At first Angelika seemed like the antidote to Juan’s sick work life. Before they took up, he’d spend 12 hours a day editing S/M videotapes, then go home to an empty bed. Now he was sharing the bed and his stories about the goings-on at work. Angelika soon figured out, long before Juan did, that he was being abused at RMP.

Rolf was the master mind-fucker. Though he didn’t really understand how it worked, he loved high tech and displayed computers to would-be lovers like a peacock’s tail. Rolf was constantly interrupting Juan at his terminal so he could show some young beefcake the system. “I’d tell him, ‘But I have work to do,’” Juan recounts, “and he’d hand me money and send me around the corner to the bar for an hour.”

Rolf also kept Juan off balance with the classic harassment combo of innuendo and attack. After Angelika began coming to Juan’s office to pick him up, Rolf “made passing comments about my penis size, like, ‘I wonder why she likes you.’” Rolf also noticed Juan withdrawing from discussions about the company’s future and confronted him about it in front of everyone. At one staff meeting, Rolf pointed at Juan and imperiously demanded, “He has to say something. He can’t just sit there.”

Rolf began to assume mythic monster proportions in Juan’s mind. After Juan had been working at RMP almost a year, he says, “Out of the blue, [Rolf] wanted my Social Security number. I gave it to him, but then I started to worry, so I went into the system and changed it — so if he tried to come after me, he couldn’t get me.” RMP is still in business, and Juan speculates darkly that “it’s because everyone’s in bondage.” The night before our interview, Juan had the classic nightmare of trying to run through tar while Rolf chased him.

Angelika was the first person in months to whom Juan could talk about RMP. He’d stopped complaining to his former colleagues Julie and Richard because they’d say, “The guy’s a fucking nut — quit now.” His guy friends just made fun of his line of work, he says ruefully. “They’d all be like, ‘Hey, Juan, how was work? See any good dick today?’”

Angelika would drop by the office several times a week, so she met the people in the stories. She reacted to the scene at RMP as any friend would — by advising Juan to quit and reminding him that a computer geek could write his own ticket. (This was 1998.) But he could only hear criticism. “She was very confident and positive about what she was doing, and she would question me and put me down and correct me,” he says. Juan has since decided that Angelika was “topping” him; he seems to have blurred her sensible advice early on with her crummy treatment of him later.

Juan speaks about his desire to tie up women with refreshing un-self-consciousness and a certain cluelessness. “I’d explored bondage with a previous girlfriend, and she liked it for a while but then she didn’t. She tied me up and that was very arousing, but I like being the ‘tie-er’ better than being the ‘tie-ee.’ I’m not sure why.” He seems unable to imagine why anyone wouldn’t like being bound. He was hurt that Angelika called him a pervert whenever he suggested trying something he’d seen at work. “I just wanted to tie her up and see if she could enjoy it. I tried to be nice about it.”

A few months into Juan’s relationship with Angelika, Rolf told Juan about a mathematician who was also an S/M master — let’s call him “Thomas.” Juan had studied Thomas’ work in college and considered him a genius. Spotting a way to get Juan more involved in RMP, Rolf sent Juan over to Thomas’ house for expert feedback on a flogging CD-ROM. “You two can talk about equations!” Rolf enthused.

Sure enough, Juan and Thomas bonded while talking math. Looking at the CD-ROM, Juan felt comfortable enough to exclaim, “How could that be enjoyable?” Thomas said, “Let me show you,” and chained Juan to his wall. Thomas spent an hour using cat-o’-nine-tails and other whips on Juan’s back and butt, occasionally reaching up between his legs with gloves. He brushed the gloves across his dick, Juan says, “but he didn’t grab it. He didn’t possess it.”

Juan loved the experience, though he has never repeated it. “I felt restrained but free,” Juan says. “I could feel I was tied up, but at the same time I felt like I was flying.” They had agreed beforehand on a signal to stop, but Juan never used it and stayed silent except to moan. After about an hour, Juan had a profound orgasm, brought on by “a combination of everything, like a ball of energy in my body. I felt enlightened.”

But this bottoming epiphany didn’t improve things at the office or at home. The gay guys were still picking on him, Rolf was still screwing him over financially and Angelika was criticizing him more and more for staying at RMP. She’d run into financial difficulty and moved in with Juan and his roommate. “I was working way too many hours, getting into relationships I wasn’t sure about; I was losing myself, losing my perspective,” says Juan.

