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

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.

fgti, my brother has said sort of the same thing about demisexuality - like, wait, what's so weird about not wanting to have sex with strangers? and he's totally right, but at the same time... there's nothing actually _weird_ about any particular way of being queer. there's nothing weird about wanting to suck dick but not get fucked in the ass, there's nothing weird about being a girl and having a penis, there's nothing weird about being a man, cis or trans, who likes to wear dresses, there's nothing weird about not having a gender. all of this stuff is basically normal, and the weird part is when people act like it's _not_, like being queer is a curse we were born with, a burden we have to suffer with. being queer isn't a burden for me. cishet people being fucking assholes to me, _that's_ the burden.

great posts, thanks for sharing kate.

i know sometimes i don't feel queer enough because i fetishize cis het manhood and crave penetrative sex, i feel more like a cop or something, but i think it's really important to acknowledge and embrace my queerness so that i don't turn into one if that makes sense. phew it's been a rough fuckin week lol.

re. the generational aspect of not fucking because of AIDS, I guess that has to be a part of it where I was concerned. I came out into the gay world in autumn 1982, aged 20, almost simultaneously to the week of the first UK TV documentary about AIDS - and I'll admit to a certain frisson of relief, in that I could legitimately get away with avoiding fucking, for safety reasons.

Between late 1983 and the late 1990s, I don't recall any sexual partner (and there were hundreds of them) placing fucking on the agenda. We just didn't, ever. Then by the late 1990s, I slowly started fielding requests (I am blessed with what some of you might call "a mighty fine ass" - it's my most classically handsome feature, and I've even modelled it for safer sex promotional literature - but perhaps the gift might have been better bestowed to a more grateful recipient!) That was when I popped my cherry, in both directions. It was fun on both occasions, and I was happy that it happened, but it didn't awaken some long-buried desire.

So I don't think the generational aspect is the whole story. I've very occasionally enjoyed topping and bottoming, but the entry qualifications (so to speak) are very high; I have to be absolutely delirious with all-consuming lust in order for it to be an appealing prospect, and my lust meter has rarely strayed that far into the red zone. Outside of that, I never fantasise about fucking, and it doesn't turn me on in porn. I don't find it repellent or disgusting or even scary - it's just not sexy.

re. Kate's excellent long post: albeit as a cis gay man, I relate to quite a bit of this, particularly the "not cumming in front of other people" bit. With concentration and grim determination I can just about get there, but it actually takes me out of the moment, and so I prefer not to. Instead, I manage expectations in advance, making sure to mention the most positive aspect: if things are going well erotically, I can stay aroused for aaaaaaages and aaaaaages (and who wants an orgasm race anyway; it's the other 99.5% of the encounter that I'd rather focus on).

re. fgti and demisexuality: I'm at the opposite end of that spectrum, BUT establishing a friendly and relaxed rapport in advance is every bit as essential as the erotic physical charge: if these two forms of attraction are in sync, then they can basically fuel each other.

i’ve never really liked any kind of label to describe my personal sexual tics. when the subject comes up with guys i usually say something like “i kinda lean top” but even that feels vague and not necessarily true in all instances (plus i don’t engage in very much penetrative sex). echoing kate, it really just depends on the specific connection i feel with the other person, what he and i are both into. sometimes the orgasm feels secondary, sometimes it’s the thing i most want. sometimes i’m in charge, sometimes he is, sometimes it’s mutual. idk it’s all very situation-specific to me.

This too, most definitely. ("What are you into?" "I don't know, we haven't started yet!")

totally feel that— I know what I’m not game for, but I also am open to a lot of different types of sexual intimacy.

thanks for yr response about asexuals, Kate. i think that i just get a little miffed by a lot of discourse that feels like oppression olympics.

"I don't know, we haven't started yet!"

omg i love this

I struggled a lot with the idea of not being queer enough primarily when working in queer event spaces, but I kind of figured out that (for me) it was a drive to be visibly queer enough to outsiders to justify my visibility and leadership of a queer event. In that case, it was literally to be visibly queer enough to be visible as queer to straight people who had no fucking idea what queerness ultimately was anyway, they just had sponsorship money.

