A Queer Sex Post

Vapid relationships, sexual liberation, and estrangement

Big shout out to my readers. Appreciating you all. I wrote this post in May and was too nervous to post it, so it’s been sitting in drafts since them. I’m a student these days, trying to get my undergrad degree. Busy times means less posting

Kneeling Nun by Martin van Meytens, 1731

Dear Lithium,

I seem to constantly find myself falling out of communities. I’ve been in the gay leather community, the queer nightlife community, the rave community, etc. I crave making genuine friends, but all I seem to find is substance use and face-value connections. Every mentor figure I’ve found in these communities has been more interested in a sexual relationship than anything else. I know that it’s not fair to say that everyone is the problem except for me, but I don’t understand why I feel like I’m on the other side of the glass. It seems like sex and drugs are all there is to community. I feel disillusioned with the people around me, but I also feel bad for not being grateful for the albeit vapid connections I have.

Thank you,
User

Dear User,

We can talk about these issues from a hundred angles. The legacy of AIDS. A missing generation. The legacy of assimilationism and the fracture of the queer community. We can talk about our broken families of origin. How each queer estrangement from a family is like one more drop of poison in the well of our beautiful community--a pain we are given that gets handed on to others.

These are important angles, and there’s still more that we could find. I don’t want to discount their value in coming to be with and coming to understand our communities. Today I want to go for a walk though the landscape of platonic, sexual, and romantic relationships in the queer and trans community, and as we walk together to point out some of the geographical features and to share with you my ideas about the mountains.

At the beginning of our walk we come upon a plaque. It’s 100 feet long, but not much is happening on any of it. At the beginning theres a small dot and then it’s just empty space for the next 93 feet. This dot would represent the advent of “proto-humans.” These guys are basically human just not quite. They were around 3 million years ago. After a whole 93 feet of empty space, 2.8 million years later, 200,000 years ago, we have another dot. This is the genesis of Humans proper. At the 97 foot mark, 100,000 years ago, scientists think we had fully developed human brains.

A mere 6 inches from the edge of this 100 foot plaque is dot representing the supposed advent of farming, just 12,000 years ago. Then, finally we have iPhones, which seem to largely be the technology that defines human culture today. The advent of iPhones, 17 years ago, is basically invisible on this 100 foot scale, it would be about 0.007 inches from the edge, of the same order of magnitude as the width of a hair.

Visualize it. Look out over this 100 foot plaque. This is where your brain evolved. The first 93 feet of it are just empty space. The advent of busting your ass in a field if you want to live is practically hanging off the edge. The deepest, most fundamental parts of our psychology are this old. They had this much space to solidify into what they are today.

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You see this plaque as you step into the park. You think “wow that’s a big plaque good thing i don’t read plaques ever” as you step around it and make your way off into the landscape. Not reading the plaque was not your first mistake, and it certainly won’t be your last, but it is a notable mistake nonetheless.

The point of the giant, 100 foot long plaque is to illustrate just how deep the groves of our minds are. We didn’t become “official” humans or develop modern cognitive traits and then all of a sudden have a brain reset. These changes are slow and slower. One change builds on top of the last. The brain we possess is better and stronger not because it changed, but because, largely, it didn’t. It grew.

I often find myself pondering the missing 3 million years of our evolution. Or the missing 200,000 of our existence. I think, maybe, it’s not an incredibly challenging exercise to go through what life might have been like for us. To imagine what the conditions of our lives probably were. Since this landscape we’re walking is a landscape about queer relationships, let’s play with the idea of what the major features of relationships might have been for the last 3 million years, long before we ever had a farm to care for.

I’m just spitballin’ here, but I suspect these people, or, proto-people, had a couple key motivations in their lives.

- don’t die

- eat food

- fuck

I further suspect that, if this were true, there’d be one key that would more likely ensure success for these motivations: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT BE ALONE. Imagine it, you’re some guy, you walk off by yourself, BAM! Sabertooth-tiger. It’s over. It’s completely over.