Then, to his horror, he couldn’t get it up anymore. Angelika’s patience didn’t last long; she continued to sleep in Juan’s bed but rebuffed his sexual advances, suggesting they be “friends.” Juan replied in panic, “How am I going to know when it’s over? I need to get practice in!” He was so freaked out about his member’s retirement that he asked Rolf for advice. “I thought because he was a doctor, he might have information. What a dumb fucking move — I just gave him more fuel.”

Two months into the three-month bout of impotence, Angelika’s work visa ran out and she asked Juan to marry her — while keeping their chaste “friends” arrangement. A few days later, Juan came home from a long day at the porn factory and couldn’t find her. He cooked himself dinner, then headed to the roof to look at the stars. “And she was up there with some guy, making out!” he exclaims.

He declined Angelika’s marriage proposal, and she went back to Sweden. After a few days, Rolf asked Juan, “So where’s the girl?” Juan told him the finale, and Rolf offered his barbed comfort. “He told me it was better for me to let her go because she was a selfish bitch,” Juan says. “I told him to mind his own business.”

Three months later, Juan finally quit RMP when Rolf tried to cheat him out of a few days’ pay. He immediately landed a high-paying job at a Web development firm whose clients include the world’s biggest, stodgiest corporations. I wondered if he was worried about his porn past haunting him in the high-tech world, and Juan told me he showed the S/M CD-ROMs to his current bosses on the second interview. “It was really cutting-edge stuff,” he enthuses. “Before, porn CD-ROMs could only hold five- or six-minute scenes, and I figured out a way to get an hour on there.”

Though it hasn’t hurt his career, the S/M stint may have oversimplified Juan’s perspective. His explanation for his miserable year at RMP: “I must be a bottom. I was afraid of [Rolf], but I kept going back. I was torturing myself. I don’t know why. I’m submissive in relationships, too.”

Juan calls everyone in his story either a “top” or a “bottom,” as if they’re all doomed to their fates as bullies and doormats — no compromise, no growth, no change ahead. While domination and submission can resonate powerfully in sex, they don’t contain all of human interaction, any more than Christian duality or social Darwinism does. Juan enjoyed a flogging, stayed in a bad job too long and got jerked around by a girlfriend. I think those are chapters, not the book, on him.

Juan is a big, amiable fellow with a scraggly beard and an orange knit cap he seems to wear 24/7 in the winter. He grew up on welfare in the South Bronx, then got academic scholarships to Hampshire College, where he studied mathematical physics. After a one-year stint working for a certain monopoly near Seattle, he returned to New York, where he had trouble finding work. “There are still barriers for a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx looking for a job at an Internet firm,” he says. “People thought I was lying about college.”

He got a job as a programmer in a bank on Wall Street, which soon made him miserable. He was 25 and “still actively skateboarding. I felt like a robot in a suit at work.” He quit and as he was planning his next move, Julie, a lesbian friend from college, invited him in on the ground floor of a new multimedia company in what she called “the biggest vertical market on the Web” — porn. Julie was also a programmer but not at Juan’s level, so she proposed to Juan that he “create the infrastructure, recommend the software and train the rest of us.” The other principals were Richard, a videographer who’d explored his emerging gay sexuality in a series of art videos, and an older European who’d put up half a million dollars in seed money.

Juan signed on, figuring he wasn’t working anyway and it might be fun. He had no qualms about pornography, having grown up with “huge stacks of it” at home. “My parents were very visibly loving, PDA all the way,” Juan remembers. “They would talk about having sex at the dinner table, and my sisters and I would be like, ‘Mommy, what’s back-door action?’” Porn tapes were mixed in with the Disney videos and when Juan was 9 he stumbled on a homemade tape of his parents going at it. He doesn’t remember this as particularly traumatic: “I watched it and thought, ‘Wow, I bet that’s them making my sister!’”

At Juan’s request, I’ve changed all the names and some identifying details in this story, but the weirdest stuff is true. The venture capitalist/mastermind behind the fledgling multimedia firm was a wealthy Austrian doctor and tax lawyer whom I’ll call Rolf. Rolf had met Richard in a gay chat room and the two discovered a shared interest in video. Juan thinks they had a brief fling before planning their business.

Rolf, who is somewhere in his 60s, owns homes in Vienna, Amsterdam, Papua New Guinea and Manhattan. During his frequent visits to New York’s gay S/M scene, Rolf saw more enthusiasm than competence, a huge target market of tentative tops and bumbling bottoms. Rolf and Richard decided to produce didactic CD-ROMs that would demonstrate knot tying, flogging, ball gagging and other forms of disciplinary caress. As it turned out, the videos were all of gay men. Juan says they were “going to progress to straight and lesbian and other arenas, but that never happened.”

