Prologue: A Spark from Lena Waithe

It was a YouTube video. Lena Waithe, in conversation with Shan Boodram, talking about emotional intimacy — the kind that lives between people who will never sleep together. I was watching her the way you watch someone who says the thing you’ve been carrying for forty years without a name for it.

She said: I would rather be hated than stifled.

And something very old lit up in my chest.

People hear the words open relationship and think: sex. More bodies, fewer rules, an excuse dressed up as a philosophy. I spent forty years watching that assumption land on my life like a verdict. What they never saw — what I’m still trying to say — is that for me, openness was never about multiplying partners. It was about refusing to divide myself.

What the Women Said

I grew up the youngest of four brothers in Rotterdam, in a household of women who spoke their minds. My mother, my sisters — teachers, healers, entrepreneurs, preachers, all of them. Fire-starters. They never shied away from hard truth.

But here is what I noticed, even as a boy: they never talked about connection. They talked about roles. What a man should provide. The ways men disappointed. And the men they spoke about were almost always Black or brown — which meant, in some quiet way, they were also talking about me. About what I might become.

I loved those women. I wanted to be the best version of myself for them. But something gnawed at me: the way they spoke of relationships sounded less like freedom and more like a prison.

One afternoon I asked my mother why she and my father never walked hand in hand. She looked at me with that particular calm she had — the kind that meant she was about to say something I’d be turning over for decades — and said:

“Sweety, everything you see is not always what it seems.”

I wasn’t even ten years old. And that sentence split my world in two: the inside, and the outside. What was real, and what was performed. I have been living in that gap ever since.

The Men I Saw

The men in my life told a different story. My father — heavy-voiced, sometimes frightening — was underneath it all a gentle giant. A man who poured every drop of himself into his family. My oldest brother filled his house with laughter and food that healed you. My second brother loved his wife with a radiance you could feel from across a room — bold and bright, in colors that seemed to light the air around him.

So when I heard my mother and sisters speak of men as if they were grown children in need of managing, I was confused. The men I knew were vivid, tender, whole. Only later did I understand: the problem was never the men themselves. The problem was connection — or the absence of it. Connection with themselves first, and then with each other.

I knew, without yet having words for it, that I had to find another way.

The Choice

I chose openness not because I wanted more sex, but because I wanted more transparency. I had watched what secrecy did to families, to marriages, to friendships — how it turned love into performance, slowly, without anyone noticing. I refused to inherit that silence.

For me, an open relationship was never about multiplying partners. It was about finding out who I was — what I actually wanted, what I genuinely felt — so I would not fall into the same trap I had watched close around the people I loved. My mind was already its own trap. The only way a relationship truly works for me is when I feel space — space to learn, space to test the waters. And that space only functions with a partner who understands that concept and is willing to live it too. Not just tolerate it. Live it.

It would cost me years of swimming against the current. People told me I was crazy. And there was a harder truth too, one I had to earn slowly and painfully: I was not always the transparent one I believed myself to be. I gave my partners room to tell me the truth — but how often had I lied to myself first? How often had I blamed the other rather than looked inward? The lies were rarely malicious. Most of the time they were just fear, wearing a familiar face. I knew that face. I had worn it too.

Mateloos

After my HIV diagnosis, I sold my shop in Amsterdam and retreated to Zeeland. Then therapy, then healing, then Rotterdam — and my first year at the Sociale Academie. A teacher fell ill one evening and gave us the night off.

I went to Mateloos, on the Nieuwe Binnenweg. One of the first gay cafés in Rotterdam where you could just walk in — no doorman, no secret knock, no portier. Tables outside on the street, in daylight. We are here. That too was a kind of manifesto.

My friend Leo was behind the bar. Leo, who poured drinks and cracked jokes and served food that tasted like home. Leo, who made you feel that belonging was possible even when everything felt uncertain and fragile. I was living with HIV in a decade when men were dying by the dozens in London, New York, Amsterdam. The laughter, the music, the brilliance of their lives — silenced. Families abandoning their own sons. Hospitals turning people into pariahs. Leo gave me somewhere to set that down for a few hours.

