Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (9 page)

Which talking point would you rather use?

* * *

I started jerking off when I was nine. I remember my favorite fan- tasy. I pictured everyone in my third-grade class, standing at their desks. Everyone took off their clothes because they got in trouble for something. It didn’t matter what. My imagination zoomed in on some boy or girl. I wouldn’t think about sex with them, really. My knowledge of sex at that age came from watching
Look Who’s Talking
. I thought you’d kiss someone and then have a baby. I’d just think of them naked, boys and girls, and maybe I’d think of kissing them, and sometimes I’d think about their butts. I’d touch myself, and it made me feel good.

It wasn’t until I’d moved in with my dad up in Boston a couple of years later that I let it hit me that anything was different. I was running the mile, in gym class, and our teacher brought us over to the high school for that because there wasn’t a track at my school.

It was 1990 or 1991. My mom wanted me to look cool, but she was from L.A., not Boston, so she had me dressing like some kind of weird white preppy surfer member of N.W.A, with ter- rible neon-green shorts that went down to my knees and a bright orange hypercolor shirt that got brighter as I sweated on it. No one would talk to me, obviously, but I kept pace with two kids who would at least let me run near them.

One of their uncles had just died. “He was totally a fag,” said the nephew. The other kid said, “But that’s your uncle you’re talking about.” “Yeah, but he was a fag, and that’s what hap- pens to fags, with AIDS, you know?” They weren’t saying it to be cruel to the uncle—there wasn’t an ounce of cruelty in their voice, even though they were saying
fag
. It was just the word they knew. They used the same tone I’d heard them use when they told me the story about going into that one overgrown house

where there’s supposedly a hunchback inside. And it was then that it hit me, as I was jogging, even though I already knew, really, but I hadn’t let myself think about it.

“Fags like boys, so I’m a fag.”

That day after school I ran up straight into my room. My room had always been filthy, but I threw everything off one little section of carpet near my desk and my dresser with the trap door I would always write stories on, and I kneeled there, and said over and over to myself, “Fags like boys, so I’m a fag,” crying and crying, not once thinking about that page from a magazine hidden in my desk, three feet from my head, with the naked women sprawled in impossible positions, the one I’d been beating off to every night for the last week, and not once thinking about the girl I’d kissed on the lips, my first kiss ever, a few weeks before, when my heart went pitter-patter and did all the things hearts are supposed to do during a first kiss, the girl whose heart I later broke because I thought I was a fag. I didn’t want to bring her down with me because being a fag was this cancer that would grow inside me and eat up the straight part of me until I’d die of AIDS and never be able to do anything with my life.

A year later, I sat at my desk with a knife, poking at my wrist. I had an impossible crush on a boy. Frank Martin and I were on the same basketball team. His locker was two over from mine, and I couldn’t help it—I was twelve or thirteen years old. I had twenty boners a day. It’s just the way it was—so when he changed, I kept sneaking a peek because I just wanted to see, because I could smell him, and it was amazing, and was it too much to smell
and
see?

And he caught me looking. But when he caught me, he wouldn’t look right back at me. Instead, he looked at the locker in front of him, and said, quiet enough so no one would hear, “I don’t give a fuck if you’re gay. I know it’s not your fault, but you

better not fucking look at me like that ever again.”

I decided that day that I would choose to grow the part of me that liked women and kill the part that liked men. I poked at little parts of my wrist until they turned bright red, then I pulled the blade up and watched my skin turn back to its normal color, and then I pressed down again harder. But I couldn’t make myself do it hard enough, because I couldn’t stand blood, because I was too afraid to die right then. I tried to spell out words with the little red dots but they disappeared too quickly. I tried to spell out
Frank.
I tried to spell out
tired.
I took out a pack of stolen Kools and snuck outside and smoked cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.

Thirteen years later, right after quitting the job with the con- gresswoman, I was in the shower, jerking off, thinking about women—I’d mostly thought about women, really, since Frank, except for all the men—and then, out of nowhere, I thought about this guy I knew who hit on me all the time. I imagined going up to him and wrapping my arms around his huge bear chest and kissing his ear, nibbling and then blowing a bit on his neck. My breath came quick and fast, and my legs gave out, and I had to lie down in the shower and let the water pass over me, and I wasn’t even jerking off anymore, it was more powerful than that. I was thinking about him and floating and it wasn’t until the water got so cold I couldn’t stand it that I got up and dried off and slept better than I’d slept in thirteen years.

Soon after, I came out on Myspace. There was no coming back from that.

Here’s the thing I want to tell Human Rights Campaign and Equality California and all the gay rights groups who have done such incredible work, who now have their own buildings in Washington and are thinking in terms of talking points and

“ramifications” and focus groups and public polling:

The gay rights movement has been so successful because activ- ists like Harvey Milk encouraged people to come out and tell the truth to their families, to their friends and to their coworkers, to be everything they were, to say “We’re here, we’re queer,” yes, but also, implicitly, to say, “We’re here, it’s complicated and prob- ably it’d be good if we talked about this over tea.”

Recently, on OKCupid, a woman messaged me:
Are you truly into ladies, and if so, what type? Finding a truly bi man is like finding a unicorn.

If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn Rocky Mountain oyster when I moved to the old rust-belt city of Syracuse, New York, to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a “half-breeder.” Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a woman. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me because, as one said, “You’re just gonna leave me to go suck a dick.” For the first time in my life, frat boys called me
fag.
My professor said, “The world just isn’t ready for gay marriage.” I emailed him “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then I went out with friends and my gay friends didn’t know what to do because I got drunk and flirted with a lesbian. A friend said she thought bi people didn’t exist. I said, “I’m sitting right here,” because that was my answer, but I was starting to believe her. I stopped telling people what I was. I let people think what they wanted, which was usually that I was like them.

