Welcome back to our Anonymous Sex Diaries series where queer and trans people from around the world let us into a seven day snippet of their sex, love and dating lives.
Day 1
I’m driving my boyfriend to a date with a guy he met who lives across town. We’re in an open (T4T, “straight”) relationship that allows us to have other casual hookups, romantic relationships, etc. He’s hooked up with this guy a couple times but hasn’t indicated that it’s more serious than casual sex. I have a few hours to myself with no real plans, projects or errands hanging over me; a rare luxury. At this point I could go home and start a movie (probably some excruciating New French Extremity thing where the female protagonists are cold, stoic and have frightening sexual proclivities), and hopefully finish it before falling asleep or getting distracted.
I also consider that my boyfriend’s date lives at roughly the halfway point between our house and one of few remaining sleazy porn stores with a video arcade. Sure, weighing the prospect of driving out deeper into a depressing shitbox postwar suburb against a cozy evening with Mme. Breillat or Denis makes for a tough choice. But rushing home to pick at the leftover chilled peanut noodles in the fridge and then waiting for our miserably slow WiFi to buffer the stuttering stream of something dour and French…I don’t know, it just feels sort of juvenile…like the giddy activity of a teenager whose parents leave the house for a couple hours for him to discover Dad and Mom’s secret shoebox of mass-market porno tapes and steel dildo. Thus, we have the porn store, a two-story concrete building graciously untouched by the mass-sanitization wave of franchise smut shops. Somewhere that — despite the inventory obviously being updated for browsing suburban couples — still stinks like cum and bleach. The very pretty transsexual clerk is pleasant and nonjudgmental while handing me five dollars worth of tokens for the video machines upstairs. She doesn’t clock me as one of her fellow travelers. The tokens are kitschy, embossed with tiny golden nude showgirls — “heads I win / tails you lose” — I’ll pocket a couple to give to friends as gifts.
I spend most of my days living with the illegibility that comes with the territory of being a butch transsexual woman, something I do intentionally as a kind of aesthetic gesture of objection to the reification of being expected to perform blah blah blah. It’s whatever I have to tell myself to ignore getting called “sir” all day at my retail job from the mock-deference of well-mannered yuppie customers. At the end of the day, I want to look like a somewhat on-edge bookish radical lesbian, the kind that gravitates towards Moosewood cookbooks and canvas workwear and has opinions on Cixous. One great big countersignal.
Despite this, I have to reckon with the fact that much of my sexuality is characterized by seeking sexual attention from gay men. Men grant sex to me as easily as I’m willing to be in spaces where it’s offered freely. I represent someone willing to gratify them, without any danger of emotional entanglement. My ambiguously masculine presentation — contextualized by the aforementioned illegibility as a woman who’s in a very complicated relationship with herself — affords me some amount of safety in gratifying these anonymous agents. I find them ultimately unknowable, like these spaces are a lead-lined box that prevents me from receiving transmissions, their deeper emotional signals beyond “that feels good / I’m gonna come / I’m not interested.” Of course, the spectral fear of sexual violence is always present. Perhaps that’s part of the negotiation that renders it inaccessible to most, but these experiences feel emotionally clean.
I’m climbing the stairs up to a murky blue neon room. Upstairs is a square, maze-like hallway lined with pre-fabricated arcade stalls. There’s a minotaur somewhere in this maze, and hopefully he’ll let me choke on his dick for a while. I think this particular guy saw me while browsing earlier. He’s probably 65-70 and handsome in the way that all the older men in my extended family from the nearby coal-towns tend to be. I’ve got my back to the far corner of my booth, facing the ajar door with my hand listlessly stroking down the front of my black underwear. He’s watching through the breach until takes the hint and steps inside. He’s wearing a compression knee brace under his jeans, which are now around his calves. I spend the next several minutes sucking him off while he helps himself to a bottle of poppers I have in my jacket pocket. I always worry these older guys are gonna fucking die when I get them to hit poppers with me, especially if they popped a Viagra first. He thankfully survives and stuffs his hand into my panties and tries halfheartedly to get me off. He comes down my throat, pulls his Wranglers up and hurries off down the stairs and out into the gravel parking lot, limping slightly on his knee in the compression sleeve. I consider sticking around to see if someone else wants to take his place, but instead put myself back together, walk quickly out past the clerk, both of us politely avoiding eye contact. I stop to buy a bottle of water at a Sunoco to wash the taste of his cock out of my mouth. I think about the peanut noodles at home in the fridge.
