Drawing mainly on recent theoretical contributions on engaging vulnerability in the humanities and the social sciences, this paper explore the making of researcher’s vulnerability, its contradictions, potentialities and consequences when conducting ethnographic research. Based on ethnographic research in the Sulawesi Island, this paper explores the perspective on how vulnerability can be thought as a productive set of relations when the hidden life connects researcher and local interlocutors. In the town of Manado, in North Sulawesia, unmarried mature men are called "virgin" (Perawan). By identifying their sexuality as being outside the social norm, this designation makes them vulnerable. Through my ethnographic research, as a man living alone, I also share this condition. In this article, I firstly explore the social consequences of this vulnerability for my interlocuteurs, the relationships I build with them, and in my ethnographic practice more broadly. Secondly, I question the contradictions and potentialities of the this designation process, by looking at how the hidden life can be both a tactic and a desirable goal that can result in different non-normative social interactions and make a publicly unspeakable sexual identity possible. I argue that the hidden life of sexual identity is a position that provides a creative escape from normativity. I show that becoming object of vulnerability should not necessarily be conceptualized as the opposite to gaining agency, and that under certain circumstances, it can even create the conditions for agency.