Rolf created the firm as a limited liability corporation, so he would supply the money but supposedly wouldn’t be involved in creating, or responsible for, the content. He gave the company an innocuous name, which I’ll paraphrase as Rolf’s Media Plaything (RMP). Juan calls the initial financial arrangement “pro bono” — nobody would get any money until the company turned a profit. The three young workers eventually protested and Rolf began paying them small salaries in cash.

The company was run out of Rolf’s five-story home in Chelsea. “At first, it was a really loving environment; we all knew each other and cared about each other except for Rolf, but he came off as a nice guy,” Juan says. “Later I found out he had a very dark side, very scary, but at first I felt really, really comfortable.” The three young friends and Rolf did everything themselves for months, Juan says, “hiring the talent, videotaping them, digitally editing and compressing it, putting it on CD-ROM. When certain people would come over, we’d have to shut off our computers and stop production and hide all signs of sexuality so we looked like a travel CD-ROM company.”

RMP needed the travel front because of Rolf’s heavy involvement in Sufism, a 1,400-year-old mystical branch of Islam whose whirling dervishes undergo ecstatic trances. Though mainstream Muslims consider Sufis far too tolerant of alternate routes to Allah, Rolf feared that even Sufis would frown on ecstasy whipped up by a guy in leather chaps.

To make sure the coast was clear, Juan, Julie and Richard had to call before arriving at work every morning. The office environment was surreal, with the Aryan-looking Rolf wearing flowing robes and prayer beads and leading naked men on tours of the premises. A 6-foot-long iguana roamed freely. Rolf regaled his workers with tales of his frequent trips to Papua New Guinea, showing them pictures of naked tribal leaders, their penises tied up and adorned with feathers. “He was obsessed with it because it’s a homosexual-driven culture,” Juan says, rolling his eyes. “He talked about it all the time.”

The scenes for the CD-ROMs were usually shot outside the office, but sometimes videotaping was on the premises. Juan has many gay friends and, at first, the material he edited satisfied a curiosity about gay sex. “But then I wanted it to evolve. I wasn’t getting any, I was nerd-boy stuck in front of the computer and I was like, ‘I want to see some naked women!’ But it never came to be.”

About three months into the job, Juan had to edit a lengthy fisting scene, shot on a rooftop in Queens. For the first time, he felt uncomfortable with the content. “It was disturbing to see the guy get fisted out in the open air. The dominant or top was a big, burly lumberjack in a leather vest and the guy getting fisted was this frail, thin little guy in a cage, wearing a leather mask and a gag. He was moaning and screaming, having his cock pulled down and around. I had to watch it hundreds of times while I was editing it. I know the guy wasn’t being coerced because I knew him, but I didn’t know if he was into it or just doing it because he needed the money.”

Juan had never worried before about whether porn actors were doing it only for the money. He may have identified with the guy in the cage, because Rolf was becoming more and more abusive. Juan was working 12-hour days, essentially creating the product with the understanding he would share in any eventual profits. When he finally worked up his nerve to ask for a contract, Rolf screamed in his Teutonic accent, “Show me more products first! How dare you ask for money or contracts when you haven’t shown me all the products?”

After four months, Julie quit, disgusted with Rolf’s financial slipperiness and fits of rage. Two months later Richard left, too, and Rolf replaced them with two gay Serbs. Now Juan was not only the only heterosexual but the only American. “It was cool that people were from all over,” Juan says, “but I felt really isolated and I started to withdraw.”

Solace arrived in the form of Angelika, a Swedish illegal alien who turned up at a party at Juan’s house. The two began dating, and when she ran into financial trouble he took her in to live with him. On the face of it, Juan held the power in the relationship, but he says darkly, “She was very dominant.” Angelika often came to the Chelsea office to pick up Juan and she started nagging him about his situation. She kept asking why he couldn’t see that Rolf was crazy and ripping him off and why he didn’t quit. Juan felt besieged by all sides, and meanwhile was watching S/M videos 12 hours a day. It’s not so surprising that he decided to assert some control with leather and rope.

Next: Juan ties up Angelika, enjoys a flogging and foolishly confides in Rolf.

