It was in New York where I first became aware of how a very small piece of skin attached to my dick could make me more desirable. Or not. As a bonafide gay tourist in the States, the second I found a wireless connection in a Bedford Ave. café, I turned on all my sex apps – enough of them to keep me so busy that I almost had no time left to actually meet the guys. But these apps became my window to just one more standard of beauty gay men hold themselves and others to.

In Europe, one of the joys of doing short city drop-ins is how one easily becomes the new kid on the block: One hour in a place and I’m soon eroticized by a bunch of Euro boys for being a foreigner, or for my dark skin. I can never tell which.

So, it was with certain surprise that while in Brooklyn, many of my future lovers (or haters, depending on how you look at it) were not racist, nor xenophobic but 'prepucist': they judged me on my foreskin.

It’s not like “No foreskins, please” is an appropriate message to put in your Grindr profile. That would have been too rude. So some NY residents decided to ask me via private message if I, as a non-American, in fact had a foreskin. My positive answer put some people off, while others almost cried with excitement (or whatever that blue splash emoji means.)

Brooklyn is a mixed bag when it comes to the nationalities of its inhabitants. And the Europeans there were close to begging for my uncut meat. They must have been deprived. The negative reactions predictably came mostly from the Americans themselves: “Do you mind washing it one more time?” was the most common. For fuck sakes, I was already late for my next date, I had to think.

How can such a small piece of skin be so polemical and lead to such fervent bias?

There are various reasons for male circumcision in the world. The main being religious and hygienic, though even the religious ones are in one way or another rooted in personal hygiene practices from a time when running water didn’t exist.

However, the most curious story of circumcision I found was the cereal one. It was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a man as bland as corn flakes (which he invented, by the way), who in the 1900s advocated male circumcision (and pure carbolic acid for the clitoris!) to stop nature from taking its course, to stop the horny young folk from tossing off. Too bad for this Adventist Church fanatic? his plan didn’t fucking work – clearly boys kept on wanking. But for all his evils, the Kellogg’s company he founded with his brother later came up with Froot Loops and Coco Pops, which for me, come in handy as sexual innuendos. Fancy a bit of my Coco Pop in your Froot Loop?

Anyway. So does this mean that other kinds of prejudice could also be based on outdated laws that seeped into public consciousness via pseudoreligious heteronormative white businessmen? Probably. That’s too much to answer in one column.

I too realised that, not surprisingly, I have foreskin preferences. I found myself looking for the ‘whole’ thing, the ‘real’ thing, the ‘natural’ thing. But I was in the USA, and my holiday libido didn’t allow me to be fastidious about sex. So I travelled the length and breadth of the city, from Downtown to Washington Heights and tried many of them: cut, uncut, XL to S, because at the end of the day, with or without a foreskin, a cock is a cock.

Image: Garofalo “The Circumcision”, ca. 1519-1559