I was certainly not a virgin past a certain age, but I always felt like one. In my days of trying and failing to live up to the expectations of being a “gay male”, I found myself often instantly triggered by even the casual mention of a gay man’s sex life. 

I was never having enough sex, I was never doing it the way everyone else was doing it…. The failure on my part to “do the thing” made me feel as though the place I should have come to to find acceptance and love was really a minefield of broken people like myself who learned not to care about others because their pleasure was foremost to anyone else’s needs. This, to me, was an unspoken hint that I had failed to be welcomed by a group of people who were already outcast from society. My failure to perform sexuality was symbolic of my feelings of inadequacy, and much more that I hadn’t achieved. Now adult approval was no longer important to me. I can’t say I really desired the approval of men, just the privilege of one man letting me into his world, and liking me enough to share it with me. 

My inferiority complex was exacerbated with the reality that any Hollywood film, needlessly explicit Yahoo Answers posts asking a “question” on “if our relationship [was] going too far?”, or braggadocios anecdote from a gay man’s recent fuck never resembled my own experiences. There was never any representation, so to speak, of a gay man who’s life was not revolving around the spectacle of sex or suffering. 

It was clear that if I wasn’t having sex I wasn’t even gay. But I wasn’t straight either. That identity crisis was more painful than anything regarding my being transgender.

While my sexual history is not approaching prolific, it had resulted in me behaving in ways that my teenage self would probably have tried to distance myself from and perform active disgust towards in front of adults to win their favor. 

And ironically, my sexual journey did begin to take shape in ways that are archetypal of the sad gay/ sad trans experience. I did get into cars with strange men on multiple occasions. I did get naked for many more through a phone camera. I let men feed me when I knew I shouldn’t have. I looked like a whore in front of someone’s family members in the house because they knew what I was there for. I was also people’s dirty secret. I was the notch under someone’s belt that was too shameful to even brag about. I was ghosted after what seemed like a decent connection. 

Honestly, for a cisgender girl, I imagine this would be what causes her debilitating shame. But It didn’t for me. None of this was preferred, none of this was what I would have chosen first. Despite the high risks involved, to not do any of these incredibly unsafe things would provide me more shame. 

I’d long since been humbled by the hordes of men that have had more bodies go through them than the poor victim of an exorcism. I feel no sense of virtue at the idea of “saving myself” for the right guy when he probably won’t save himself for me. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Perhaps my thinking is all wrong, and I estimate that will become apparent as I get older, but right now, I’m not merely trying to “make up for lost time” as much as climb up to a level in which I might not feel cripplingly inferior to a potential future partner.

In terms of me having been split in two, these instances amount to a secret double life for most people that know me. Even being a transwoman implies inherent hyper sexuality just because of social stigmatization. I’ve had old people assume I was a virgin if they thought I was cisgender, but if they knew I was trans, they might have not assumed the same.

This pressure to be hyper sexual and how damaging it is is never a point of discussion in any queer space that I have seen. This is perhaps because it is deemed harmful to “the movement” for sexual freedom and liberation. After decades and castration, secrecy, desexualization and worse, we ought to feel proud of who we are. And for some, that pride might take the form of revolving their entire personality around their body and sex life as some bizarre reclamation of religious stigmatization about “perverted homosexuals”. 

However I see this as an over-correction, tilting us from one extreme or another.

I once watched a YouTuber named James Sommerton who was waxing poetic about the show Gay as Folk for its frank depiction of sex, drugs, homophobia and polyamory, and how at the time this was liberating for him because he had seen gay people of the Will and Grace variety. That is to say, desexualized and unintimidating to heterosexual audiences. This is interesting to me because James is of older generation than I am, so by the time I came along the hyper sexualization of gay men was all I was exposed to. He was suffocated by the opposite problem that I had. 

This is why I feel as though shame can come from multiple different places, and those nuances are almost never addressed by the media or by members of the community. I think that’s a shame because at the end of it, excluding queer people from family-friendly entertainment like Disney, the Hallmark Channel or Sesame Street, actually creates the problem that parents often seek to avoid. Having queer characters on Nickelodeon shows is not inherently pornographic if they behave the same way as any straight character present. They don’t need to call attention to themselves— (or the show runners’ progressiveness for that matter), they just need to exist. 

Them existing does not promote or indoctrinate kids into a life of raves, drugs and risky sexual activity. In actuality narrowing the framework of who queer kids can grow up to be by limiting examples to that of internet pornography, and film and TV that emulate it as close as possible does just that.  I probably never would have entered the dangerous situations that I had if I didn’t feel compelled to perform hyper sexuality to  feel like I was “doing the thing gay people do.” What would my image of myself have been like if I were exposed to a gay version of Snow White and Princess Charming at age 5 or a Jack and Rose at age 12. 

I went right from classroom snickers about butt sex at 11 to the most overtly aggressive and degrading videos you can imagine by age 15. People I was supposed to identify with were being brutalized and abused on screen and no one on Pornhub was going to educate me on what kinks were, were they? Nor were they going to assuage you that everyone was consenting to it.

So I went from sex is bad because its rebellious and worthy of adult derision, to sex is bad because it oddly resembles that childhood fear of being physically targeted by a homophobic guy.

***Sigh***

So this was a lot. I basically just ran down some thoughts of how porn shames and traumatizes all of us, but we’re all still gonna watch it, aren’t we? Like, I’m not trying to take that away from anybody, but I’d like us to unlearn the ways we think of sex. The way people still talk about it might not necessarily be from a place of religious zeal, but the language we use to express resentment of it is certainly descended from that socio-cultural context. 

Many of the adults that I had grown up around were middle-aged women that were raised Catholic. My mother and most of her sisters had been parents by the age of 18. This was a result of the nonexistent sex education provided in a 1970s American school setting, and my emotionally apathetic grandparents.  Passing this trauma down to a young pre-transition trans girl socialized into the world as a gay boy in the 21st century gives my view of sex a particularly distorted lens. 

All of the sudden the people I was trying to gain approval and acceptance from were adults who were doing their own form of overcorrecting; superimposing their derision of their younger, “stupider” selves onto the new generation in hopes that they would not make the same risky sexual decisions that they had.  And they would be vindicated in doing that because, none of my cousins had kids before 20 years old, and my being a “special needs” kid probably came with the assumption that I would be a virgin forever. But the type of sexual anorexia that came as a result of this was not desirable either, and actively made my relationship to the all accepting and diverse gay community even more fraught than it already would have been on its own.

The bright side is, engaging in sex has been a lot more liberating as a transwoman than a gay man; a fact that surely opposite of most people’s expectations might be. But that’s a story for another day….