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

It’s going to be a while before the mental image of Amy Sedaris singing “Glitter And Be Gay” leaves my brain

just saw some strangers with candy for the first time. woah lol. also steph colbert is hot.

got exhausted and went to sleep super early and so i woke up in the middle of the night with all kinds of super gay thoughts (god i remember when some assholes tried to make "super gay" mean something transphobic, yeah that wasn't gonna happen) and the desire to post them

like one of the things i sometimes wonder, and i say it here because folks here have mentioned it, is if there should be a poly thread. because it's all Discoursey now and to me, like, it's just inevitable, it's one of those things where if you're really supporting LGBTQ people it doesn't make sense to be all outraged about poly. i see a lot of similarities and parallels between being poly and being queer in the sense of, there's been a lot of pressure to be closeted about it. and so it's Discoursey and people act like it's this new thing that people just fucking came up with last week, and it's so not. so many people i know have been poly all this time and just couldn't be OUT about it. it's also one of those things that i personally see as being implicitly queer in the same way kink is. like a lot of the people i know who are poly are... i mean i guess i don't have any reason to think of them as anything _but_ cishet? but i don't assume anybody is cishet. particularly if they're my friends. a lot of the people i know turn out to be queer in some way... i like to call it "B-52s syndrome", in which these three people wind up in a band together and they're somehow all queer but they don't want to come out because they're not sure the other people in the band will accept them.

but maybe queerness is just that common, and i only really learned about it when i came out. i came out as poly and suddenly all of these friends who i didn't know where poly turn out to also be poly. that kind of thing.

i guess also, not to trauma dump, but a lot of it comes down to my breakup with my ex, who was trans-affirming but also super fucking SWERF-y. so not actually trans-affirming. and also incredibly hostile and judgemental towards poly... i mean i'm poly, she was monogamous, obviously that's not gonna work out, it was just this incredible vitriol and hatred she had towards me for being poly. she didn't see my transness as having anything to do with our breakup because she accepted me as _trans_, she just didn't accept me as _poly_ (again "accept" doesn't mean we have to stay married, it's the exceptional vitriol and hatred she had for any and all poly people).

it's one of the reasons a lot of trans people break up, even if the cis partner is accepting of the trans partner transitioning, when the poly thing comes up... she was like "fuck how much shit are you gonna throw at me here". as much as i need to? i guess? which is probably one of the reasons i haven't actually done any poly shit despite being extremely poly, all that internalized guilt and shame i got from my ex, and then to have people say that she was justified in being shitty to me like that because of this idea that being poly is just about being a slut

which it isn't, for me, i'm goddamn ace, and fuck me if i could ever explain _that_ to her to her satisfaction (which of course i had to, not so much because we were married but because one always has to _justify_ one's identity to the "normal" people). i mean a lot of it is that i'm just too fucked up for monogamous relationships. i still think of it... i thought of it as my _fault_ for a long time and i don't so much now, but i think of it as a goddamn shame, we were so good for each other in every other way but we _never_ clicked sexually. her abusing me was a pretext, but a lot of her abusing me was because i didn't _want_ her sexually. it's easier to talk about the abuse than to say "yeah i left her because i wanted to do kinky shit with a bunch of other people and she wasn't down with that". i feel like an asshole... no, i feel like a _man_ because of that. not only do i not feel comfortable saying that but i haven't actually done kinky shit with a bunch of other people, in large part because of that fucking shame.

so much of queerness for me is _almost_ getting the stuff i need. my partner and i saw this couples therapist on monday, and they were super fucking great - trans, poly, kinky, AuDHD, and knowledgeable and able to work with people from all those backgrounds - but not able to work with people with BPD. well, where the fuck are we supposed to find a couples therapist who is also able to work with people for whom all four of those things apply? well, the truth is that here in portland we _could_, but that would also mean paying cash because they don't bill insurance. sigh.

anyway! poly is good and there's not even a word for being bigoted against poly people like "SWERF" and there should be, because my fucking SWERF ex was the same way about poly. PERF? can i just, like, coin that? it sounds dumb and i don't see why anybody would pick up on it, but it also seems obvious. also my ex... i guess she's probably radfem these days, but they fucking overturned roe, no shit she's radfem. it's not like there's any causative link between being radfem and being anti-poly.

