I attend the girlies night at Wet on Wellington for research purposes. Mimi comes with me because
she supports me, and has a thing for watching people be intimate in 25m lap pools.
We avoid the video lounges because we’ve both sworn off porn in the new year. Mimi wants to spend
time in the sauna but I decline because of La Niña. Do viruses spread faster in the heat, or does it kill them?
There is nothing more abject
than contracting COVID-19
at the gay sauna.
Lately, I’m obsessed with going out into the world. It’s because I’m reading Delany’s Times Square
Red, Times Square Blue, which posits that a healthy community depends on interclass encounters
(contacts), like the kind that happen in Times Square’s pornographic theatres. Gay sex is just
another nuance of urban life, and I’m wondering, where are the porn theatres for the girlies? And do
we even want them?
Mimi and I fuck in one of the private rooms upstairs. Mid-session, she does a bump of coke. I don’t,
because I’m driving. There’s a certain kind of privacy that being on drugs affords her. I’m jealous, I
whine. She says nothing, and sucks on my earlobe.
To quote Lauren Berlant: There is nothing more public than having sex in a private room at W.o.W.
With three of Mimi’s fingers inside of my vagina, it occurs to me that the sex act shielded by the
zone of privacy is the affectional nimbus heterosexual culture seeks to protect, and perhaps our
decision to fuck in one of the private rooms upstairs is not very gay of us.
Sometimes
it feels like everything
is always about
fucking.
The sex ends when Mimi notices I’m distracted. We get dressed and go downstairs. At the bar, she
gets a Sprite and I get a Coke with a paper straw. We slow dance to Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing
Compares 2 U with the other lesbians.
When my paper straw gets soggy and I can no longer use it to drink my Coke, we decide to leave.
While making our way out, one of Mimi’s rings falls off her finger and into the pool. A group of
three girlies canoodling in the corner stop canoodling momentarily to search for the ring. One of
them finds it, passes it up to Mimi, and importunes us to join them.
Three lesbians
sailing toward
a single destination
— pleasure.
Mimi declines their offer, and tells me she prefers to live life with one other person at a time. This is
why she doesn’t want group-sex.
On the way home we share a Filet-O-Fish from McDonald’s. Mimi says she’s extra horny in the
summertime and I tell her it’s because of the rising average global temperature and that soon, it will
be too hot to have any sex at all.
