Arts & Culture | Queer Life

How Queer Sex Liberated Me

Leaving my cishet marriage was hard, but it set us both free to find more satisfying relationships.

My husband and I did not have sex on our wedding night. The bed in the house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where we spent our honeymoon was piled high with a white duvet that was puffy like a cumulus cloud. It looked like it belonged in a hotel from a movie scene where two characters check in to spend the night having illicit and passionate sex.

In the morning light after our first night as a married couple, our bodies became visible—a tangled mess of arms and legs, heavy with sleep, not yet ready to face the world. He kissed me and pulled me close, hopeful as always. He knew better than to push too hard though, used to being rebuffed, fearful of shutting me down, not wanting to introduce tension into the beginning of our lives as husband and wife.

I turned him down the way I always did: “I love you,” I said, as I turned my head and pushed away his hand. We were two people on our honeymoon, waking fully clothed in a bed that had been used only for sleeping, which is how it would stay for the rest of the week-long trip. But that was to be expected by then.

*

The first time I slept with my husband, three years before we were married, I asked him to punch me in the face. “I like it rough” was a refrain I used with the men I bedded at the time, convinced both that it would make me sexually appealing to them and also that if I asked them to hurt me I was in control of the pain—physical and emotional—that often came from having sex with men.

I can’t tell you much else about that night, as my memory of it is patchy. I was an active alcoholic at the time. I thought he was gay up until the moment he kissed me, which is why I had gone home with him in the first place. I was drawn to his tenderness, the ways he seemed to reject traditional ideas of straight masculinity by seeming at ease with his own. He thought I was a lesbian, which wasn’t entirely wrong—I had met him in a bar where I had been drinking with my ex-girlfriend. I remember his scratchy navy blue sheets, the half-drunk Gatorade bottles on his nightstand, the way I seemed to be floating above my body during the act, fluttering about the room like a ghost.

When we moved in together six months later, our sex suddenly stopped, unless I was drunk. It was the only time I could feel safe having sex, even if that sex would make my sober self feel ashamed and dirty. But the booze was masking my true desires. The alcohol coursing through my veins convinced me I was a different person, one who willingly and enthusiastically had a type of sex I otherwise didn’t want to have. There was no way for me to realize the truth: that I wasn’t attracted to cisgender men and that I wasn’t actually a woman.

Over the next seven years, I can probably count on two hands the number of times we had sex. I wanted to want to have sex, though, and there were a lot of things I mistook for The Problem. They included, but were not limited to: sobriety, which brought with it a whole new relationship with sex and my body; the sexual trauma I’d been repressing with substances; the herpes I was diagnosed with in rehab; my first pregnancy, during which I had hyperemesis gravidarum, chronic herpes outbreaks, and a yeast infection lasting for three months; and nursing my first child, which killed my libido completely and made me stop seeing my breasts as erotic in any way.

We talked about opening the relationship, but tabled it. We started couples’ counseling. Our counselor helped my husband understand what trauma looks like: It’s not always panic attacks; sometimes it’s dissociating and numbness, like I was experiencing. What I would come to realize much later was that part of my dissociation was due my body trying to protect me from sex with a man, which I did not yet know I didn’t want to be having.

For a while, it worked. We didn’t have an especially active sex life, but we were able to have sex without me dissociating. I got pregnant with our second child, which explained the next year of drought, and then nursed again, which explained the following.

In my mind, there was always a good reason we weren’t having sex. But eventually I ran out of reasons. Instead, there was always something better to do than have sex.

Not now, I’m reading this article.

Not now, can’t you see I’m putting dishes away?

Not now, I’m cooking dinner.

Not now, I’m going to take a shower.

Not now, I’m just so tired.

Not now, not now, not now.

Not now.

There is a predominant narrative about relationships, perpetuated by many straight women, that ambivalence is normal. So many women in long-term relationships with men talk about how little they have sex, particularly after having kids. They talk about how mediocre their sex life is, how the men seem to enjoy it so much more than they do, how they dread having it. These were the conversations I had with the moms I met at the play groups and the preschools. I thought this was just how it was supposed to be.

*

Trying to work myself up to having sex with my husband looked something like this:

When he touched me, tenderly and always with some trepidation, I tried not to act annoyed. If he approached me while we lay in bed together, cuddled close, and brought my mouth to his lips, I tried not to recoil from the touch, tried to lean into it, even though I was afraid that any touch that felt sensual or gentle or intimate or loving might lead to him wanting or expecting to have sex with me.

I would try to stay present and tell myself I loved this person, because I did. I would think about the closeness that came after the sex, when the endorphins and dopamine and oxytocin were surging through my body, so that perhaps the sex itself might also seem appealing.

I would think about the times I enjoyed the sex, in the hopes that remembering those experiences would remind me I was once capable of having it. I’d tell myself to stop writing the grocery list in my head and focus on his mouth on mine, his hands warm on my back.