That night, in the middle of one of my heated debates about life and what mattered — I was newly educated and thought I knew everything, hahahaha — I felt a presence. I ignored it. Then I had to look.

Tall, slender. Half Turkish, half Jewish-Dutch. Dark blonde hair. Eyes that shifted colour like the sea — turquoise, green, blue. Yeez, he is hot. I felt my knees suddenly weakening before I caught myself. I nodded. Went back to my performance. Then walked to the bar and told Leo to ask him what he was drinking and put it on my tab.

It took me some time to finish the heated discussion I felt so passionate about — all the while feeling those eyes piercing a hole in my brain. Who was I fooling. The discussion was losing the battle. I made my way in his direction.

Hi handsome.

Before I knew it we were talking as though we had already met. My only desire playing out in my head — I wanted to undress him, or to be undressed. Everything I was looking at I desired with my whole being. Luckily his thoughts were no different. So we said our goodbyes to the room and before we knew it we were outside.

We walked through the warm October night talking and laughing, and later I felt what I can only describe as frightening bliss: to feel so connected to someone new, so completely at home, for the first time in my life.

The Second Morning

After a beautiful evening and a long night of sleep, I woke to the sun peeping through the curtains. I turned to look beside me — as if I needed to be sure it wasn’t a dream. And there he was. Still here. Still asleep. Dark wavy hair against that tanned olive skin, his pronounced Turkish nose, those features that sent chills down my spine. Is it real? Could he, would he, still feel the way he did yesterday?
Slowly, very slowly, I crept out of bed. Tiptoed out of the room. Quietly pulled the bedroom door closed behind me and went to the kitchen. Coffee. Orange juice. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, made myself presentable. Then tiptoed back, placed his coffee neatly at his end of the bed, and slipped back in beside him. A soft kiss on his forehead.
Hi. Good morning, sleepyhead.
I gave him a big smile. Acted like I always woke up like that.
He opened his eyes and looked at me. Good morning, handsome. This feels so good. How do you feel?
I feel amazing. I don’t know what you are doing to me but please keep on doing it.
He looked straight at me and I at him — one of those moments that turns you into a puddle. And then he said:
“I can imagine us in a long-term relationship. But I can’t promise you I will only have sex with you.”

Kaboom.

After years of silence and half-truths leading nowhere, that sentence felt like bliss. Right then and there, I wanted to marry him.

What I Had to Tell Him

I waited until I was sure he was as much in love with me as I was with him. Then I told him I was HIV positive.

He paused. Took it in. Later, he told me exactly what had happened inside him:

“I thought deeply about it, and came to the conclusion that I could not let you go because of my fear. That I could — and must — trust in an iron policy of no blood and no semen. This is a perfect example of why a nightlight is no longer needed once you know what hides in the dark. It was scary, yes. But I knew that if I did the right things, I could trust that it would be okay.”

Hearing that was like watching a door swing open inside me. He didn’t turn away. He chose me — and in doing so, he taught me something I’m still carrying: love is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to walk through it together.

Gay Palace

We talked. We agreed. We believed we understood what we were choosing. Three weeks later, Gay Palace on a Friday night showed me how much I still had to learn.

Three weeks in, still in the honeymoon phase, both of us looking and feeling like gods. We were all over each other in those weeks — though we held back sometimes, not because we didn’t want to but because, as I already knew, eating the whole box of chocolates leaves a nasty stomach.

That night on the dancefloor I was rocking it. And then, in the corner of my eye — André, kissing someone I didn’t know. I didn’t know whether I was about to puke or cry, or both. It was a bitch slap and I was wide awake. This is what you signed up for. Stop whining and deal with it.

We had talked so much about how to handle these moments rationally. But when it happens in real time, you are fucked. That was also one of the first times I understood we operated at opposite ends of the psychological spectrum. It seemed to leave him cold. He introduced us, then kissed me long and lovingly, and asked if it was alright if he took him home. I checked the guy out — handsome as fuck — gave him a hug, three kisses, and told them to have fun.

From the outside you would think I owned the situation. Inside I was closer to tears.

I forced myself back onto the dancefloor. The music was pumping — soulful vocal, British nineties garage at its best. The alcohol was doing its work. And somewhere between the bass and the dancefloor I stopped thinking. I was flying.

