Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

ugh j0rdan that's a beautiful post and i'm really happy for you. thank you for sharing that.

I like your post J0rdan S

while i'm oversharing (is it queer oversharing or autistic oversharing? is there a difference?) i guess i'll talk a little bit about anal.

it has been interesting and surprising to me how transition has changed my sexuality. pre-transition i was kind of repulsed by anal. i had this kind of "ewwww, why would anybody want to do _that_?" judgemental attitude towards it.

at some point after starting hrt - i don't remember when exactly, probably no more than a year - i thought to myself "well, that was silly of me. what on earth could be wrong with anal?"

it's not, like, my most favorite thing ever, but since nature has blessed me with an enormous honkin' prostate (seriously, i've had my dick and balls cut off and i still need to take a pretty high dose of flomax) i don't see any reason not to take advantage of it. i'm actually not super fond of prostate orgasms but stimulation is nice enough. i haven't yet had a flesh and blood dick in my ass - i'm not averse to it but it's not something i particularly crave either. i like anal reasonably well enough that it's one of the reasons i didn't feel it was important for me to get a full-depth vaginoplasty, in the sense of "hell, if i want to get fucked, i already got a perfectly good orifice for it". a lot of trans women feel differently!

i do actually enjoy anal topping! maybe it doesn't really count since i don't top with my dick (for obvious reasons). the stereotype about trans women is that we're all bottoms, and it's not true - i'm vers, myself. maybe it's just that everybody wants a trans woman who tops with her dick and most of us have terrible dysphoria about the stupid thing and would really prefer not to top with it. i do have a harness and i do like anally topping that way. i can see how it might seem weird, if you look at a strap-on as nothing more than a substitute penis, but i don't look at it like that, myself. not only do i not get dysphoria from it like i did from my factory equipment, i actually get euphoria from it. it just feels, i don't know, _right_.

oh you guys are sweet xp you all sorted my thoughts out

i also liked that post, J0rdan. it gets at what i love about topping, and bottoming, too. tho admittedly i think might like getting smacked around a lot more.

kate, i agree with you in many ways re: oppression olympics

So this is a weird thing to talk about and I didn't expect to do it here.

Me and my girlfriend fell in love this past weekend.

It wasn't some kind of meet cute, out of the blue thing. We've been together for six months. We've actually worked really hard to try and have as healthy a relationship as we can. We both got a serious history of codependency and enmeshment. For us to get together was an objectively stupid idea. We both recognized it and went in with pretty low expectations. For the first couple months pretty much all we did was hold each other and cry. The whole thing... we've worked really hard to respect each other's boundaries, allow each other autonomy, express our needs without expecting the other person to meet them and have just slowly grown to trust and care about each other more through that process. Going into the weekend, we loved each other and had long-term plans to be together (technically she's sleeping on my couch in my tiny apartment now, but that's a temporary thing, half of us are homeless and can't afford Portland rents and don't have anyplace to stay, she's moving out in a couple months). We've certainly spent lots of time together, done lots of things together.

I mean, for me, it's enough to love somebody. I don't need or, well, particularly _want_ to fall in love. It's temporary, it's a distraction, but you know, fuck, it feels _so good_ to be in love. I'm not sure if I was in love with my ex. It was a long time ago. The memory cheats.

I've just been kind of sitting here waiting for the con drop to hit, everybody gets con drop, and it hasn't, and it's not until today that it hits me that oh, wait, I'm in love. Of all the ways to fall in love. I'm just imagining trying to explain to friends the circumstances in the future. I'll, uh, spare y'all too many details.

One of the things that I think people... misconstrue about kink is to think of it as some sort of Venus in Furs thing, that it's some sort of dark, doomy, _edgelord_ shit. I mean, it's not that "Venus in Furs" is _wrong_ about kink particularly, that's certainly part of it for a lot of people. Some dark, heavy shit does get involved. I saw (and in some cases did) things that, I mean, I'm not going to describe because a lot of people would be horrified by them. A lot of trauma too, a lot of healing from trauma happens through kink, which again _isn't therapy_. It's just something people do.

