“You first encountered the defendant where, Brian?”

“At the gym. My parents signed me up for the same gym Dr. Sheridan went to.”

I did not want to be here, in this courtroom. But the DA had intimidated me. He had said that the defense might delve deeper into why I liked going to the gym by myself. He said something about not saying anything about my confused and conflicted thoughts about men—what I’d obsessed over even before I met Dr. Sheridan at the gym—that I should just respond like an innocent fourteen-year-old. That’s what I was fourteen. I’m not going to apologize for starting early, though. I didn’t know fourteen was too early. The DA told me I should say I didn’t know—that I was just a child—anytime my motivations came up in the trial. The issue hadn’t come up again until the DA was looking for witnesses to help put Dr. Sheridan away. They had other reasons to want to convict him.

“How old are you, Brian?”

“I’m fourteen, sir.”

“Fourteen. Just a child.” He looked up at the judge and over to the jury. I guess that was an important point for him, but I wanted to say that some guys grew up faster than others. I didn’t think like a child when I thought about doing it with me.

“Did Dr. Sheridan make untoward advances to you in your gym, Brian? In the gym’s sauna?”

“I don’t understand.”

The prosecutor turned and looked at me over his glasses with his head tilted down—the “Oh really?” look. Done for the jury, I was sure, developing on the theme that I was an innocent child—a theme I felt conflicted about. “You understand what this trial is about, don’t you, Brian? Dr. Sheridan stands accused of entrapment, holding his victims in captivity, and rape—and in your case doing it to a minor. You do understand that, don’t you? And, to the extent you testify that he did this to you, and you are fourteen, that adds to his crime.”

“Yes, I understand,” I answered. I knew what the prosecutor wanted. I knew what might happen if I didn’t give it to him. But it would be skating on thin ice here. I tried to tell him how it really was—that with me, it didn’t really mean captivity and rape—but he didn’t want to hear it. He told me to keep my answers short and right to the point of the questions he asked. But already he was making it difficult for me to give him the answers he wanted and not perjure myself—and even more important to me, not reveal what I didn’t want to face.

“Then I ask you again, Brian. Did Dr. Sheridan make untoward advances to you in the gym sauna room on June 15th, 2019?”

“Yes ... I guess so.”

“You guess so, Brian? It seems a straightforward question. Either he did or he didn’t.”

“Yes, yes, he did. But I hesitated in my first response, because I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know it was a sexual approach. I was so naïve and it happened so indirectly. I’m embarrassed to testify to how dumb I was at that time. And there was that medical element—that confused and numbed me to what was happening, I think.” He’d told me not to say anything about whether I would have rejected the man even if I’d known—that I was conflicted and confused about my thoughts of men at the time. I wasn’t anymore, but I was then, not long after my fourteenth birthday. I had to be careful to say this like the DA had coached me to say it.

“We’ll get to the medical aspect in a moment. Let’s take this step by step. You’d never had sex with a man before, had you, Brian?”

“No. Never before. Never before Dr. Sheridan.”

“And you didn’t ask him to take advantage of you, did you, Brian? You didn’t ask him to perform sex on you in the sauna or ask to go back to his office and be restrained and taken again, more fully—be penetrated in a sex act? You didn’t initiate any of that with Dr. Sheridan, did you?”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

I could see now why I was told to keep my answers short and to the point. I’d almost drifted off in an unwanted direction. But the prosecutor had brought me back. And his questions were now leading me to short, specific response that would help me stay clear of the shoals while he phrased the questions to pull the answers he wanted out of me—the short, specific answers he was leading me to, and nothing more.

But, although I was answering his questions truthfully, this was misleading. This isn’t exactly how it transpired. I wasn’t the raped innocent. I had denied—was still denying—so much to myself. But I couldn’t pretend on that point—not any longer. It hadn’t been just that once—that evening at the gym and the night in his house. I’d gone back, again and again.

It had started two months before, as I was turning fourteen and changes were happening in my body—when I still had the softness and flexibility of a child, but I was beginning to get the attributes of a man. I was hardening up, which is why I wanted to go the gym. I wanted to hurry the process of becoming a man. I wanted to be a man—and I already was thinking of being a man with men.