But when the night was over I had to face the music. I shed some tears — some, because I kept hammering myself: you signed up for this yourself. The quicker you deal with it the sooner you become master of it. But the voices didn’t wait. One said: Scott, you know it doesn’t work like that. You are going to have to sit with the pain. Another said: leave the fucker. And another, quieter, more cruel: he is way too handsome. He is going to leave you anyway.

André called, or came by, or we went for dinner — I honestly don’t remember. All I wanted was to know everything that had occurred between them. Yes, I know how that looks. But I believe it still — that’s my way of dealing with pain. Learn to feel it fully so it can’t ambush you. Walk toward it instead of away. Take it in until you know its shape, until you stop being its victim. By then I was a pro at this. It was a survival mechanism I had built myself, from scratch.

My fucked up psyche made me do that.

And so began the education I hadn’t known I needed.

Through his honesty, his showing up, his dedication, I watched something happen in me I hadn’t expected: the jealousy I had always hated began to loosen. Not disappear — loosen. I began to see my own growth. I had spent years believing I was somehow faulty. Dangerous. Not enough. His constancy made that belief impossible to sustain.

The Price of Freedom

Maybe the word open is the wrong one. What I was really trying to describe was the freedom to remain whole — and the price of that freedom was learning to sit with jealousy without letting it own me.Jealousy is about ownership. But underneath the ownership is fear — the fear that you are not enough, that love will run out, that you are replaceable. Here is what nobody told me: first you have to sit with the pain. Not fix it, not explain it, not drink it away on a dance floor — sit with it. Feel its full weight. Because only once you’ve done that can you begin to separate what is mine from what is theirs. What is this emotion actually about? As long as I was blaming André, as long as I was holding him captive in my anger, I couldn’t see clearly. I had to let go — not of him, but of the grip — so I could look at what was actually mine and deal with that. Only then could I see again.

I had slowly learned something crucial. By putting everything on the table, all the emotions, all the hurt, and having a partner who listened and added to the conversation rather than shutting it down, I began to see what was actually happening: he came back. Every time. I was home. The sex was never the only point — connection was. He could explain and answer my questions to my satisfaction. And if not, we could agree to disagree, with respect for each other. It was a learning spree, for both of us. I met most of those men. Some of them are still our friends. They had to respect what we had — otherwise it was a no go. Even if they didn’t fully understand it. How could they? Most people don’t. By having that outlet, those conversations, that relentless honesty — it turned into therapy. Because you have to deal with what you feel. I was merciless about that. Constantly asking myself and him: what is it we’re actually feeling right now? And most of the time it wasn’t even mutual. We were in different places, spaces, feeling different emotions, and we had to find each other anyway.

I had tried this before — the open relationship thing. But it only worked when I gave freedom, never when I took it. With André it was different, because the concept was clear to both of us from the beginning. And because we respected each other — this part is so important. We were two men from completely different parts of the psychological spectrum, and yet that respect, that daily lived transparency, always brought us back to common ground. We almost never raised our voices at each other.

What haunted me in those years had no name then. I felt everything at a volume other people didn’t seem to hear — every slight, every absence, every charged silence in a room. I thought everyone felt that way. They didn’t. And underneath it all, the testosterone was its own kind of noise. Learning that later — giving it a name, understanding what it had cost me — was its own quiet liberation. Male testosterone is a bloody thing.

The Circle

André’s love gave me something unexpected: security. And security made me bold. Attractive, even — at least on first glance. But let me be honest about what I was actually doing.

There is a Dutch saying: je ziet de splinter in de ogen van een ander maar de balk in die van jezelf niet. You see the splinter in someone else’s eye but not the beam in your own. I compared André to a computer — cold, unfeeling, unable to read me. I wanted to be seen completely, read without having to speak. But I knew, somewhere underneath, that you cannot expect another person to be a magician. Only I could give myself what I was looking for. I just didn’t know how yet.

So began the dating habits. I would meet someone and be in total awe — and within weeks, sometimes months, arrive at the same conclusion every time. First they seemed better than him. Then they disappointed. And I would understand again, quietly, why André was home. Why he was the one I wanted. The others wanted to own me. André gave me space. The difference, when I finally saw it clearly, was everything.