Neither furtive family man nor flamboyant queen, Aaron arrived at his New Year’s Eve drag debut by a uniquely convoluted path. It started in art school in Washington, where I first met him. At the time, he was photographing and videotaping himself naked over and over, with bananas duct-taped to his nipples, with bacon stretched across his mouth, with his torso corseted in black paint. He was painting nudes, too, but his female professor pushed him toward the naked performance art. “She told me it was better than my painting,” he shrugged as we leafed through his portfolio in his Brooklyn, N.Y., loft.

Many of his self-portraits tuck his penis away; in some, he has painted breasts on. In one striking series, he has turned his thighs and stomach white with gesso, then redrawn his genitalia with orange paint. His scrotum is spread out into fat labia, his penis nestled in the middle with a slit painted on its front. A pubic triangle of brush bristles crowns the lewd simulacrum, which resembles the giant vaginas in Chinese erotic prints.

Aaron grew up in Nebraska, and he talks like a taciturn cowboy. A lanky 6-foot-4, he tried basketball for a year in high school but was never much good at it. Though he’s shy and soft-spoken, when I asked why his work is mostly of himself, he drawled, “I’m a narcissistic, egocentric motherfucker.” He then added some art-crit justification: “I was interested in that feminist thing about how a male body can be made grotesque and the guy’s still admired, but the female body is always objectified. So I’m playing with that as a young man whose body can be both grotesque and, uh, sexually attractive.” He pauses, embarrassed. “Well, I don’t know how attractive it is, but I get turned on showing it.”

I assume he’s being disingenuous. Aaron may be the prettiest redneck in New York, a gen-u-wine head turner. He’s 24 years old, tall, slim but broad-shouldered, with huge blue eyes, curvy lips and elegant bone structure. When he told me he wanted to do drag, I pictured a young Candice Bergen — they have the same long, classy nose.

Aaron moved to New York last year to be an artist and maybe do some modeling. He was signed with the Wilhelmina agency for a while, “but my agent was getting 14- and 15-year-old boys fucked up on drugs and having sex with them, so he got fired.” This fall, Aaron had his first homosexual experience with Tom (not his real name), who moonlights as one of the most famous drag queens in the city. I ran into Aaron a few months ago in an East Village bar and he told me he was seeing Tom, whose drag act I’d seen and admired. I asked Aaron if he was identifying as gay or bi these days. He said, “Hell no, I’m straight. I’m dating a couple of girls, too. I’m just seeing Tom casually.”

At first Tom was enthusiastic about helping Aaron dress up, and both agreed to let me watch the initial transformation. But then Tom stopped returning Aaron’s phone calls. I wondered if he suspected the younger Aaron would pull an (All About) Eve Harrington, clawing his way past his mentor. This seems unlikely, for, beautiful as he is, Aaron’s a little short on snap and sass.

The relationship cooled, according to Aaron, when he figured out that his sexual attraction to Tom was really a desire to do drag himself. Tired of waiting around, Aaron decided to just dress himself up — for a one-night show of his paintings at rock club CBGB on New Year’s Eve. Though I’d hoped to observe the master teach the student, I invited myself along for his debut and offered to help however I could.

Aaron did his shopping at transvestite store Patricia Field, spending “way too much money.” (Interestingly, tiny singer Björk spent an hour and a half in the store that day, but Aaron couldn’t see what she bought, damn it.) The blizzard that hit the Northeast that weekend looked as if it might keep Aaron in Nebraska, but his plane arrived just in time for him to race home to get ready. His sister, also a former model, helped him dress quickly.

I turned up at their place around 11 p.m. The creature who opened the door was stunning but much sluttier-looking than Bergen: long platinum blond wig, heavily made up eyes and lips, black bustier with little pink breast forms escaping out the top, long shaved belly and red leather miniskirt with a wide white stripe down the front. Three big blue stars marched down the stripe, and the middle star bulged sporadically all night. Aaron’s sister, understandably, wasn’t much help with tucking, and the spandex underpants with the butt pads sewn in didn’t do the job either.

When I arrived, Aaron was teetering on 4-inch stilettos. I knew from experience he’d be miserable if he couldn’t walk, so I bossed him, “There’s a foot of snow out there; for God’s sake, lose the stilettos.” I told him to put his cowboy boots back on, which Tom had expressly forbidden — but Tom hadn’t seen him wobbling like Bambi on the spike heels. I chipped in with some finishing touches, borrowed his mascara and then we all headed to CBGB.