I wasn’t blameless in getting it started. I had thought about it when I was younger, but I had put it out of my head. I’d been told it was a choice, and I made the choice not to do it. But, as my body and my needs changed, I became less certain—and then increasingly certain that I at least wanted to try it.

I probably would never have thought about it at all if I hadn’t been in the boy’s room at school early in May at the same time the janitor was in there. He made what I was slow to realize were advances to me. I walked away from it, immediately—well, as soon as I could control myself—in total shock, without any thought of doing anything, but it started me thinking. While I was at the urinal, the janitor, a Hispanic older guy, came over to where I was and stood beside me at the other urinal. I was petrified when I felt him touch me on my penis and turned around to see that he was flashing me and making a circle with his mouth, obviously offering me something.

I was in shock. I didn’t say anything or try to hit him or anything. I held there, in shock, long enough to embolden him and for him to get the wrong impression. The touching moved to encircling me with his hand and whispering, “Nice.” I don’t know if he was commenting on the size of me or that I began to harden under his touch.

Pulling away from him, I wet myself down the inseam of my trousers and turned and stumbled out of the boy’s room. I just stood there in the hallway, confused and in shock. I also have to admit, though, that I was curious and was going over what happened in my mind. I wanted to wait there to see the janitor come out. Part of me wanted to take a good look at him and to think about how I maybe would have liked to have the experience he was offering. I saw another boy—a classmate my age—go in, with the other guy, the janitor, still in there. And he didn’t come out. Neither of them came out while I stood there and I stood there long enough that they should have finished taking a leak and have come out. I suspected I knew what they were doing in there; I knew that it could have been me, if I had stayed. I felt guilty about how my mind was playing with that. I fought the impulse to go back in there and see what they were doing. My hands were still shaking several minutes later when I clutched my books to my trouser leg to hide the drying stain there and went to my next class.

I hadn’t done anything. Nothing happened. But in the ensuing weeks, I thought about it—increasingly. And I started fantasizing about it. I began to think of the what ifs. And it turned on my curiosity, and I went to the Internet and sought out the sites I didn’t even know had existed before. The sites were older men were doing it with young guys excited me the most.

A few weeks later my parents signed me up for a gym. And I guess if I was pressed to tell all in this courtroom, I’d say that this was the beginning of my undoing—the first action beyond just thinking about it in going down that slippery slope. And that, no, Dr. Sheridan might have been the vehicle—and he may be as evil and criminal as they are making him out to be—but he isn’t guilty of everything the prosecution is implying—at least not in my case. Maybe the other witnesses can justify their cases. Truth be told, though, I don’t think I could go that far in my own case. If his lawyers accused me on the stand of having invited what happened, I’d deny it—that’s what the DA told me to do—but I couldn’t completely deny it for real.

In my own case, I was embarrassingly naïve, yes, but I guess I really wanted it. His wasn’t the first approach at the gym, and I invited the earlier one, even though I was just being a tease, I thought. I’d seen sex in the sauna before—if I was to fully disclose what happened, I’d have to admit that I asked for the gym membership because I heard about it and it made me all tingly inside. I’d heard what happened there—and, specifically, in the sauna there. I spent more time in the sauna than on the gym floor because I wanted to see it for real, not just on the Internet.

I told myself that the tease and the what iffing and the voyeurism were enough. That’s what I told myself initially when I asked to be signed up for a gym. But once there, I knew it wasn’t enough. I wanted to see it for real—and then, maybe, experience it for real.

A week or so before Dr. Sheridan took me, I’d been lying on one of the benches, covered with a towel, when one of the guys I’d seen have sex in the sauna before came in there when I was in there alone. When I’d seen him before, I’d come into the sauna when he was sitting close to another guy. That other guy was a classmate of mine. He’d been the one who told me I could get action at this gym, that there were older guys who really went apeshit over fourteen-year-old boys. The boy’s name was Conrad.