-

big fan of jerri blank if only because one of my best friends is named "jeri" and in my head jerri blank was a lot of what made that possible.

as for colbert it physically pains me when someone hot turns out to be catholic, like, not traumatized ex-catholic but _practicing_ catholic. no good can come from that. one of my friends posted a meme yesterday: "me explaining to a gen z my parents' hetero findom paypig consensual breeding fetish coparenting relationship (A Catholic marriage), and that shit is TOO REAL, except i'd call it more "dubcon" personally. also "dubcon" sounds like the setting of Super Mario USA that all of the weebs insist is inferior to subcon, even though it's actually a really fucking good dub which they'd know if they EVER FUCKING LISTENED TO IT.

i almost changed my username to "hetero findom paypig consensual breeding fetish coparenting relationship (A Catholic marriage)"

loved your post Kate, thank you for always being so thoughtful and open. bpd is really a mess for me, i won't lie. in other worlds, i've been discovering some kink lately but feel slightly self-conscious about it.

i mean not that kink is new for me, but i guess the past 5 years have seen an uptick.

i'm glad it's not just me who's self-conscious about kink, haha :)

<3 <3 <3

swen, i wrote the following and then realized you emphasized that you are feeling self-conscious about it, so please disregard if you'd rather not go into it here, i meant it in good fun:

may i be so brash as to offer a few guesses?

restraints, kinda goth with some candle wax
discipline maybe with forced fem for the extra eye water
smelly pits, socks and stuff, feet
chastity cages

am i in the ballpark?

i did a restraining thing with my guys for the first time, at least it felt like the first time because it was totally amazing. both giving and receiving.

omg

restraints sound cool. very "body of evidence" feat Madonna

tbh you haven't really gotten that close! feel free to keep guessing tho, i don't mind :P

or feel free to tell us more about you, don't mind that either.

lol. give me a hint!

lol i meannnn let me sleep on what kind of hint i could possibly give you

well i think i can pretty readily say the boyz def don't mind calling me dad and i'm not upset about it either, tho i guess that's pretty basic/not even kink by now

oh niiiice

but i dunno is like a 23 year old wanting to hang out with a 39 year old like an abysmal reality
i mean how do we *feel* about that

Most of my youngest friends are between 22 and 30 nbd

just crazy how many of the queer boys have daddy issues, like that's really quite a thing, i'm curious to look up the studies

dad-making-pancakes.jpg

it's my main gig in kink land, welcome to the club

swen as someone who is 41 and dating a 24 year old (with his 50 yo partner no less) - it can be so beautiful, as cliche as it might feel sometimes.

i am curious - what way-outside-your-generation artists or phenomena are you being introduced to and liking in spite of yourself because of this situation?

in my case it's bladee and drain gang ;_;

i made breakfast burritos for the guys one morning and it was, like, really satisfying. i live to serve dad realness.

wow
. yeah like what a thing, just so beguiling as a concept and yet so real
. you know - Sade and Fleetwood Mac maybe, and Stone Temple Pilots (the latter as far as being out of my general genre. maybe also simplicity has been a new phenomenon in my life so i'm trying to understand that.

simplicity! i love it.

:D

Well as long as we’re going there:

More vanilla:
- tighty-whities, singlets, sweatpants/pajama pants, pajama singlets with buttflaps, wet hair, “saggers”

More not at all:
- piss play, choking, slapping, breeding, gangbangs, bukkake, etc.

a mighty ensemble!

i really like group stuff but i almost never have the energy to make it happen. plus i always get hella nervous before it goes down.

pee is slowly happening in our three way. we've also done some wrestling.

https://d3o2e4jr3mxnm3.cloudfront.net/LIG-Daisy-Vintage-4-Circle-Sticker_66338_1_lg.png

omg

fellas can we talk about boner pills? what do you like?

i have a daily sildenafil pill with some other stuff in it. not sure i love it. i'm thinking maybe i should just order straight sildenafil from mexico next time.

I was introduced to kink at age 21 by my (older) then-girlfriend, she did some professional dom work. It didn't naturally work its way into our sex life, one day she was like, "you want me to work on you? just to see?" and she did. I wasn't into it. I still don't think I'm into it.

I have tadalafil, the big ones that last three days. I use it rarely, I sometimes have a tendency to slip into "an anxious state" when I'm sexing my bf, and the tadalafil helps me to not shut down entirely. What works better for this is a little weed tbh, the anxiety stays away and the boner stays put

but i dunno is like a 23 year old wanting to hang out with a 39 year old like an abysmal reality
i mean how do we *feel* about that

― Swen

i mean speaking only for myself? not great. by and large i don't judge anybody else for age-gap relationships, but i worry a lot about how other people perceive me... like, people are gonna call me a "groomer" no matter what i do or who i associate with, and at the same time i do feel a lot of pressure to not do anything that bigots could use to justify that false accusation.

personally i _do_ prefer the company of people my own age. there just aren't a lot of us. not, mind you, because we're all dead. the expectation for my generation _isn't_ one of queer community. some people transition and vanish, innumerable people just don't transition. i do try to go by the classic x/2+7 guideline, and it's just... complicated.