In the cab, I coached Aaron to take smaller steps and speak more quietly, echoing my mother’s nagging from my own gangly youth. He would try for a second but then immediately revert to his low voice and legs-spread sitting style. I walked a little behind him into CBGB to watch the reaction, which was hilariously jaded. All his friends said, “Hey, Aaron, how’s it going, man?” shaking hands or hugging him without blinking. In the club, Aaron’s outfit wasn’t transgressive; it was just fashion.

Midnight struck and people yelled and kissed, but no magical transformation took place. Aaron kept muttering, “I need a drink, man. I need to be drunk for this to work.” “What would change if you were drunk?” I asked. “I don’t know, I could just get naked or something.” Clearly we were straying from the most basic principles of gender illusion.

One former girlfriend did gasp when she saw him, and Aaron said with false bravado, “You like it? You wanna fuck me, baby?” Seconds later, his hand flew to his mouth and he mumbled, “Oh, my God, that just slipped out. I’m sorry.” It was fascinating to watch him grab at pieces of identities like floating wreckage. He started muttering, “I gotta get out of here and into someplace where people don’t know me.”

He introduced me to a woman who used to live with his father when Aaron was an adolescent. The stepmom was visiting from Nebraska and confided to me that she’d been wanting to try sleeping with a woman, maybe on this trip. I suggested the three of us go to a lesbian bar a few blocks away, which I thought would be a good place for Aaron to be desired as a woman. He suggested we first stop by the drag restaurant where Tom worked, and I enthused, “Something for everybody!” It was nice to be social director and not have any sexual agenda of my own.

I herded the Nebraskans through the East Village snowdrifts and the whooping drunks in their plastic hats. The lesbian bar, the drag bar and all the dance clubs had outrageous cover charges. Aaron made a disconsolate cellphone call to Tom and got his answering machine. It was cold and late. We parked ourselves at the first free bar stools we could find, and Aaron leaned onto the bar and said in a loud, low voice, “Gimme a Bud.”

Then he slumped into his seat and exhaled Marlboro smoke. “Well, this night is a bummer.” It was a perfect distillation of New Year’s Eve, holiday of disappointment: Aaron, flanked by me with my notebook and his former stepmother, our alcohol buzz curdled, our eye makeup smeared. I’d gotten no epiphany about drag; the stepmom hadn’t muff dived; Aaron hadn’t gotten to be a beautiful woman, or even a drag queen.

I gently asked how his night could have gone better, and Aaron cast about for answers. “Seeing myself as feminine in my performance art turns me on. I thought the social interaction would be more like sexual interaction, but it sure wasn’t tonight.” I asked if he was hoping to have sex with someone tonight. “Oh no, it’s not about that, it’s about flaunting.”

But Aaron wasn’t after the standard object-of-desire thrills. Any man who looks like he did in 21st century New York knows plenty about being desired. I wondered if he’d been a homely kid, one of those people whose self-image hasn’t caught up with their blossoming. He said, “It’s less that I used to be ugly than that I was shy. Dressing up as different people gives me a say in my own life.”

A little later, he blurted, “I just want to do this with Tom and feel all superconfident.” It struck me then that women really have come a long way. Men used to cross-dress to become more submissive, but Aaron wanted women’s clothes to make him more articulate and powerful.

A screenwriter and video store manager, Joe is smart, funny, thoughtful and talented. He is not, however, buff, tan, high-cheekboned or 24, and the second list tends to overwhelm the first in the dating world. Pudgy guys need lovin’, too, though, so Joe has cruised the bars and, before Mayor Giuliani closed them down, the peep booths on 42nd Street. The plastic partitions between the stalls had been jimmied so men could suck or jerk each other off, Joe says, shuddering at the memory. “It’s unseemly and creepy, and horrible loud porno music is playing and it smells bad.” Men sometimes left the booths together, “but even that’s a competition,” Joe laments. “The best-looking people paired off and you had to take what was left.”

Three years ago, Joe spent Christmas Day with his family, which did not fill him with goodwill, and came back to New York a few days before his roommate. He hadn’t had sex in a few months and he’d stirred up a little lust Christmas Eve by flirting with the record store cashier. “That put the idea in my mind … I was alone and I thought, I don’t have to be.”

He looked through the ads in the back of a gay entertainment guide. He picked Alejandro’s ad, which included a photo of his body with his face cropped. Alejandro offered massage, the ad said, and he was “versatile” and “affectionate.” They made their massage date for midnight, because Alejandro was going to the movies with friends: Coincidentally, he and Joe both saw “As Good As It Gets” that day. “It wasn’t very good,” Joe remembers, “but I thought that Skeet Ulrich was kind of cute — remember, the one who ended up robbing and beating Greg Kinnear?”

