Words by: Michaela Baxter
Graphics by: Nash and Shea Peña
Before you’ve fucked, though, it feels like everyone that has is part of an esoteric “cool kids” club– no squares or celibates allowed. The girls who were already hot by eighth grade would describe their first times to the rest of us eager, curious virgins at sleepovers as we stuffed our faces with milk-sopping oreos and listened to this glorious novella that was infinitely better than the wattpad fodder that informed a lot of our early preconceptions about what sex would be like. Asking if it was “big” as if that actually meant anything to any of us yet, as if we wouldn’t squeal at the sight of unsolicited pictures of penises that middle school boys would frequently, and hilariously, airdrop to everyone in a twenty foot radius at lunch break.
In tenth grade, “it”-twins Sophie and Emily will host a Margarita Monday party and you’ll somehow get an invitation, probably because of your friendship with Jamie. She has a foot in each world, straddling the fine thread that separates the heterodoxical theater kids and the pod of would-be Brandy Melville models affectionately referred to by the student body as “The White Girl Group”. By the time you pour your second margarita, everyone’s cheeks are glowing red and giggly girls are slipping off their barstools. Someone jokingly/completely-seriously suggests watching a hybrid reality/porno series called “Swingers” wherein most episodes culminate with a lively, seemingly choreographed orgy featuring shocking new octets each week.
You watch these contortions, you can’t tell where bodies begin and end, like an ouroboros of flesh and extremities: exorcized bodies and bloodshot sclera and pupils rolling back and mouths dripping ambiguous semi-opaque fluid and it’s all taking place in a baroque room with persian rugs covering every flat surface, candelabras assuming most of the burden of lighting, and you think it’s probably dangerous to have that many candles lit around so many thrashing and convulsing limbs.
This, though, will be your first time witnessing a sexual act. You will engage in your first sexual act six months later. This will not have been any help in preparing you, and you wonder to yourself many years later how both of these acts can be filed under the same intersection of “queer sex” in the venn diagram of gay vs. straight sexuality.
You’re returning for your second year at your musical theater summer camp in the Catskills. Upstate New York in June means muggy, dense heat and everyone in jean cutoffs and iridescent leotards, dancer’s legs and DIY curtain bangs abound. Someone nearby is running vocal scales in a classroom, on the lawn an improv group is reconstructing a fairytale character speed dating convention: Peter Pan and Ursula are making out full-on. Your roommate is Sloane, a girl from New Zealand with big murky blue eyes and dark, full eyebrows, chin length bleach blonde hair and an impressive graphic tee collection. She is openly bisexual and this is intriguing. Her casualness when talking about it is maybe attractive but makes you pulse with white hot fear if you think about it for more than a fleeting second. You become great friends. Most nights you climb out of your top bunk and sneak down into her bed and together you shine your flashlight at the bed board above you, reading the notes etched into the wood by campers past: initials written in sharpie encircled in a heart, sappy sonnets and song lyric parodies, crass jokes about the red hotpants Mr. Flaherty wears at the annual staff production of Chicago.
One night you will climb into Sloane’s bed and it will be decidedly different. You will feel the weight of something illegible and mute, at once completely foreign and primordial. Your heart is beating in the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet, your chest is thumping arrhythmically, you feel like you’ve swallowed a hummingbird: feverishly beating its wings and spinning your insides out. You don't know why, and you do.
She kisses you. You clutch your stomach; you kiss her back. She weaves her hands through your hair. You’re alert to every acre of your body as if someone’s hooked your solar plexus up to jumper cables. It’s terror cross painted with rapture.
You fuck. Or, at least, you do what you think comprises fucking. It’s an emotional sort of deflowering, a revolution of identity transpiring in a rickety twin bed; you feel like you’ve catapulted forward eons in terms of interior psychic understanding. You can’t help but write poetry about her, and there doesn’t seem to be room on paper or in the legion winding halls of your mind for any other such topic. You’re sixteen but you feel like you’ve been missing this shade and texture to love for your entire life up until now.
When you’re eighteen, you start caring about having cute underwear: lacy thongs, a bit of loincloth for every day of the week– you like your “Monday'' pair the best, written in hot pink cursive and trimmed with pearly ribbon. You are insecure about your weight and spend the summer in quarantine trying to shake off fat by doing burpees and jumping rope until that fat gives way to bone, the contours of your skeleton and new muscle now visible just below the surface of your fair skin. Your hair has grown long and you like how girlish it makes you feel. In highschool you felt very much un-girl because boys didn’t seem to see you as one. Sure, you still had long hair then, but you wore velvety maxi skirts and screen-printed t-shirts with Frida Kahlo’s face on them, which is to say that you didn’t look like a straight girl and therefore weren’t a serious contender for anything x-rated as far as male onlookers were concerned. You convinced yourself that you were fat and that everyone else thought so too, especially next to the waifish girls who had the right hairlines for high ponytails and still had thigh gaps in sweatpants. This is all context for why you felt like, after so much teenage self loathing and emotional turmoil, you’d finally arrived at some banal, flat eden when a popular boy looks at you and makes fun of you in a language that means he likes you– maybe even wants you; the iconography of his face says so: a slantwise smirk, eyes narrowed and defying you to spit back riposte, his every other comment charged with vaguely sexual double entendre– the kind that makes other people witnessing these exchanges look at each other and delight in this tacit shared discovery:
they’re gonna fuck.