Both Conrad and the man—maybe in his early thirties—were well-built, Conrad in a slim, willowy way, and the man a muscular bodybuilder. I got the strong impression that they’d had their hands on each other before I came in. They stopped and leaned away from each other when I entered the sauna, though. I sat there for a few minutes, looking at them. But they didn’t do anything. I really wanted them to do something, something I could watch without doing it myself. I wanted to watch what an older, muscle guy would do with a fourteen-year-old boy. I’d been looking at it in videos on the computer, but this would be live; this would be a step up. And I thought this would be enough. Then I could go off by myself and take care of myself while thinking about what I’d seen actually happen, in live action, in front of me.

The three of us just sat there. The man obviously was waiting for me to leave, although he couldn’t keep his hands off Conrad while they were waiting. He placed a hand on Conrad’s shoulder and the other under the towel across Conrad’s lap. Conrad had leaned back in the bench and spread his thighs. I knew what the man was doing with his hand under that towel.

I knew too that Conrad wouldn’t care if I watched, but it was the man who was calling the shots. So, I left the sauna. And I went for a cold shower and waited for them to come out—they’d gone in before me, so they should be coming out to cool off in the shower themselves. But they didn’t come out. So, I went back in. Now they were too far along to just pull away from each other, though. They both had their towels off and the older guy was leaning over Conrad’s lap and working the boy’s cock with his mouth, while he beat his own. And this time, they just continued as if I wasn’t even there.

The man fucked Conrad on the bench, laying Conrad out on his back across the bench, pulling the boy’s pelvis up with an arm under his back, while Conrad hooked his knees on the kneeling man’s hips. One of Conrad’s arms dangled off the bench and he turned his face to me and gave me a dreamy look while the man fucked him. The muscle guy rearranged his and Conrad’s legs so that I had a clear shot of his dick in Conrad’s hole. It was like he wanted me to see that it was happening for real. There was no question that Conrad was being fucked in the ass. I watched the dick move in and out, slow at first and then faster and deeper with each stroke until the man jerked, pulled the dick out to where I could see the bulb release his cum, and then he stuck it back for a few more strokes. Conrad just lay there, jerking a bit himself, and taking it.

The man didn’t seem to mind now that I was watching, and when he was finished and was leaving the sauna, leaving Conrad stretched out on the bench, legs spread and bent, and moaning softly, the man put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a look that I took to be “You’re next.” But his dick was limp from fucking Conrad, so I knew that “next” wouldn’t be right away. I didn’t even know whether I really wanted what Conrad got. I’d have to process what I saw and think about it.

Conrad certainly looked like he enjoyed what he got. He had been groaning and grimacing, but he’d arched his back, slitted his eyes, and murmured, “Yes, yes. Fuck me. Just like that. Yes,” as the muscle guy built of speed, and he’d clutched at the guy’s biceps and cried out when I say the guy shoot his load at Conrad’s entrance. He’d already jacked himself off with a hand.

A couple of days later, I’d decided I wanted what Conrad was getting.

So, I sort of dallied in my exercises a couple of days later when I saw the muscle guy doing his. And a short time before I figured he was finishing his routine, I went to the showers and then to the sauna. I laid down on a bench, with my towel around my midsection, knotted at my waist. Sure enough, the guy came into the sauna and sat further down the bench from me, below my legs. I was nervous and trembling, but it was something I was building up to, something I wanted. I was wrong when I thought that I’d be content with just seeing it live and that this would be enough to fuel my masturbation dreams. After seeing it, I wanted to experience it to.

I spread my legs, pulling the towel tight, leaving a wide gap at the bottom between my wide-stanced legs so that he could see all the way up my legs under the towel—just for the thrill of that much of a connection, I thought. Another guy had come into the sauna and was sitting across from us. I didn’t know before, but I know now that it was Dr. Sheridan.

The first guy didn’t seem put off by Dr. Sheridan being there, and I began to hyperventilate—but in a good way. Being aroused that some other guy would watch us. I was getting hard, thinking about some guy the first one was comfortable having watch like I watched the muscle guy fuck Conrad. Already in my mind I had myself on my back, with the muscle guy on top of—and inside—me.

