Author, Therapist and "Sacred Intimate" Bodyworker Don Shewey Is Having a Ton of Sex at 70

He talked to me about his no-holds-barred spiritual sexwork memoir "Daddy Lover God" and about why his daddiness brings all the boys to the yard.

Caftaners, greetings from NYC where we are having what I like to call “September 11 weather”—a string of those perfect days, just like the day the planes hit the towers. Despite that tragic memory, I love this time of year in NYC. I particularly love going to the beach after Labor Day, into October if possible, as I did yesterday with some friends to Jacob Riis, which I’m sure some of you know is the part of the Rockaways where the queer beach is, which was great fun. Every type of LGBTQ person you could possibly imagine, all sorts of music overlapping in the air, everyone jumping waves in the water, many kinds of hotness everywhere you look.

Here we are (me on the left)

Before we “get into it,” I want to share a few things. One is this interview I did recently with Tom Viola, the amazing man who has helmed Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS for nearly 30 years and is stepping down at the end of this year. BC/EFA has funded more good things, in NYC and elsewhere, than I can even count. And, uh, what else? I thought I had a few more tidbits to share but now I can’t remember what, haha. Well, one thing I wanted to mention is that, if, like me, you want Kamala to win in November, and for Dems to secure strong majorities in both the Senate and the House, please consider doing some canvassing or at least phone banking. Here is just one way you can get into that, but really all you have to do is google “How can I canvass or phone bank for the Democrats in [add your state here]?”

Oh! And I also want to really thank Matthew Rettenmund and Kevin Sessums for their frequent shouting-out of my Caftan posts and ask you to look at their Substacks (linked on their names) and and consider subscribing or following. They are very overlappy (I just made that word up!) with Caftan, especially Matthew’s and his love, which I share, of the marginalia of the past few decades of gay cultural and recreational history.

And finally I’ll say that I already have October’s interview in the can. It’s with a rather BIG NAME with a BIG PERSONALITY and it’s so good, and I’m also proud to say that I (mostly) succeeded in doing an introspective, thoughtful and heartfelt interview with this someone, who is known to live IN CAPITAL LETTERS!!!!

But THIS month’s interview is with author, and (now semi-retired) psychotherapist and erotic bodyworker Don Shewey. I have known Don around town for a while and have been meaning to read Daddy Lover God, his memoir he published last year about how the AIDS epidemic, in the early nineties, moved him to transition from a rather glamorous journalistic career [he did this very iconic 1991 Advocate interview with Madonna] to a kind of hybrid career of spiritual-healing-via touch-meets-sex-work for other gay men (many of them semi- or totally closeted). And then he became a gestalt psychotherapist on top of that. And then he wrote about his experiences—often in sexy, graphic details [albeit anonymously]—in DLG and another book, The Paradox of Porn, which looks at the healthy and unhealthy roles porn can play in the lives of gay men.

I really got into both books, in part because I feel like, in my fifties, I’ve been having a kind of personal expansion in terms of what sex means to me and feel like I’ve been throwing off a lot of the shame and negative feelings I’ve deeply internalized about sex since I was an adolescent. (This is a big theme in Don’s work.) Sometimes I lament the fact that it took me this long to be able to see sex as, say, nothing more than two or more guys having a good time together and making each other feel good. Don’s books make me think a lot about the era that guys my age and older came of age in, all the negative ideas about gay sex we absorbed often even before we ever had sex—and then of course, the fear and grief of AIDS laid on top of that. But the flip side of my lament is genuine gratitude for having lived to see a new era of sex where, largely thanks to PrEP (and now doxyPEP to help prevent STIs), it seems to have regained some of the joy and lightness (and, uh, filthy kinkiness) it had in the seventies.

So that’s just a bit of why Don’s books really spoke to me. They’re also very well-written, which should be no surprise from someone who used to write regularly for The New York Times, The Village Voice, etc. This may, in fact, be the first time I’ve done a Caftan interview with another journalist, which is nice because journalists understand, in a way non-journalists sometimes can’t, what makes a good interview. And by that I don’t mean necessarily being shocking and salacious but rather being specific and concrete and story-driven rather than abstract and all beat-around-the-bush (so to speak!).

So please enjoy this interview with Don! Perhaps check out his books after, if this interview piques your interest. Perhaps even consider doing one of Don’s annual retreats for older gay men (more on that in the interview). Oh! And please consider subscribing to HIS Substack. (I just did.)

And I will ask as ever that, if you’ve free-subcribed to Caftan for a while now and enjoyed it, you consider pay-subscribing.