After they hung up, Joe went to the cash machine, then tidied the apartment and made up the futon in the living room. His bed was in a low-ceilinged loft, so he figured there’d be more room to play out by the Christmas tree. He lit some candles and waited nervously, both guilty and excited that money would change hands.

Joe was a devout Catholic until he was 17. “Then I realized being gay wasn’t just a phase and I said, ‘That’s it, I’m not going back to church.’ I decided not to be part of this group that doesn’t want me. I’d believed in J.C., Mary, the whole gang. And I felt so hurt that these people I’d accepted on faith wouldn’t accept me.”

Alejandro turned out to be a handsome Spaniard in his mid-30s with long, curly hair in a ponytail and a crucifix around his neck. He told Joe later that he still goes to church. Joe theorizes that Alejandro “transcended that Catholic guilt better than I have because he grew up in Spain, where they’re more sensual. Plus, Mary Magdalene did do that job, too.”

The two men shook hands and introduced themselves, then Alejandro whipped his clothes off. “Considering what I was doing, this is probably pretty puritanical,” Joe says, “but I was a little shocked he wasn’t wearing underwear. He had this really nice body, not overly muscular but well-defined. His chest was completely hairless like he’d had electrolysis, and he had a tan in December.” Alejandro told Joe to lie on his stomach, then he hopped astride. He gave him a thorough shoulder and back massage, his dick flopping pleasantly on Joe’s lower back.

Joe chattered nervously and found they had a lot in common. “I was afraid he might be like those porn stars you see on [the cable TV show] ‘Robin Bird,’ all strung out, barely able to string two sentences together. But he was bright and nice and could have been the boy next door except for the ponytail. We talked about music, Christmas and ‘As Good As It Gets.’”

The bonding deepened when Alejandro spotted Joe’s huge collection of Barbra Streisand CDs. Joe told Alejandro about his most prized relic — bootleg video footage of her recording her “Back to Broadway” album. “After that, there was no way we were going back to the massage until he’d seen it,” Joe says, so they got up and watched Barbra outtakes for an hour. Alejandro reassured Joe that he was off the clock.

A few minutes after they resumed, Alejandro told Joe to flip onto his back. “When he did my legs, he’d brush his hands by my balls, which was so exciting,” Joe says, and he worked up his nerve to ask if he could touch Alejandro. “Then I started fondling his balls and stroking his dick and he got hard. That was sort of my favorite part, taking a little control.” Alejandro kept massaging.

After a few more minutes, Joe blurted, “Do you do any more than massage?” and Alejandro gave him the breakdown: $200 for a just-sex hour, $125 for just massage and $150 for “the mega-mix.” Jim selected the mega-mix, which was “kissing, caressing, licking and exploring each other’s body, back and forth. It was really nice, which may be a funny word for sex with a stranger, but it was gentle and really sensual. I was glad all that happened after the Barbra break, too.”

Alejandro went down on Joe for a while, not to orgasm, then Joe went down on him “and there was kissing and caressing and talking, it was all very natural and flowing … We ended up getting each other off by hand almost at the same time. I was lying down and he was sort of kneeling over me. We both kind of came all over me.”

Up until that night, Joe had been stabbed with guilt every time he had an orgasm, even by himself or with a regular boyfriend. “I felt like I should be married. The church just gets you young, and if you’re gullible at all, you really believe you’re bad and wasting your time and it’s for married people. And even though I didn’t believe it on a conscious level, it still permeated what I did.

“And somehow Alejandro helped me break free of that. Maybe it was because it was so much about pleasing me that made me feel worthy, that it was OK to want pleasure, to get and give pleasure.”

After a moment, Alejandro went to get towels and washed Joe off. “I thought that was sweet; nobody had ever done that for me before. He was attentive, like a really, really good waiter, the kind you want to give a 30 percent tip to.”

They got dressed and chatted about their respective plans for New Year’s Eve. Joe lent Alejandro some Tina Turner CDs “because I felt like I’d met a kindred spirit, he was as excited about music as I was. I completely trusted him.” Joe paid, they hugged and kissed goodnight and said “nice to meet you.”

Joe called him six weeks later. “If I had the money, I’d have a mega-mix every week, like a vitamin,” says Joe, but for budgetary reasons, they average three times a year since then, sometimes at Joe’s apartment, sometimes at Alejandro’s sparsely decorated studio. They also talk on the phone occasionally about music, movies and Alejandro’s attempts to break into fashion design.

