![gay men jerk off at gym gay men jerk off at gym](http://www.theyearbookfanzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Alex_17-768x1083.jpg)
As I dressed and wandered into the night, I thought about parting words from John. “It made me very wary of dating any gay guys who worked out there,” he says. On the one hand, I thought about the warning from guys like Will. I found myself back in the steam room on a recent Saturday and for the first time, was hyperaware of six or seven guys anticipating some action. It must take balls, no pun intended, to initiate an encounter. “No straight guy is going to want to run up to the desk and be like, there’s two guys fooling around in the shower,” he says. And regarding a straight-guy snitch, John is similarly confident. “It’s in the best interest of the gym to look the other way as long as it doesn’t get out of hand,” he says. “If I walked into the locker room or sauna, I would very obviously be interrupting naughty play.” John likewise argues it’s a nonissue. But Will, a former staffer at a North Side gym, says he always looked the other way. “Their girlfriend isn’t going to think twice if they’re like, ‘Honey, I’m going to the gym.’ ”Īt the family of health clubs I belong to, there is usually a staff attendant monitoring the locker room area and straight guys abound. “That kind of culture of excitement by virtue of the aesthetic just blends itself over into something that could be sexual.” John also says many of the men he encounters hook up out of necessity. “There is kind of a show-and-tell aspect in a locker room or shower area at a gym because there are mirrors everywhere and everybody’s kind of checking each other out,” he says. In the age of Grindr, Craigslist, Scruff and a thousand other places for gay and bi men to meet and have sex, why risk getting booted from the gym over some hanky-panky? For starters, says John, there’s an exhibitionist element. Instead, I just sat there and watched the steam engulf his cock like fog over San Francisco Bay. I said I hadn’t and he waited expectantly for me to make a move. He asked if I was gay and when I nodded, he asked if I’d ever jerked off in a steam room before. This summer, I was alone in the steam room when a guy sat down across from me and deliberately arranged his towel to reveal a perky boner.
![gay men jerk off at gym gay men jerk off at gym](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b8t1bNY5Mcw/UugoTXgri5I/AAAAAAAATN8/TWHwBwu2Mt4/s1600/marc-fitt-shooting-fitness-model-15.jpg)
“It doesn’t seem to be that abnormal of an idea if you think about it.” “I figure, why not maximize my incentives to work out,” he says. “My initial reaction was it was a little creepy,” he says of a guy who started masturbating in an open shower stall across from his, “but I wasn’t turned off by it.” John surrendered to temptation and has since become a frequent practitioner. He mentioned a Naperville gym as the site of his first sexual encounter many years ago. John, a friend and thirtysomething North Sider who agreed to be interviewed for this article (all names in the story have been changed to protect sources), recounted numerous gym hookups when we spoke via phone. Turns out, a steam-room circle jerk is as common an occurrence for some men as the flu in winter. Up until that day, I hadn’t taken the notion of sexual activity at the gym, aside from the occasional cruise or furtive glance, all that seriously. “I want to bury my face in your ass.” When an attractive, thirtyish guy said that to me in the middle of a crowded locker room many months ago, it was a wake-up call.