Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

well i'm twitterpated by a cowboy

he sent me a semi-nude this morning - him standing outside in the freezing ass cold with a foil four leaf clover on his chest, some green glittery thing covering his crotch and rainbow socks.

Bummed this thread didn’t get bumped a couple days ago for International Penis Day.

i.e. St. Patrick's Day

when we all celebrate the very juice and sperm of kindness

I have been feeling especially faggoty this week fwiw, but I think it’s because I became obsessed with a Carly Rae Jepsen song

hahaha which one?

lemme guess, 'western wind'

I suspect it's "Kiss My Sodomite Mouth."

“Comeback”

very relatable

hi everyone, i'm in a 'men are mostly trash' mood today.

otm

It’s obvious we’re not a woman

I'm sure you must have things to do in the bathroom, Eric dear.

tw gym content

so my gym is kind of famously known as cruisy among locals. the primary reason i joined is because it is 2 blocks from where i live. i used to be titillated by cruisy gyms and had my fair share of shower encounters back in the day, but i'm just totally over it now. i've turned completely into a glowering solo gym rat dude with big headphones on who isn't happy unless he is situated in front of some weights and either lifting them or about to lift them, like it's heroin and i am a junkie - not as overblown a metaphor as you might think. anyway, today i was obviously being followed around by a guy who was wearing shorts SO SHORT and a sling-back tank SO TIGHT. he had skin SO PINK and muscles SO WELL FED i thought he was just going to explode, and at some point during his follow-me-around routine i noticed a stripe of sweat had be-slickened his topographically dramatic ass crack and i grimaced. this used to be exciting to me but this morning i was just trying to avoid giving him the looks that he was looking for WHICH IS DIFFICULT considering what some people wear to the fucking gym.

ilx posts with striking imagery

i'm not physically attracted to people but based on your description, he'd probably even catch me looking.

"topographically dramatic ass crack" definitely of serious intrigue.

xpost- crypto beat me to it lol

I have become such a regular at the local climbing gyms that I have seen gym workers at other gyms and climbed with them. It’s a little embarrassing but I’m also in the ranks of stronger climbers they have so I guess I am not too embarrassed.

Climbing is very queer-friendly, I’ve found!

Anyway, there’s only three people at the gym I would absolutely go for, and one of them is a cis woman and the other two are twinks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i, like, can't even imagine cruising at the gym - like what an interesting world of opportunity, so foreign to me

this work DAY IS DRAGGING

Wake up babe new Harry Potter Balenciaga dropped pic.twitter.com/hTBPUGtwwf

— Joe Sixpack Capital (@Joe6packcapital) April 1, 2023

I am so so into this and didn’t know where else to put it

We’re in Fruita Colorado and just shared a beer by the river with a very hot farm banker.

Did not share anything else unfortunately

coming back from a solo weekend in SF. spent my easter sunday going to an actual easter mass (first since i was a kid maybe?) at grace cathedral, then went to an extremely packed dolores park to see the hunky jesus/foxy mary pageant. also saw old some pals, went to point reyes, bought some fun records, saw a fantastic concert and even had a fun lil fling with a handsome brazilian guy. never a dull moment in that city!

that is an enticing scenario map!

aww i'm glad you had a nice time in sf!!

do i dare try a miniature of this guy? he was extremely handsome. i'm really into these outdoorsy sort of farm boy types who have some straight dude energy. they make me go 'durrr' you know. i'm sorry, i can't help it. he had the beard, the trucker hat, a football team hoodie, beautiful eyes, smile, ears that poke out a little. he was a chat on scruff from earlier in the day. most dudes on there, these days, just no. and i was hesitant but he was nice and close by so he met us down by the river and offered j a beer. he basically told us his life story and was well-spoken and sharp about it. i listened very intently haha. a western slope local whose father owned a guide business at the base of the san juans. hint of money, maybe an inheritance or something. recently took a year off work and now does underwriting for a gov backed lender to big ag outfits. very gregarious, almost chatty, but circumspect. positive energy. not cynical at all. (these kinds of guys, i always tell myself i can't hang with too much because i'm way too depresso). anyway, he kinda got stuck in my head and if i'm being honest i feel jealous of him. he's also 40 but unlike yours truly seems to have it made financially, have a naturally optimistic outlook, have his priorities figured out, and now i guess he's looking for The One like some kind of prince from rancher royalty. it's a mild sort of jealousy. and now we're back in salt lake and it's finally warm and i'm facing the precarious weeks and months ahead with nothing settled except for a companion i love dearly and a job i despise that at least pays 80% of the bills.

oh and i ran every day while we were in the desert, i haven't felt the need that strongly in a while, i ran like a prancing goat.

phew, quite the character sketch! he does sound pretty dreamy.

that mingling of attraction with jealousy is something i relate to pretty strongly, the age-old "do i want to be with you or do i just want to *be* you?" thing. it happens less often as i get older and give less of a shit but i used to get it pretty badly in my twenties, and it sometimes led me down some weird emotional paths. for me it often felt rooted in aspirational socioeconomic stuff, less about money per se (although i guess that was the elephant in the room) than access to certain social circles/particular markers of a cultivated taste etc. and always with people around my age or a little older. so...i feel you on all this

good job on the running! i have fallen pretty hard off the exercise train, i can count on one hand the number of times i've gone to the gym this year. keep telling myself i'll start going more regularly once it gets warmer but it's been so persistently rainy/gray/cold here this winter and i keep using that as a crutch :/

that mingling of attraction with jealousy is something i relate to pretty strongly,

otm

It’s funny, while I’m glad that it hit all of your buttons, map, it truly does sound like we might have the opposite problem— I often fall for young punks in trouble and lust after slightly chunky (what T and I call “prison fat”) construction workers. Whereas all of our actual gay friends are artists or administrators.