They’ve never stayed together as long as the first time, and Joe admits it’d be nice to spend the night some time. “I’m not going to pay $500, though, to just get up and have breakfast with him. Plus, when you’ve been on your own for a couple years, it’s kind of nice to have them go on their way; you have your own space back and you can be yourself.”

But Alejandro’s gift of guiltlessness has persisted with other men, whether Joe picks them up or pays for them. Joe says his progress was bolstered recently when he saw Sister Wendy, the nun and art historian, interviewed by Bill Moyers. “She said, ‘Sexuality is a gift from God, but it wasn’t a gift I ever felt the need to open.’” Joe continues in an outraged voice, “I thought, How ungrateful! Someone goes to all the trouble to give you a gift, and you can’t even be bothered to open it and try it on! And I thought, It is a gift and it is mine, and there’s no strings attached. Nowhere does it say, ‘Do not open till wedding day.’”

Mal’s exoptic fields concept includes a smidgen of optical science about which colors are perceived better with peripheral vision (blue, green and yellow). The first Exoptic Fields video employs those principles: It’s one hour of a brick wall turning slowly blue, then greenish yellow, then blue again from a horizontal line in the middle outwards. It is boring but vaguely pleasant, something that could decorate a nightclub wall. I didn’t make it all the way through, but I didn’t feel my eyes pushed away either.

“Blind Heat” is much more watchable, even though Mal’s ad copy claims that it too works through “benign sensory negation — ‘deflection’ — in electronic media. Such deflective media strive to subtract all stimulation.” Bainbridge liked the idea of “taking over the home entertainment center,” but he tweaked the exoptic concept somewhat. He doesn’t want people to avert their eyes, but rather to pay the same peripheral attention they pay to music, which he refers to as “decorating the air.” His aim is for “people to use video to shape a visual space the way music shapes a sonic space.”

He made “Blind Heat” using analog audio/video synthesis, which dates back to Nam June Paik’s work in the 1960s, but is rarely employed in these digital times. “The same electrical signals used to make sound can be used to make video, though not that many people know that,” he says. “There’s only one studio in the world dedicated to this kind of work that the public can use.” He spent a week setting up the software, then “painted” the piece live, in real time, with a synthesizer.

“Blind Heat” is visual make-out music for people who prefer DJ Spooky to Sinatra. It sounds like stripped-down ambient, a drum machine subtly distorted and stretched. But “Blind Heat” doesn’t look like other high-tech video art, which all too often resembles a software demonstration. It’s more like a vaguely biological Abstract Expressionist painting dancing and marching to skittering rhythms.

The packaging plays with the porn association: The videotape is red, with a painted X in the middle. The spine reads “Blind Heat: set your love life on fire,” then in tiny print “(no nudity or sex acts depicted).” Both men say they find porno generally crude and stupid; Bainbridge calls it “less sexy than even advertising!”

I ask Mal and Bainbridge if they’d test-driven their video for its marketed purpose. Bainbridge composed “Blind Heat” with the inspiration and help of a girlfriend, but they broke up before he finished, so he’s only shared the experience thus far with Mr. Left Hand. He thinks his solo session was enhanced by the video but admits it may have been because it made him think of his ex. Mal, married for 12 years, says he and his wife had unusually hot sex while the tape played beside their bed.

But what else is the exoptic mastermind going to say? I enlisted a horny couple to give it a whirl, and I also watched all 45 minutes myself.

I pop the tape in after discussing it with Mal on the phone. He reemphasizes that it’s nothing like porn, though enhanced sex is its goal. “You can’t expect the tape to do it for you. You’ve got to do it. It’s like if I’m stroking my dick, that’s supposed to be pleasurable, but if other factors aren’t lined up, it’s not.”

After we hang up, I turn my full, non-peripheral gaze to the screen, where vagina-shaped red blobs pulsate bigger and smaller to a vaguely martial snare drum. The red blobs alternate with black blobs, back and forth on a green background that looks sort of like tendons. After a few minutes, I decide the red blobs are penises despite their female shape and the black blobs are the corresponding holes, but I also see tissues or cells under a microscope. Clusters of white dots cast a slimy sheen on everything.

The images and sound vary slightly every time, but follow a basic pattern, a 23-second cycle. (I know I’m not using the video sexily enough when Bainbridge and Mal say later that the cycle’s news to them; they haven’t even timed the intervals.) Each cycle starts out pounding and fizzles into silence as a white lattice flutters down over the images. This shimmering curtain reminds me variously of lace, calcification, veins and orgasms. It keeps me thinking about bodies.