What I was running from wasn’t them. It was myself. The fear of not being enough. That fear was always there, biting and rotting at the edges of my brain. I tried every time to face it. I didn’t know how. So I walked away and found the next, and started the same circle again. The grass always seemed greener. But at the end I stood there naked and exposed, exactly where I started.

The Year I Disappeared

In the nineties my body gave out. I had been using too much — speed, MDMA, marijuana — everything that could numb my feelings in the name of heightening my experiences. It sent my HIV into AIDS. I lost fourteen, fifteen kilos. My reflection looked like a stranger. For the first time I believed I might actually die.

André never left my side. He cooked. He cared. He kept vigil. He carried me when I couldn’t carry myself. For a year I lived in that shadow — and slowly, with his hands and the new medicines and my own stubborn refusal to die, I came back.

That year showed me what openness really meant. Not a philosophy. Not a lifestyle. A test — the harshest one I know — of what survives when everything else is stripped away. For us, what survived was not just love but trust built from actual proof.

What I Couldn’t Take

The circle taught me one thing I hadn’t expected: that the fear I was running from wasn’t about them at all. It was in my body. And my body carried something that made everything harder.

The cruelty of living with HIV, in those years, was not only the fear of dying. It was the fear of being the one who passes it on. I could not bear the thought of another man carrying my illness because of me — because of a moment, a lapse, something I did or didn’t do. That guilt alone could have destroyed me.

So I held back. I gave. I served. I let my partners take, but I could not fully take for myself. Pleasure became sacrifice. Intimacy became restraint. I told myself it was the moral thing — and it was — but deep down it left me feeling faulty. Not good enough. Half a man.

And yet. There were moments when that armor cracked. I wanted to feel them bare — oh, how I wanted that. I knew it was dangerous. But the alternative was refusal, and refusal made me feel faulty and dirty in a way I could not deal with in that moment. I felt like a hypocrite and a horny devil at the same time. I am not proud of every moment. But I also refuse to perform a shame I have already lived through — because the world was already doing enough of that. Looking at my body, my face, and telling me I couldn’t possibly be sick. As if HIV had a look. As if I hadn’t watched men just like me disappear.

That’s the stigma nobody talks about cleanly: being desired and being dirt at the same time. Being alone in a room full of people who thought they knew what you were. The voices. God, the voices. There was so much I could not say out loud, so much I carried in silence. It wasn’t an excuse. It was just the full weight of the world I was living in — and the full mess of the mind trying to survive it.

What Broke Us

In the end, it wasn’t dating that broke André and me. It was something quieter. His contentment with who he already was. My relentless demand for more — more growth, more questioning, more hunger. I see now what I couldn’t see then: that must have felt, to him, like not being enough. And the truth is — I was very demanding. Living with my nervous system blazing twenty-four hours a day is exhausting even for me. I didn’t understand that then.

I had to learn — slowly, painfully — that it isn’t faulty to simply want to be yourself. That André never blocked my growth. I did that all by myself. And you cannot blame another for that. You often cannot even blame yourself — because we can only understand ourselves with the knowledge we had at hand in that moment in time.

I still love that man as he is. Always will. André is not a closed chapter — he never could be. All your pasts bring you to your present. He is part of what made me who I am.

The difference is: I love myself more now. And I no longer place those expectations on anyone else — not André, not my partner today. This constant hunger, this restlessness — it is mine. My way of living, my way of thinking, my way of being. I thrive in it. I just don’t need someone else to carry it with me. Still to this day we love each other. And the case studies we were /are — hahahaha.

Full Circle

When I heard Lena Waithe say she would rather be hated than stifled, I wasn’t moved because it was new. I was moved because it was mine.

Openness, for me, was never only about sex. It was about refusing to lie — to my partners, and to myself. It was the long, expensive, sometimes brutal work of finding out who I was. What I wanted. What I feared. What I was capable of. You cannot do that work in hiding.

I have chosen this path my whole life. I have paid for it in ways I am still accounting. And I would choose it again — not because it was easy, but because the alternative was to divide myself in two and live as half a man.

I have always refused that.