In 1992, just before the ninth grade I got braces. And headgear, which I was told to endure for 22 hours a day, but only wore at night because I just couldn’t wear the contraption to school. My orthodontist hung polaroids of his patients in their various stages of orthodonture on the wall near the bathroom of his office and one day I noticed a new photo. He was cute and about my age, in denim over a white T-shirt. His hair was gelled into spikes and his bright eyes and smile beamed out at me from the photo. The name on the bottom of the Polaroid read Sarah, and before a next thought could fully form, as I realized this boy was a girl, my youthful cunt swelled. My normally pale face flushed in spite of myself and I looked around to see if anyone else had seen what I’d just felt. Before this moment I’d had no idea Sarahs existed out in the world and my being tingled as I took her in. Sarah, whose parents had let her get that haircut and wear that outfit. Behind my arousal, the rest of me filled with shame. As I laid back in the chair to get my braces tightened, mouth agape, I simultaneously tried to push Sarah out of my thoughts and hoped our appointments would sync up and bring us together at last. I knew I was supposed to be attracted to Jason Batemen, a Sean, or a Cory maybe, the male teen celebrities of my time. And I probably would’ve been had they been socialized as Veronicas or Heathers. Because these arousals were a wordless fringe in my youth, and for many years after I still had no language for them – and there was no internet – I copied my sister and pretended to be attracted to your Mario Lopezes and Mark-Paul Gossalars instead of Frankenferter, Freddy Mercury, and Sarah. 

Had I not been acting primarily out of hiding shame and forcing myself into the shell the world wanted me to be, I could’ve been exploring, learning, and honing the skills of my long fingers and meeting others like me. But just being gay back then was something you prayed to God that you weren’t. I didn’t even know how to pray to God about the other stuff. 

I like to identify as bi-curious but that’s just for fun really, because I like the mouth feel of that label and all the cuteness it conjures in my head. But the truth is that what stirs my loins, what arouses me, is what the kids now call genderqueerness. I didn’t have that word in the 90s as my hormones were turning on and my overbite was being wrenched with wire and cement. I quiver for an interesting life story and when people don’t fit neatly into their assigned boxes. Young me fought this vulnerable personal truth and my own queer little part in it, hoping denial would yield a more traditional and acceptable outcome for my inclinations. 

Arousal is interesting isn’t it? My initial experience with it was a skirmish, and an invitation to be someone and something else. It’s not that I wasn’t turned on by the subsequent boyfriends or girlfriends of my youth, but something was just missing, like a good meal that would be an excellent one if it just had a squeeze of lemon. My sexual encounters with cis men rarely lasted long enough for me: just as I was fully aroused, he finished. Current me could take a stab at why, but it never registered back then to go finish myself off, either in the bed next to him or with a foot on the toilet, and a hand pressing into the vanity in my own delicious self-love session. To have allowed the partner sex, as Betty would say, be a warmup for masturbation. Instead, I laid in bed panting slowly and denying deeply, filled with a vast undistinguished need. 

In bed with a straight-but-curious woman sometimes meant I was audience to her performance, her cooing and staging of herself as she might for a boyfriend, with that practiced look on her face, the way I’d also staged myself for boyfriends. Or maybe she told me how small and tight her pussy was. Or maybe she just laid there and didn’t move. One lesbian I dated wouldn’t let me see or touch her body. And another left me one afternoon to get back together with her ex. 

The sugarplum visions I now have when I think of full arousal is an afternoon swollen and dripping. It’s a dewy yet solid knowing that I need the fractal space with other in-between fractally people. Full arousal is my brain sliding onto the floorboards below the backseat and my cunt taking the wheel, driving us down the scenic mountain roads of erotic expression and deviation in the pouring wet rain or drowsy smoldering sun, he doesn’t really care, she fancies many kinds of weather. They enjoy the journey for the journey’s sake as long as the adventure is winding, bent, timeless, and tilted. 

Anatomically speaking, my outer labia fill with blood and swell, doubling or tripling in size. And if this happens too quickly it’s painful but not in a bad way. My inner lips too can swell if sucked for a good long while, becoming deep purple and springy as they fill with blood. Pre-aroused, stimulation of my urethral sponge – the back of my clitoris – feels meh, to weird, to uncomfortable. But full arousal fills with blood that relentless walnut siren who speaks with my voice, and whose song and measure allows me to ride orgasm after orgasm. 

It was dark and loud but we’d found a darker little corner all to ourselves. We crouched down on the carpet just off the dance floor, knees bent to our chests in the initial coyness of fresh attraction, heads cocked towards each other, mouths close but not quite grazing. We breathed a little sigh together. One of my favorite moments of being a human is just before lips touch for the first time. The lightening and churn and timelessness just before a first kiss is a lifetime in itself. The large ballroom was filled with homosexuals and queers of all stripes and visions, and a packed dance floor of bodies moving synchronistically with one another. You could taste the rhapsodic energy in the air, the expression that got to flow out of us when we were with our own kind. And there were enough of us to create a buffer from the rigid normalcy we’d survived to arrive at this place together, from the clean lines we were forced to draw outside this space, outside this weekend. I pressed my body into theirs, straddling their lap, and lapped at their mouth with my own. Their hands found my bare waist and ribs and their tongue met mine. I pulled their head closer, continuing to kiss and suck at their face, caressing their mouth with my lips. My other arm wrapped around them, fingers discovering the length of their spine. We barely knew each other so all I had to go on was the idea of them, the muse of them. We had the now that was in front of us, this little private moment of ours amid the crowd of gay splendor. This remarkable creature, and the dance floor behind me filled with a hundred splendid stars and beams of moonlight. I wanted to reach a hand up their shirt and feel the heat of bare skin and another between their legs, to draw their zipper down and touch what was surely sweet and delightful, and maybe one day I would, but not this night. Though the arc of my life had brought me to stand firm in my own queer delight, it was so late and I had such an early morning. 

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