But the short cycles are the opposite of a build to orgasm, more like small waves that lap onto the shore and recede without ever cresting. Perhaps it’s frustration with this aimlessness that’s supposed to lead the audience to fool around. Perhaps the narrative arc toward climax is being negated or subtracted by this endless loop, which leads the couple (or self-lover) to fill in that blank.

At this point, lo and behold, I start to feel a little warm down there. Is it video-inspired lust? Boredom? Work ethic? Self-regard over my clever theorizing? I find I’m not sufficiently ashamed by any of those motivations to keep my pants on.

But once the exoptic devil has busied my idle hands, the video doesn’t move me along. I try squinting, but then it just looks red and green and makes me think of Christmas — whoa. Christmas not sexy: quick, reprogram! I shut my eyes, but then I’m listening for variations in the cycles, and the sound quickly becomes monotonous. Then I think about what Mal said about the video, specifically the “stroking my dick” part. That’s better. Though I like “Blind Heat” as art, I find I actually have to tune it out in order to come. I don’t think this is the next Viagra.

My friends Henry and June (not their real names) are even less convinced. Henry says the sound reminds him of “a relaxation record from the ’70s” and the video was “kind of offensive. It looked a little bloody, like cells.” June, a musician, said she wanted sounds more overtly sexy, like panting and moaning.

Both agreed that the looping hindered sex. “At first, the rhythm of it worked with what we were doing,” June reports, “but after a while we wound down like clockwork. Making love didn’t have the natural ending it usually does.” Their session was shorter than usual and ended before the 45-minute tape was over; June says the sex was actually worse than usual.

She adds that the light flickering on Henry’s skin “looked sort of cool, but not nearly as nice as candlelight.” Bainbridge also brings up fire in our interview, saying he wanted to “warm up the room visually. Fire was our first television, and I want to take the screen back to its roots. A campfire is not so enveloping you can’t talk with the person beside you, and it’s great to look at, but eventually you look at the person beside you and notice the light on them.”

Bainbridge likes my comparison to waves, even though I (and June) found those rhythms stalling the climb toward orgasm. At least waves are natural and not overmediated like so much modern experience, Bainbridge says. “We’re so far past the ‘Plato’s cave’ shadow metaphor. Now it’s like the Xeroxed, scanned JPG of the photograph of the shadow of the reflection on the cave wall. I was trying to reflect more the rhythms inside me that I associate with lovemaking or passion.”

It is sexy to make love to the sound of ocean waves and in flickering light. And contemplating art can make one, if not specifically horny, at least opened up, receptive, tender. Yet this flickering, whooshing art video isn’t sexy to three out of three test subjects, and even its creator may have been fantasizing about his ex. That gap between intent and achievement underscores what huge wind machines the exoptic fields project is tilting at — not just corporate media, but its seedy cousin pornography.

By trying to take sex back from its commodifiers, the project follows rabble-rousing avant-garde movements like dada and situationism. The playful gesture is generally the point in such tiny art “revolutions” and “Blind Heat” doesn’t aspire to pornography, but still I wonder why the video didn’t incite more lust, if only placebo lust.

Perhaps we should blame the media’s genius at creating unquenchable desire — we’ve been programmed to respond only to pornographic and advertising images. Or maybe, no matter how often we say we prefer the suggestive to the obvious, we’re born needing human bodies (present, depicted or imagined) to reliably turn us on. Either way — regardless of why we’re so narrow sexually — we’re the opposite aesthetically, and especially diverse when it comes to abstract art. One man’s electric campfire is another man’s bloody cells.

Mal acknowledges the grand absurdity of his mission to cure TV numbness with arty videotapes, but he swears the project is no put-on. He is genuinely alarmed that “the sublime is being flattened by the ever-more-perfect relationship with media. Anyone can find something to entertain them and they could watch it forever. To respond to that, I thought, why not reverse the equation, come up with an aesthetics that would be deflective rather than attractive. And if it works, it would heighten sexual response, because it would create a negative space inside this flattened one-dimensional world.”

Even if deflection doesn’t globally overthrow attraction — a fairly good possibility — “Blind Heat” and Exoptic Fields’ videos could work locally, Mal says. “Our product is made as something you exchange. Somebody hands the tape to someone and says, ‘Here’s a video that’s made to make you look away.’ Maybe the person laughs, but they also think about its opposite, about how most media works on you.”