Let's Get Real About Queer Sex

Mary Jane Eyre on Normalization, Projection, and the Gesamtkuntswerk of Good Sex

Dear Republic,

This to me is a really cool essay and a nice round-up of the sex writing series.

Mary Jane Eyre

writes on the vast hall of projections that goes into writing on queer sex. The piece doubles as a celebration of excellent queer writing emerging out of the Substack community.

In the next post we’ll announce the next round of contests. We’ll also do a formal and deliberate appeal for money, but you can guess the gist of it: give money! If you’re reading you have a sense by now of what The Republic of Letters is — a highly heterogenous, diverse collection of writers writing freely and ambitiously and showcasing the talent on Substack. All proceeds here go to the writers.

-ROL

LET’S GET REAL ABOUT QUEER SEX

1: Why Can’t You Just Be Happy For Me?

‘Gay sex!’ the big, blonde one exclaimed giggling, after all three of us had come, and I was lying exhausted between him and his smaller, darker boyfriend, who had started talking to me on Grindr barely two hours before. It was 4 am. I was in Amsterdam enjoying the freedom of my ethically non-monogamous relationship. I’m not sure what exactly my erotic compadre found so hilarious about gay sex in that moment. Perhaps there is something inherently comical about an MMM threesome: who can ever forget the rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006)? But it didn’t matter — his laugh was contagious.

Good writing about sex, like good writing in general, should be honest. It doesn’t have to be fully transparent, or literally true, but it should at least gesture towards an image of the truth. There may be good reasons to avoid writing honestly about sex in general and about queer sex in particular. It’s a touchy subject. If I’m being honest, I chose to start with this particular personal anecdote not only to establish my bona fides when it comes gay/queer sex, but as a bit of a flex, to signal to the reader that despite my transsexual pseudonym, I am not one of those weirdos on the Internet who has never had sex with another human being. I am attractive enough that complete strangers want to have sex with me at 2am in the morning. To which the reader might reply that such strangers are unlikely to have the most exacting standards. To which I would reply that they were both super hot and friendly, okay, and why can’t you just be happy for me?

A different Shortbus scene from the one Mary Jane is referring to

Why can’t you just be happy for me? is a question we queers have been asking since the days of Moses. I was a bookish kid, so I tried to make sense of my uninvited but suddenly very insistent desires by looking up ‘homosexual’ in the copious amounts of Christian literature we had at home. What I found was not encouraging. Since this was during the transitional time of dial-up Internet, I googled “famous gay authors” and wrote down a list of names on a piece of a paper which I took to the Krugersdorp public library. In quick succession, I read Baldwin (Giovanni’s Room), Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms), Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers), and Hollinghurst (The Swimming-Pool Library). My parents, although not big readers, are not blind, so I also inadvertently outed myself in the process. The library didn’t have a copy of Andrew Holleran’s classic Dancer from the Dance, so I only read that later, but David Sessions' description of Holleran’s novels as “all but devoid of depictions of gay relationships or sex that is not shadowed and sordid” applies to a depressingly large part of the gay canon. And that was before AIDS. Gay literature in the 1980s spoke of little else. When I finally did have gay sex it was something nothing that I had read (or the thousands of pornographic images that I had viewed online) had prepared me for. It felt like the fulfillment of an unwritten prophecy: despite what all those books had said, this was indeed what I had been looking for.

Advocates for same-sex marriage, framing it as the cornerstone of legal and social equality, steered the conversation away from gay sex: Love is love. Love wins. It was quite a successful strategy. There was also a push to improve not only whether, but how queer people were represented in popular media: fewer transvestite serial killers and more queer joy! At the same time, writers were told: stay in your lane. Accordingly, if you were a feckless young female writer, you could only write from the point of view of a feckless young female writer, even when writing fiction. If you were a young male writer, you couldn’t write at all.

2: Homoromantasy Swallows The Culture Whole

Eros has never been one for playing by the rules, though. One of the most peculiar erotic genres to emerge organically out of the digital matrix is that of slash fiction: fan-written sexual fantasies featuring two famous male characters, such as Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, written primarily by women for women. Alice Oseman’s “boy meets boy” story Heartstopper became a sensation (there are already five volumes in the graphic novel series and three seasons of the Netflix series). Needless to say, it bears little resemblance to the lived experience of any teenage boy who has ever lived — straight, gay, bi, or pan. The ne plus ultra of the basic bitch homoromantasy genre has to be Red, White & Royal Blue (2023), the Amazon adaptation of the novel by Casey McQuiston, in which the dashingly handsome, ethnically ambiguous son of US President Uma Thurman falls in love with a British prince during a state visit.

