I hear a scuffling and glance at the guy on my left. "And when she showed up, whoa!" Now he is grinning. Is he smirking? "I called one the other day," says the man, tall, lean, blond, wearing a soft blue bespoke suit that must have cost $7,000. More specifically, young, slender, tall prostitutes. The fourth man confesses his weakness for prostitutes. The next is a compulsive porn watcher who doesn't cheat on his girlfriend but thinks about it for hours every day, and then there's a man who "eye-f-ks" every woman he sees but can rarely manage the genital version of the act with his wife. The first man to share says he wants to stop cheating on his wife but can't. The person who used the language should not take this personally, as we simply want to provide a safe place for everyone." "If anyone does feel triggered, raise your hand, and I will repeat this announcement. I am not weak, I am not bad, but I am a self-hugger. The self-huggers' eyes dart around the room with puzzlement and some fear. "While we encourage members to be open and honest," Roger reads from the binder, "we also ask members to refrain from mentioning specific establishments, websites, social-media platforms, or persons, as such language can be triggering." A timer will buzz if we exceed that limit. But, and here he swivels for another owl-eyed sweep, we should limit the revelations of our brave secrets to four minutes or less. This is where we can be brave, where we can reveal whatever secrets we need to reveal, and no one will judge. We are all in the right place, Roger assures us. I saw a few other men already seated, frowning into the middle distance, hugging themselves.
A few minutes earlier, when I entered, I saw knots of men hugging each other, slapping each other's backs. We're gathered together on the third floor of a 100-year-old stone church, in a dingy room with brown linoleum floors, breathing in what smells like cabbage cooked a decade ago. It is four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, a cold, sleeting winter day. "My name is Roger*," the binder man says, sweeping that unblinking, owlish gaze from me to the man sitting next to me, then to the man sitting next to him, then to the man next to him, until he has peered into 25 ailing but not necessarily twisted, criminal, or irredeemable souls. What if I'm not a dick? I'm beginning to like the man holding the blue binder. He tells me that I'm not a wrongdoer trying to do right, merely a sick person trying to get better. "Trust me," the unblinking, putatively sincere eyes say, while the mouth makes noises I am fairly certain are lies. He looks at me the way a televangelist looks into a camera, the way a human-resources director at a company about to fire half its workers looks at those workers. You are not bad, the guy holding the blue binder promises me, and you are not weak.