He was kind and patient, and I tried very, very hard. In my experience, bottoming is like having a hot knife jammed into my intestines - and I avoided it for the next three years, until I met a man I wanted to like sex for. Gay sex is supposed to be transcendently exhausting, so orgasmic that it makes you instantly grab for a pack of cigarettes. Instead, I accidentally took a shit all over him. Before I took my clothes off in his bedroom, which was filled with stacked PBR cans and old laundry, I repeated to myself, “I am a person who likes sex, I am a person who likes sex.” I thought if I said it enough times, it would be true. A week later I had sex with someone else - just to prove that I could. The next day, he told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. It was really painful and it didn’t feel right.
When I was 23, I told the guy I liked to stop the first time we had sex. And when I was a teenager staying up late to browse the family computer while everyone was asleep, the internet’s definition of sex - at least when it came to man-on-man action - was two drunk straight guys who had “never done anything like this before.”įor me, sex was something shameful, marked by a lifetime of disappointment. According to philosopher Michel Foucault, sexuality is a discourse, bound up in our societal attitudes and laws regulating the human body.
What is sex, exactly? If you’re a freshman taking your high school health class, sex is a flower having its petals torn off.