This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
It was fine.
He was kind and patient and gracious. I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been and he took it all in stride. He was a good kisser.
It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t disappointing. It wasn’t mind-blowing.
It was sex. And I thought it would provide clarity.
It didn’t. At least not how I thought—how I hoped—it would.
Among the men I’ve connected with and talked to who are in a similar circumstance as mine—accepting their queerness late in life after otherwise living as a cisheteronormative man—most of them at least had some sexual experience with another male in their youth. This fits the results of a study published in the Journal of Sex Research in 2020.
In the study’s findings, most of the men interviewed who had self-identified as gay1 reported having some form of consensual sexual acts with other males before the age of 19, while the average age of sexual debut for all the study’s participants was between the ages of 14 and 15. Approximately 1 in 5 of the gay identifying participants reported having consensual sex before the age of 13, much higher than the national average for men in the United States. And that wasn’t all the queer participants led the pack in.
“Notably, we found that the debut of same-sex anal intercourse was approximately age 16, which is younger than the national mean of 17 for vaginal intercourse among heterosexual men in the United States.”
Now, sex isn’t everything and shouldn’t be. There are components to healthy interpersonal relationships that are, at least outwardly, more salient in determining character and how people interact with the world.
Yet, as demonstrated by movies like Super Bad, Can’t Hardly Wait, American Pie, The Graduate, Revenge of the Nerds and many others, as well as nearly every mainstream romcom, sitcom and drama television series and countless books and magazines and other media, sexual experience in youth is portrayed as paramount to character development. It provides an opportunity to demonstrate tenderness, patience, and attentiveness. It serves as this mythical finish line for awkward, confused, aimless youth to finally “getting it.” And, for better or for worse, many men at least attribute some weight of that first night in the sack with someone as awakening them to who they really are.
So, what if you didn’t get to have that moment? Or didn’t allow yourself to have that moment?
I spent my teens and twenties worrying that I’d end up like Steve Carrell’s Andy Stitzer from The 40-Year-Old Virgin—a loser who was too nerdy, too shy, too weak-willed as a kid to get laid and thus have that crucial formative carnal event on the journey to becoming a guy who has a wife and family, a house in the suburbs, a job they are competent and passionate about.
I dated a few women and definitely fooled around in high school and college, but it never crossed that line from heavy petting and dry humping. I did not have penetrative vaginal sex until I was in my mid-20s. That’s a story for another time.
Now I am 40+ years old, most definitely not a virgin2 and know how deeply wrapped up in toxic masculinity, patriarchy and exploitative capitalism those romantic and domestic ideals and goals of my youth were. And I also am honest with myself about how my pursuit of sexual experience with women was, at least on some level, an attempt to prove to the world—and, most importantly, myself—that I was not queer, that I could be normal.
Were there opportunities that I could have finally had that formative queer experience? Maybe. I’ve written before about that final time spent with my childhood best friend. There were one or two times while inebriated in my 20s that I perceived as potential openings with men I knew. But nothing ever happened. And as I continued to age—to build a life around a family and career—I was increasingly sure that secret longing for a man to embrace me, to touch me, would go to the grave with me.
But as I worked to become more true to myself, I realized that I had to experience sexual intimacy with a man. Years of repressing and denying and minimizing my desire for it had done nothing to diminish it.
I needed it to move past it.
A journal excerpt written after the fact:
“...I’m oddly frustrated about my nonchalance about it all. I don’t see colors differently, there was no shining light, no flood of emotions. It was sex. That’s it. We’ll see how I feel over the coming days.”
Don’t get me wrong, in the moment there were flashes of it being what I imagined, certain sensations that aren’t necessarily overtly sexual, just...intimate. His weight on top of me. The feel of his beard against the palm of my hand. Laying side by side afterward, lightly caressing each other, his leg straddled over mine.
But I was detached, clinical throughout the whole thing. I did it deliberately, to remove as much emotion from it, so my unfulfilled adolescent self could consider everything rationally. To think that was possible is laughable in hindsight, whether viewing it through the lens of an adult or a teenager. But it was also kind of necessary. In my encounters with women, the arc of time between my first kiss, my first time seeing a nude waist and my first being inside someone spanned years. Those equivalent experiences with a man spanned less than an hour.
In all honesty, I don’t even know what I was expecting when it came to the clarity I craved. Just some sense of…certainty. A sense of what I was supposed to do.
In the days after, I began to understand my focusing on that experience was helping me avoid being more out. Helping me avoid my anxiety about how I feel in other aspects of my life. Helping me avoid some of the adjacent questions and challenges my wife and I were facing as I sought to live more authentically.
It made me realize how I was hiding behind having that experience.
I’m still in touch with him. We enjoy grabbing a coffee, maybe having some fun, when he’s in town. I wasn’t lying when I said he was kind and patient and gracious.
There were more experiences since that day. Each has affirmed what I’ve known since I was a pre-teen, that intimacy with men is a valid need of mine. Not just sexual intimacy; the intimacy that allows you to lay side-by-side quietly, to lay your head against another man’s shoulder, to smile at him.
I’ve now been someone’s first. I saw the same confusion, bewilderment, uncertainty in their eyes just as I felt after my first time with a man. They had been discovered, they couldn’t hide anymore, they didn’t know what to do. It’s difficult but I know they’ll be fine. I just hope I was as good to them as my first was for me.
Should it be so narrowly defining? Why not “queer?”
We really should find a better term to define lack of sexual experience. As the study in the Journal of Sex Research noted, consensual sex acts are numerous and don’t always involve a vagina or anus, much less penetration.
Just found your story - This was a good read - thanks for sharing - for a long time I have thought "maybe it is just me" - it is not!