MUSINGS: Moonlight and Boundaries

Everyone wanted to be the exception. No one was.

By mid-afternoon the east side heat was already slick and mean, the kind that makes your skin feel too tight, like you’re wearing yourself wrong. That’s when I’d see him—James—lounging outside Intelligentsia, espresso in hand, a paperback in the other, shirt half-unbuttoned like he’d just wandered in from some Fellini film and forgot which city he was in.

People said he was a lawyer, real estate mergers, or something equally bloodless, but that was just his daylight disguise. It was the other hours, the ones after dark, that people told stories about. By night, James became something else entirely: a soft-mannered, elegant sort of specter, the type of person who arrived at parties like mist and left them like myth.

He was queer in the most expansive sense of the word—pansexual, poly, untethered from any single idea of how to be. In a city that still thrived on binaries—gay or straight, masc or femme, dom or sub, James floated above it all like those categories were just someone else’s bad dream. Gender, orientation, style, power dynamics; none of it dictated the way he moved through the world. It was intoxicating to witness.

I never slept with him.

That always surprises people.

Not because I wasn’t curious, I was, deeply, but because I didn’t want to become another note in the chorus of stories told about him. Another “James night.” Another half-remembered kiss in a Silver Lake apartment. I wasn’t interested in the momentary high. I wanted to understand what it was about him. The way he made people feel. The spell.

Because everyone had a James story.

“He made me tea afterward,” said Annelise, once, eyes wide like she was still there. “Like, not in a performative way. He actually sat on the edge of the tub while I soaked and told me this story about growing up in Sonoma. It was the most cared for I’ve felt in a year.”

“He asked me what my favorite childhood memory was,” Theo told me. “And I cried. Like, before we even got undressed. It was like he wanted to see the parts of me I don’t usually show. And then he just… held them.”

James didn’t just fuck people, he entered them. Quietly. Courteously. With reverence. And then he left, not cruelly, not callously, but with just enough distance to make it clear: the moment had ended.

It fascinated me, the way he moved between people, man, woman, trans, non-binary, with a kind of fluid precision, like a conductor moving through instruments. His intimacy was precise and generous, and yet it was always held inside an invisible glass box. You got to touch the flame, but not carry it home.

What struck me most wasn’t how many people he slept with; it was how well he managed it all. How none of them seemed angry. Or bitter. Or possessive. If anything, they seemed grateful.

It was like he had mastered the art of boundaries while completely erasing the space between bodies.

I remember thinking: This shouldn’t be possible. You shouldn’t be able to fuck everyone and still keep your own soul intact. But James had a way.

We had lunch once, at Sqirl. He ordered the sorrel pesto rice bowl and flirted absently. When I didn’t flirt back, he looked surprised. Not offended…just thrown.

“You’re not interested?” he asked, tilting his head in that way he did, like a curious bird.

“Not like that,” I said. “But I’m listening.”

And something shifted. Just slightly. The air changed. The smooth, well-mannered mask slid an inch off center. He told me about his brother. Heroin overdose. Palm Springs. How he got the call at 2:14 a.m. and drove all night in silence. How his time in prison felt like a dream he never really woke up from.

“I don’t do that anymore,” he said, sipping his coffee. “But sometimes, I miss the chaos.”

He said it softly, not looking at me.

That was the real difference between James and everyone else trying to be free. James had been the chaos. He had lived the fire. And now, he lived in its ash. Carefully. Elegantly. On his own terms.

But even in that moment, sharing something fragile, he never gave me the whole thing. Just a sliver. A shard. Enough to feel real, but not enough to hold.

And I realized then what it was. The contradiction. He gave people his body, his time, his warmth, but never himself. Not fully.

There was always that slight remove. That glass wall. That breath of space between his soul and yours, no matter how deeply you believed you were in.

Maybe that’s how he managed it. How he moved from person to person, moment to moment, night to night without unraveling. He loved everyone a little, and no one completely.

Now and again, I still see him. On Instagram stories, mostly. At someone’s Echo Park birthday, or shirtless by a pool in Silver Lake, skin bronzed, covered in tattoos and indifferent. Or rollerblading at Moonlight Rollerway in a sequined tank top, arms out like wings, face tilted up toward the disco ball like it might baptize him. Moving through the haze like a saint in exile.

And I always know what it means. What void he’s temporarily filling.

It’s never just sex. It’s gravity. Warmth. Surrender. That precise little moment when someone forgets they’re alone. When they believe they’ve been chosen.

And maybe they have.

But only for a moment.

James doesn’t stay. He drifts, from body to body, apartment to apartment, always gracious, always kind, always just out of reach.

He’s not trying to be yours.

He’s trying to remind you what it feels like to be seen. To be touched without being taken.

To want something with no rules. No name.

And no promise.