The truth is, I’m not very good at (perhaps I mean “interested in”) exploring every algorithmic strategy for getting more pay subscribers. Mainly I focus on lining up and doing good interviews and hope that mere word of mouth suffices to grow this thing—which it has, but I could also use more growth, in part because I would like to use this platform to start posting more health stuff. (For example, I’ve been meaning FOREVER to post something about how, especially if you are a gay man living with HIV, you need to get PROPERLY screened and (easily) treated for anal precancer (here is a guide I wrote)…because you DO NOT want to have to be treated for anal cancer. I’ve talked to people who are going or have gone through it, and it’s hell.)

But anyway, for now, here’s Don Shewey. See you in October. And please write me and tell me what you think about Caftan or if you have ideas for me. I’m at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com. Thanks, friends, and see you soon. xTim

A very young Don in Waco, Texas. (Most photos of Don here are courtesy of Don.)

Tim: Don, thanks for agreeing to talk today. So, to start...you're how old again?

Don: I just turned 70 in May. I've always looked forward to aging. Turning 60 felt old to me—I went through a little bit of self-examination. But 70 has felt a little more abstract. But I did wrap up my therapy practice because I'd said I'd retire from that at 70. Otherwise there's something weirdly empowering about turning 70. I find myself saying "I'm 70—I don't have to do that." So I'm not doing regularly scheduled appointments with ongoing clients anymore. I decided to liberate myself from daily life being defined by appointments all day long.

Tim: I have always wondered how therapists did that, absorb so much stuff back-to-back all day. 

Don: It's very intense. Unlike being a journalist and interviewing people, you're absorbing a lot of information and holding people's stories, year after year, and unlike journalism, it's all confidential—you're not sharing it. That's why having some kind of supervisor is really important for therapists [because you have someone to process with]. I can talk about my clients anonymously with my husband, but we live in NYC, where a lot of people know each other. You run into clients at parties or events and you know a lot about them that other people don't know, and how do you hold that?

Tim: Right. So your book Daddy Lover God, which is a kind of memoir of your bodywork/intimate healing work, came out last year.

When did you write it? It feels like you wrote much of it in the nineties and then you added in more recent notes, like addenda.

Don: I started writing it in the nineties as journal entries when I started my sacred intimate practice. It was very consuming—a new thing for me. Finally I got it into a manuscript, but my agent was embarrassed by the material and sent it to a couple of people and the response was not positive. One editor said, "I firmly believe that no therapy should ever involve touch, so I don't approve of this." So it sat in a drawer for quite a long time. But then I self-published The Paradox of Porn in 2018 and was pleased with the results, because self-publishing has really evolved—lots of big and important books have initially been published that way. So I decided to self-publish Daddy Lover God. I wrote it pre-Internet and the whole business of doing sexual healing work, erotic massage, is very different in the age of the Internet. So to make it feel relevant now I added these "Memos from the Future" (MFFs) that addressed things like the Internet and how concerns about safe sex have changed since PrEP.

Don, mid-eighties, at the Long Island family home of Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s longtime publicist.

Tim: Maybe this is just me projecting, but it feels like a lot of the uptightness and shame around gay sex in the very HIV-phobic nineties has kind of evaporated in the age of PrEP and that we've in many ways returned to the uninhibited, kinky seventies. Do you think so?

Don: In my experience, yes, there's a new generation of hardcore things, but as for self-acceptance, everyone has to face that. So although certain kinds of social disapproval around gay sex have shifted, it's still never far from the surface. And now social media has given us this whole other flavor of competitiveness and comparison that creates all kinds of new sources of envy that show up on people's Instagrams. 

Tim: The profiles in DLG are so detailed. They're anonymous, but were you worried that certain people might be identifiable?

Don: I created composites so that even if the details are vivid, everyone who is presented is really disguised in terms of describing their age, race, occupation. I had a client who recognized himself in The Paradox of Porn, but he loved it.

Tim: Haha, okay. So where do you live, Don?

Don: In the heart of midtown Manhattan. I've been here 30 years now in a tiny little five-story building surrounded by hotels and embassies. Marlon Brando lived in my apartment once. I inherited it from Scott Bromley, the architect who designed Studio 54. My husband Andy lives in Astoria.

Don and Andy, about a decade ago.

We just celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary but we've been together since 2009. He just turned 54. We spend Wednesdays at his place in Astoria and weekends here in Manhattan.

Tim: My husband and I have our own places, too. Do people ask you all the time, "Don't you wanna live together? When are you moving in together?"

Don: His mother was very concerned about that at first. But then she started mentioning our arrangement to her married girlfriends and they all said, "I wish I had my own place." [laughs] I mean, I'm open to cohabitating—I did it for 14 years with a former boyfriend. But part of it is real estate. You have to have a whole lot of money to find a place big enough to accommodate two grown men who both have a lot of books. And Andy was in a decade-long relationship before with someone he lived with, so that apartment in Astoria was the first time in his adult life where he lived alone, which was meaningful to him. We say we'd rather be apart and wish we were together than the reverse.

Tim: I hear that. So what is a typical day like for you in this semi-retirement?

