At dinner recently a friend said their three favourite things are surfing, poetry and sex. And another friend said that these were all creative things, and that libidinal desire is about creating something.
When I started truly loving sex, it was in a relationship and in the relationship it sometimes felt like everything was sex. Sex was always happening, rolling sex. Doing anything together could become sex just by curving the neck, one of us curling into the other, the two of us curling together.
It was in this relationship that I discovered I have my version of a dick. There are these gestures that come so naturally to me during sex, that are like this presence of a dick I’ve never had. The curve of a hand or the way my pelvis pushes out, reaching. If I wear a strap on, the way I handle it has a natural tenderness. I push out my hips and look down and so does the person I’m fucking and the dick is their dick as much as it is mine and it’s filling a space between us.
I do not dream of having a dick but the way I want to have sex needs a dick. The clit, the dildo, the hands, the mouth, my thighs, my stomach, my face, I make them all a dick and they become dicks in no other sense of the word but what I make for myself in that moment. What the other person makes with me. The absence of a dick is a space to fill. The space is my dick. Not having a dick is a dick, something to continually create and so I am always ready to be libidinous. I know where to start.
Sometimes I have had sex with people and they seem to really want me to feel like I have a dick – you have a dick, they say, and it’s not a turn off but it just doesn’t mean as much to me as they think it does. It’s no longer about creating a dick, it becomes something static. There’s a very specific dick they’re referencing and it’s in fact the only dick I don’t actually have. The only sort of dick I don’t actually want. “You have a dick” – well, I simply don’t. But the talking around the dick, I want your dick, I love your dick, I can feel your dick, this is inventive, creative. Is my invented dick in the room with us now?
I am embarrassed sometimes by how long I spent a little bit repressed. How long it took to discover these important things about myself: gender, sexuality. It was so many years of thinking that I wasn’t living right, that I was wasting a life with no idea how to fix it. It feels so much by chance that I discovered this thing about myself that I worry I had nothing to do with it, but then equally, it’s also this miraculous gift that could have only come from me. The gift being just deciding one day, deciding or accepting or whatever it is, that I would no longer think of myself as a woman, which was this catalyst for, over time and years, making all these discoveries. I found my body and all its parts and some of the parts, some were changed by hormones or surgery, sure, but some changed just by thinking differently about them. Some made real just by imagining them.
In 2019, still newly loving sex, having just changed my name and in an era of feeling myself, I attended a writing workshop in Portland. One night, towards the end of the workshop, Garth Greenwell read the story ‘The Little Saint’ from then-unreleased Cleanness. No one had heard it before. We were all sitting outside in a large amphitheatre, drinking cold rose from plastic cups, the sun was setting around the enormous Douglas Firs. ‘The Little Saint’ is a horny story and as he read, there was atmospheric horniness. The air was thick with it, and I felt a part of it, perfectly in sync with everyone else’s sexuality. In ‘The Little Saint’, the narrator meets a young guy from a hookup app who says he wants to be used, he wants to be nothing but a hole, he says in his bio. The narrator is used to being the submissive one in sexual encounters but he is intrigued by this guy’s profile. So they meet, they go to the young guy’s sister’s apartment where he is staying on a makeshift bed in the living room. They fuck. The narrator fucks the young guy, he loves him and he dominates him. He traps the guy’s head between his thighs and fucks his face, he uses his belt to whip him. And as he does so he remembers being beaten by his father as punishment as a young boy. He feels rage and corrosive emotions bubble up, he’s shocked by them and fuelled by them and he keeps fucking the guy harder. At the end, when they’ve both come they fall back on the bed and the young guy says ‘that was so fucking good’ but the narrator starts to cry. He was wrong, he realises, to think those hot, angry feelings would have no end. There was an end and the young guy had brought him there. Embarrassed, he covers his face with his hands but the young guy realises he’s crying and climbs on top of him, trying to pull his hands away from his face. ‘Why be like that?’ he says. ‘Don’t you see. You don’t have to be like that, you can be like this.’ and he licks the tears from the narrator’s cheeks. It’s the best. The raw and rough parts of sexuality becoming sweet and tender.
There are still tensions in my life around sex and gender. But I’m not holding them, they are not conscious. I live with them and maybe one day, completely by surprise, unplanned by me, they’ll release. But I’m not living a lesser life by having them. This is what has changed, this is what has allowed me to create, just accepting this. The tensions are not a source of shame in themselves. My life won’t finally start, finally be full because the tensions have gone. The tensions are part of who I am and who I am is good, or fine, or just is. There’s nothing to grieve. Why be like that when you can be like this? Creating into absence, creating from absence, creating with absence. A sense of discovery into the void. Not just the dick thing, you understand, any void we might have, the space we’re continually inventing ways to fill. Perhaps it seems fruitless to continually fill what empties. Or maybe it’s thrilling, the invitation, the space for a new way to fill it. Creating the space by emptying it, creating the way to fill it, creating what comes when you do.
