It impresses me when taking polygraphs the deadpan manner in which the facilitator grills me about my sex life. He bats not an eye when he asks if I’ve had sex with any animals in the last six months. Nor does he stutter when he asks whether I’ve choked my boyfriend during intercourse or coerced a young child to sit in my lap. He interrupts the interview only once, briefly, to take a sip from the Chick-fil-A cup that sits on his desk.

The questions are typical of the pre-polygraph interview and are all ones I’ve heard before. Only a handful will be selected for the actual test, those which are deemed most pertinent to determining my compliance with probation and treatment.

The facilitator sets his drink aside and continues his interrogation: Have I had sex with persons of the same gender? Have I patronized a bath house or adult video store? Have I participated in group sex or had sex outside of my relationship? Have I had any anonymous encounters, engaged in BDSM or spanking?

“Yes,” I say. “The last one.”

The polygrapher looks up from his computer.

“The guy I’m seeing has spanked me—lightly—on two occasions. I’ve talked about it with my therapist.”

On the edge of the polygrapher’s desk, beside the Chick-fil-A cup, sits a small webcam with its iris trained on me, recording every word. It was only a light spanking. It happened only twice. It annoys me that I should feel obligated to justify what is a perfectly healthy, consensual sexual behavior, as though it were a transgression.

Only it was a transgression of sorts, according to one of my therapists, Mrs. Hassan, whom I see once a month for individual sessions. The subject came up during one of our meetings, along with the use of sex toys. She was fine with toys but drew the line at spanking. “There is no harm that is too small,” she said. Therefore, there is to be no spanking while in treatment.

My boyfriend had guffawed when I told him. “Surely you misunderstood her,” he said, our bodies still damp from lovemaking. “Surely she meant the violent kind of spanking, the beat-you-like-you-owe-me-money kind of spanking. Not the light kind.”

I combed my fingers through his chest hair and shook my head. “I asked. She was quite clear. No spanking of any kind.”

He and my gay male friends have observed that certain aspects of my treatment program seem moralistic, Puritanical, or—worst—homophobic. My treatment workbook deems many forms of sexual expression off-limits, such as group sex, BDSM, cruising, hookups, open relationships—activities enjoyed predominantly by gay men.

“It sounds like they’re trying to brainwash you,” one friend said flipping through my workbook, a volume entitled Facing the Shadow by Dr. Patrick Carnes. “According to this, the only healthy sex is bland sex with a single committed partner.”

I asked Mrs. Hassan about this.

“Is it my imagination, or does this workbook gives off the slightest whiff of homophobia?”

To my surprise, Mrs. Hassan agreed. She recounted that homosexuality wasn’t fully erased from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1987—barely a generation ago—and that the field still echoes with outmoded moral assumptions regarding sex.

But on the subject of spanking, she remained firm: “There is to be no spanking while in treatment.”

She had looked rather pointedly at me when she said it, and I wondered whether in that gaze there hadn’t been an implied wink, as if to say that anything that happened after treatment was my own business. I often got the impression in these sessions—both in the monthly individual sessions with Mrs. Hassan, and in the weekly group meetings with her husband Mr. Hassan—that there were things which the facilitators were required to say and there were things they actually believed, and the two weren’t always unanimous.

Perhaps, then, it was a slip of the tongue when during one of our group sessions, Mr. Hassan, speaking on the subject of sex, had said offhandedly that he felt it necessary, now and again, to “put a little sting on it.”

Of the eight men in the circle, it was I who laughed the loudest.

“That’s not what your wife said.”

Mr. Hassan turned. “Excuse me?”

It had been well-established that I was the only man in the group who held his individual treatment sessions with Mr. Hassan’s wife, who typically only treated female clients. Thus it had become a running joke in the group that, having access to the wife, I’d become privy to the inner workings of their marriage and, specifically, to the foibles and shortcomings of Mr. Hassan’s husbandry.

I laughed again. “Your wife says we aren’t allowed to spank.”

Mr. Hassan leaned forward in his seat, grinning and delighted, perhaps recounting to himself all the times he’d put the sting on Mrs. Hassan. “She said that?”

“She said there was to be no spanking. None.”

I smile now recalling Mr. Hassan’s incredulity, until I remember where I am: in the hot seat, so to speak, preparing to take a polygraph over the tawdry details of my own sex life. I become aware once again of the webcam recording me and kill my smile. I don’t want the polygrapher to think I’m not taking his exam seriously.