Don: I wake up around eight or 8:30, wash my face and sit and meditate for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. I light a candle and some incense. I've been meditating for 35 years. Then when I'm done, I put on the teakettle and do some stretching exercises while my tea water boils, then I'll come to my desk with my tea and have a fun time checking emails, texts, Facebook messages. I can do that for two or three hours. I usually have breakfast around 11am. Then I may have some kind of appointment. On Tuesdays, I generally go protest outside Fox News with the activist group Rise and Resist's regular "Truth Tuesday." Mondays I have online yoga at 2pm. Wednesdays and Fridays I go to the West Side Y and do a TRX class, which involves a strap attached to a pipe and you use your body weight to do resistance training. 

In his first NYC apartment, Perry St., 1980

Tim: And otherwise in the afternoons you are...?

Don: Here at my desk, which is like my motherboard or cockpit with my iMac and MacBook and iPad and phone and piles of papers. My favorite thing to do is read and write while drinking tea.

Tim: Are you working on something right now?

Don: This retirement thing is fairly new. I'm still adjusting to not having a super-scheduled life. I fortunately don't have to rely on writing to produce income as I once did, so I have the luxury of a lot of spaciousness around me. I started a Substack and I'm spending a lot of energy on it. It's a collage that includes blogging about performances that I go to. And I have a lot of notes and journals I've never published. I have several full-length manuscripts I've put together. One is called Let's Dance Together in the Minefield: Sex, Love and AIDS. 

Don mentions the landmark 1992 The Advocate cover interview he did with Madonna when Truth or Dare came out that The Advocate dubbed "The X-Rated Interview." 

Don: My agent got that syndicated and I lived on those revenues for two years.

Tim: Well, I am always up for talking about Madonna. What was her essence to you that you picked up on? Robert Plunket told me he thought that she was very insecure and just wanted to be part of the popular crowd.

Don: I spent a day with her at her place in Beverly Hills. She's very mercurial—she's not one thing. Yes, there's vulnerability and insecurity and self-consciousness, but there's also this part of her that is willing to take on the world. I was friends with Liz Rosenberg, Madonna's longtime publicist, and Liz handed me this plum assignment. So when Liz and I showed up, I was very prepared and Madonna got off on it. I asked her ballsy questions and she really rose to the occasion and was really eloquent. She's a serious reader. She talked about Paul Bowles and read me an Anne Sexton poem. But as soon as the interview was over, it was like I wasn't there and Madonna, who'd been very proper-spoken, became this yappy girl from Detroit with Liz and I felt invisible all of a sudden. But the day the article came out she called us and really thanked us and was sweet.

Tim: I love that. And Don, what are your evenings like?

Don: Around 5pm, I do my Duolingo. I've been studying Spanish for four years and now I'm doing Portuguese. [He's half-Portuguese.] Then I'll cook dinner or Andy and I will go out. I love making those New York Times Melissa Clark sheetpan dinners with chicken thighs. I love the farmer's market. This is prime time for corn, tomatoes, peaches and zucchini. I spent all Saturday cooking a meal for Saturday night. It's therapy for me. It gets my mind off politics, which can be consuming and crazy-making. And in our relationship we have a nice deal where I do all the cooking and shopping without complaint and Andy does all the cleaning up—without complaint.

Author photo, mid-eighties

Evenings, I'll watch a movie. I go to the theater a fair amount. After a couple glasses of wine, I'll listen to music or cruise Scruff or flip through social media. Maybe I'll get a little stoned and put on headphones. I grew up in an alcoholic household so I'm super vigilant about my own drinking and the drinking of everyone around me. I don't start until 8pm or 9pm. That gives me limited time to do my drinking—no more than half a bottle of wine per night, usually red. I've always been a night owl. I almost never go to bed before midnight, although I've been going a little earlier these days.

Tim: Will you talk about how you transitioned in the early 90s from being a rather successful freelance journalist to a sacred intimate worker?

Don: I went to Boston University and started writing there for Gay Community News and then The Boston Phoenix, then moved to NYC at the tail end of 1979 and started writing for The SoHo Weekly News, The Village Voice, The New York Times. I moved to NYC for love. I was in a relationship in Boston for five years with a guy named John Ward, a legendary gay lawyer, but then I met [longtime New York Times arts and culture critic] Stephen Holden and I fell in love with him at first sight. So over the course of the year, I broke up with John and moved to NYC to be with Stephen, and we ended up having a great relationship for 14 years. He was very plugged into NYC culture and knew lots of people, so I had a very exciting introduction to NYC. We were just complete culture vultures, out every night at concerts, plays, performance art. I was extremely ambitious and prolific as a writer and got hired as the theater editor of The SoHo Weekly News, so we could get tickets to everything. The downtown art scene was exploding—Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I was a huge fan of The Wooster Group.

Tim: Did you partake of the sexual disco paradise of pre-AIDS NYC?