Day 2
I wake up to a private message from a mutual on Twitter. Beefy, boyishly handsome anarchist folk-singer (NOT an oogle) who lives over the state line but visits the city for bender weekends of busking, bathhouses and beer drinking. His message just says “Hi.” which feels overly formal, like the start of a very specific conversation he’s hoping to have at 2am. I wish he’d dispense with the pretense a bit and just hit on me. The last time he was in town, we had beers at a local dive and talked small town glory hole etiquette while our friends argued about Heidegger or something else fucking insufferable. He dropped the line “If we make eye contact through the glory hole, we might as well be getting married,” the profundity of which both endeared him to me as a troubadour who truly understands poetry, yet also kept me from wanting to follow him into the bathroom and clean the dribble of whiskey-ginger-piss from under his foreskin. That would have been far too forward (by that statement’s calculus, anyhow), so I got his number instead. So it’s odd he’s choosing to message me on social media. Whatever. I respond “hiii,” and after about a half hour, he apologizes for hitting me up so late. He was “really hammered,” he explains.
I take my slightly bruised ego downstairs and fix breakfast for me and my boyfriend, and over coffee he tells me about his evening spent anally-fisting his date. I tell him about my encounter at the porn store. Neither of us came the night prior, so we take turns getting each other off before spending the rest of the day doing the rounds at the local thrift stores. Unlike the encounters I have in the dark with most men, he is one with whom I’ve been able to build a rich infrastructure of life in daylight. He’s proven himself to be someone with whom I feel safe and satisfied, with whom I’ve come to share much of my inner thoughts and witness his in return. I love him so much.
Day 3
After dinner, a friend and I decide to meet up for a drink at a gay dive whose claim to fame is their nude male dancers who strut on the second floor bar. Over gin and tonics, we complain to each other about mutual enemies in our social circles, the bullshit hookups with men who seem to want to waste our time and energy for their own ends, and get romantic about the partners and lovers we’ve chosen to build lives with, etc. We give each other the advice we both seem to know we need to take ourselves, but don’t.
Meanwhile a small cadre of bored nude men gyrate and slink around atop the square bar in the center of the room. They tower over us, stretching up to the rafters to show off their varying physiques while we stare up and try to hold our conversation. A guy-next-door-type dancer, the kind with a handsome protruding tummy that is still firm to the touch, stops to chat with us. He squats down in front of us so we can hear him without shouting. His cock is long and thick and half hard. The tip touches the formica bar when he shifts his weight back and forth to the music. He tells us about how he got in an accident before his shift today — a head-on collision that totaled his car — and he knows that he’s going to be sore tomorrow, but he’s not feeling it yet. We lavish him with singles and both try not to stare at his cock in front of each other.
Day 4
I find myself staring out the front window at work, off in my thoughts, having an existential crisis spurred by the mental image of my boyfriend fistfucking his lover the other night. Perhaps I should attempt to become more of a bottom in the coming year. Though I’m happy with being the top, penetrating him, there’s something intoxicating about the idea of feeling his body move inside me the way his other lovers have experienced. The thought of his shoulders and arms flexing as he works his hand inside me — and the absence in my life created by not knowing that pleasure — is too much to bear. I think about the way the veins stand out on his forearms. I get so distracted that I fuck up whatever meaningless task I was doing for my boss and have to start it over.
Day 5
My boyfriend and I are taking turns sharing the bathroom mirror, sink, and shower as we get ready for a threesome with a guest this evening. We’re performing our ritual of hyping each other up a bit. We do this before trips to the bathhouse or dates where one of us may get laid. I have to ask him if he wouldn’t mind running the razor and clippers (a hand-me-down from my father) over body hair I can’t reach. I want to maintain an amount of hairlessness besides a neat trim above my cock. He’s patient and meticulous with the razor and I feel more vulnerable under his blade than I do being exposed to a stranger. Sometimes, I just want to cry from the tenderness and attention I’m shown.
Our guest for the evening is a bearded, cubby guy. The last time we visited the bathhouse, I blew in the darkroom while my boyfriend watched. Estrogen use made it more difficult, but I’d have liked to get hard for him. I’m hoping for redemption this time around. He comes over after hitting the gym and asks to use the shower. We oblige him and roll a couple joints with weed he brought while he rinses off. The time between a hookup arriving at your house and when he first takes out his cock is such a tense segment of time. It feels like it lasts for hours, just mundane conversation and chatter. He’s talking about his AirBnB rating and the app he uses to auto-respond to his clients when he’s not in the office. I tell him and my boyfriend about the fake Public Health bedbug outbreak signs that Greek residents of hip neighborhoods have been putting up on the doors of AirBnBs to frighten tourists away. After forever, there’s a pregnant lull in the conversation. I seize the initiative and ask the boys to go upstairs.