not only are there limited people in my age group, the vast majority of them are earlier in transition. see, to me, "trans time" is just as important an age consideration as cis time. i find that i'm unusually old in both cis time _and_ trans time. if someone's my age but started HRT and came out _last month_, there's an inherent imbalance there - both lack of experience and, honestly, i'm rapidly reaching the point where i'm no longer pubertal. most of the trans women i know are _very much_ pubertal. plus, at my age, a lot of the people transitioning are in monogamous cishet marriages, and are trying very hard to salvage those marriages. based on my experience, i'd say that the vast majority of those marriages can't and _shouldn't_ be salvaged, but that opinion is very much colored by my crushing on them, so it's not a belief i'd _ever_ express to a trans woman in a cishet monogamous marriage. i just wind up pining and waiting for the marriage to fall apart by which point there's no fucking way i'm going to get with them because, too much other shit has happened by that time.

like, for instance, it often turns out the person in question is only interested in bottoming/subbing. i genuinely love domming and topping, as long as i can trust the other person to trust my emotional boundaries, which, since i'm dealing with people going through puberty who _don't_ often have a lot of experience and have been starved for affection pretty much all their lives, is a pretty big risk, and as long as i'm getting what i need on the right side of the slash _somewhere_, which i'm usually not. plenty of cis lesbians and guys are happy to do that, but getting stuff going with cis lesbians and/or guys has its own challenges.

just crazy how many of the queer boys have daddy issues, like that's really quite a thing, i'm curious to look up the studies

― Swen

yeah parental abuse is a huge part of queer culture unfortunately. the other reason these age-gap relationships are something i run like hell from is... i got huge trans mom energy, and i got dom energy, but i DO NOT ever mix the two. and a lot of these younger folks, they're looking for a "mommy dommy" which is a HARD red flag for me. i am really frustrated by all of these kind of stereotypes, particularly since they do have a certain amount of basis in reality. the expectation is that older people top, and younger people bottom, which _doesn't_ hold at _all_ in my view, and that masc people top, and femme people bottom, and here i _definitely_ find there's a correlation. it's memetic, it's a running joke, two people like each other but whoops turns out they're both bottoms. it doesn't really work any different for kink than it does for sex - _somebody_ fuckin' has to top. for my part i don't really think of myself as butch or femme or even "futch", it's all contextual, which might or might not have something to do with me being switchy, but I mean, you put all of my limits together and, uh, I don't exactly get a lot of action. As much as I'd love to be living a debauched, hedonistic life, the sad truth of it is that I just _don't_, by and large.

personally i _do_ prefer the company of people my own age.

this rings true for me, generally speaking.

the only age gap i've ever been in before this has been me younger, them older. being with a significantly younger man has been very interesting. it helps that he is mature for his age. *gasp* a red flag! but it's true. i don't tell him that all the time or anything. he is very much his own man, knows what he likes and wants. i'm not reckless, but he wouldn't stand for it. i do see the ways in which he is young, and i can love them from a distance - they don't satisfy some misplaced need i have to feel young myself or anything. the power stuff always comes from him. my partner and i are more passive about it. we're just happy to be there. even when we're doing the dad top thing. communication before sex has been good and clear. one surprisingly challenging part of this is he's 24 so he's a horndog! we're both more in the cum-every-2nd-day stage of life. so i feel like sometimes we just lay there and let him do his thing lol.

i find a lot of the libidinal energy that i used to have as a younger man being transferred into wanting to be an older supportive person in this case. in other words, a dad! before all of the bullshit that makes many dads horrible. in my experience most of the parental abuse on the dad side is withdrawal or checking out or workaholism or the like. so many gay guys crave some combination of the strong and the loving in an older male figure they can feel close to and sexually connected to. it's my personal mission to make that a reality, as unfake as possible. i feel like a big part of that for me is being my own loving father to my inner hurt boy. that practice has really expanded my ability to be the fully integrated adult male i want to be for myself and others.

I should specify: I meant younger guys as friends, which happens naturally because I work at a university and if they stay local we keep in touch. On hookup apps I still trend younger than my age but not mid or late '20s.

