I walk onto set, and usually encounter a flicker of surprise when someone realizes the Intimacy Coordinator is…me. A man. A guy. It’s never dramatic, sometimes it’s just a pause followed by “oh I didn’t know there were male Intimacy Coordinators!” And I’ve been thinking lately about what it means for male identifying people to be Intimacy Coordinators, while also feeling some resistance to the question itself.
Years ago, when I was stripping and dancing burlesque at The Box in New York, people occasionally described what I did as “boylesque.” I found the word strange. I wasn’t doing a male version of burlesque. I was doing burlesque. The qualifier revealed an assumption about who belonged.
I hear an echo of that in “male intimacy coordinator.” There are many men doing this work globally. I’ve trained some of them. But Intimacy Coordination is still predominantly female-led, and that did not happen by accident. The profession emerged in an industry where sexual power had been overwhelmingly structured around men. Male directors. Male producers. Male executives. Male stars. The casting couch. Women performers expected to accommodate sexualized demands because that was simply understood to be part of the business.
This history also lives in the images on screen. Nina Menkes’ documentary film Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power examines the relationship between cinematic form, the male gaze, and power. The documentary Body Parts by director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and producer Helen Hood-Sheer looks at the uncomfortable realities of how nudity and simulated sex have historically been filmed and negotiated for women performers.
So when I think about being a man doing this work, I wonder what it means to exercise authority differently in an industry with such a long history of male power. What responsibilities come with that authority, and how do we put them into practice? Because there is something strange about the possibility that, after generations in which men held disproportionate control over the systems producing images of sex and bodies on screen, the responsibility for developing better practices around those images would become another form of labor performed primarily by the people who experienced extraordinary exploitation by those systems.
The work of an Intimacy Coordinator encompasses working with performers across the spectrum of gender and identity. What I’ve come to witness first hand is that most people, across the board, experience body shame. Many have had to navigate unwanted touch, pressure around nudity and sexual performance. They carry histories of sexual trauma, cultural systems that shape behavior around sexuality, and professional expectations of confidence and sexual ease that can leave little room for how someone actually feels.
Some of my most revealing experiences have been working with men performing sexual assault scenes. On camera, they play the person committing the assault. Off camera, they typically need support with the violence they are being asked to inhabit, their scene partner’s safety, or what it means to spend part of a shoot day repeatedly enacting a story of harm. The character may be perpetrating an assault, but the performer still has a body, a nervous system, boundaries, and needs of his own. The same is true of every performer in the scene. My responsibility is to recognize those needs while helping everyone do the work they came to do.
Intimacy coordination makes space for those needs within a shared creative process.
What does the scene require? What is the story being told? What are your boundaries? What can we adjust?
These questions are part of the work, whoever is asking or answering them. We work with performers, directors, producers, and crew to turn the answers into practical choices about movement, touch, camera angles, and what will appear on screen.
This job asks me to be decisive without being controlling. To care without infantilizing. To understand power without pretending I do not have any. I may have authority in the room, but that authority serves someone else’s agency. I may intervene; but I do not decide another person’s boundaries.
None of these capacities belongs to a particular gender. Yet care, vulnerability, and emotional fluency are still often coded feminine, while authority, leadership, and technical knowledge are coded masculine. Intimacy coordination requires all of them.
On a given day, I might discuss a personal boundary with a performer, negotiate language with production, coordinate with wardrobe, solve a camera problem, or tell someone with far more institutional power than I have that something cannot happen as planned. The distinction between “soft” and “hard” skills does not survive long in this job. In this field, relational intelligence is professional competence.
This is also personal for me. I’m a queer. I’m also a man. I’ve also lived the liminality of gender. I learned early that masculinity could be watched and judged: how you moved, how you spoke, who you wanted, whether you were masculine enough, whether you were straight enough. I have spent much of my life deciding which parts of masculinity I want to inhabit.
Intimacy coordination has become another place where I make those choices, except here they are not theoretical. They happen in rooms where bodies, sex, power, vulnerability, and storytelling are being negotiated in real time.
The person across from me might be a woman telling me particular camera angles which she doesn’t want to be filmed from, a nonbinary performer deciding how much nudity they may be willing to show, a director describing the sex scene they want to make, or a producer trying to solve a scheduling problem. It might be an on-set costumer applying a modesty garment or an actor who has suddenly realized that something discussed weeks ago feels different now that they are standing on set.
The people change, but my responsibility does not. If someone tells me a boundary, I make sure it is communicated appropriately. If I make a commitment, I follow through. If circumstances change, I adapt. If I get something wrong, I need to be able to acknowledge it, correct it, and remain accountable. And when something crosses a line, sometimes I have to be the person who says so, even when doing so is uncomfortable.
That is what has started to interest me about masculinity through the lens of this work. There is a great deal of conversation right now about what men are supposed to become. Tougher, softer, more vulnerable, more resilient, more compassionate, more traditional, less traditional. I find myself less interested in constructing another model of an idea of masculinity and more interested in the qualities that make a human trustworthy.
Can you be trusted with power? Can you acknowledge a mistake without becoming defensive? Can people rely on you when they have made themselves vulnerable? Can you care for someone without deciding for them? Can you intervene without needing to dominate? Can you stand up for another person when doing so is inconvenient, even when that person is someone with more power than you?
Those are questions I return to through practice. Intimacy coordination asks me to develop capacities our culture has traditionally divided into masculine and feminine categories, and to use them together. The more I do this work, the less useful gender becomes as a way of deciding what I should be capable of.
I have to be caring and authoritative, compassionate and decisive, receptive and capable of intervention. I have to recognize my own vulnerability while remaining reliable to others. I have to understand sexuality and the responsibilities that come with it. I have to recognize the power I hold without allowing that power to become control.
So when someone looks surprised to find a man standing in the intimacy department, I come back to the same thing I felt years ago when people called what I did “boylesque.” I was doing burlesque, just as I am now doing intimacy coordination. The work requires the same professional competencies regardless of who is doing it, even as our identities shape how we experience the work and how others experience us.
Perhaps what is interesting about a man doing this work is what the profession asks him to become responsible for: other people’s trust, his own power, the promises he makes, the boundaries he is given.
I came into this work as a man, and I am experienced by others as a man. That matters. But the qualities the work demands of me belong to no particular gender. They are responsibilities we have to one another. What matters is how we put those responsibilities into practice, particularly when doing so comes at a cost.