So, what if, for 3 million years, we developed to infuse our primary drive to stay alive with a drive to not be isolated? 3 million years later, in the iPhone era, in a queer community, not dying, eating, and fucking are all available, readily. Idk if you’ve used grindr but you can literally just get laid in like 8 minutes it’s kinda neat I guess. My question for us is, then, what is happening to our brains when one half of the loneliness equation is being auto-solved for us by modern tech? The motivating factors that, throughout ancient history, have motivated us to seek and maintain community and companionship, have essentially gone away. We still don’t want to be alone, for the most part we know that, but the extrinsic motivation, the drive, has vanished into a society built on convenience.

Today, if our relationships fail it’s not life or death. We’re not getting kicked out of the tribe and forced to wander the wilderness until our deaths. We, instead, leave community when the conflict of the month is more than we care to deal with because there’s food at home and a tiktok to scroll. The faces of the influencers won’t keep me warm but they sure as hell will convince a 3 million year old part of my brain that someone is talking to me.

On the left, here, we can see a mountain. That’s Death-Is-No-Longer-An-Active-Threat-So-My-Relationships-Don’t-Make-Sense-Anymore Mountain. Wow. What a beauty. I’d sure hate to fall off that one.

Seeing as we are standing in a valley, here on the right is Mount The-Fate-of-Your-Life-in-Community-Now-That-Your-Psychological-Contexts-Have-Been-Broken. We just call her Mt Brenda for short. We can see that there are a few houses scattered around the mountain, but also that the mountain is on fire. Haha. Look out!

Extrinsically motivating factors might have once operated as guardrails for people who are navigating relationships. “That proto-John is a real jerkface, but he’s also better at fishing than any of us. It’s probably best that we keep him around.” These factors might have caused us to figure out how to live together and how to work through conflicts. “Sure, John can come to dinner at our hut tonight. He did catch the fish after all. Just don’t give him any alcohol this time.” There used to be something that was bigger than us that provided context for us setting aside our personal gripes. Today, this idea of something that is bigger than us is practically non-existent and is even actively discouraged by our society. The preference of society and the preference of ourselves tends to be that we are solo units. We can exist perfectly fine, not needing anybody else. It feels relevant to me that the saying “to pull yourself up by your bootstraps” used to be a joke making fun of someone trying to do something that is impossible, and now is a very real saying praising hard work and individualism in a society that assists few on the way towards conventional success.

It’s easy to forget that these mountains are on each side of us. The reality is that the last three million years have shaped us and shaped how we function in community and how we, on a fundamental level, understand how to interact with one another.

From Gary Larson’s Far Side

As we’re flanked by these two mountains, “no more active threats”, and “how that affects our ability to create community” let’s keep walking forward and see what else we can find in the landscape around us. Ecology is fun when we can ward off active threats with guns!

It makes sense to me that you’re falling out of communities and falling out of relationships. You’re, ironically, not alone in this. I am part of a queer community that seeks to create a container for stable community and stable relationships, and one thing that I hear from people quite a bit is about how their experience has been in the broader queer community trying to make friends and connections. People are so often surrounded by aggression, gossip, drugs, lots of sex, and ultimately anti-social behavior. they struggle to fit in and to feel secure in community because the community itself is not secure. If I am entering into a place where everyone is using drugs and alcohol and sex as a way to get to know one another, then drugs and alcohol and sex will be the foundation of these relationships. This is what we will fall back on when we need something to fall back upon. I’m feeling like in order to forge deep bonds in a community like this, I would need to first overturn the foundation of a relationship. There are totally exceptions to everything. And I’m not saying this is a 100% rule. I think what I’m getting at is that forging a heart-to-heart connection with my drinking buddy is going to be a substantially more difficult process than forging a heart connection with someone I meditate with. As someone who has had many drinking buddies over the years, and many meditation buddies, this feels like an easy truth.

