Doug had been conditioning me for months. We had met at the gym, and several weeks after we’d become regular spotting partners, he revealed to me, almost in an off-hand manner, that he was bisexual and that he actually preferred gay sex. He didn’t come on to me—at least not directly—and I consider myself fairly open-minded, so I continued with our informal spotting arrangements, him monitoring me as I worked the weights and me doing the same for him. I also had an insatiable curiosity, and Doug was quite clever about exploiting that curiosity. He wasn’t the one who said or did anything about my trying out the gay lifestyle; he just responded to my natural curiosity. How was I to know, though, that this seemingly innocuous quirk was but the beginning of a long spiral down into the maelstrom?

Sometimes after we’d worked out and showered, we’d go someplace together for a drink before going our separate ways. As time went on, I started asking him about his life and about the whole gay scene. I don’t know why I did this—or didn’t know at the time. Looking at it from hindsight, he obviously had seen the curiosity in me for all sorts of things and had played on that from the beginning.

Regardless, the more he didn’t push the topic, the more curious I was, the more I asked about it, and the more I became interested in it. After a while, he wasn’t at all shy about watching me in the shower, but I guess I wasn’t all that shy about watching him either. He slowly made his interest in me known in no uncertain terms.