Montreal: February 2013 – When I was a kid in 1960s London, my father insisted on installing our first house phone in the unheated downstairs hall. The choice of location was to prevent my mother getting so comfortable she ran up a bill.
The benefit for me was that I got to hear, through my half-open bedroom door, any late night phone call that the grownups made. As the late 60s sexual revolution got underway, I had a window on the goings-on among my extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles. I may have only heard half the story, but I soon got adept at imagining the rest. I don’t know whether this somehow influenced my choice of sex therapy as a career, but I do know that eavesdropping has generally got less exciting. These days, when even a trip on the bus requires you to listen to half of someone else’s mobile conversation, I am more likely to lament silently the decline of public manners than to wonder if I might hear one side of a juicy personal story.
But the other day I heard one half of a phone call that took me back to that experience. Having taken a break in Montreal to see an old film maker friend, we went to see Phone Whore, a stage play by telephone sex worker Cameryn Moore that my friend is adapting for film. I would highly recommend this honest, funny, thought-provoking, and – if you are not a sex therapist who thinks he’s heard everything before – occasionally shocking play. But it was less the play than having coffee with Cameryn in her kitchen a few days later that took me back forty plus years.
Cameryn had explained that she was on call and might have to excuse herself. So there we were, my friend and I, sitting self-consciously at her kitchen table while Cameryn took one of her regulars through his sexual fantasy du jour next door. I was impressed, as in the theatre, by how quickly she moved into the desired character, set the scene with what he wanted her to be wearing and then proceeded to simulate having her bra and pants ripped off (I think it was thick paper she was tearing to get the sound effect). Then back she came and we resumed our coffee talk.
What struck me most about this experience was my intense curiosity about the guy on the other end of the line. Cameryn’s delivery was realistically sexy, but it wasn’t half as interesting as the imagined sounds and words of her client. Who was this guy? Was this his main kink or just some light relief on a Monday morning? Just as Cameryn’s callers project their visual fantasies onto her voice, I was imagining what excited pleas and requests had been the hooks for her creativity. It was less Cameryn than the unheard words of her client that got my attention. It’s a cliché of sex therapy that the brain is the most powerful human sex organ, but I was reminded once again of the power of our sexual imaginations in an otherwise everyday Canadian kitchen.