Ahh, isn’t it nice out here? I do love a good walk through What-the-Fuck-is-Going-On-With-Queer-Relationships Valley. This is my favorite trail. Up ahead you can see this big field of flowers. At first glance they might look like poppies, but they’re actually This-is-the-Logical-Conclusion-of-Our-Culture, an invasive plant that has been responsible for the extinction of 12 different types of bees. Sad stuff. It kills by tricking the ~~queer people~~ bees into thinking that they’re gathering nectar for the hive, when in reality they’re being exposed to a biotoxin that makes them post really passive aggressive shit on Facebook and complain to their friends about this socially awkward bee named Marvin.

We live in a world of disposability. I put plastic in the bin basically everyday, plastic that will sit at some unknown site for the next thousands or whatever years. When things are broke, we just buy a new one. Fixing clothes and electronics and household items just isn’t as easy as it used to be for us. In 2018, seven years ago, PornHub reported that there were 4,790,000 new videos uploaded to their site. That’s a new porn video every 10 seconds, give or take. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2018-year-in-review It seems to me like there wouldn’t be that much new porn if there wasn’t a demand for it. but none of it lasts. With that much content, it seems like everything becomes ephemeral. People upload themselves, all of themselves, and then just disappear into the sea of dicks.

Items of extreme importance used to be passed from generation to generation. We used every part of the animal we killed. Some cultures used mnemonic devices, sacred mnemonic objects to memorize the names and stories of dozens of their ancestors. I barely know anything about my grandparents today, let alone my great grandparents. We treat even ourselves as disposable the way we degrade ourselves and live our lives with masks on in shame.

In an ancient culture where everything was used and reused, relationships were likely more stable and long lasting. In our culture of convenience and disposability, our relationships take on a similar form: they are optional.

You may recognize this tree to my right here as an Oak, but to be more specific it’s an I’m-Just-Making-This-All-Up-As-I-Go-and-You-Should-Take-What’s-Useful-and-Discard-the-Rest subspecies of Oak. Golly, isn’t nature fascinating?

It only makes sense then that we don’t try to save relationships that are failing when we don’t save anything around us that is falling apart. It seems to me that we don’t even have this opportunity. First of all, it takes two people to build a secure relationship. Both people are going to want it, know how to get to it, and be willing to put in the work for it. But, even if you have two motivated people, the cards are stacked against us. Very, very few of us, have true examples of secure relationships that we can shape ourselves with. We can’t just one day say that we’re no longer going to play by the rules of our society. The locks and channels of our culture have etched themselves into our brains generation after generation. Wanting to escape them is an entirely different process than escaping them.

It is reasonable today to see no way forward with people. There is nothing vital that glues us together. We have all become independent people. Told that if we are strong, if we are moral, good, upstanding people, we can navigate life in this world alone. The American Dream, a social philosophy that so many of us have been subjected to, dictates that if we are good, honest people, and willing to work hard, we can make it on our own, and even thrive in this society. Even as we make the decision to walk away from social philosophies such as this, it feels exceptionally difficult to truly rid our psychology of them.

As we go over this small foot bridge here, look very carefully into the chasm below. This is My-Family-Made-Me-This-Way canyon. You can see the lava seeping out of the ground, we call that The-AIDS-Epidemic, not sure why. If you look carefully you can see the charred bodies of your queer ancestors. Whoa! *Shakes bridge* Don’t fall in! Haha, just kidding. I wouldn’t.

Just on the other side of the bridge here is a slab of meat. We call it The-Meat. Sorry, I’m running out of ideas but at this point I’m in too deep.

Up to this point, many of these ideas apply to both straight and queer people alike. But here I’d like to look at something that affects just the queers specifically surrounding sex. Queers tend to take a more laissez-faire attitude towards sex than our straight counterparts. Especially here in the Bay Area, polyamory and absolute sexual freedom are treated as somewhat the ideal. We fuck our friends, and we fuck our friends’ friends, and our friends’ friends fuck our friends, and we all get along, at least in theory. The straights, on the other hand, have a bunch of unwritten rules about who they’re allowed to sleep with and when. Women, in this regard, are very much treated like property. Straight people are also generally told not form friendships with people of the opposite sex, which potentially uncomplicates things for them quite a bit, since no one is sleeping with their friends. So when we’re talking about how relationships work in the queer community, I want to be really clear that it’s going to be different from how relationships work in the straight community, partially because of how different our experiences of sex are. And of course there are queer people that fall into the other camp, and straight people that fall into our camp. But for the purposes of our walk, I’m attempting to speak in generalities.