The muscle guy moved closer to me. I moaned at the very thought of what we were moving toward, probably loud enough for both of them to hear, when he put a hand on my ankle. I did nothing, and the hand went up onto my calf. My mind flipped ahead to feeling the hand on my thigh, under the towel, and then higher. And I knew I’d be hard as a rock by that time.

I heard him say, “How old are you, kid?” in a low, growly voice. I answered that I was fourteen. “Sweet,” he said.

The other guy—Dr. Sheridan—across the sauna said, “I didn’t hear what he said,” and the muscle guy told him I said I was fourteen. Then I heard Dr. Sheridan say, “Sweet, indeed.” I started having trouble keeping my breath going. Was I going to get it now—what I saw Conrad get? Was I ready for it?

I had a vision of the muscle guy’s hand reaching and encasing my cock and beating me off, slowly, as my eyes went from his to the rise and fall of the towel still encasing my midsection and then to those of the other guy in the sauna, watching us.

But then a couple of other guys came into the sauna and the muscle guy stopped, his hand pulling away from my ankle. And, scared suddenly, I got up and escaped out to the showers—and masturbated under the flowing water at the image of what hadn’t happened.

So, I was ripe for it, I knew. I could say that I hadn’t verbally asked for any of it. But I couldn’t truthfully say that I didn’t want any of it—and that I hadn’t sent out signals that I did. Or that I didn’t know I’d go through with it, given the opportunity.

“And in the sauna, Brian. When you had your first sexual encounter with Dr. Sheridan, did you know that this was what was happening? Did you ask Dr. Sheridan to touch and fondle you? Did you give verbal permission.”

“No, I had no idea. I thought that it was me, that I was misinterpreting what was happening. And that any sexual connotation in it was mine—and it embarrassed me.”

“How could that be, Brian? Did you purposely expose yourself to Dr. Sheridan to initiate a sex act? Did you ask him to handle your genitals and cause you to ejaculate?”

“No, I didn’t. And I thought I was the only one who had any such ideas about it as being a sexual encounter. I mean he was a doctor—he told me so the first time he talked to me—and he was so clinical that first time. He said he’d seen something that he questioned medically, and he seemed to just be trying to help me, to give me medical advice. And I was nervous—and thought my reaction was just because I’d never had that happen before and the circumstances were so ... strange, unusual.”

“Did he ask you your age, Brian?”

“No he didn’t,” I answered. I knew the DA wanted me to say he had asked—that I told him I was only fourteen. But I was conflicted about this. I’d had sex with Dr. Sheridan. He’d been good to me in that way and liberating and I accepted that I was as responsible for that as he was. And he hadn’t asked me my age and I’d never told him I was fourteen. He’d asked the muscle guy in the sauna and the muscle guy told him. We were in court. I felt that, since that was technically how Dr. Sheridan knew, I was technically right not to say I’d told him.

“And I ask again, Brian. Did you give verbal consent to him touching you intimately?”

“No,” I answered. That much was certainly true. I hadn’t said yes. I was too confused and embarrassed to say anything.

“Let us be clear about another point while we are in this line of questioning, Brian. Did you at any time touch Dr. Sheridan in this sauna encounter? Specifically, did you handle Dr. Sheridan’s genitals?”

“No, no, I did not.” I was emphatic about that answer—because on that point, too, I could clearly answer in the negative. I had not touched him in any way. He had seemed to want me to at one point, but I wasn’t at all ready for that in the sauna on that occasion. I knew why the prosecutor had asked this question. He sensed that my feelings of guilt had me on the edge of saying more than I had—more than he wanted me to say. He was leading me—and the jury—back to safer ground.

“Did he touch you on the genitals that first time?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “But I thought it was, like, a medical thing.”

“What did he do? Did he fondle you there?”

“Yes.”

“Both your penis and your testicles?”

“My what? My nuts?”

“Yes, those. Did he bring you to ejaculation?”

“Yes, he handled those—and what was the other?”

“Did he cause you to ejaculate—to come?”

“Yes. He said he was checking something. I was nervous. Nothing like this had happened to me before. I just lost control.”

“Thank you, Brian. Strange and unusual circumstances you said in response to the previous question. So, you didn’t go into that sauna to have sex with Dr. Sheridan, did you, Brian?”