But it's like... you know, just with gender, what gets centered isn't the euphoria, it's the _dysphoria_. People center the pain and don't talk about the joy. I went into the room where the really extreme stuff happened, and one person, some stuff was happening to them and the way they were experiencing it was as something fun and playful, just kind of smiling and laughing about it. You go meet some of us and a lot of us aren't stern and gloomy, we're just, like, _nerds_, and this is something we're nerdy about. I'm just about the least cool person you could ever imagine.

Anyway, next to them, I saw someone who was very concentrated, stoic, but then when the scene ended they just had this look of utter serenity, and the partners who were doing those things to them just hugged them. There was emotional catharsis, closeness, _intimacy_ in what they were doing, and even though it's not stuff I would particularly want to do just feeling that _joy_ vicariously, it was infectious. Shadows and light, you know?

My experience with my girlfriend was much closer to the former. We weren't out to do anything super intense or heavy. Just, you know, trying stuff out and seeing what happened.

One of the things that hit me today (FIGURATIVELY) at my regular Thursday morning coffee group is that... I'm not sure it was even _sex_, honestly. I mean, in a physical sense, of course, sure, I'm not trying to rules-lawyer what we did into something pure and chaste. It absolutely wasn't. What I mean is, I'm not sure I processed it _neurologically_ as sex. At a certain point, and for me, in the right environment, it can be a pretty low point, I stop processing pain as pain, it just turns into pure undifferentiated _sensation_, just like a sine wave of feeling. It never occurred to me that this implies that... I don't experience pleasure in the sense that I do when I'm, I don't know, not doing the "no thoughts head empty" thing. It didn't feel like sexual pleasure, I wasn't ever going to cum from it. It was... like I'm not going to say "better" than sex, that's a stupid value judgement, but that sort of experience is way more _valuable_ to me than sex. From what I can tell a lot of people don't get to feel that way, like, ever. It certainly wasn't anything I ever felt before transition.

And I don't know, ever since the weekend we've been all moony-eyed over each other, just disgustingly cute. It's a nice change of pace. It's been kind of a hard year in a lot of ways.

i don't mean this to sound flip, but i feel like i'm reaching new heights of gentle, loving connection ..... with my cat.

love you, sarge

My essential queerness, I've realized, is my preference for aloneness with constant refreshment: friends, a trick or three for a few months. But I've wondered recently to what degree these habits are borne out of fear of sexual commitment? When I fuck around it's mostly oral; when it's top to bottom I almost always top. I've avoided relationships in anticipation of assuming that sooner or later I'll have to bottom, but, as I wrote yesterday, when I consider it I still feel the stench of death in my nose.

Maybe my reluctance to commit rests on my reluctance to -- my fear of -- submit, in many areas.

Sorry if this is awkwardly expressed.

it makes sense to me alfred! i think it's one of those things where only you know the answer, but also one of those things where asking the question is necessary before an answer is possible, so it's cool that you're asking the question!

It makes sense to me too. I have had a lot of good sex, but have had a life-long desire for - and simultaneous fear of - sexual intimacy

hey so farm banker from fruita has been feeding us a lot of exciting thruple energy the last few days. we're mailing underwear to each other.

dear queers, you're going to a sunday tea dance. what songs do you want to hear?

Happy birthday to Morbius/Bill in gay heaven. P.S. To map, Bucks Fizz: "I Hear Talk."

oh nice!!!

Jamie Principle -- "Waiting On My Angel."

hell yeah

The U.S. Remix of Talk Talk "It's My Life", please.

I'm writing a paper on death disco for Pop Conference and it figures heavily. I never get tired of it. xpost

i loooooove “i hear talk”!!!

i would love to hear this gorgeous nugget that i rank up there with erasure’s best singles tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goHXRs4haS0

perfecto!

