Charging the monkey is exposure to erotic situations before real sex. It results in longer and more intense orgasms, tapping massive loads with powerful hydraulics. But it takes more than abstinence to save up for a special date. To hit the ceiling, put an eye out, shoot targets across the room, I squirrel away unreleased erotic tension into a mental vault, stockpiling Reichian orgones for the most choice occasions. Not spanking the little bugger doesn't cut it. Charging the monkey, like a lithium battery, makes him dance like a dervish when the time is ripe.

Chargers deploy a wide array of strategies seeking "the cruise" for erotic reserves, stretching the limits of "not sex" as far as justifications and imaginations allow. My first notion of a silent undercurrent appeared when I innocently decided to check out a local Japanese bathhouse, renowned for being new age, straight and beyond reproach. There were tatami mats, burbling Zen fountains, rice paper screens, sauna, steam, cold dip, the works. A few burnt out stockbrokers were unmistakable. Damp and folded Wall Street Journals strategically covered the one deficiency they couldn't plump with a bulging portfolio. Everyone else was middle-aged and queer.

In polite society men and women aren't permitted to mix wearing terrycloth sarongs (half the size of a bath sheet at that) as most believe the opportunity tempts men beyond their limits of self-control. When it is all boys and most are suspected deviants, the more powerful minority apparently takes comfort from placards everywhere forbidding sexual activity. Windows into the sauna and steam areas were patrolled with suspicious intensity by sneering towel jockeys itching to vindicate aspersions to their own sexuality by busting a fag with wandering fingers.

Why would queers enthusiastically support a business that slanders them with caveats and homophobic sex police? Oddly enough -- and I suspect few of these men deconstruct their motives -- it re-creates an erotic paradigm dear to their hearts: stealth cruising.

Behind masks of earnest intent, they lust after one another with varying degrees of subtle refinement. No one speaks, but the same guys keep landing in the same locations together. The strikingly good-looking have followers in tow. Invariably they are of the same ilk as the object of pursuit, but not as stunning; such are the delusions of narcissism. In dry heat, bubbling water or through steamy fog, disinterested self-caresses and coy glances are perfected in pursuit of a silent language of hardening. Never have I seen so many men fluffed to a state of maximum tumescence, barely in repose, but short of a fully indictable hard-on. Everyone knows the game, but no one speaks for fear of spoiling the fantasy.

Health clubs are a haven to similar layers of deception. Gay men claim the gym as native habitat now, but they learned as adolescents -- if they wanted to survive -- to avert their eyes from what they most desired. The cruising that squeezes by, rife with the danger of accidentally provoking a loutish straight man, is eminently prized.

A straight trainer at my gym provides endless thrills to the queers who line up at the bench press for their daily peep show while he spots them. As he straddles their upturned faces in his baggy shorts, they're storing away the spectacular view, huffing and puffing, getting off on the glorious possibility of sweat from his pendulous balls dripping right in their eyes.

The value this exhibitionism holds for him when he later throws a hump to his girlfriend is less clear. Maybe he isn't so straight; everyone lands somewhere between on the Kinsey continuum. If he is oblivious, it must be a coincidence that all his shorts sport extra-wide leg holes. Sure, and it must be his aversion to underwear that gives him that perpetual semi-hard-on.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk