Action: A Book About Sex (4 page)

Boy About Town

I don’t have a sexual “orientation.”

My personal theme song is by a band called, fittingly, the Jam. There are many reasons why I love “Boy About Town,” outside of the sole fact that it’s a through-and-through life-affirmer, quality-wise. It tracks a young ruffian who’s on the move:

See me walking around, I’m the boy about town that you heard of.

See me walking the streets, I’m on top of the world that you heard of.

The sunny hustle mapped out by the lyrics matches the daily flânerie of my thinking—scattershot, blithe, far-flung:
Oh, like paper caught in wind, I glide upstreet, I glide downstreet.
Like a raffish prettyboy traipsing through life with all the pride and beauty of itinerant trash picked up by a breeze, I cruise.

In gay male culture,
cruising
signifies a casual process of selecting and catching onto a temporary sexual cohort—if a guy is
cruising
, he’s testing the currents of all his potential sexual options, looking to see what strangers out there he might take home with him. That verb’s meaning for all people, in a slightly different sense, is also the general shape of my attitudes and manner when I am feeling most like myself: I drift, I pass through easily, I shred along the pathways of my life delicately and with joy, I travel forth in a manner that’s generally steady, if circuitous. I see how wide and sprawling the world is as though through a window of a plane that is cruising at 40,000 feet, and I am able to observe the interstellar-feeling
smallness of its landscape’s dappled towns and cities, each light a cosmos of faraway people, direction-inversion:
all those stars down there.
It feels something like this idea from Audre Lorde: “There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself—whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.—because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you’ve lost… Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.” Hovering in this way, I feel like a spacecraft.

Part of that is shucking off any one orientation. I am not a lesbian. I am not straight, nor am I bisexual. Not identifying feels luxurious: It is professing the right to visit with each of the coruscating dots I admire as I travel, rather than deciding a single, fixed star as my home. While this works well for me, many people with more discrete gender identities and sexual proclivities have felt unmoored inside of communities of people unlike them for their whole lives, and so find great power, camaraderie, and newfound convenience re: finding boneable people, and other blessed benefits in identifying. After all, to “orient yourself” is to affix your meaning, and your place—a right from which non-straight, non-cis, and trans people have long been disallowed. You have a right to decide your own name—to settle into a home rather than take to the streets, or to the space between bodies.

Another line from the Jam’s itinerant boy:
Oh, I’m sitting watching rainbows, and watching the people go crazy.
While aligning yourself with a specific sexual orientation can open you up to protection and love of all-new magnitudes, you can also move between homes when it comes to embodiments. I never designated myself “straight,” or “gay,” or “bisexual,” depending on whom I was dating/fucking, because to do so made each of those words feel like the bigots who call fluctuating sexualities “faddish” were being thrown sturdy proof, even though that’s bullshit and everyone has the right to claim whatever gender they like for themselves, even if they capitulate. But I did not know how to mean any of these things, and I felt bad for potentially skewing
their definitions for the people who did. I wasn’t doing anyone any harm, and it was fine for me to slip on identities as I felt them, but I prefer a mode that draws mainly on the fact that I can hook up with anyone I want, and it doesn’t have to change what I
am
. I could call myself any one of those things, despite my dalliances outside of their normal confines, and be correct. I don’t want to.

I have to say
something
. Otherwise, how would people know that they’ve got a shot with me, or that I had the wiring to scout them out? Here is as close as I can manage, as far as how a name for my gender identity and sexual orientation might sound:
queer
. I picture it as a spaceship, or, no—of course, a cruise ship. Picture one of the massive ocean liners in romantic comedies from the 1970s (coincidentally, my favorite aesthetic may be found among the streamers, muted pinks, and dinner gowns native to this decade’s cinematic boats): I am uneasy when people confine me to a specific word when my heart feels as roomy and compartmented as a sea vessel. I am open to whatever kinds of aliens might want to float along on holiday with me.

To make it easier in my conversations and writing, “queer” is vague enough to wrap me up loosely, like a one-size-fits-all floral caftan (told you I was all about that
Love Boat
lifestyle). For the most part, I say, “I sleep with people of all genders.” It does not make me feel like I’m obscuring my heart’s actual shape with a free ’n’ breezy muumuu-word. It does not put off someone who was trying to put it on me. “Queer” may not be “cruiser,” but it is sufficient. And succinct enough to preserve the amount of time I would have taken explaining all of this in person, freeing me to spend it starfucking instead. While being a dilettante in terms of what gender your partners are doesn’t have to dictate the way you identify—you can be a heterosexual man, make out with a guy, and have the first part of that status remain firmly true—I don’t really care about any of it. I cruise forth.

Oh, please leave me aside, I want to be a… I want to be… I want to live in… There’s more than you can hope for in this world.

Alone in the Bone Zone

Feeling sexy mostly has to do with YOU YOURSELF—with your inner foundation, regardless of whether another person’s opinion of/attraction to that self sweeps through it. According to Dr. David Schnarch’s book
Intimacy and Desire
: “A person’s relationship to their self-worth likely informs their relationship to sex more so than lust, romantic love, and attachment. How you see yourself [… ] profoundly shape[s] your sexual desire.” So if you see yourself as an animate slime-filled trash bag, that correlates to the mucked-upness of the sex you’re having (if you’re even having it).

