The Siren Song of Straight Sex
on eradication and failure
One of the first girls I had sex with once told me I did not fuck enough like a man for her.
I was laying on a fleece blanket on the pull-out couch. It was spring but the blanket had Christmas decorations on it. She wasn’t my first, but she was the first girl I had sex with consistently, where I knew what it was like to get used to another person’s body, where I understood that this was a nice feeling. Her parents left us alone in the house for hours at a time, and she had part of the house sectioned off to herself. She had a grey TV, the kind that was everywhere in 2008 but only some places in 2016. She had her own microwave. Having sex here had felt more real than spending time with random boys in parking lots. It felt like the kind of sex I was supposed to be having as a high schooler.
Instead of the stoic reassessment she was clearly aiming for, I pestered her with pathetic questions. Did she want me to be more dominant? More assertive? She did not answer. We kept having sex for a few months. Every time, the way she looked at me after made me feel like a failure. I liked failing. It helped me stay present.
A note: I will not use the term “cishet” anywhere in this essay, because I think it is utterly unromantic. Bad phonics!
I believe most Barnes and Noble smut is straight. It does not matter if there are two guys, or two girls, or shapeshifting monsters. All it does is reify a distinctly heterosexual style of letters. Men use the same words to fuck men that they do to fuck women. The monsters have cis bodies. Gay circumstance within these works only serves as a “worldly” temptation in contrast against the implicit assertion that True Sex is exemplified, perfectly and fully, in straight sex and its accompanying jargon.
Millions of queers read this stuff, of course, and thousands of queers write it, too. But the words themselves, the vocabulary meant to trigger our imagination into Pavlovian erotics, all derive from the same old dichotomies of desire. Fantasies do not, by necessity, carry over into real-life, but none of smut I have sampled seems particularly interested in the taboos that arise from lived faggotry. The passion afforded to me by my real-life perversity is unilaterally ignored by texts ostensibly engineered for arousal. Simply put, none of this gets me off.
And that’s fine. I am not here to tell you that reading or writing porn like this is fascist, or a byproduct of internalized homophobia, or whatever - though that would probably make for a cleaner essay. I just think it is worth acknowledging that the most visible form of deviancy in American culture is linguistically disallowed interface with queer expression.
My life, as it is now, could have gone much differently:
He’s 25 and an adjunct English teacher. He lives upstate with his partner. He calls her his partner, and there are multiple pronouns in her bio, but it’s his girlfriend and they both know that.
She is a graphic designer. She makes twice as much as him, but he insists on splitting everything equally. She thinks this is hot but also stupid. She is two years older than him. She talks for them in public and he loves that. She owns a loom. She can cook. She likes that they don’t have a “conventional” dynamic.
He talks over her sometimes and makes her elaborate gifts. He is pretty like a girl, a girl that looks like a man. She finds him stressful. He never admits that he is mad at her, especially when he is mad at her when he should be mad at himself. She is smarter than him, but he makes her feel small. She wishes it was different, but she can’t tell if it’s a big deal.
He gets mad when she tells him that his eating disorder triggers her. She is secretly repulsed that he is a man with an eating disorder. Sometimes he talks a lot about his drinking and sometimes he does not bring it up at all. She never mentions it.
When I think about this, I feel like I cannot breathe. When I think about their sex life I feel dizzy.
For the sake of argument, I will paraphrase the mental catalogue I have kept of observations people have made about their sex life that I do not relate to: Who pays for dinner is important. There are “positions.” There is a clear delineation between foreplay and fucking. It is obvious what “counts” and what does not. It’s bad if you don’t cum. Anal is a kink. Dominance and submission are prescriptive performances. If it feels like you’re making porn it’s bad. If it doesn’t feel like porn it’s also bad. If you feel bad about yourself after sex that means the sex was bad.
It puzzles me that, when it comes to a physical intimacy experienced by the vast majority of strangers, I find myself unable to imagine it.
The thing about gooning as a fetish that I find abstractly compelling, if not actually erotic, is that it is not about sex. It is about masturbation, and hypnosis, and porn, and voyeurism. But such a profoundly heterosexual corruption circles back to this dissatisfaction with “sex,” according to their own ill-fitting definition. So they replace it, then, with exaggerated forms of “sex”-adjacent activities, for fear of defining intimacy as anything that could allow space for queerness. But like, are straight people even aware what they want out of this?
I have spent my entire adult life, or at least the parts of it when I’ve been single and sentimental, trying to have straight sex. That’s a pretty hard thing to do when you’re a a faggot.