Greatly appreciate Kate's take (and thank you for sharing it, Kate) because it echoes a lot of both what I feel and what I *want* to feel

i like going full butch drag when i dj, it's me at my queerest i guess. tho when i'm beaming and singing along to "your love is my drug" by kesha with the girls up front, there are two poles represented there and it feels like me at my most authentic.

Instead, I manage expectations in advance, making sure to mention the most positive aspect: if things are going well erotically, I can stay aroused for aaaaaaages and aaaaaages (and who wants an orgasm race anyway; it's the other 99.5% of the encounter that I'd rather focus on).

― mike t-diva

oh i used to be the same way, the few people i fucked seemed to really appreciate my stamina. i'm really glad those days are over, though. it's super gratifying to me that PIV of any sort of physically impossible for me now.

honestly, one of the things that convinced me of the nonexistence of a benevolent god was seeing some of the dicks trans women have. for god to make dicks that amazing and then put them on women who have no interest in or use for them just seems like wanton cruelty.

This too, most definitely. ("What are you into?" "I don't know, we haven't started yet!")

― mike t-diva

i will say for me that it's a little bit more complicated than that. primarily this is because my approach to intimacy is fundamentally kink-based - one of my big things is "all consent must be negotiated". negotiating on the fly can have problems when one of them gets into, for instance, subspace. so when d/s dynamics in particular get involved, it's pretty much necessary for me and any partners i might have to have at least a rough understanding of what is and isn't on the table before starting. it's surprisingly easy to get someone into a headspace where they will do literally anything you ask of them, even things they are _really really not ok with_.

if kink isn't involved, though that approach is fine. more than fine, honestly. what you're talking about is actually one of my favorite things about queer sex, which is that there really is no "default". there has to at least be that "what are you into?" question, whereas with cishet sex, the question can just be "so, you wanna do it?" and for me, that's just a recipe for rote, boring sex, sex as a _routine_. again, i'm really glad that's physically impossible for me. as a lesbian i _don't_ have sex that often - before this weekend i hadn't had sex with anyone in a good three months. i'm fine with that. all that means is that i'm getting rid of all the mediocre sex and _only_ having the really great sex.

thanks for yr response about asexuals, Kate. i think that i just get a little miffed by a lot of discourse that feels like oppression olympics.

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

the challenge is that we're all under a lot of pressure to define ourselves in terms of suffering and oppression. to be accepted by cishets you have to have these respectability narratives. respectability narratives suck. nearly every queer person i know hates them. unfortunately in a practical sense i find that i _do_ need cishet acceptance. that's why i transitioned in 2019 and not in 1996. talking about what i actually did last weekend, which i think is amazing and i'm really proud of and was a really positive experience for me, if i talk about it to cishets they're just going to be aghast. if my christian co-worker tells me she's dropping by my place to pick up some of my old wigs for her sister with cancer, ok, i have to change out of my t-shirt that says "skip school! take hormones! kill god!" and i have to make sure that the vibe and all of the rope and something that says on it "Hustler Spank Stick" (it was free), all that stuff has to be out of sight.

and the main way that gets done is by centering queer suffering, and not only that _certain acceptable kinds_ of queer suffering. so we talk about gender dysphoria and never gender euphoria. gender euphoria is the real reason i transitioned. gender dysphoria alone _never_ would have been enough to push me to transition. but "i hurt less" is more acceptable to cishets than "it makes me feel really good".

the same way, we have trans day of remembrance, but there's only certain things it's acceptable to remember. if a trans person gets murdered, _that_, that's worthy of remembering. if a trans person commits suicide, though? cishets are like "well they shouldn't have transitioned, then." the suffering they inflict on us only _counts_ if it's literal physical violence.

