Practicing Exposure in the Dark

What saunas taught me about vulnerability, presence, and the body

Photo by Valentin Jorel on Unsplash

In the darkened laconium, I sit naked and sweating in my designated alcove. It is a circular room lit by a soft green glow. I think of a spacecraft. Coffee grounds steeped in honey slide down my supraorbital ridge, my squinting eyes blurring what little I can see.

Nine of us face the same center in the room. Steam thickens. No liftoff — just heat, closing in.

Then the glass door opens.

A German spa attendant walks in, a towel knotted at his waist, a large fan in his hand.

This is the kind of note-taking I do. This has become my odd hobby of late. I want to go cave spelunking, but so far my spelunking has been limited to saunas and spas.

I struggle to write about sensations and emotions. Friends suggested writers who explored them in depth. I tried reading Thomas Carlyle, who evoked emotion tethered to external pressures, while Virginia Woolf revealed étincelles of implosion through her internal struggles. When that still wasn’t enough, I leaned into Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin — their letters of infatuation, charged with obsessive, intimate attention to one another.

And when books won’t suffice, and my imagination runs dry, I need to expose myself to heated, confined conditions to gain more lived-in knowledge.

Why do I pursue this?

As I have hinted in previous articles, I am writing a story that takes place on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 274 confirmed moons. Enceladus is the only moon of Saturn with confirmed, directly observed geysers.

That’s as far as the facts go in my story. The rest — the moon hosting a colony of cave spelunkers and spa enthusiasts — is tantalizing sci-fi speculation. For now, at least.

I explore spas and saunas to create an out-of-this-world world grounded in my own lived experience and observations.

To add more depth to the why of my pursuit, the story’s surface-level glimmer is as important as its subtext: the psychological push and pull that the protagonist experiences.

This is, in part, encoded in my own identity explorations of the gay cultures of our time — those I move through, and those that move through me.

When, in the past, going to saunas was a way to explore a sexuality I was only beginning to name, it has since deepened. Not because of sex itself, but because I am now looking for meaning in the conditions that surround it — for myself, and for the story.

I find myself at an intersection: between sexuality and sensuality, between emancipation and overindulgence, between being naked simply to exist and being naked as an invitation. The distinction matters more than it used to.

I grew up in an environment where acceptance was not an option. It was not always overtly condemned, but what I learned was coded through silence, shame, and avoidance. Those lessons linger in the body longer than in thought.

To loosen those bindings, they often need to be replaced by another form of constraint, paradoxical as that sounds — one that is sex-coded, or one rooted in confined, sensorial experience. Sometimes the line between the two blurs, and navigating it requires care.

I go inward into sensation, then roam far outward into social speculation.

Too much sex — too much unexamined indulgence — can make me lose myself. And that loss easily collapses into stereotype: the promiscuous, amoral gay man. These narratives are inseparable from bias, judgment, and internalized homophobia, shaped by societies that have long sought to discipline sexuality. To “stay in line.” Disruption is rarely welcomed. Even minor declarations of sexual presence can carry consequences.

But sex is not always the point.

Sometimes what I seek is the experience of approaching another naked human being while naked myself — without armor, without pretense — and noticing how we communicate in that state. What remains when seduction is absent. What softens when danger is no longer assumed.

Because my past is threaded with abuse and trauma, my relationship to exposure carries both trepidation and pull. In certain contexts, nakedness without a sexual imperative becomes reparative. It allows the body to unlearn vigilance. To exist without scanning for threat. To be seen, and to see, without bracing.

Sometimes there is only the quiet freedom of walking naked among other naked bodies, without scorn or interpretation. Sometimes the games of seduction return. The difference is not moral — it is contextual. And learning to feel that difference, to stay present within it, is part of what I am practicing.

In the story I am writing, the caves and the spa infrastructures on the moon are connected, so it makes sense for me to follow that extension: cave spelunking.

My next mission: to plunge into Earth’s subterranean depths, where there is no one but myself and my thoughts, their echoes returning from the walls. Perhaps to share the space with small creatures that live in these massive, stone corridors of time immemorial. And perhaps I’ll strip myself down there too — not as provocation, but to exist in the dark, unobserved, unguarded.

This reflection began as a response to Pentremites’ prompt to name an odd hobby — and explain why I pursue it.

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