By the time fucking was something that felt good I had long ago killed certain parts of myself, suffocated him under my tongue and between the muscles in my thighs. Straight sex was something I should have done earlier when I had the chance. It is the only thing fundamentally inaccessible from me. It is something I did wrong.
Most of the men I had sex with were really sweet and liked my body as it was, which typically ruined the illusion for me. Most of the women I slept with wanted me talky. Obviously, this wouldn’t do. Trans people gave me other grievances instead, with their jealousies and false affirmations. Besides, there was too much creativity in bed, and there were always so many of us around.
Some have tried to fuck me like a man, but I’d always move my hips too slowly, like there was a wood block between my dick and the rest of my body. Some have tried to fuck me like a woman but I’d always kiss back a little hard, grab their waist a little too gruff. But I like doing it wrong, of course. It lets me off the hook so I can fuck them better instead.
So there’s this one part in the movie Something Wild, ‘86 not ‘61 that I really love. In the movie, Jeff Daniels plays Charles, a yuppie businessman who gets a ride to work courtesy of Lulu, Melanie Griffith, after he dines-and-dashes in downtown NYC. He gets in the car and, whoops, she’s kidnapped him, offers him nips from her flask, flirts with him. Charles is wearing a wedding ring and has that hot look of blissed out terror when he leaves his suit unbuttoned. Lulu has Louise Brooks hair and a penchant for spontaneity, kleptomania, and Charles’ company credit card. After a wild night in a motel, she drives them both to a small house in suburban Pennsylvania.
Lulu reveals her name is actually Audrey, and her black bob is actually a wig hiding some frizzy blonde hair. She introduces him to her mother, says they’ve just gotten married. Later, she nuzzles into him, says he lies well.
Of course, neither party knows quite yet just how well they both are at telling lies. Charles’ is not some shit heel adulterer letting off steam; his wife left him nine months ago, and he’s been the shell of a man ever seen. Audrey is no free-spirit vixen, but a scared young woman struggling to get back on her feet after leaving her abusive ex-husband. The roles they play-act for each other are ways of approaching deviancy and intimacy in equal measure. Charles and Audrey can change themselves to fit the other’s mood. Despite their diametric opposition, there is the underlying sense that these two people need one another.
As Charles and Audrey stand in her childhood bedroom, brand new car out in driveway, both still hiding, I realized this was the fantasy I had been searching for in strange lovers- of perverse loneliness giving way to unremarkable stability and tenderness. It was the hottest thing I had ever seen, yet I could not picture myself within it. It was an imaginary gift for a part of myself that was already dead.
A conservative talking point, long incubated by dozens of pundits but first fully explicated by Michael Knowles at CPAC in 2023, is the “total eradication of transgenderism from public life.”
This will, of course, not come to pass, even if we are systemically attacked and our bodies criminalized. We are not going anywhere, I am not going anywhere. They will have to kill me before they detransition me, and I refuse to die for them.
But as I am continuously confronted with such virulent language, it has occurred to me that I have lost the ability to conceptualize a life, public or private, that is not perverted. It is easy to get so bored with being gay that you forget that it is not a universal condition of existence. Being gay is a choice; it something you choose for yourself every day. I have chosen it so many times I no longer know what it would look like to make another choice.
My world is dominated by queerness. I am curious, then, about the desires I have abandoned, what some hope will take my place if I am gone. What, in their wildest dreams, would replace me after my eradication?
This began as an essay about what I like in bed, because if I’m going to be Substack girly, (even sometimes, even not really) I had to be willing to write about my sex life.
Not that I would mind. I have no qualms about my own bouts of hypersexuality and I talk frankly and enthusiastically about fucking both online and in my personal life. I like that it is mine. I am proud of the way I fuck, I am proud of the person I am when I fuck.
I kept looking for a place to talk about this, some moment where I could segue beyond the space left in my absence, but no such opportunity presented itself.
Because I did not write this essay to talk about my most deep-seated sexual preferences. I thought maybe I wrote this essay to talk about my most self-destructive urges. In the end, though, I guess I wrote this essay to put to an old version of myself to rest - one that kept trying to graft her desires onto fantasies that had nothing to offer her.
love ya lots and stay safe,
helmet girl xx
Bibliography of Influences
“Can a novel that only has cis characters be ‘trans literature?’” by Davey Davis
geez now i’m crying. you so perfectly put to words things i’ve only just begun to explore and attempt to understand about myself, thank you🩷
this is so real ily