white teeth + slowjobs in 90s suburban america
are all mistakes just actions produced from mindless haste?
are all mistakes just actions produced from mindless haste?
conscious or not, it seems the choice is always ours to move faster than we want or intend.
i remember sleeping in the same bed with many of my male friends well into high school. as an only child, i think it felt good to have a kind of brotherly companionship. these nighttime trysts were mostly platonic – though a few times, under the influence of teenage alcohol consumption, they took a more sexual turn. i always filed these moments of my life as incidentals – they were the outliers from the statistical norms of my determined heterosexuality. i remember my parents walking in one morning to find me sleeping next to my best friend and awkwardly asking us if we were experiencing some kind of ‘lifestyle change.’
i was used to people thinking i was gay. i went through a period of kissing my friends’ penises when i was around 7 years old. we always did it in the third-row seats of our parents’ white, full-sized SUVs. we thought we were so sly, unbuckling ourselves and slinking into the back below the sightline of the rearview mirror. there amongst the wafting scent of pre-millennium manufacturing – fresh auto upholstery and the off-gassing of our Jansport backpacks – we would pull down each other’s pants and put our genitals in each other’s mouths for fleeting and thrilling moments of sexual curiosity. the exploration was always more ecstatic than any of the physical sensations ever were.
my friend’s mom used to ask me why my teeth were so white. at the time, i was always confused by the question but defaulted to the thought she was genuinely interested in my oral hygiene routine. in retrospect, i realize that she was suggesting that my teeth were white because i was giving her son blowjobs and that his non-existent ejaculation was having a miraculous bleaching effect. a great jest to exact on an unaware 7-year-old.
i remember one time her teenage daughter flat-out accused me of being gay in front of a car full of all my friends. what little i knew of being gay, i adamantly denied simply because everyone laughed at me like someone just accused me of being illiterate.
it was the 90s and the only allusions to homosexuality to be found in my version of suburban upper-middle-class America at the time were Fred Flinstone and Barney Rubble. at least, that was the example that was elicited to us whenever anyone asked what being gay meant or was. which honestly, didn’t make much sense nor does it still, given that the pair were clearly straight, pseudo-neolithic males with wives and families. if memory serves, they were just two men who liked each other and spent a lot of time together. my young mind tossed, turned, and twisted around the notion: what did it mean about me that i liked to spend most of my time with my male friends? and now that we were secretly copulating with each other… i knew i was in trouble. whatever statistical deviance that was brewing in my loins must be immediately quelled lest it be exposed for a more thorough (self)analysis and (self)antagonizing.
“i managed to stuff my pre-pubescent queerness into the deep pockets of my sagging basketball shorts for the better part of a decade."
as if my misguided quest to become a future NBA star somehow exonerated me of the excitement i once felt from touching tummy sticks. it wasn’t until i stopped playing sports in high school that my queerness re-emerged as one of the preeminent suburban plagues of the oughts known as metrosexuality. certainly, we all remember the great threat to social stability latent within men’s unexplored desire to care for their bodies and dress in a gender-non-conforming manner. i let my friends dye the tips of my hair blonde, do my eye makeup, and allowed their mothers to drive me over an hour to the nearest Hollister for weekend shopping hauls.
it wasn’t until well into my thirties that i took the time to collage together my own queer personal history into any kind of cohesive narrative. i never had any kind of massive revelatory moment or felt like i was cockstruck by god themself. (if you’re interested in the notion of god as a ‘them’, i highly recommend picking up a copy of Tarka Journal, On Queer Dharma, and flipping to the article called God is Queer, masterfully penned by Jacob Kyle). my queerness came on slowly, like soil erosion in the Badlands. before i knew it, the sands of time had exposed me to myself. all that was left for me to do was accept it. to welcome in a new reality like an old friend patiently waiting on my doorstep to be invited in. a process that continues to unfold for me… but slowly. oh so slowly. i guess you can’t force a flower to bloom by pulling apart the petals.
my queerness has always existed like some kind of unsightly social ill inside me. every time i came across it, my internalized shame embodied itself as Hyacinth Bucket in ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ trying to reign in her menacing husband, “come along dear.” come along, as in, let’s not pause here too long, lest anyone should spend an appropriate amount of time trying to suss out the reality of the situation. or see us. or we see ourselves. god forbid we linger long enough to truly get to know and understand ourselves, our motivations, and our deepest desires.
“as i learn to lean gently and intentionally into my pansexuality as an adult male, i have moments of imbued shame where i look back at my sexual history as some kind of error – a decades-long mistake."
“if only had i known then what i know now, i would have done things so differently.”
this brings me back to the original sentiment that guided this piece of writing: what we often deem as inadvertent consequences of our regular habitual behaviors are usually mired in our lack of awareness, intentionality, and pacing. i still make mistakes even when i’m being careful, but i can admit to myself that the vast majority of the time, my errors are a result of simply moving too fast for my own good – my own health and my most total self-expression.
i am certainly not trying to layer on any additional shame onto myself or anyone else out there who is exploring the spectral nature of their sexuality or gender at any stage of their life, but i am recognizing and honoring my own desires to move more slowly as i age. in that newfound and celebrated slowness, i have finally allowed myself to uncover parts of myself that i was simply moving too quickly to acknowledge and integrate. i believe strongly that this speed is a learned behavior, no different than the predominant narratives around sexuality still clinging to the vestiges of fabricated normativity. in fact, what i’m alluding to in this piece is that perhaps they go hand-in-hand.
i’ll leave you with a poem i wrote almost 10 years ago now. little did i know then that i would be referencing and sharing it again within this new context.
in a fast and
reckless world:
to do anything
slowly,
and with great
care,
is a rebellious act –
is a resistance
that will make you
strong –
is a kind of worship
that will draw
sacred marrow
from the bones
of the ordinary.