In the bedroom, my boyfriend and I get each other undressed slowly and sexily while our guest flings off his clothes in a way I find somewhat childish, like he can barely wait to get out of his school clothes. I’m no longer annoyed once he starts sucking my cock. I’m stroking his fluffy hair while my boyfriend gets on all fours to take our guests’ swelling cock in his mouth, inviting me to stroke him from behind and grope his upturned ass. The next couple hours are an exercise in configuring our bodies to accommodate another into what is normally a simpler equation. I find myself stalking around either side of the bed, standing and snorting the bottle of poppers in my hand while I find a reclining boy whose upturned smile gives way to an open mouth. My boyfriend is sinking his ass down onto the guests’ cock and riding while I line him up to fuck his throat. It feels like we are two ends of a life-sized toy.
At some point, I need a break, and I find myself standing around in inhalant-fogged indecision, watching the two of them slurping on each other’s cocks on the bed. My boyfriend’s face is getting absolutely wrecked. He’s dewy with his own spit smeared all over his mouth by the guest’s pumping cock fucking down into him. I decide to shake off the intrusive jealous thought that I am being left out and instead spread the guest’s ass and stuff my tongue into his hole. He’s clean enough, not that I care honestly. I hear him moaning louder as he’s sucking on my boyfriend’s cock, while my tongue and fingers tease deeper into his exposed asshole. I stop short of greasing up my cock to fuck him raw. I’m not hard enough to make it more pleasurable than it would be annoying.
We eventually reconfigure, and the guest and I dedicate our efforts to making my boyfriend come, which he does with my fingers stuffed inside him while he jerks off. The guest and I recline on our sides and take our cocks in each others’ mouths until we’re both hard. I manage to come all over the guests’ beard and chest hair, moaning and shaking hard with his hips pistoning his cock into the back of my throat. A few more minutes pass where I’m tending to his shaft and heavy balls, but once he figures out he’s going to be unable to make himself come, he hops up and quickly dresses, thanks us, and makes for the door. It feels needlessly abrupt. We’re caught off guard and have to laugh at the brevity of it. But I suppose we are better left in our afterglow without this strange interloper. The whole room smells like cock, spit, poppers, pot smoke and asshole; an herbaceous and meaty melange that hangs like a fog in the humidity of our vaporized sweat. It soaks into our bed linens.
Day 6
I awake after a few hours in a bout of insomnia to another late-night private message on Twitter from the folk- singer. He’s wine drunk, and he wants to tell me that he knows I’m in a relationship but he feels brave enough to shoot his shot and flirt with me. It’s cute and lets me feel oddly girly to let this boy tell me how cool and smart he thinks I am, abetted by some liquid courage. I flirt back, reassure him that I’m not monogamous and tell him that we should go out for a date when he’s next in town. It’s a nice change, to feel pursued by someone in a way that feels almost innocent and teenagery. He fumbles by hastily requesting we trade nudes, which contradicts the good feeling I had been riding for the brief few moments before he asked. I’m not offended, nor even particularly turned off, just too exhausted to feel any more than ambivalent about it. I explain that I don’t want to share nudes before we hook up, that I like the mystery and being more conservative about my digital image. I’m trying to move away from the cringing early-transition hurry to feel desired that manifested in folders of tragic nude photos passed like currency between fellow sufferers.
I spend the rest of the day at work aware of how bruised my mouth and throat are from the previous evening. I get home to my boyfriend, who’s been recovering in bed for most of the afternoon. He’s sweet and affectionate and makes me come all over myself while he tells me how pretty I looked throat-fucking the guest from last night. He’s too sore to want me to return the favor, plus he’d already jerked off earlier while thinking about our performance last night, which I can still smell on him. We shower off and make dinner together.
Day 7
My boyfriend wakes up stuffy with a sore throat. As the day progresses it turns into a sinus infection, which melts his usual self confident, working class swagger down so that he’s just a sleepy, sad helpless boy. I get him pho with brisket and pet his hair while we watch silly movies. It feels so nice to show him such calm, undistracted affection. I can almost ignore his discomfort that’s rendering him feverish and whimpering in my lap. His need for a comforting embrace feels drawn from a profound hunger. I savor it in a way that the recollections of his body, contorted in pleasure and aching for release, cannot approach.
In compartmentalizing sex into a mere activity that can exist between a range of friends, lovers and strangers in specific contexts (backrooms, bathhouses, other spaces of meaninglessness), I find myself more fixated on these moments of emotional intimacy, these ones that require trust and care, that leave me open to the possibility of wounding and being wounded by the other parties involved in them. I seek out and meditate more on intimacy that can exist within a fuller range of the erotic or sensuous, forms of love that don’t feel as rigidly narrativized as the typical script of “we’re talking, we’re seeing each other, we’re in a situationship, we’re falling out of love.”
I’m more likely to fantasize about the emotional tenderness I experienced in the still embrace of a lover, as much as I recall the taste of their skin, the warmth of their ass against my thighs and the bouquet of their deodorant and sweat flooding my nostrils. It makes the pain of absence worse, being haunted by the indelible warmth of a tender expression that burns long after the pornographic recollections of ephemeral lovers have become ghosts.
This is beautifully written.