“No.” Skating on thin ice here, but he’d prepared me on this point. I hadn’t seen the muscle guy who had come on to me in the gym that evening. When I’d gone in the sauna, I wasn’t thinking of having sex there with anyone, let alone Dr. Sheridan, who I didn’t even know. But my general idea of going into the sauna was someday to have sex with another man in there, so this was a circumstance for me to listen very carefully to how the prosecutor worded his questions and to answer them just as I thought he wanted them answered.

“Let us go back a bit to establish the ground. Did Dr. Sheridan ... in the sauna on the evening in question, on June 15th, 2019, did Dr. Sheridan identify himself to you as a doctor, Brian?”

“Yes.”

“And did he or did he not indicate that he observed some possible medical problem with you while the two of you were in the sauna alone?”

“Yes.”

“And what was the nature of that medical problem?”

“I’m not sure, really. Even now. He used medical terms and indicated that there might be some abnormality in my ... in my...”

“With your genitals?”

“Yes. With my genitals. He started asking me some medical questions, and I became concerned that there was something wrong with me, and he seemed to be giving me free advice.”

“And why would he even see your genitals, Brian? Were you accustomed to exposing yourself in the gym.”

“No, no, of course not. But it was a sauna and an all-men’s gym. It was customary for some of the men to go in there uncovered—with a towel but not using it to cover themselves. Using it in the sauna to cushion them from the hot wood of the benches. Nobody seemed to worry about that. I didn’t walk around undressed, but plenty of the other men did, and nothing was made of it. It was a men’s gym. I had undone my towel to wipe my face off and just hadn’t covered myself with it again. Lots of the men just walked around the locker room and sat in the sauna in the nude. It was just a guy thing.”

I looked up to see that the prosecutor was holding his hand up. I knew I had rambled, but beforehand he’d told me that wasn’t a real problem. That if I showed to the jury that I was nervous about any of that, it would actually help his case.

“And so, although you were embarrassed by the situation, Dr. Sheridan had made you concerned about possibly having a medical problem—maybe a serious medical problem—and in your mind he was doing a cursory examination to advise on whether you should be worried about it or not?”

“Yes.”

“And his attitude. Was he clinical in his approach, or did he make it clear that he was soliciting you for sex?”

“He was being like a doctor in an examination room.”

“You never suspected he had any motives other than to give you medical advice on what possibly was a serious condition?”

“No. As I said, nothing like this had happened to me before. I knew it seemed a compromising position—to me, at least. But I thought it was all something I was imagining. And I didn’t want to be impolite or to cause an incident.”

“And in the course of his, as you considered it, examination, his fondling, let us establish again, he brought you to ejaculation—he made you come? Right?”

“Yes.”

“Did this happen quickly, or was it over a prolonged period?”

“Quickly. I was nervous and embarrassed and confused about the situation.”

“And what did you do then? Did you enjoy it and ask him to do it again?”

“I apologized.”

“You apologized?” The prosecutor’s eyebrows went up, and he smiled. Then he turned to the jury and shock his head before looking back at me for my response. I waited until he was facing me before answering. I needed the time to steady my voice.

“Yes, I thought he would get the wrong idea. I was embarrassed.”

“Yes, of course. But then he did it again, didn’t he? This time for a longer duration in time.”

“Yes.”

“And you let him. Still unaware of any motivations on his part that weren’t medical. Still believing that you weren’t having sex?”

“For me, it was sex—and I was confused and embarrassed by that, not knowing how I had gotten to that point. But I just thought that I was the only one who realized that—that he was just giving free medical advice, trying to help me. It made a difference to me—at the time—that it seemed only me who took it as sex. Somehow, if it wasn’t him too, it wasn’t really ... a sex act. It’s not really sex unless you both think it is, is it?”

It sounded really lame to me, but, although he didn’t venture an answer for that, the prosecutor was still smiling, so I guess I was doing OK for his purposes. I plunged ahead. “He said that coming when I was still soft, as I did the first time, might be a symptom of a serious problem—that I should be hard when I came.”

“And so he brought you to ejaculation again, with you going hard, and you let him?”