During your gap year in Nicaragua you get entangled with a boy named Owen. You spend months woolgathering about his spring-colored eyes and dreamy biceps, and love when he makes playfully disparaging quips that simultaneously maim and flatter you because he knows how to hurt your feelings, notices what cuts you. You mistake his severity for honesty. You call each other ugly and play with each others’ hair and push your shoulders together when you walk. One afternoon on a daytrip to the riverbank you’re treading water beneath a cloudless blue sky, splashing each other in the face, dunking each others’ heads under the dark water. The river settles and he wades over to you, places his hand on the expanse of skin between your legs and watches your face with brazen anticipation, daring you to react.
A week later you’re in a club somewhere: garish blue lights are strobing and a disco ball is spinning maniacally in the center of the room, intermittently blinding you. You’re suddenly aware of Owen’s hand on your bare back, his mouth on your neck, by your ear, murmuring something profane to you that makes your stomach flip. You notice then that his other hand is slipped down the front of your pants, his fingers wriggling around by the junction where your pelvis and thigh meet.
You find yourself in the bathroom with him under sterile fluorescent bulbs, you find yourself missing the vulgar blue club lights and a time when you could smell anything besides bleach. You make out messily and grab at each other in such a way that looks less like desire and more like an incitation to a brawl. He lifts you up awkwardly onto the sink, your bare ass dipping into the cold porcelain basin, the faucet digging into your lumbar. He thrusts four, maybe five times before quickly withdrawing from your body and finishing exuberantly into a nearby trash can.
The fleeting thought that you might’ve deserved a better first time than this darts across your mind.
When it’s over, you and Owen walk along the pier standing a foot away from each other and pretend to be much drunker than you really are. You find your friends and stop at Johnny Crispy for 2 am fried chicken and soft serve. Your neglected vanilla cone starts crying down your arm as you stare at Owen, willing him to toss you a glance. He doesn’t look at you. It never happened. Now that you’re sharing a space with other people, the dynamic that existed between you evaporates without a trace and you’re alone with this disappointment and desperation for him to acknowledge you, to acknowledge what happened.
I’d avoided men in every context for a long time after Owen. I didn’t want to joke with them and I didn’t want to touch them. I felt that at least sexually, men would continue to view me as an opponent, a sparring partner in a game of who can be less attached and more cavalier about sex. In a lot of ways, the Swingers saga confirmed the ideas I’d had about heterosexual sex: there is an inherent violence to it; blunt force trauma; nothing that evoked rose petals or made me feel like I’d previously been locked out of heaven. Sex constituted two poles: it was a promise of intimacy, or it was another way two people could kill a couple of hours together.
As you get older you get accustomed to certain tropes and roles you play during sex. You can vividly see yourself from outside your body: pulling faces like the Swingers girls,
watching him own your flesh, brand you with his palm, eat you alive, and you think about the intersection of pain and pleasure– how you really can’t tell the difference sometimes. They sound the same: a staccato of impassioned wailing, a face twisted up in fear and submission, a panting circle for a mouth. How the rough and tenderness coexist. How you can’t decide if you should feel vanquished and exploited, or if this is just what it’s like to be a woman having sex. Internally you’re mortified at the sound of your own ooh-babys and fuck-me-harders, skin slapping skin fast, fast, and faster; and at the end of it all you’re dropped into an odd, transitory quiet, punctured by mutual cross-examination: Was that good for you? Did you finish?.
I lost my virginity when I was sixteen. I lost it again when I was eighteen. I think for me it had less to do with the rote of the sex itself as it varied between men and women; it was equal parts how I viewed myself in each setting and how I related to my partner. I found often that I inhabited the role of negotiator with men: a compromisess shooting her “buzzer beater shot”, as Owen once put it; making a last ditch effort to pull some semblance of genuine affection out of him. It’s more about how you let the sex make meaning of you, how much you let it inform your self perception. For example, having sex with someone that you care for so deeply that your shared intimacy and mutual emotional investment threaten to dismantle you, piece by piece. A bad performance with a hot stranger, on the other hand, can only hurt so much.
With any women following Sloane, I was at ease. I never allowed myself to view gay encounters as ones with real emotional stakes because I would not be a queer woman in earnest; I denied myself the possibility immediately. I was shocked by how easily I could detach and sweep memories of myself with women into the distant annexes of my mind. I think it was always about how I interpreted the sex retrospectively: did I make myself small and vulnerable to exploitation because I’m conforming to the schema of heterosexual sex? Am I supposed to feel like I’ve come away with less of myself? Or to believe that I’m fundamentally mousey or slutty or obsequious? Maybe I feel unmoved by women because I’m just assuming the position that I think a man would, projecting my own internalized canon of gender order onto my queer experiences. Maybe I subconsciously believe that between two women, an exigency persists: an inherent demand for the conqueror, the “she-man”, the blasé Casanova who doesn’t want to know your last name after he’s wiped his hands of you. Maybe, this self examination is a janus-faced attempt to understand my sexual past in all its dimensions: as it happened, as I experienced it, as I reflect on it through the roiled lens of memory.