Even though I am not always a prime-feeling or -looking person, I try my best to conduct myself majestically, regardless of the times when I’ve been (or at least felt) overworked, poor, lonesome, ugly, anxious, depressed, and so forth. Shove yourself in front of the world, and become near-to-deranged with goodwill and hard work, and I promise: Gilding the kingdom of your brain will help you establish a “sex life” by building, first, a multilayered “life,” no modifiers necessary.

Allow yourself to become flooded by your own personality, and make a concerted effort to get rid of the shame that allows you to muffle it for other people’s “comfort.” Most of the time, you’re not
comforting
anyone by editing yourself; you’re reinforcing that there is one right picture of how to be in the world, and that it likely does not resemble the one that comes to
others
naturally, too.

You know how everyone wanted to make out with David Bowie? His specificity, and his exacting dedication to presenting the world with the person he was rather than the ideal of what
other people might think is “sexy” or “masculine” or “human, in any sense” is why we were convinced he was so good-looking. (Well, that and his hypercolor eyes.)

The sex-symbolization of a man who willfully tried to pass as an extraterrestrial among us earthlings imparts a cogent lesson: Be and look like
you
, and do not make a single apology, unless being deferential is a natural and crucial part of that you-ness. Confidence in the character and appearance you’ve got is not only the most attractive thing going, save for an unclassifiable eye color, but also the most
comforting
to others—it’s signing a permission slip allowing them to surface their idiosyncrasies, too. Consider how people always try to make comedians laugh: They’re attempting to exchange the social currency they think professional stand-ups find most valuable (usually while telling really bad jokes). If what, in your actions, you prove is valuable to you is unique strange foxadociousness, you will attract a trail of other unself-conscious foxes who’ve caught the scent of your freak pheromones. Besides, who wants to fuck a clod? OTHER CLODS, AND HOW THEY FIND THEM IS BY BEING CLODDISH. You are
not that clod
.

If you are positive in your belief that you are, in fact, the worst and least attractive person who ever slunk shamefacedly through the atmosphere—the anti-Bowie—there are a few ways to dodge that insecurity, which, I’ll argue, is ultimately rather self-centered: I can say that with confidence, since, for a while, I couldn’t bear to say ANYTHING with confidence, and when I let my insecurities monopolize me, it’s the most I ever focus on MYSELF MYSELF MYSELF! When I quiet my life down because I’m afraid it looks funny otherwise, low self-esteem and narcissism deaden the air around me that other living beings could otherwise be deeply breathing in. Why would I do that, when, instead, I can go hunt for archival tour T-shirts at the thrift spot, or try to beat the old heads at chess in the park (never gonna happen), or get ten people I know haven’t met one another, but would true-to-definitely like one another, together in a room?
No, I’d much rather stay here in bed, half-dressed, worrying that I’m inert, in large part because I am!!!
That’s bad logic, plus solipsistic, plus a snore convention. You know who you are already, so whenever I’m picking myself apart, I remember that its more interesting to extend my hand out to someone else, regardless of who they are, to shake hello.

Of course you have to pay exclusive attention to yourself sometimes, but it’s atrocious to think about yourself
all
the time, which is what you’re up to if you’re gazing at a Hope Diamond of a dime-piece and ruminating to the tune of,
I’m gonna screw up I always say something ungraceful I want to know and then french that person I won’t be able to muster not zero of the nerve to go over there no way not never
. The proper amount of
you
in there, if we were to trim that thought-attack down to its one valid germ, is:
I want to know, and then french, that person.
Notice how the rest of it takes place in either the future or the past—and how the selected trimming is the sole part of the thought that accounts for a person outside yourself? That’s the only current truth. The rest is YOURSELF YOURSELF YOURSELF, and not even your real self, but some fictitious version of you involved in events that aren’t even going down to begin with. Do your best not to focus on that mirage self-portrait of a basket case to whom you bear little true resemblance, when you could be admiring the Hope Diamond.

So create an empire of your life and your for-real self—the person other people are waiting for you to present them with: the person who doesn’t otherwise exist. Do, make, and enjoy excellent things. When you find yourself slinking around unattractively, you can call upon the memory that you just Jet-Skied through a glass ceiling, or made a Lego model of Seinfeld’s apartment to scale, or learned a new chord progression on your sick-nasty electric keyboard. Or whatever it is you enjoy.

Even if some of this seems beyond reach—especially the part about commandeering a WaveRunner through the patriarchy—much more of it is eminently possible. And I feel lucky about that! I think often of something the cartoonist Chris Ware once said
in an interview for
Rookie
, a publication for teenagers for which I am a story editor: “Being able to say ‘I don’t know what to do with my life’ is an incredible privilege that 99 percent of the rest of the world will never enjoy.”
^*
I don’t want to squander the arbitrary and overwhelming luck I have to be able to be and do and see all kinds of things and people! I have all this splendor in front of me. It would be a waste of my life to spend it sulking about how “unfuckable,” and therefore unhappy, I am, when there’s no causality there and neither have to be true.