I’d focus really hard on my cunt, trying to will it to get wet so maybe then I’d feel like I actually wanted to fuck my spouse.

What’s wrong with me? I’d wonder. What if I never want to have sex again? Will I be okay with that? Will he be okay with that?

And then I’d realize I’d been having sex for several minutes already, and I didn’t even know it. I was somewhere else. I was making all the right sounds, my body was moving in all the right ways. He had no idea that I was not there, that I couldn’t feel a thing. He would not have continued if he knew I was gone.

Then, blessedly, it would be over.

I could tell he felt closer to me. He dozed off to sleep, content, with me snuggled up in the crook of his arm. I, on the other hand, felt empty and confused. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just want to have sex.

Maybe I’d cry, but maybe I’d compartmentalize, a different form of the dissociation, and push the feeling so far back inside myself that I’d forget it was there until the next time he came up behind me while I was doing dishes and kissed me softly on the cheek and I knew, just knew, he was feeling like being intimate. My entire body would tense up at his touch, protective, afraid.

The next morning, he always made me coffee. He was nicer to me, more forgiving of my failings as a housekeeper and mother. See? I’d tell myself. It wasn’t that hard. So why can’t I seem to make myself want to do it again?

*

There is this line in Daniel Lavery’s essay about top surgery, where he explains the mental gymnastics he did to convince himself that he wasn’t trans, which perfectly mimics the way my brain worked to convince me I was still attracted to cis men.

“Other people wanted or needed to transition because they were legitimately trans in a way that I was not (what legitimately trans meant or why it couldn’t apply to me, I couldn’t have told you); I, on the other hand, simply couldn’t stop thinking about transitioning, which was not the same thing,” Lavery writes. “Merely thinking about transitioning was somehow distinct from wanting to transition, as long as I was the one doing the thinking, which meant that I was not trans, which meant that I ought not to transition, which meant that I had no choice but to continue thinking about transition.”

It was this way for me, with my queerness. I wanted to want sex. In fact, I thought about sex literally all the time—queer sex. I masturbated a lot, too—thinking about queer bodies. I purchased a subscription to the queer porn site Crash Pad Series, which I was terrified my husband would find out about because then he would know. But none of that seemed weird, because I knew I was queer. I had come out when I was nineteen, to little fanfare, first as bi, then as queer, but always with cis men as an option. Which is why, reader, I married one.

Considering that I was in a monogamous marriage, it seemed only natural to fantasize about other people sometimes, I reasoned. As long as I was thinking about hypothetical sex with queer people, I didn’t need to have sex with other queer people, right? Plus, I thought, everyone probably obsessively thinks about the theoretical gay sex they are not having.

I had come out when I was nineteen, to little fanfare, first as bi, then as queer, but always with cis men as an option. Which is why, reader, I married one.

Even still, there were limits to what I let myself fantasize about. There was a part of me that suspected my lack of desire was related to an understanding of my queerness different from the one I’d held until that point, but I couldn’t go far down that road because if it were true, it would mean the end of my marriage and blowing up my entire life. Yes, I watched queer porn in an attempt to determine if it turned me on, but my denial often got in the way and I would have to turn it off and put on straight porn to reassure myself that I was still attracted to people like my husband.

*

The day I left my husband, I didn’t know it was going to happen. I hadn’t planned it or thought it out. In fact, we were finally having sex again. Pretty good sex. We’d had sex just the day before I looked at him and said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” while we were on a three-week vacation in a cabin in Vermont, in another Airbnb but this time, with a bed we used for more than just sleeping.

I finally had the thing I thought we’d been working for, but something still didn’t feel right.

Isn’t this what I’m supposed to want?

I knew I was attracted to masculinity and so I’d always assumed that meant cishet men, because that was the dominant form of masculinity, the only one I was ever exposed to in popular culture. Growing up, I never saw the spectrum of gender and what it could look like; my understanding of my options was incredibly narrow—both in terms of grasping my attraction to others and figuring out the words to describe myself. It wasn’t until I was older and I saw queer masculinity on cis and trans people alike that something clicked for me and I understood the difference, and the entirety of my own desire. It was like putting on a pair of glasses and being able to see clearly for the first time.

The difference is that while it is generally understood that straight male masculinity is prized in the United States for its appearance of strength and stability, queer masculinity is just hotter. It is more expansive and decidedly not performed for other men; it challenges mainstream gender norms instead of stubbornly adhering to them. Queering masculinity means turning it on its head and allowing room for critical inquiry into the toxic systems that straight masculinity has built and upholds.

When I got married, I thought my queerness involved being attracted to a spectrum of genders that included cis men. I’d later come to realize that it was the opposite: I am attracted to a spectrum of genders that excludes cis men.

