Lust Life: Sex in a Closet

It was the horniest time of the month for both of us. She came over with her laptop to help me with a technical problem. I didn’t really have sex on the brain, but when I looked over at her standing in my office, all professional-dyke-sexy in a suit, there was a rumbling in my nether regions. How the pinstriped polyester hugged her ass! Yet as horny as I was, I didn’t think I needed sex at the moment, or rather, I ignored the urge, crushing it with the problems and obligations that brought her there in the first place. I left the room to get something, and when I came back, I hugged her. It felt so good to hold her without any expectation, that I started kissing her neck. Before I realized the extent of my desire, she had me hoisted against the wall and we were grinding with our clothes on. When our hearts started to return to their regular rhythm, I was half-stripped and straddling her on a chair, thinking that we were somewhere else.

I was imagining we were in a utility closet, a narrow space between filing cabinets or an airplane bathroom. That’s what I told her. “Mmm … that’s hot,” she said. What’s so hot about losing your balance and banging against hard surfaces in an un-erotic environment? Well, sometimes satin sheets, candles and Barry White don’t do the trick. This is not the first time I’ve experienced “sex in a closet” without actually stepping into a closet. In past relationships, when sexual desire was at a low because erotic connection had thinned due to time, stress, outside interests and/or domesticity, it often snapped back in a spontaneous moment of lust. And in these moments of spontaneity, my partner reclaimed the mystery that attracted me in the beginning.

A sudden attack of intense arousal has the power to transform a familiar face into a stranger. When you’re not fixated on the idea that “we’re a couple, we should be having sex, and if we are, it shouldn’t be bland,” you can create space to see your partner with new eyes. Esther Perel elucidates this concept in her book, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic. She writes, “When we resist the urge to control, when we keep ourselves open, we preserve the possibility of discovery. Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination.”

Closets and bathrooms are the last places I think of when I’m contemplating openness. These places are often stuffy, dusty, smelly, dirty, confining and, in some cases, frightening and claustrophobic. The metaphorical closets may not be smelly or dirty, but they’re certainly confining—even with their illusion of safety. If the only positive attribute of a closet is something that deadens desire for most people (at least the “flannel nightgown” sort of safety as Ms. Perel refers to it), then how does a tight windowless room become a great setting for lust to explode?

If the closet is the coatroom of your office, and you notice the cute intern hanging up her coat after she flirted blatantly with you during lunch, you could stroll on over and pull her in while nobody’s looking. Of course, if you’re in public, the thrill of getting caught fuels the sexual excitement. But there’s more to it than that. Small, enclosed spaces represent immediacy in my mind. You have only so much room in which to move. And though you may be hidden from public view, you can’t hide from each other. Put two animals in a cage and what do they do? They have sex, if they don’t kill each other first.

This wildcat has never had sex in a closet. But I’ve fooled around in an elevator and had sex in a hostel shower. In every one of these situations, I felt the compression of time, the awareness of taboo and the seductive unknown of my partner. Although none of them were long-term lovers at the time of the tryst, their already-inherent unknown qualities were magnified to the point where, during certain moments, it was easy to imagine not knowing them at all. The illusion of unfamiliarity made them more desirable.

You don’t have to lock yourself and your partner in the closet at work to experience the transformative power of immediacy through confinement. This phenomenon can be recreated in fantasy, whether it’s spontaneous or planned. Just open your new eyes and feel erotic connection renewed in not knowing the person you love.