About a year into being there, I thought,
Why don’t I just call

myself gay?
I would see if I could do it before I told people, I thought. I mean, except for the occasional straight porn, and that one girl, and maybe that other one, I was only dating men. I made it a point. No more straight porn. No more thinking of women. No more dating women.

A few months later, I found myself in bed with a guy. I’d been doing well making up for lost time. No women, no women at all, except for a tiny bit of porn. I was almost ready to just say, “I’m gay. You guys were right. That bi thing was bullshit.” I was getting better at the whole blow job thing. I was tied to the bed because I love being tied to the bed. I couldn’t move. I moaned and screamed and made all the right noises, but then it was time, and he started to expect an end because it was getting late—dogs needed to be fed and teeth brushed and homework finished—but I just couldn’t come. I just couldn’t. He was getting tired and starting to look around but he didn’t stop, thank god, because it would have ruined it, because I was right on the edge. Right there. So I did what no one admits to their lovers they do but that everyone does: I closed my eyes and let my mind wander to other people. I thought about men. I was sitting there forcing myself to think about men, only men, men men men men men men, and then it slipped in there, like when someone says don’t think about rhubarb pie and you think about rhubarb pie. I thought, for a second, about Willow from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” because I’d watched an episode earlier that day. Then I fucking erupted. I came so hard I was worried about getting enough air. I hope Alyson Hannigan doesn’t take out a restraining order on me for admitting that, but it’s important. Not because I came like that, and not because it’s ridiculous, which it totally is, but because I’d tried to make a choice to be straight but it wouldn’t work and now I’d tried to be gay and it wouldn’t work.

I wanted to join a team so I wouldn’t have to answer any more questions, so I wouldn’t have to say that I preferred one or the other or whether I exist or if I’m a unicorn or how I can ever hope to be monogamous if I’m attracted to more than one gender. But I failed to choose a side, so now, for once, I’m going to answer all of these questions honestly:

I don’t know. I can’t speak for other bi people, but only for myself. I just don’t know.

I don’t know because I can’t get all the voices out of my head, the ones that ask all the wrong questions. The ones that tell me I must be one thing or the other—for whom, or why, I don’t know. The voices want a neat fit, but I can’t accommodate them. I’ve tried, and I can’t, and I shouldn’t.

No one will ever make this go away. No one will ever make it simple.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s how I win.

Rest Stop Confidential

Conner Habib

I was fifteen the first time I found out that men have sex in public. On the way to Maine with my mom and stepfather, we pulled off the highway and into a rest area. At the urinal, there was a man next to me. He was tall and homely, and holding himself. He stared at me. I was electrified, but held to that spot; he shook himself at me and I couldn’t move. We would have stayed there forever, but another man came in and saw what was happening and scowled. Time started again and I ran out of the bathroom.

If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times; we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. It never stops, not for season or time. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s

always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new.

This has been going on for a long, long time. The new ways that men meet—endlessly staring into phones, searching on hookup apps like Grindr or sites like Manhunt—haven’t changed the fact that we’re still having sex at rest areas, because they offer something different. For the man who is unsure of his sexuality, or unsure of how to tell others about it, for the man who has a family but feels new desires (or old, hidden ones) unfolding in- side of him, the website and the phone apps are just too certain of themselves. They’re for gay men who want to have gay sex. Sex at the rest area, instead, abolishes identity; there’s a sort of freedom there to not be anything—instead, men just meet other men there; men who want the same sort of freedom.

Is it any wonder why people who feel the weight of their iden- tities have been caught having sex at rest areas? Sen. Larry Craig and pop star George Michael were both discovered having sex at them. There is an appeal not just to having sex, but to having anonymous sex—not because you want to hide your identity from the other person; surely the other men recognized George Michael—but to feeling your own identity left behind. And this freedom is open to everyone, even those comfortable with their sexuality.

When I was twenty-one, on the day I got my first car, I drove to a little parking lot off the highway near where I lived: the gravity of memory—of that day when I was fifteen—drew me there. Later, on the long drives between college in Massachusetts and home in Pennsylvania, I’d pull over whenever I found a rest stop. When I got there, I would wait. I wasn’t nervous, I wasn’t thinking—it seemed like where I should be.

Sometimes men go to rest areas because there’s nowhere else to go. My college town and my hometown were surrounded

by thick lines of trees and post-industrial abandoned factories. There was no way to meet anyone, or if there was, it felt forced, somehow. Maybe I could go on dates with a few guys who were out like me, but I didn’t really want to go on dates, so it would’ve been dishonest. The straight students were going to parties and hooking up, making out on the green, having sex in dorms. The gay guys had to do what they could, wherever they could find it. Making out drunkenly with straight also-drunk frat boys, sex in the library with townies, trips to the nearest big city: either do those things or sit with your sexual feelings, like many of us had our entire lives. All that energy and nowhere to put it, no one to share it with.

Someone else would park next to me and look over. There were lots of old men, and younger ones too. There was no signal, just the way we looked at one another. We could tell. I would go into the little bathroom building, like the one in Maine. At the urinals, when the bathroom was mostly empty, we could stand side by side and reach over to each other. Or if not at the urinals, someone would be sitting in the stall next to me, tapping his foot, and I’d get on the cold dirty floor and slide my body halfway un- derneath the divider or sometimes there’d be a hole in the wall.

After a while I began to develop a strange feeling at rest areas, like I was giving myself to someone. Not that I gave my full self, but that the part of myself I did give was complete. There was no pretense, no awkward conversation or dancing around whether or not I should be attracted to somebody. There was no wondering if someone was straight or gay; there was no sexual orientation at all. We were just there, together, as ourselves.