It’s late December, those lazy few days between Christmas and New Year's. I’m home on a gap year, back in the bed from my teenage days. Except, unlike any experiences I had during that time, there is now a beautiful, queer woman teaching me how to 69. I’m sure for some of us, being asked if we’d ever 69-ed might elicit a chuckle of embarrassment or a “No” in reply. We may even back out of the situation completely. But in 2018 I was committed to accepting myself, and so I nodded my head yes. For me this process of self-acceptance wound up being inextricably tied with the sexual encounters I partook in.
There are so many ways, I’ve since discovered, that being your true sexual self can lead to acceptance. A lot of it comes from the fact that, boiled down, when you say yes to new sexual experiences you are practicing, trying, and opening up to “new” things. When you get good at this, you realize it’s pretty simple to apply the same mentality to yourself. If this queer sex makes me feel good, and if my body makes others feel good, then why can’t I love it? It’s doing amazing things! This was one of my epiphanies.
I also noticed that these encounters I had defined as “new” were in fact very normal. We all feel pleasure in different ways, none of which are odd or different from each other at their core. As I lay beside that beautiful woman, having just cum from someone else for the first time (via 69-ing, no less!), my previous embarrassment at the act melted away. I felt good, she felt good, what difference did it make how we got there? Later, I got to share this discovery with others in my first threesome, and the laughter and pleasure we all experienced are nothing I’d ever be embarrassed to tell others about.
That’s the thing about encountering confident, queer people. They have had to earn that confidence due to persecution or hardship and it shows. They actively love themselves every day, even when the going gets tough, because they understand loving themselves is the key to loving others. Here’s how they inspired me — they shared their sexual knowledge with me, told me how wonderful, how sexy I was and showed me not only how to accept my queer self, but my body as a whole. Whether it’s being gifted a sex toy (purely for my pleasure and not to insinuate a need to go faster), losing my p-in-v-card surrounded by three other wonderful, sexy humans, or being someone’s first queer sex experience, the community and my willingness to actively take part in it have translated into a self-love I never thought myself capable of before. There are bad days, of course, but at the end of it all, I love my brain and my body and all that they allow me to feel.