Some of the regulars were already there: Tony, the boy from ‘parks and gardens’, Gwyn and Iolo, the vicar and the GP who always came together, Eddy, who taught at the university in Bangor and Stan, the chip shop owner from Llandudno. Ben didn’t knowingly have sex with any of this group, though in the steam room it wasn’t always easy to know who was who; these were the men he sat around with and talked to about politics and travel, gardening and DIY. It was still early, but there were a couple of strangers that excited him; this was how Ben had grown to like it – anonymous sex was so uncomplicated. This way he could be certain, when he left The Steamworks, that no one would be likely to turn up on his door step or phone him at school… and he could be sure that he wouldn’t become emotionally involved.

It wasn’t that somewhere deep inside him he didn’t yearn for one man to love and share his life with. A long time ago, nearly sixteen years, he’d made a choice to return to Gwynedd and immerse himself in Welsh life. Though Manchester had seemed tempting, since the gay scene had come into its own, offering freedoms and choices that would be out of reach in Meirionnydd, the chance to teach science in a new Welsh-medium school and to live his everyday life in his mother tongue touched him at his identity’s core. He knew well enough that such a choice would demand that his gayness remain in the closet, but Ben Pasgen was neither disappointed nor dissatisfied with his life. Just like the peppered moth, the example he always cited to his GCSE class when explaining the theory of natural selection, he had adapted successfully to a potentially hostile environment.

Ben’s experience of sex in The Steamworks was often bizarre, but it was always safe: it was as though the group voiced a silent message about self-preservation that no one transgressed. One of the staff replenished the supplies of condoms and lubricating gel once or twice through the course of an evening; like fruit or sweets, they lay in bowls on occasional tables for customers to help themselves. It was with some pride that Ben would occasionally reflect on the fact that for all his brief encounters, with perhaps fifty, seventy, even a hundred men a year, he’d never caught an infection. But then he wasn’t complacent either, and knowing that some STIs developed no symptoms, he had himself checked over at the clinic in Wrexham every school holiday. Since the cute new consultant had arrived, Ben almost looked forward to these visits. His colleagues at school, the faithful few on the Parochial Church Council and the dwindling congregation at Eglwys Sant Pedr, his co-campaigners in Plaid Cymru and his friends in the choir would have been shocked and scandalised had they known of Ben’s evenings at The Steamworks. Some, he felt sure, would be disgusted and want no more to do with him. Yet, he’d always been careful not to deliberately mislead people or lie to them, and in all the years he’d been back in Wales, no one had asked about his ‘private life’. Perhaps the visible busyness of his days precluded, in most people’s minds, any notion of him having a private life. But he knew well enough how people made assumptions about others… how they filled in the gaps of other people’s lives with their own fancies and fictions. Ben couldn’t know the untruths in which they’d clothed him.