• ABOUT
• CONTACT
• SUBSCRIBE
• HOME

Thursday, January 4, 2007

And I’m Looking Forward to Getting to Know You, Now That We’ve Fucked

filed under: Dating 2.0, Love & Other Glitches by Melissa Gira

danah boyd (and wow, am I a pervert for getting off on her finding such good sex stories?) sifted this Salon piece on gay vs. straight dating from 2001 to the top of her del.icio.us links, and so this must bear repeating in some now-ish way:

See, a straight woman says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t have sex with you until I get to know you.”

A gay man says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t get to know you until I have sex with you.”

There’s a (and god, I wish there were a less pretentious word for this) frisson to near-anonymous sex, where each party is moving in on their target with a totally shameless motivation — fueled by desire, one hopes, and not just too much fancy booze. Mutual projection is a fine intoxicant here, imagining one another as one’s own utter fantasy lover but with just enough differentiation from the jack-off material as to be a real being. Nobody knows who anybody is yet with a drink in hand and in the low light of a bar or restaurant or at a club or a show, and so this sort of sexual collision in public is a ripe moment for total self re-invention. Why hate on it? Why not work it?

Is this where the so-called straight girls (and their homo-kin, that the writer bemoans, the queers who are over-ritualizing dating, in his opinion) trip up in this mix? Are they hunting some more “authentic” self as they audition future partners pre-bedtime, or are they maybe just holding out for a nice dinner first?

Or is it that knowing based purely on sex is seen as somehow one-dimensional? As if the “you” that someone picks up on to take home is any less real than the “you” that you are all the time? As if the “you” you are on a more formal date is the whole you, right, and not just a blip of you?

The question then is, if you want to, how do you begin to give someone the story of you in sex? Over a meal, or bent over the bed? Through a photograph, a text message, or with your own mouth, and if so, then where is your mouth? Maybe with a chart or graph of previous partners? With glorious annotations on each one? How do you fill in the flourishes of want that can only be captured limply in a sexual history? And do you need to tell a personal or sexual history only with words? Could the truth of sex best be found and told in sex?

I suppose I’m a gay man, in this particular equation. So what are you?

Comments