Lately I had started to notice bruises appearing all over one of my mates. He explained them away at first by using his job as the excuse; he does a very physically demanding job for an industrial firm (yes, a gay man who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty!). After a while, none of use were convinced and became suspicious that the bruises started appearing around the same time that my mate started ‘seeing’ a new guy – I use inverted comas because, to him, seeing a guy is finding someone within a half mile radius who he can pop round and have sex with at short notice.

Finally, it all came out the other day; his new friend likes it kinda rough, in fact he likes to get hit – hard. Apparently he’s happy to get hit anywhere apart from his face, as he does a very stuffy office job and it wouldn’t go down too well if he kept turning up on monday mornings with a black eye. According to my mate, if his bruises looked bad, it was nothing compared to what the other fella looked like. My mate said he was reluctant to give in to this guy’s demands at first, and was terrified of going too far and putting him in hospital, but over time he got a taste for it and was happy to oblige – at first just slapping and punching, but later using hard objects . The bruises on my mate were accidental, from when it got a bit too intense.

He told me that he hasn’t heard from this guy since their last session, and is worried that he seriously hurt him – this time they were using a tennis racquet and he hadn’t meant to hit the guy in the stomach as hard as he did, but the guy fell to the floor in pain, curled up into a ball, and didn’t get up. My mate kept asking if he was okay, but he was groaning and just about managed the words ‘please go.’ That’s the last time they saw each other. I told my mate he should call him or go round if he’s so worried, but that’s not in their rules, apparently; they only contact each other for sex.