If you want to make someone feel good, you'll figure out how to make them feel good

Advice to my younger self

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Last week, I published a piece called, “Gatekeeping queerness doesn't make you more queer.” Today’s piece builds on the idea of expanding the possibilities for exploring one’s queerness, sexuality, and gender.

As I sat writing at my favorite (now closed) coffee shop in Silverlake, I couldn’t help but overhear the woman at the table next to me telling her friends that she had a crush on a woman (gasp!) but because she’d never been with a woman sexually, she was afraid to make a move. She wanted to reach out but didn’t want to bother her crush. Frozen by insecurities about her lack of experience, she felt she couldn’t go for it.

I had to stop myself from leaning over and saying, “If you want to make someone feel good, you’ll figure out how to make them feel good.”

I’m queer—I date people of many genders and my own gender doesn’t fit into one of two categories. I think I’ve more or less always known this on some level, but I’ve also deliberately chosen to focus on and expand this part of my life as I’ve gotten older (more on the simultaneous discovery and creation of gender and sexuality next week). However, the majority of my sexual history is with cis men, or at least people who were identifying that way at the time we dated.

In my early twenties, I dated a woman we can call L. Though she wasn’t the first girl I’d had feelings for or been attracted to, she was the first one I entered into a relationship with. To put it bluntly, L wasn’t very nice. She made fun of my lack of experience, and invited me to meet her at a bar knowing that her ex-girlfriend would be there, to try to make her jealous, without telling me that was the goal. The relationship was short-lived and left me feeling fearful of continuing to explore my sexuality.

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After that, I only dated cis men for many years. Though I had crushes on people of other genders, I didn’t pursue them. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened with L. I would occasionally open my dating profile preferences to include genders other than men, only to find explicit requests that ‘baby queers’ (newly out people) or ‘tourists’ (straight women looking to explore their sexuality temporarily) stay away. I heard friends of mine gatekeep queerness by criticizing boys who say they’re bi but “they’ve only ever gotten a blow job once from a guy in high school,” or asking another friend, “How many women have you eaten out?” as though numbers or particular sex acts can determine someone’s sexuality.¹ These friends seemed to think they could determine who was ‘queer enough.’ I, like the woman next to me at the coffee shop, didn’t want to bother anyone with my inexperience. I’d put the settings back to just men, and label myself as straight. Unsurprisingly, this led to continued inexperience.

My dream life became the main source of a lot of my exploration. I had countless dreams of doing or receiving the sexual acts I hadn’t done in real life. I figured it would all happen for me some day down the line.

"Bar Boy" by Salman Toor