The Boyfriend Experience

I’m in toronto without my husband, sitting in a tent with an audience of mostly gay men during Pride Week. I look older than everyone else. In front of us a man named Simon (pronounced Simone) is explaining the virtues of foreskin by holding his fleshy penis in his hand. With the other he pours water on himself from a glass pitcher to demonstrate how easy it is to keep his privates clean, thus debunking the myth that improved hygiene is a good reason for genital mutilation. All he wears is a T-shirt that reads I ❤ MY FORESKIN. We can buy our own shirts for twenty dollars after the show.

“In most parts of the world, if a safety pin so much as touches a vagina, it can put you in jail.” Simon speaks with a seductive French accent as he continues to manipulate his penis, telling us that because fifty percent of its nerve endings are in the foreskin, circumcision greatly reduces sexual pleasure. I’d have an erection by now if I were Simon, but he has everything under control.

“Amen!” yells someone from the audience.

“This is the civil rights issue of our time!” says Simon, stretching his foreskin up and out like a little fan. As a circumcised man, I know I’m supposed to feel enraged, but I already hold enough against my parents and I don’t want to add my penis to the list.

One of the few women in the tent starts to cry. Her dreadlocks sway as she says that she has felt guilty for five years for not circumcising her son. All this time she’s wondered if she’s made a terrible mistake, if he’s going to be harassed in the locker room when he gets older.

“My mother told me I was ruining my boy’s life,” she says. “You’re the first person to make me feel like I’ve done the right thing.”

“Of course you did the right thing.” Cupping his ear Simon yells, “Didn’t she, Toronto?” I clap and hoot with the crowd, but my heart won’t open. This is my first time back since I lived here in the early nineties, right after graduating from college. I feel like I’ve been locked out of the house.

When Simon opens the presentation up to discussion, a man says that while he can’t prove it, he’s certain his lover left him because he didn’t consider him a real man without his foreskin. Then the man announces that his penis is almost eight inches long, and that he has often wondered if he would have made it across the finish line if he were intact.

“Are you talking real inches or Internet inches?” someone yells. Everyone laughs.

There are questions about how painful the procedure is and how much scar tissue is left. Someone asks about foreskin restoration, as if it might be as straightforward as remodeling a bathroom. The procedure sounds too long and painful for me, especially now. Who knows if I’ll ever be able to experience the benefits? When Simon ends his presentation, he passes around a cap, telling us that he volunteers at his job, and that he’d appreciate a small donation to cover his expenses back to Quebec City.

“May the foreskin be with you,” he says as we exit.

It was our marriage counselor who suggested my husband and I take separate vacations. A friend had recommended Dr. Knox to Stuart who offered “queer marriage consultations.” What this meant, I learned at our first meeting, was that Knox wanted to change the marriage paradigm for queer people. Instead of us discussing Stuart’s cheating, Dr. Knox proposed that my husband and I do a year of “relationship exploration” to get back on track or, if we couldn’t keep ourselves from drifting apart, to “uncouple with respect.” He also said that many male couples bring new sexual energy into their lives by going on solo “no questions asked” vacations. Stuart left for his mystery trip a few weeks after...