We went climbing outside yesterday, T’s first time bouldering outside a gym, and it went really well! I’m glad that he’s embraced climbing so fully, it gets at his natural strengths and it’s fun to work on things together.

i'm so in love with my girlfriend. we had such an amazing weekend together.

awwwww love is in the air

i love the duality of lesbianism, that post makes it sound really sweet, like puppy love kind of stuff, and it's true! just like it's true when i tell my co-workers that we went to a convention for autistic people where they had all kinds of cool stim toys and we got to practice our social skills.

I need man-flesh soon.

anyone else feel a disconnect between lust and love? feel like those two things are still pretty disjointed for me and always have been.

kate i'm curious what you mean by 'the duality of lesbiansim,' can you expand a little bit?

kate i'm curious what you mean by 'the duality of lesbiansim,' can you expand a little bit?

― ꙮ (map)

there's a meme for it, crappy text version:

comment 1: "kinda wish she would kiss me under the moonlight :/"
comment 2: "ple,,please kick m in the face jfgnmfdnd"
which type of sapphic are you

...to which the answer is almost always "why not both"

in this case "i'm so in love with my girlfriend, we had an amazing weekend together" coexists with me telling her on friday why don't we get the one that's _not_ covered in broken glass?

with regards to lust and love, map, i'd say that they're... not correlated for me. a lot of my friends are some variety of asexual (the "A" in the thread title), and that can manifest different ways. some people are asexual but very romantic, some people are asexual and aromantic. there's people who are demisexual, who are only sexually attracted to people they know well, and then there are people who are freysexual, who are only sexually attracted to people they _don't_ know. all sorts of flags... at the con we were at this weekend they had one where i was like "wait isn't that just a timbers flag", nope, it was an old-school lesbian flag. looked like a timbers flag though.

with me there are so many different things. there's people i like as friends, there's people i like romantically, there's people i think are hot that i wouldn't _do_ anything with, there's people i'd really like to cuddle with, there's people who i lust after insatiably. and that's on top of the way lust manifests in me... some people use kink to spice up their sex life, whereas i use sex to spice up my kink life. and that just makes me _not compatible_ with a lot of people as far as physical intimacy is concerned.

that's a very interesting post. using sex to spice up my kink life, i can sorta relate to that lately.

is there a good explainer for asexuality anywhere? i have a really really hard time accepting it, frankly and honestly, but am wanting to allow it into my heart.

part of why i feel so much resistance, fwiw, is that a lot of asexual memes and material make it out as if asexuals are a continuously oppressed population— when i literally cannot hold hands with my husband in certain areas for fear of being bashed. that is, it often seems like a legitimate and understandable identity in search of a grievance.

there's people i like as friends, there's people i like romantically, there's people i think are hot that i wouldn't _do_ anything with, there's people i'd really like to cuddle with, there's people who i lust after insatiably. and that's on top of the way lust manifests in me

Seconding this post. Often the "people" you mention are friends.

Although it's not what you might call asexuality, my erotic drive is a lot stronger than my sexual drive, and I've never been much into yer actual anal. I've recently discovered that there's a term for the latter - "side" - and I'm quite pleased to have a label for it at last. (My partner was positively thrilled: "finally, there's a name for me!")

Same here.

The writer Brian Blanchfield has written about this being a phenomenon particular to a specific generation of gay man, fwiw— those born between 74 and 82, from his experience and those of others he knows, absorbed so much fear of anal sex b/c of the epidemic that many forgo the practice in their sexual lives. I get that, even if I wish for nothing more than to get fucked in the ass repeatedly by many people. No longer an option because of my surgery in 2019

(i also was born in 84, so am outside that window)

It's totally that fear for me, compounded by the knowledge that AIDS killed my uncle in '95. I'll bottom on occasion but I can't shake the sense that I've drawn a target on myself (I'm not on PrEP btw).

I don't "identify" as demisexual, and in fact am resistant to being labelled as such (because I personally feel as if my outlook is in-fact "normal", and people who behave otherwise are the ones who are divergent and deserving of a label). That said, I have zero interest in hooking up with strangers without gaining some level of familiarity and emotional connection with them. The idea of engaging in sexual activity with strangers feels as bizarre as eating food in the dark. This feeling is not a strict by-product of sexual trauma, but a fricassee of "knowing the dangers of STIs", "only wanting my junk in the mouth of somebody who I can trust with my junk in their mouth (and vice versa)", a feeling of "why would I spend my time exerting myself in sexual activity with somebody I don't know and/or give a shit about?", and probably lots of other reasons, of which sexual trauma is surely a part. The only times I've hooked up with strangers have been times when I've been drunk+single+on Grindr and/or been going through a bad break-up and wanting to get railed indiscriminately by some stranger.

