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.

For some weeks after the sex education workshop, when he was driving or in the middle of some renovation job on his cottage, Ben had thought about how he might respond if a student asked him about his sex life. He’d tried rehearsing different scenarios and anticipating responses, but gay and lesbian issues were not part of everyday conversation in the cafés of Dolgellau, the pubs of Trawsfynydd or the staff room at Ysgol Bro Meirion, so the imaginary role-play only led to an uneasy paranoia. He liked the idea of establishing a ‘no personal questions’ ground rule with his classes, but he also liked Catrin’s suggestion: ‘Ask them why they want to know’. He couldn’t help wondering how many boys and girls, in his fifteen years at Bro Meirion, had been confused and tormented by the realisation that they were gay or lesbian and found no information or support at school. He remembered the fear and loneliness of his own school days. Ask them why they want to know, he repeated to himself.