeezed my hip with his broad hand. I wished I was gay, that I could elect to direct my body in that seemingly less perilous direction. But when Jessica wearied of being different from everyone else at our school and started spending more time with the soccer team than with me, I wished I didn’t miss her so much, that I could believe a boyfriend was the solution to my heartache.

Instead, I found a solution in Lila — my first official girlfriend. A couple of years my senior, Lila had ceased attending our local public high school in favor of what appeared to be a liberally defined home schooling. She had short, messy hair; didn’t wear makeup; and introduced me to Otis Redding and Kristin Hersh. Years later, I discovered girls who dressed like boys, and thus discovered my true type, but at the time, she was a revelation. When my little brother starting dating Lila’s little sister, Maya, the four of us would spend afternoons riding ramshackle bicycles down the rural miles between our homes, cooking vegetarian meals, and then making out in our respective bedrooms.

If this post-’60s Rockwellian teenage vision makes my hometown sound like some kind of East Coast Berkeley, it is a misconception. Our town was a liberal one, relative to other small towns, but we were the exception, not the rule. I was tired of feeling like an outsider in my school, and tired of school altogether, which I’d already decided was not the quickest way to become a writer — my plan since childhood. I officially dropped out after freshman year, and replaced it with my own reading list, and Lila.

But if I’d thought that removing myself from the mainstream would solve my sexual conflicts, I was wrong. Lila had conflicts, too. Under the covers of her bed, I grew to know a certain shadow that would fall over her face — a look that often preceded tears. Neither of us ever fully articulated those doubts, but I knew that something in our sex scared her. I thought I recognized the tinge of shame. Perhaps the teenage girl secure in her sexuality is a chimera altogether, but being queer in a homophobic society tends to present special challenges, regardless of your background. The fear I felt kissing Lila in public caught me off guard. There was a part of me that wondered if I wasn’t really just straight. Did I have a choice? Was being straight the easier choice, in the long run? How much had my mother’s experience influenced me? When not dry humping each other’s legs to Tori Amos, Lila and I were often crying, without really knowing why.

But despite the drama that infused our relationship, there’s no way I can dismiss it as experimentation. What part of love is ever not an experiment, however high the stakes? And I was in love. Being with girls was a safer place to explore my feelings, partly because they also seemed to have a lot of them, but it was also sexually exciting. There were so many prescriptions for how to love men, and how to screw them. Or rather, be screwed by them. The sexual passivity that I had been surreptitiously socialized in did not apply to sex with women. In my childhood bedroom, I had lifted Jessica’s T-shirt, moved my mouth down her chest, squeezed her hips with both hands. Lila and I might have had a maudlin relationship a lot, but we also spent most of our time together in bed. The excitement that had always been cut short by actual sexual contact with men went on for hours with her. Looking back, our love seems almost chaste — no toys, no talk, incidents of head I could count on one hand — but it was my first introduction to a desire that my body was able to consummate. I didn’t orgasm with a lover until the girlfriend after her, but it was with Lila that I first experienced my body (and hers) as a pleasurable place to inhabit.

It was also a lot easier to convince my dad to let my girlfriend sleep over on school nights.

My father is a sea captain, and so would often return after a three-month voyage to find me considerably changed. After one such return, he pulled into his driveway (my parents had split years before) and turned up the radio. “I Kissed a Girl” — Jill Sobule’s folky precurser to Katy Perry’s club hit — filled the minivan: I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet/she was just like kissing me.

“So,” drawled my dad, with an awkward smile. “I hear you’ve been doing some of that lately.”

“Daaaaad!” I rolled my eyes, and unclasped my seat belt.

I was mortified, having no clue how lucky I was. A far cry from disturbed by my broad view of potential romantic partners, my father seemed to find it somewhat charming. Though he never knew the sexual harassment I suffered as a result of my earliest sexual experiences, it’s easy to see how much safer Lila must have appeared than the sketchy older boys I had a penchant for. Also, I think he probably associated me with my mother, whose bisexuality he also found unthreatening. Understandably, I think he’d have rather seen both of us with women.

To that end, I’ve been asked more than once if I think it’s hereditary. I don’t. I try not to be offended by the suggestion. On the Kinsey scale, my mother and I probably both hover near a 3. Of course, it’s not for me to exclude a genetic component with any certainty; I’m a writer, not a scientist, though I strongly suspect that it has a lot more to do with nurture than nature.

Since those days, I’ve been in love and lust with close to an equal number of men and women (not excluding a few who identified as somewhere between the two poles). At 31, I spend very little time entertaining definitions of my own sexuality. Thank god. I do not miss those early days of wishing I could be one thing or another, of wondering if I had an obligation to push myself in either direction. There was an important moment, a few years later, when I came to the startling understanding that I fell in love with people, that individuals’ personalities, pheromones and even fashion sense were more compelling to me than their gender. This is a cliché, of course. But I came to it on my own, and in the vacuum of my own experience, it was a true revelation.

Arriving at such a revelation, at such an age, and greeting it with the happy satisfaction that I did, requires a freedom that I had the privilege of taking for granted as a young person, though I know better now. Most of us circle back around to the models we were given in our formative years — not in terms of who we love, but how we love. It sounds stupid, but I am good at falling in love. That is, I do so with abandon, free of any reluctance born from shame. I feel entitled to love whomever I do, and as an adult, I have always fallen in love fully and frequently. Perhaps this is an innate human quality; I suspect so. But it is also a delicate, malleable impulse. We love as we have been loved, and as love has been shown to us. And I was loved with great abandon, and earnestly encouraged to love whomever my heart called for. And I know whom to thank for that.