I can’t resist a vulgar Freudian interpretation of this erotic transgender identification (which is much more widespread than the controversial medicalised variation). In these increasingly heteropessimist times, intersectional feminism offers a theoretical framework for why the cis white man is the enemy, but it provides little guidance on how to deal with the fact that one still desires to sleep with the enemy. In the dream logic of the erotic, however, a modern woman can still crave male desire, not as a sex object (i.e. a woman) but as an equal (i.e. another man). That a certain style of feminism ended up contributing to the creation of the masculine mystique is just one of the many ironies of our era.

Homoromantasy conquers all

But it is not only in unedited corners of the Internet and in mass-market entertainment that gay sex is romantisized. Washington Post book reviewer and an editor at The Point magazine,

becca rothfeld

, writes in “Only Mercy: Sex After Consent,” part of the collection All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, how against the “new puritans” like Louise Perry and Christine Emba she stands with the “disciples of the erotic” inspired by the “sensibility of the bathhouse” which according to the queer theorist David Halperin offered “a possibility available nowhere else in modern society: the possibility of being wanted for your body alone.” This statement strikes me as debatable, but Rothfeld is concerned about a creeping sex negativity in our culture:

Emba and Perry may seem quaintly antiquated in the circles I am lucky enough to run (and fuck) in, but members of these circles would be self-serving and delusional in assuming that the latest incarnation of puritanism is the preserve of a few dedicated prigs.

Please DO NOT infer from that parenthesis that Rothfeld’s marriage is open, that would be an “astonishingly thorough misunderstanding,” as Rothfeld wrote here on Substack (before deciding that, like with bathhouses, she prefers the version of Substack in her mind). Rothfeld’s kinship with sexual deviants is only in the spiritual realm: she would hate to be mistaken for one in real life! To paraphrase Matthew Gasda: if you’re so Romantic, why aren’t you dying of syphilis? Lest I be accused of excessive himpathy, however, allow me to bitch about the blatant gay erasure in the following statement in Gasda’s polemic:

But it’s fair to say that, as far as I can tell, there are no ultra-sexual, super-genius aristocrats riddled with venereal disease running around New York, London, L.A., or Miami.

One can hardly hold it against contemporary ultra-sexuals that medical advances have made it unnecessary to be “riddled with venereal disease.” Granted, “super-genius” is a matter of self-perception rather than objective reality, but that seems to be exactly what writers like Rothfeld get from queer theorists like Halperin: not so much a new understanding of sex as a new set of techniques for self-romanticisation. I don’t mind that Rothfeld doesn’t know what she is talking about when she writes about sex in a bathhouse, but if she tried a bit harder to imagine what it must be like to be somebody “wanted for your body alone,” it might have occurred to her to consider the fear of AIDS, or the bitter taste of chems, or the loneliness that can drive a person into the arms of a stranger in the dark.

On another recent occasion enjoying the company of multiple gentlemen at once (what did y'all think sex positivity meant? vibes? papers? essays?), I found it funny that transgressive sex is often associated with occult rituals or dirty dealings or both, as in Stanley Kubrick’s unequalled Eyes Wide Shut (1999), yet here we gays were doing it for the hell of it. Boys will be boys. L’art pour l’art et le plaisir pour le plaisir.

3: But Am I Just A Dick In A Dress To You?

For a hilariously unromanticised view of contemporary sexual mores, one can hardly do better than

Naomi Kanakia

’s novel The Default World, published last year by The Feminist Press. Jhanvi, the main character (in the book and in her own head), moves to San Francisco to crash at the Fun Haus, the polyamorous found family of her old university friend, Henry, whom she hopes to marry so that his corporate benefits can pay for her medical transition. The housemates support all the right political causes, but she feels excluded from their sex parties, which especially stings since the usual complaint is that there aren’t enough women in attendance.

It can be particularly difficult to be honest about sex when people like you are routinely portrayed as a sexual threat to society. Support for gay rights have increased rapidly during my lifetime, but in many parts of the world, gay men and women still fear for their lives. For trans people in the US and the UK, the tide has already turned.

Jhanvi protests her exclusion by playing the trans card and the race card, but she is forced to reckon with the highly problematic fact that some bodies are more desirable than others. She can persuade people to take pity on her, but not to desire her. Or more precisely, she can’t persuade them to desire her in the way that she wants to be desired. Because in fact Henry does desire her, or at least a version of her, even if it is exactly the version of her that she would like to disown. How does a trans woman feel about topping a man? Conflicted, it seems.