The scene right now is a world where it’s extremely easy to get access to the things that we need to survive. We’ve come to understand that we can have much of what we want and what we need, even when we’re living in poverty. It’s no perfect system by any means, but it’s probably not like how things were 100,000 years ago. So what might happen when we combine a psychological attitude of things being easy to obtain with an attitude of fucking any and everyone is encouraged? I believe that when I have sex with someone, I get closer to them. I would say that a good majority of my queer hookups, and even of my straight, pre-transition, hookups, resulted in some type of intimate sharing. Maybe it’s me sharing about my traumas, or me listening to the other person share about theirs. I know that having sex with a near stranger will bring me closer to them.

This brings me to my point. I want to be close to someone. I have been trained that that is possible and that I am allowed to have it because in general I get what I want and I get it fast. I have learned that sex brings me close to people. In my world where sex is so open and free, I’ve learned that I can have intimate moments with other people that I do not have to spend the time getting to know. In essence, I can fast forward through my relationships to get to the good stuff if I’m willing to fuck early and often enough. Every once in a while I meet someone who has a totally different experience than this and who really makes these scenes work for them. At least that’s how they portray it to me. But usually I find myself hearing from people who are struggling in these environments.

My general experience of relationships is that sex is a poor feature to fall back on when a relationship is in need of repair. But if our foundation is sex or drugs, then that’s generally what we have available to us. All of the relationships that I have today that are long-term, secure, and life-affirming are built on serious levels of trust and communication. These are people who I can communicate with when I’ve fucked up or they’ve fucked up. And because of this communication, we mutually understand that the relationship is not just going to end, but that we’re capable of working things out together. Unfortunately this looks like a slower progression of friendship up to the point where we’d be, for example, comfortable talking about traumas together. I’m pretty saturated with people right now, and so new people can take 6 months to a year to start getting really close, if it gets there at all. This can feel a long time, but as an adult this is what my experience is like. Then, when there is turbulence in the relationship, we have all that time to lean back on to support us. Someone I met last week who is showing turbulence isn’t going to last because we don’t have the mutual tools to resolve issues.

If we had mutual tools like needing each other for food production then we’d be able to work through issues, or at least able to forgive them. But since I can have a Bahn Mi here in like 12 minutes I don’t need help with that.

For me, there’s no problem with sex or drugs, but they are not relationship building tools.

Here. Up over this ridge you can just start to see the ocean. This ocean doesn’t have a name. It’s just the ocean. If you remember this place, you can come here to relax. You can come here to breathe. This is an isolated beach, so it’s a nice place to be alone. To listen to the seagulls. To watch the fishing boats and to feel the sun on your face. Let’s check it out.

Your participation in these systems is optional. While cultural deconditioning and extricating yourself from these circles is more difficult than willing things to be different, it is still something that you can choose to do. While this might be getting smaller and smaller, I refuse to believe that there are not circles of people today who want to have healthy, secure relationships. We are out there. We want what you want. We are practicing and we are learning how to love just the same as you. The sex and party scene is optional. Your participation in this scene is optional. I know it can feel like all the queer people in your town are in this scene, and maybe if you live in a small town, that’s true. But also, if you live in a small town, where the hell are all these people partying at? My friend, dear User, there are new ways to live. I believe that you are capable of finding your people. If these scenes that you are falling out of are not your people, then you need to make a decision that they are not your people. There is more than one way to live.

PS it doesn’t really help me or even matter if you subscribe because I’m not monetized but it does give me a hit of dopamine so please consider that the next time you come to my page and choose to not give me dopamine.

PPS I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the matter hit up the comments if you’d like.

PPPS The relationship matter, not the dopamine matter, k thx.