I want to be supportive and I get immense pleasure from guiding and giving someone an amazing sexual experience. My goal is to provide a safe environment so they can open up and ask any question or do any thing and not risk feeling ashamed or embarrassed about it. But that is often not enough. On the other hand, I want that to be reciprocated and if there is hesitation and anxiety about my, um, “needs,” then I lose the ability to enjoy it on the level I want to.

In my marriage, we have an ebb and flow in a pretty consistent fashion. Inside I begin to build up a large amount of sexual tension that is craving to be released in a manner that is not easily obtainable. I begin to push for something that will amount to that release and when it doesn’t happen it’s like sticking a cork in a volcano. I will spend a few days getting edgier and edgier until finally there is some blown-out-of-proportion conversation that ends up with everyone feeling inadequate and generally bad. We will then promise to work on it and things will go well for a few months until life gets in the way and the cycle starts again.

I want to break this cycle and we are currently doing an immense amount of work to try to bridge the gap. But until that happens, I’m still left with the need to reset my libido and I have few, if any, options available. I do not want to go outside of the marriage but if that is my only option I will.

Besides our sexual gap we have a fantastic relationship, but I am getting to the point where, after five years, I feel like I’m never going to achieve what I need. Any thoughts?

So this is funny: You’ve written such a smart, interesting and lengthy email, but I have no idea what you actually want. I see only amorphous sexual wanting. You don’t list a particular desire, like wanting to have more sex or to explore a specific kink. Instead, I’m left trying to read in between the lines in search of what’s missing from your sex life.

I wonder if your wife feels the same way. I wonder if you feel the same way.

There are a handful of words and phrases that stand out to me from your letter. The positive ones, the ones that seem to represent what you want, are “exploring,” “safe,” “open” and “do any thing.” The negative ones: “ashamed,” “embarrassed” and “anxiety.” You seem to believe that your wife is repressed — and that may very well be true, because, who isn’t? — but freedom from sexual shame can look very different on different people. For some, open exploration means joining a local swinger’s club; for others, it’s losing themselves in the pleasures of monogamous sex. There are as many personal definitions of sexual freedom as there are people. How does your wife’s definition compare to yours?

If you use the same abstract language when talking to her about what you feel is missing, it’s very possible that she is picturing a different goal than you are. Your strap-on fantasy might be her dream of bubble bath cuddles — or vice versa. There’s a tendency to expect our partners to know what we want, to intuit what we mean when we say, “Let’s explore” or “Let’s get kinky!” In part, that’s because the idea of our partner wanting exactly what we want is a compelling fantasy, right? But it’s also just damn hard to talk about these things. You gotta do it, though.

This is my personal take — and I’m just an unmarried, childless 28-year-old with a sex column. Marty Klein, a sex therapist and author of “Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want From Sex, And How to Get It,” took a look at your email and determined that therapy — preferably with your partner — is the way to go. “Without that, or something like a near-death experience, this couple will split up (or he’ll have an affair),” Klein, who has over three decades of experience counseling couples, wrote in an email. The man tells it like it is.

I went to sex therapist Ian Kerner with the question of how one can tell the difference between a relationship that is hopelessly sexually mismatched and one that can become sexually compatible and satisfying with work. He said that there are two types of people: “thrill-seekers and comfort creatures.” This is a broad generalization, sure, but it can be useful to spark discussion around a tricky topic, he says. “Thrill seekers often crave a high degree of novelty and tend to get bored rather quickly, while comfort creatures believe that less is more and enjoy the familiarity of a sexual routine,” Kerner explains. “Part of the problem is that in the early stage of a relationship, the infatuation of falling in love provides a level of excitement that often masks real differences in our sexual types.”

Are these differences insurmountable? “Not at all,” he says. “But dealing with the issue is going to require creativity and communication.”

Aw, buddy. This is the second week in a row where I have to come straight out and say it: There’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing. Not a thing. (OK, so there might be something wrong with you, seeing as you’re human, but this isn’t it.)

Porn represents a popular fantasy norm, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect what people want to do, or are actually doing, in real life. Researcher Debby Herbenick, a sexual health educator at the Kinsey Institute, tells me, “There are probably many, many things that are shown in porn in our culture or other cultures that he or his partner don’t have any interest in doing and that’s OK,” she says. “Having some sense of self-awareness about your sexual likes/dislikes is a far better place to be than being clueless as to your own boundaries. So, good for him for having some sense of this.”

I recently wrote an article on why the money shot is such a fixture of porn and spent some time talking about “facials,” as they are so politely called. Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid,” speculated that in the era of HIV, semen has come to represent disease and danger; and thus, “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” as she said.

None of the experts I spoke with for that piece pinned the phenomenon to a real world, as opposed to porn world, rise in the practice. Herbenick says, “We have no numbers [on the practice] but it’s definitely not ‘the norm’ as in ‘most people are doing it.’” In fact, your very concern seems more common than the act itself: She sees your question come up often in group discussions, from college classrooms to talks she gives to middle-aged crowds. “While some people are into it, particularly on an infrequent basis, most people seem not as into it,” she says.

That isn’t to say that there’s something wrong with people who are into it. In terms of sexual practices, numbers and averages mean very little. They tell us nothing about whether we’re having authentic, fulfilling sex. The truth is that being in the majority actually means being unsatisfied with your sex life. How’s “normal” looking now?