It is such feelings of ambivalence that truly humanise Jhanvi’s character. It might sound insulting to suggest that she needs to be “humanised” to begin with, but our default setting is to perceive other people as NPCs (non-playing characters, in the charming vernacular of the online vitalist community). It is always good to be reminded that the subjectivity of others runs every bit as deep as our own. Even if we can’t relate to Jhanvi’s gender dysphoria, we might be able to relate to the realisation that what someone wants from us is not we wanted them to want from us and wondering whether it is worth pretending to be the person that they wants us to be. It is noteworthy that Jhanvi first penetrates Henry under the influence of psilocybin, allowing her to dissociate from the mechanics of the act. However casual, sex is never simply a matter of a body wanting another body. No sex act has a single, inherent meaning: it means something different to each of the participants and is likely to mean something different in retrospect to what it meant in the moment. Kanakia beautifully captures the seductive promise of sex (and drugs): the opportunity to become something other than our everyday, regular selves and then, for a few blissful moments, to become nothing at all.

Speaking about psychedelic experiences,

John Pistelli

’s Major Arcana, newly out from Belt Publishing, is a true revelation of the collective unconscious. The results are not always pretty, from crossdressing homosexual rapists to nullification surgery. But in the words of one of the novel’s protagonists, the gender-deviant turned gender-abolitionist Simon Magnus, it is “both dishonest and dangerous to deny the horror squirming underneath everything — underneath everyone, no matter what they’re wearing or if they’re otherwise discriminated against or whatever.”

In a classic edition of his Weekly Readings newsletter, Pistelli wades into the interminable Lolita discourse with characteristic incisiveness, complicating the idea of good and bad desires (whether judged from a traditional or progressive perspective):

Lolita really is closer to certain Platonic gay novels, not only Death in Venice but also Billy Budd and Dorian Gray; these don’t shy from implicating their authors in the forbidden desire the authors’ gaze transmits in the very course of narratively surrendering, this to elevate art over eros.

Major Arcana can itself be read as an elevation of art over eros, or as an offer of art as an escape from a world bereft of eros, as the case may be. In the metaphysics of the novel, a virgin birth seems more plausible than a mutually satisfying sexual encounter without cataclysmic consequences. So there is nothing particularly outré about the problematic relationship between Simon Magnus’ former editor and former lover Ellen Chandler and her former student, Pilar (formerly Pablo) Rivera, who would “get high and lay there and let Ellen Chandler, who was what they called stone-cold sober, do as she pleased” until one day Pilar has had enough and bursts out:

What am I? Just a dick in a dress to you? I’m a human being, for Christ’s sake! What the fuck is wrong with you, lady? You’re a schoolteacher! You make me sick!

It may be a provocative move to portray a woman taking advantage of another woman’s unwanted maleness, but I think Pistelli pulls it off, because the situation rings true. Fixating on the genders and parts of the individuals involved seems beside the point. As Ellen Chandler remarks earlier of her and Simon Magnus: “they added up somehow to a man and a woman, though precisely how she could not have said.”

In his fiction and criticism, Pistelli playfully explores the ways in which art holds space for masculine and feminine traditions of magic to intermingle and transmute. We all know that in Shakespeare’s time, even the female parts were played by male actors. In the recent past, there was an unspoken rule that a masculine archetype should preferably be played by a female actor, e.g. Sigourney Weaver’s lacklustre portrayal of Prospero on the West End. But why shouldn’t a woman grab hold of Prospero’s staff, especially when he has voluntarily relinquished it? Even J.K. Rowling didn’t blush at writing about “her wand.” And as every good bottom knows: the creative receptivity of Coleridge’s eolian harp requires far more than mere passivity.

Kanakia and Pistelli demonstrate that to write honestly about queer sex, we have to be willing to break a few rules and conventions. In the words of the late anarchist-historian David Graeber, we should dare to act as if we are already free. This is not to say that there is no value in norms. An analogy might be drawn between the proper attitude towards writing about sex and the proper attitude towards sex itself. As a pluralist, I don’t believe in prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach, but I think it is worth considering the one articulated by Dan Savage in his influential sex and relationship advice column “Savage Love” (which in all honesty has been of more practical benefit to me than the entire gay literary canon): be good (master the basic techniques), be giving (consider the needs of your partner/audience and not only your own), and be game (be willing to try something new).

As visionary fiction from Middlemarch to Major Arcana has taught us: everything is connected. Good sex is a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Mary Jane Eyre writes about Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil and gay stuff at The Extremely Difficult Realisation. He lives in London.