“Yes. I know it sounds stupid now. But I was embarrassed and concerned. I thought I might have a serious medical problem and this was not a good place—on my body, you know—to be having a medical problem. And he was explaining that what he was doing was necessary to check the problem out.”

“And then afterward, what did he say?”

“That I really needed more medical tests, and soon. And that his medical office was nearby and he’d be happy to check me out a bit more—just so I would know if there really was a problem, in which case he’d be happy to refer me to a specialist.”

“And none of this was suspicious to you?”

“No, not at the time. I was grateful. If there was something seriously wrong, I felt relieved and grateful that help was at hand.”

“And you went to his medical office with him that night? Your parents weren’t surprised when you didn’t come home?”

“Yes, I went with him. My parents were gone for the weekend. I was fourteen, and I hadn’t gotten into any trouble before. They thought I could stay home on my own for a couple of days. I rode my bike to the gym. They didn’t know I was going to go to the gym while they were gone.”

All of this medical stuff was true, but, at the same time all of it was misleading, incomplete. What happened was more complicated—more damning—than that. It’s true I was seduced by the medical line he fed me. But it was nearly as implausible then as it sounded like it was when I was testifying here. On the surface I believed everything just as my carefully tailored testimony revealed—but under the surface—and not too far under the surface—it was less a seduction than a fulfillment of desires. I’d used the excuse of my parents not being there to go to the gym that night, fantasizing about what could happen there. I was only dumb about this on the surface. Underneath it all, I was hoping what happened would happen.

I was attracted to Dr. Sheridan from the beginning—from the moment I saw him entering the sauna when the other guy was making a move on me. From that moment, I wanted to have sex with him—and had done so a couple of times in my mind already. He was middle aged, maybe thirty years older than I was, but he was in great shape and quite handsome. And he was full of self-confidence like nothing we were doing was unusual or wrong.

We were alone in the sauna throughout the seduction encounter. I’d gone in before him. We’d both been exercising in the gym, and he’d come by and said a few things to me—just pleasantries and a bit of encouragement when I was trying to struggle out those last five reps of a routine.

We’d been on the floor at the same time on previous occasions and he’d said nothing to me. But that was before the evening when he’d come into the sauna and seen the muscle guy make advances to me without me resisting. Now it was evident that he wanted me to notice him. And shortly before I left the floor, he asked me if he’d see me in the sauna and gave me a “special” smile.

So I wasn’t all that surprised by anything that happened afterward.

I was waiting for him in the sauna. And I didn’t bother to cover myself with the towel as I sat on the top level of the benches. He came in and sat close to me on the bench below mine and nearly into my leg—and he started talking to me, looking up into my face. Of course he could see the goods; he was almost at eye level with them. I remember thinking I really should cover myself, but that it might be too obvious that I was uncomfortable if I did—but knowing that, in these thoughts, I was kidding myself. That was just the surface me. I was glad I was uncovered.

He had his towel open too, giving me a good view of his cock. His cock wasn’t thick, but it was one of the longest ones I’d ever seen, and I’d been looking at them whenever I could in the gym and locker room. I was sitting the same way, full frontal, on the higher bench. Then he started by noticing something he thought might be wrong with my genitals. He said he was a doctor, and I remember being uncomfortable but not wanting to make a scene and believing that he really was being clinical—almost disappointed that he was. He certainly was taking his time, making me feel that maybe this wasn’t what I thought it was. The muscle guy who’d fucked Conrad seemed to get right down to business when and how he was able.

At that point I was thinking more about how much longer I should be in the sauna than about him. It was all so ludicrous, but he was a doctor, and he had me embarrassed about even thinking he shouldn’t be touching me there. He was being clinical and using words I couldn’t understand and he was probably making up. I went semihard and was embarrassed about that, and then I came almost immediately. He tut tutted and said that was fine, and he actually indicated I might not have a problem, but that he’d have to do it again to be sure—that I’d need to be hard, and I wasn’t fully hard the first time. I was being dopey, and he thought I probably was being coy—neither really, I was still just struggling with myself and being confused. He did ask me if I had enjoyed it—that there might be a problem if I’d had pain rather than pleasure.