I played a sequence tonight that I would TOTALLY tea dance to:
I’m Not In Love - Scherrie Payne
If You Could Read My Mind - Viola Wills
In The Name Of Love - Sharon Redd

💋

omg hi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

what a shit show of a month. anyone with me?

mine was pretty good, but tell me about yours.

are we feeling pride this year or nah?

i'm busy djing during pride week here and definitely not going out voluntarily lol even though i would like to see crystal waters.

i'm a little tired of the pride posturing i see in my city. a certain person doing an alternate pride called 'riot'. hon it isn't a riot, it's a clout and moneymaker thing for your personal career with local business sponsors instead of bud light or whoever.

like i just want to stayyyy innnnn or get out into the boonies, fuck all you exhausting people lmao

there’s a big pride concert in weho this year with good headliners but i ultimately don’t want to deal with the festival thing. i’m sure i will attend the usual pride social events here though. my fave is dyke day which is taking place at the park next to my house again this year, which works out beautifully for me lol. this weird ginned-up culture war thing that’s happening all over right now is so depressing/irritating tho and i can’t shake the feeling it’s just gonna somehow escalate over the next month and cast a pall over everything. i mean i guess it kinda has already.

i’m flying solo for pretty much all of june - husband is doing a biking/writing trip in NY state for the whole month. considering a little weekend trip somewhere while he’s off, like to long beach or san diego or something for a night or two.

i sure don't know what my thoughts on pride are! i guess i always have a decent time? i'm kind of a cheerleader at heart so i think people appreciate the morale boost when i'm around lol.

well map i don't even know what to tell you, work got insane and then i was hit with one of the worst anxiety / depression spells i've had in a while. i think i am JUST NOW sliding past it, with all hope from the galaxy.

love hearing everyone's updates!

donna i love your ideas for june while the hubby is away!

hai gays

I'm gay camping this weekend. I just arrived.

oh that sounds nice, where does one gay camp in florida?

surm hon i'm glad you're sliding past it. donna, little trips are on my list for the summer too and feeling very necessary.

Things like this are certainly exposing the rhetorical limits of the corporatization of Pride: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise-pressure-trans/index.html

But I'm not entirely sure what the (non-anarchic) alternative is in this particular culture war?

xp <3 <3

how's everyone's romantica adventures?

husband and i are going to western co this weekend to "hang" with cute farm banker, who i have mentioned previously in this thread :D

omg "hang" he said

how fascinating!

do you think you'll like make out?

possibly ;)

i sent him an old jock in the mail last week 🤫

omg lol

we sexted about it while i was eating hamburgers on sunday night. anyway i think it's probably game on. i'm more worried about outdoor activities together since we all like to do different things.

Saludos from Clewiston!

https://i.imgur.com/zjaPXRH.jpg

I'm here btw: https://vitambi.com/

oh that looks lit!! is it a 'natural' resort?

Doing fine here,
lovely to see you Swen.

actually everything is cuckoo but i am dealing with it okay 🙂

we go to Hawai’i to visit my husband’s family next week… with my parents, who have never met anyone from the Chinese-Native Hawaiian side of his family. should be lovely but also a little insane, he has like a gazillion relatives, but we’re staying at a chill hotel away from Waikiki.

Lovely!

But I'm not entirely sure what the (non-anarchic) alternative is in this particular culture war?

― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.)

i got into real trouble with my friends defending target here

the allyship we need is for allies to be willing to literally put their lives on the line for us, because goddamn our lives _are_ on the line every day and there's only so much we can do about that

if target corporate leadership wants to mitigate the effects of this on their underpaid retail workers in states where the risk is particularly acute... the optics of it are shit but honestly, when it comes to things that worry me about florida "target moved their queer merch to the back of their stores" is not at the top of the list.

a lighter post.

My friend was telling me last night about this podcast.

"They ask you a hundred questions, and the last one is always this: You're sentenced to death. How do you want to go - death by blowjob, or death by hamburger?"

"Mmmm. I'd love to choke to death on a big fat cock."

"That's... not what they mean by that question."

"WELL THEN THEY NEED TO BE SPECIFIC ABOUT IT."