So, with the help of some experts, let’s take a moment to dismantle what you think you know about topping and bottoming. Sure, people have a preference, but now could be the perfect time to escape the top or bottom prison you live in. But it ought not to be impossible to sexually switch things up. These two subdivisions have their own rules, stereotypes, and in-jokes, and can sometimes seem as if they’re at war with each other, rather than both working together for mutual sexual pleasure.Īll of this can make trying different things daunting, especially if you’re a baby gay venturing into this world for the first time. But often, penetrative sex can feel divided into rigid binaries that make being a top or a bottom seem like a cult you’ve signed up to for life, and one that you have to declare as soon as two (or more) consenting men decide to take their clothes off and rub up against each other. This is clearly not the case, especially for those people who consider themselves versatile ( HIYA). And maybe, like the song says, that does sanctify our sex lives and makes us just a little bit holy.Legend would have you believe that once you’ve earned your gay card, a Harry Potter–like ceremony occurs where, instead of the Sorting Hat, a giant magical butt plug divides all gay men into two houses: tops or bottoms. Bursting through that shame is our badge of honor, our beautifully united experience.
More than anything though, was the repeated lyrical mantra of “I won’t be ashamed.” Because as queer people, we’re buried in lifetime’s worth of shame so vivid and searing that oftentimes it’s crippling. Sure, I know all about gay guys having sex with straight guys, but it felt reassuring to see him describe the “saint and sinner role” he embodied during those experiences, and to hear the uncertainty and melancholy weaved into the song. It was listening to Years & Years’ new song “Sanctify,” and seeing the band’s out gay singer Olly Alexander talk about how the song was inspired his sexual trysts with straight men, that I realized that these feelings are way more common than people let on. Worst of all, though, the shame attached to the memories of those first times marred how I would approach sex for years. I realize I fell into that old gay adage of placing my feelings on a person who, for whatever reason, was never going to invest them back in me. I believe it was just sex, or at least that’s what I have tell myself now to avoid slipping into a memory induced k-hole. I think, when I look back now and occasionally find myself tumbling through his Facebook page, that he wasn’t. I never learned whether the boy I lost my virginity to was struggling with his sexuality. I’m not sure whether I really fell for the guy or not, but I do know that at the end of it he was just using me to get off. And while at the beginning I felt like I had the upper hand in the situation-I was the one who was out and comfortable in my sexuality, right?-after each time we met became more secretive and more dirty, I began to feel secretive, dirty, and most of all shameful. We’d meet surreptitiously in dark and make out in the cold British weather on a park bench before venturing back to his place to have sex.
I didn’t tell him that I’d never had sex with someone before instead, saturated with vodka and inflated by nerves, I was swept up in the motions.įor the next year, we’d hook-up on and off, usually at 3 a.m. All I know is that one moment we were talking and the next minute, well.
The minutiae of exactly how things developed from us being together in that room to us having slightly unsuccessful sex in a bathroom in a different corridor have since escaped me. He was clearly intoxicated, but it was a party after all and who was I, quite drunk myself, to judge. It was late (or early, depending on your outlook on the world) when I was joined by the boy who was living in the room next to mine, way back on the other side of the building. I can remember, although I'd had some drinks, sitting alone in my friend’s room on a single bed, the mattress overly springy and with a coarse plastic coating, attempting to stream a song over our dorm’s spotty Internet connection. The whole thing went down near the end of my freshman year at a party, at which people from the whole dorm floor were drunk and celebrating, carelessly streaming in and out of each other’s rooms, following the various different pop songs until one room took their fancy. I was at college, living in dorms, and the experience-aside from the usual horrifying awkwardness and somewhat spontaneity of the occasion-was completely and utterly unremarkable aside from one thing: the guy I slept with identified as straight.
I was 19 when I first had full-on sex with another man.