i don't want to perpetuate that narrative. i didn't want to acknowledge that i was trans, for a long time. why? because i thought being trans was a fate worse than death, literally, the absolute worst thing in the world, and in fact for me it is the fucking _best_ thing in the world. cishets act like, again, me going out and saying "being queer is amazing, not everybody can be queer i know but if you can possibly figure out how to be queer you should definitely do that", they call that social contagion, that we're _corrupting their morals_, and fuck their morals! their morals are bullshit! their morals inflict suffering and violence and make them and everybody else miserable!

but saying shit like that isn't going to keep us from being killed. saying "well yeah, i think attacking and dethroning god is a pretty rad idea", that's not going to keep us from being killed. what keeps us from being killed is centering narratives about us on suffering and pain and victimhood.

tl;dr don't hate the player, hate the game.

I'm in the process of writing a piece for a zine about gender/queer euphoria, queer joy rather than queer suffering and it's so much an epiphany to focus on my thoughts about that. I'm nb, I started coming out in '97, and I hate people thinking I'm exotic for feeling pain. Kate, you're hitting everything dead center. Thank you for that.

sorry, turning the convo back to gay sex here for a min. i started typing this post out a few hours ago & then had some work distractions

i identified as, essentially, anti-anal for all of my 20s and into my 30s. part of this was a baseline fear of STIs (not HIV but the other stuff), a desire to not go on further medication (prep), and a desire to not wear condoms (which made it difficult for me to get/stay hard & thus top, tho maybe there was mental stuff going on too). but i also rarely if ever watched porn of people having anal sex & it was never something i fantasized about while jerking off. i just thought it was a part of the menu that i didn't ever want to order off. i too was excited when i found out about "side" nomenclature. we exist! i also ended up hooking up w/ a lot of guys who also said they didn't care much for anal. i always felt a certain special kinship w/ these men.

and then i met my current partner, for whom anal penetration is a part of the menu that he is always focused on. he in a way taught me how to top, or at the very least put me in a low pressure space where my hang ups about fucking could dissipate & i could learn to enjoy it on my own terms. (the barebacking helped). now i love topping & often desire it on my own... i even consider myself a good top which is funny to think about. there is an aspect of bodily closeness and the rhythm of fucking that i've found really appeals to me -- the gasping and panting directly into an ear, the whiff of an armpit, things of this nature that can/do exist during other sex acts but feel heightened to me when fucking. but i think my enjoyment of it is also heavily tied to my love for him & for each other & our relationship. i feel like my lust for him comes out in other sexual acts -- the ones that i used to express my lust to random hook ups of the past -- but when we fuck (which is to say, when i top), even when we fuck really hard, i feel like i'm conveying something closer to love. (i'm trying not to get too heteronormative here.) and even tho i have been in a long term relationship w/ someone i loved before this, i don't feel like i ever achieved that synergy between love and sex the way i do w/ my current partner.

the wonderful thing is that i've also kinda gone on a similar journey w/ bottoming, by which i really mean subbing bcuz i still don't really enjoy the feeling of anal insertion (tho we're making progress :]). but i do love "bottoming" in the purely power dynamic sense. i actually prefer it & i've had some really great sexual relationships in the past based on that power dynamic but i've learned so much more about my own body, what turns me on, what bottoming/subbing can encompass, how far it can go etc w/in this relationship. i honestly thought that my asshole just wasn't a pleasure center for me, wasn't connected to the wires in my body that connected to my brain and my dick. turns out -- i was very wrong! but i needed someone i was into in a real way to put me on all fours and really show me that. which isn't to say that ppl hadn't tried before, or that i wasn't receptive to those efforts, but there is something about the emotional closeness of the relationship that opened that world up for me. even when we were still in the "lust" phase having met a week previously, i knew that i was in love with him, and that feeling of sexual and emotional excitement crashing into each other was the most powerful sexual experiences i've had.