*

Before I met my husband, I had a lot of sex with other queer people. But because I had yet to understand the totality of my queer desire and how it manifested, I spent most of that time having sex with other femme bottoms, trying to squeeze myself into yet another box that never quite fit. The sex was fine, if not mind blowing—at least I didn’t dissociate—and despite the fact that I knew something about it wasn’t working for me, it wasn’t enough for me to question my queerness in any useful way.

I used to be ashamed of my body; I didn’t let partners go down on me or hold me open to objectify me. I had sex in positions that obscured my body—either missionary or me on top, leaning over, distracting my cishet male partner by putting my breasts in his face so he couldn’t see anything else. The pressure I felt around the expectations men had for my body, the one they thought of as “womanly,” prevented me from being able to fully give them access to me because I didn’t trust that they could hold the entirety of my identities.

Over the years I spent learning about the kaleidoscope of genders, marveling at the range and depth of their expressions, I came to more fully understand where my own situated—non-binary and hard femme, a themme, if you will—as well as the expressions that tended to make me weak—masculine-of-center queer tops, what’s up? I began to understand that the queers I couldn’t stop staring at but was terrified to talk to were causing this reaction in me because I was attracted to them, but I hadn’t had the words to articulate it.

*

It was in the only gay bar in Rockford, Illinois, where I sat drinking seltzer with an internet friend, that the official end of my marriage began. It was the first time we were meeting in person and I did not know at the time that they were considering leaving their own spouse when I told them about the state of my marriage.

“It’s fine,” I told them, playing with my wedding ring, the family heirloom gifted to me by my mother-in-law. “I could probably live this way for a long time and be ok. I’m not, like, unhappy.”

In staying, I was not only denying myself the chance at true happiness, but I was keeping him from having it, too.

Two people approached our seats on the bar’s patio, having recognized us from the internet. My friend politely shooed them away and the pair backed up into the thick summer night.

“But what am I potentially missing out on if I settle for ‘fine?’” I asked my friend.

They paused for a minute. “You know,” they said. “I’m not going to tell you what you should do. But if you’re worried you’re going to miss out on something, it means you already are.”

The reality of those words knocked the wind out of me, and I thought about them every single day in the year between that conversation in the bar and the day in the Airbnb that I finally asked for a divorce. I knew I needed to leave—for me, but also for my husband. I deserved to have everything I wanted, to have a partner I desired and could not get enough of. So did he. In staying, I was not only denying myself the chance at true happiness, but I was keeping him from having it, too. It was that realization—that I was preventing my husband from having the life he deserved—that ultimately outweighed the fears I had about leaving.

By the time our marriage formally ended, there was no anger, just sadness. We walked away from our lives as husband and wife the way we had gone into it: with love. The card he gave me when our divorce was finalized hangs next to the desk in my new condo, a little piece of him in the home we have never shared. On the inside of the card, he scrawled three words: “We did it!”

*

My current partner is disrobing in front of me for the first time.

I audibly gasp and the words “Oh my god, you’re perfect,” fall out of my mouth and I can’t believe I’ve said that on just my third date with this person, the first time we are getting naked together. I chide myself for being so intense, worry I have freaked him out.

But then I look at his body again and I feel it so completely. My memories of taking him in for the first time are clear: His husky build and the hair on his chest, thickest right in the middle, at the base of his sternum. The linear scars under his nipples, faint after so much time has passed since his top surgery, but there if you know to look for them. I want to burrow my face in his chest and never leave, to inhale the totality of him.

When he touches me, something in my body unravels. The wetness I used to have to will myself to make is immediate, involuntary, spontaneous. It feels like being touched again for the first time. Any doubts I am harboring about whether leaving had been the right thing, if I have blown up my life for nothing, melt away in that moment. I cry with relief after we are done fucking and he holds me until I have no tears left, and then we fuck again and again and again. I come so hard that I hide my face under the covers, feeling too vulnerable to be seen in that moment, and then I laugh uncontrollably for what feels like ten minutes.

The safety that queerness and transness has allowed me has opened up new desires within me, too. Queer sex means that anything is possible, that our bodies can do incredible things together, that there are no limits to the places we can take ourselves because our bodies do not fit within the prescribed scripts we have been given about what “having sex” entails. We can make it up as we go along and create new pleasures. I want to do things with my partner that would have felt gross with anyone else: I want to have my face licked, to be bathed in saliva. I want to open myself up and swallow his hand whole, because I want him as far inside me as he can possibly be. I want to put my face in his armpit and lick it, huffing the smell and taste of his body odor. I want to know and taste and feel all of his parts, and to give him all of mine, and to watch the ways our bodies, when entangled together, become something totally different, something that only we can ever be, only we can ever know.

I never want it to stop. Something in me has cracked open and in some ways, it feels like I am making up for lost time. I am hungry, ravenous, sex starved.