I'd be surprised if at least a plurality of gay men are "side" tbqh

is there a good explainer for asexuality anywhere? i have a really really hard time accepting it, frankly and honestly, but am wanting to allow it into my heart.

part of why i feel so much resistance, fwiw, is that a lot of asexual memes and material make it out as if asexuals are a continuously oppressed population— when i literally cannot hold hands with my husband in certain areas for fear of being bashed. that is, it often seems like a legitimate and understandable identity in search of a grievance.

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table)

well, the big site for asexuality is AVEN at https://www.asexuality.org/, but if you don't mind i'd kind of rather give my own perspective on asexuality as a queer identity.

i read the ace memes and material a little differently from you - i think it speaks to the experience not so much of oppression but of marginalization and stigmatization.

part of my experience as a trans person is that i now for some reason have to deal with people trying to carry out _literal fucking genocide_ against trans people, but i don't think of this as being important in any way to my queer identity. when people stop trying to exterminate us - the sooner the better, please - us trans people will still be just as trans.

one of the formative experiences of my coming out as trans was attending pride in 2019. i'd been before as an "ally", but this time, even though i _looked_ like an "ally", i knew the truth. i knew that i was trans, and that i was going to transition, and pride suddenly looked very different to me. i felt like i _understood_ it for the first time in my life.

i'm proud to be queer because i was taught to be ashamed of who i was, that it was... _pathological_, in some sense.

when it comes to asexuality... i don't know if i'm asexual or not. the thing about queer labels is that i don't take them as definitive. i really can't relate at all to "gold star" lesbians, for whom it's really important that "these lips have never touched dick". being queer for me isn't about telling people what they're _not_ allowed to do.

i can tell you that i've historically had a pretty fraught relationship with sex. i have experienced erotic desire and lust since puberty, but those feelings weren't the feelings i was told i was _supposed_ to have. i didn't want to fuck girls, or fuck boys, or be fucked by girls or boys. i wasn't interested in any kind of penetrative sex at all. my fantasies were about bondage but also about closeness and intimacy and vulnerability and trust, and i think there's an argument to be made that all of those things are at the core of sex.

when i tried to open up to people, tell them about my feelings, about my desires, they would look at me like i was an alien. "ok," they'd say, "but where does the sex come in?" that was my ex's reaction, when i tried to open up to her. we didn't have a very good intimate relationship.

i don't orgasm from sex. never have. when i say that having kids was never a possibility for me, that's what i mean. this did make me feel inferior about myself, wrong, broken, for a long time. there's a sort of running joke, shitty dudes who thrust inside a woman twice and shoot their load and then ask us "did u cum?" and it's _not important_. it's just not important. when i do kink, it makes me feel _fully embodied_, all of the rumination and second-guessing is gone. all there is in my world is feeling _really, really good_. and sometimes that involves stuff that other people would consider "sexual" and sometimes it doesn't. that can look like everybody being fully clothed and nobody cumming. fine. if i want to cum i can go home and vibe myself and have a really good orgasm, you know? i don't need sex for that. but for a long time i felt guilty about that, like it's _wrong_ and _bad_ to only be able to cum by myself.

am i asexual? well, i guess that's up to me to determine. it turns out "what is sex?" is a question as fraught and difficult to answer as, well, "what is a woman?", when you really look at it. it _seems_ simple enough, but the reality is anything but. the label... if it feels useful to me, if it feels like it serves my purposes, i'll take it. if it doesn't, i'll leave it. there's no one clear answer on that question, for me. i don't _need_ a clear answer on that question.

all queer identities, to me, are basically like that, self-determination. i know that the way i experience desire, the ways i like to be physically intimate with partners, aren't the ways i was taught i was _supposed_ to do those things. i know that i was ashamed of that for a long time, and i'm not now, that i'm proud of who i am, that it's good and right for me to want what i want, good and right for me to _not_ want what i _don't_ want. and that experience, to me, that feels _really queer_.

i was talking with a diverse group of friends yesterday about queer stuff, and whenever i talk about queer stuff with other queer people, there's one thing that comes up, there's one thing that just about every other queer person i've talked to struggles with - the idea of _not feeling queer enough_. if there's such a thing as a universal queer experience (there isn't), it's not believing one is _really_ queer, or queer _enough_.

so i try not to judge. other people's queerness... isn't dependent on whether i personally understand it or not. anybody who calls themselves queer, i trust them, i believe them, because i know how hard it is for anyone to say that. i know pretty much all of us have this little voice inside our head screaming that we're not really queer, that we don't have a right to call ourselves queer. and maybe it's paradoxical, but all the asexual people i've known... they all have that little voice in their head too. that's enough for me.