i'm really one of those ppl where sex in my 30s has been so much more fulfilling than sex in my 20s. i love that my tastes have changed, and continue to change. at the same time, the idea of a quick dirty random bj does hold a lot of appeal to me. maybe even more so than ever? i have some friends who have been going to this sex party here & i wanna go w/ them. but the sex i've had in the best relationship of my life is also the best sex i've ever had in my life. coincidentally or not. idk

Great posts, everyone

Despite being "demisexual" I'm very much a fucked-or-be-fucked kind of sexual being, penetrative p-in-a sex has always been the primary currency of my sexual exchanges, whether I'm topping or bottoming. I've "seen the light" and I hope to receive communion by having my guts reamed or proselytise the same belief in others by reaming guts. Just, personally, not with a stranger. The thought of a loved one's penis flexing and spraying semen within me is immensely appealing, the thought of a stranger doing the same would be immensely upsetting. The same vociferousness by which I reject any label of "demisexual" being used to define my preferences, I apply the same vociferousness to defend those who are promiscuous to engage in acts that I myself find unappealing. As kate said, ones identity and preferences should not be a burden (or even a label, afaic).

ugh j0rdan that's a beautiful post and i'm really happy for you. thank you for sharing that.

I like your post J0rdan S

while i'm oversharing (is it queer oversharing or autistic oversharing? is there a difference?) i guess i'll talk a little bit about anal.

it has been interesting and surprising to me how transition has changed my sexuality. pre-transition i was kind of repulsed by anal. i had this kind of "ewwww, why would anybody want to do _that_?" judgemental attitude towards it.

at some point after starting hrt - i don't remember when exactly, probably no more than a year - i thought to myself "well, that was silly of me. what on earth could be wrong with anal?"

it's not, like, my most favorite thing ever, but since nature has blessed me with an enormous honkin' prostate (seriously, i've had my dick and balls cut off and i still need to take a pretty high dose of flomax) i don't see any reason not to take advantage of it. i'm actually not super fond of prostate orgasms but stimulation is nice enough. i haven't yet had a flesh and blood dick in my ass - i'm not averse to it but it's not something i particularly crave either. i like anal reasonably well enough that it's one of the reasons i didn't feel it was important for me to get a full-depth vaginoplasty, in the sense of "hell, if i want to get fucked, i already got a perfectly good orifice for it". a lot of trans women feel differently!

i do actually enjoy anal topping! maybe it doesn't really count since i don't top with my dick (for obvious reasons). the stereotype about trans women is that we're all bottoms, and it's not true - i'm vers, myself. maybe it's just that everybody wants a trans woman who tops with her dick and most of us have terrible dysphoria about the stupid thing and would really prefer not to top with it. i do have a harness and i do like anally topping that way. i can see how it might seem weird, if you look at a strap-on as nothing more than a substitute penis, but i don't look at it like that, myself. not only do i not get dysphoria from it like i did from my factory equipment, i actually get euphoria from it. it just feels, i don't know, _right_.

oh you guys are sweet xp you all sorted my thoughts out

i also liked that post, J0rdan. it gets at what i love about topping, and bottoming, too. tho admittedly i think might like getting smacked around a lot more.

kate, i agree with you in many ways re: oppression olympics

So this is a weird thing to talk about and I didn't expect to do it here.

Me and my girlfriend fell in love this past weekend.

It wasn't some kind of meet cute, out of the blue thing. We've been together for six months. We've actually worked really hard to try and have as healthy a relationship as we can. We both got a serious history of codependency and enmeshment. For us to get together was an objectively stupid idea. We both recognized it and went in with pretty low expectations. For the first couple months pretty much all we did was hold each other and cry. The whole thing... we've worked really hard to respect each other's boundaries, allow each other autonomy, express our needs without expecting the other person to meet them and have just slowly grown to trust and care about each other more through that process. Going into the weekend, we loved each other and had long-term plans to be together (technically she's sleeping on my couch in my tiny apartment now, but that's a temporary thing, half of us are homeless and can't afford Portland rents and don't have anyplace to stay, she's moving out in a couple months). We've certainly spent lots of time together, done lots of things together.