i've never been in a sexual or romantic age gap relationship but i'm at a point in my mid 30s now where i have a number of close friends who are a decade younger than me & i find myself really enjoying being in the position of wisdom! talking about life experiences w/ people who are younger is very fulfilling, which is also why i really cherish social spaces dominated by older gay men -- the townhouse in nyc, p town etc. i always tell ppl that one of the reasons that i think p town is >>> fire island is because of how many older gay men are around at bars to dote on you, tell you you're young and sweet and beautiful, but also to hear about the lives and experiences of 60 year old gay guys. i usually really enjoy those convos even if they sometimes involve hands being put in places i may not otherwise ask for them to be :) RIP dr morbs my first older gay friend

my bf & i recently opened up the relationship and one of the goals on my list is fucking up and down the age spectrum in ways i never really have. there is a normative way of looking at domming/subbing thru the lens of age and size that i will admit i am interested in. i hope that makes sense. i've not yet experienced hardness issues -- if anything my problems go in the other direction -- but i will say that weed has an amazing ability to prevent me from cumming while still fully luxuriating in the sex i am having in a way that kinda concerns me bcuz i don't want to link sex w/ being high so completely, but it really works! i can top for so long when i'm stoned & it feels incredible

i love older gay men! the content ones have so much wisdom to offer. i've met a few miserable ones who i think in hindsight it would have been best to steer clear. including my first ltr. even though he taught me so, so much, and i an a completely different and better person because of him. i was very in love with him. he wouldn't give all the way with me though.

i'm definitely one of the 'daddy issues' gays if it wasn't clear already lol.

it's so interesting to me to hear how weed affects people differently. for me it definitely makes sex a deeper experience. but i have to make sure my mental and emotional shit is sorted beforehand, that i'm feeling positive and strong. idk if it really affects my orgasms. j it makes me really happy to hear that you're getting so much pleasure out of topping.

feeling somewhat sexually inert lately tbh

partly because i just started a new job and that’s been taking up a lot of headspace (and time - my commute is sort of insane and i’m just totally depleted by the time i get home) and partly just not feeling in the mood for various reasons, some of which are maybe self-body-image related

ah sorry to hear about the commute dr. fuck work, is how i break that down. for what it's worth jar and i agree you're beautiful.

I can keep it up way longer if I'm stoned.

One of the more satisfying recent friendships I've begun is with a 23-year-old who applied for but lost interest in the student paper. We met for coffee once and lost touch. Then a year later in summer 2000 he sends a screenshot of one of my Grindr photos with "is this you lolz." He'd already graduated. We started meeting for drinks. He's damn cute but I'm not attracted to him.

Then I gave him advice about his abusive boyfriend. Around Xmas 2022 they broke up. Finally one night we started having sex one time but couldn't finish it. No hard feelings and we laugh about it now.

He has a new boyfriend and he's happy. I'm glad he's in my life.

aww yeah! playing a part in the young lives. i'm not gonna have kids but that doesn't mean i don't want to have a positive effect on people who will be here after me. i especially love to be the one telling guys to cut out their abusive parents / pvmic

Summer 2021, I meant

thanks map <3 fwiw the job itself is wonderful so far and i’m much happier here than i was at my last gig, the commute’s the only bummer thing about it

i now work at a university but i have a strict apps-off policy when i’m on campus. i’m gonna be hiring and training students (mostly grad students) soon and would rather not deal with any potential awkwardness in that regard lol

Totally get that.

It doesn't even occur to me to use the apps on campus

j it makes me really happy to hear that you're getting so much pleasure out of topping.

― ꙮ (map), Tuesday, February 13, 2024 4:29 PM (one hour ago)

thanks! same :) i just needed someone to teach me. i feel like i'm being sent back out into the world as a good top tho i guess i'll find out

Oh the awkwardness when I loaded the apps on my phone after my divorce and started window shopping in the bathroom stall and one of the first profiles that came up was one of my coworkers

I’ve never used the apps— I have a completely blank profile on Grindr but have never used it or any of the others. Honestly I find them terrifying.

it's the sniffies era baby throw those apps away (barely any idea what i'm talking about)

I also admit that while I talked to my shrink about it and he assured me that he’s seen men in similar situations on the apps, I am wary of being on an app and being upfront with the fact that I have a permanent colostomy and no butthole. Mostly would go on there to drown my mouth in twink jizz, but the whole “altered body” thing still gives me pause.

Except for those two things, I have the body of a 25 year old who works out regularly, tho, so maybe I should just go for it.

*googles sniffies* jeez

I’ve used Grindr only on a couple of occasions, and both times I didn’t like it. There’s something wolfish about men in that stream that makes me feel unsafe

I did however have a hilarious power bottom week after a breakup, when I wanted to get fucked into oblivion. My butthole was extremely pliant and clean and it felt like a magic talisman, like I could show hole to any passerby and be ready for loads. I think I took enough dicks in that week to last me the rest of my life

I did meet my current bf on Grindr. I was tipsy and stoned and loaded it up and was fielding dick pics from all directions, just dicks flying at my face for an hour. One guy I was chatting with suddenly broke kayfabe and was like “honestly this chat is so much more interesting than any other chat I’ve had on here and more than hooking up with you I kinda want to go on a date with you” and so we did that and it’s been 3.5 years now

It is funny when blue haired relatives ask us how we met and we just chorus “ON GRINDR” without a lick of shame