I mean, for me, it's enough to love somebody. I don't need or, well, particularly _want_ to fall in love. It's temporary, it's a distraction, but you know, fuck, it feels _so good_ to be in love. I'm not sure if I was in love with my ex. It was a long time ago. The memory cheats.

I've just been kind of sitting here waiting for the con drop to hit, everybody gets con drop, and it hasn't, and it's not until today that it hits me that oh, wait, I'm in love. Of all the ways to fall in love. I'm just imagining trying to explain to friends the circumstances in the future. I'll, uh, spare y'all too many details.

One of the things that I think people... misconstrue about kink is to think of it as some sort of Venus in Furs thing, that it's some sort of dark, doomy, _edgelord_ shit. I mean, it's not that "Venus in Furs" is _wrong_ about kink particularly, that's certainly part of it for a lot of people. Some dark, heavy shit does get involved. I saw (and in some cases did) things that, I mean, I'm not going to describe because a lot of people would be horrified by them. A lot of trauma too, a lot of healing from trauma happens through kink, which again _isn't therapy_. It's just something people do.

But it's like... you know, just with gender, what gets centered isn't the euphoria, it's the _dysphoria_. People center the pain and don't talk about the joy. I went into the room where the really extreme stuff happened, and one person, some stuff was happening to them and the way they were experiencing it was as something fun and playful, just kind of smiling and laughing about it. You go meet some of us and a lot of us aren't stern and gloomy, we're just, like, _nerds_, and this is something we're nerdy about. I'm just about the least cool person you could ever imagine.

Anyway, next to them, I saw someone who was very concentrated, stoic, but then when the scene ended they just had this look of utter serenity, and the partners who were doing those things to them just hugged them. There was emotional catharsis, closeness, _intimacy_ in what they were doing, and even though it's not stuff I would particularly want to do just feeling that _joy_ vicariously, it was infectious. Shadows and light, you know?

My experience with my girlfriend was much closer to the former. We weren't out to do anything super intense or heavy. Just, you know, trying stuff out and seeing what happened.

One of the things that hit me today (FIGURATIVELY) at my regular Thursday morning coffee group is that... I'm not sure it was even _sex_, honestly. I mean, in a physical sense, of course, sure, I'm not trying to rules-lawyer what we did into something pure and chaste. It absolutely wasn't. What I mean is, I'm not sure I processed it _neurologically_ as sex. At a certain point, and for me, in the right environment, it can be a pretty low point, I stop processing pain as pain, it just turns into pure undifferentiated _sensation_, just like a sine wave of feeling. It never occurred to me that this implies that... I don't experience pleasure in the sense that I do when I'm, I don't know, not doing the "no thoughts head empty" thing. It didn't feel like sexual pleasure, I wasn't ever going to cum from it. It was... like I'm not going to say "better" than sex, that's a stupid value judgement, but that sort of experience is way more _valuable_ to me than sex. From what I can tell a lot of people don't get to feel that way, like, ever. It certainly wasn't anything I ever felt before transition.

And I don't know, ever since the weekend we've been all moony-eyed over each other, just disgustingly cute. It's a nice change of pace. It's been kind of a hard year in a lot of ways.

i don't mean this to sound flip, but i feel like i'm reaching new heights of gentle, loving connection ..... with my cat.

love you, sarge

My essential queerness, I've realized, is my preference for aloneness with constant refreshment: friends, a trick or three for a few months. But I've wondered recently to what degree these habits are borne out of fear of sexual commitment? When I fuck around it's mostly oral; when it's top to bottom I almost always top. I've avoided relationships in anticipation of assuming that sooner or later I'll have to bottom, but, as I wrote yesterday, when I consider it I still feel the stench of death in my nose.

Maybe my reluctance to commit rests on my reluctance to -- my fear of -- submit, in many areas.

Sorry if this is awkwardly expressed.