Sex is always a lifelong learning process; we’re all just out here doing our best, etc etc. Sometimes though, as you’re fumbling toward ecstasy going through your life as a queer person who has queer sex, you stumble across something that changes EVERYTHING – it makes you feel like something never has before, or totally opens up your perspective about what sex can be or is. Here are some of our stories about those moments. [Law and Order sound]
Bailey Writer
Did you know hickeys are one of most common sex injuries? I’d always felt owned or claimed by people leaving marks on my body without permission. Something about the act always felt like the marking of territory. I recently discovered there’s something really sexy about letting a committed partner leave “love bites” in inconspicuous places on my body, that only we know about, especially when we are long distance. When we see each other, we have meaningful experiences of intimacy and quality time and then there’s this additional thrill of seeing the marks left on my body during the days after we hug and cry goodbye. I’m a soft sentimental boi at heart and the mix of giving permission, knowing they’re in secret places and seeing them for days (sometimes weeks if we’re lucky) after make me feel, as us Brits would say, peng.
danijanae Writer
I had an on and off sexual relationship with this woman that made me realize I loved dommeing. There’s something so sexy about that power: to be on top of someone and watching them squirm with pleasure and beg you for more. Also there was lots of squirting involved and that I loved loved LOVED. Total fireworks moment.
Ro White Sex & Dating Editor
When I was in college, a cute girl pushed me against the wall to kiss me and accidentally bit my lip. I immediately asked her to do it again.
Rachel Lewis Writer
I always thought of myself as a kind of lowkey bottom/pillow princess, but that really drastically switched for me once I started experimenting and pushing my partners a bit. I’ve come to realize that even though I’m a control freak in real life, I’m also a control freak in bed (even though people say it’s the opposite), and I am now committed to one sexual act: getting my partner off while I get myself off. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life and I’d be happy doing it forever and ever.
Renea Baek Goddard Writer
Where do I start? The first time I knew I was gay, it was hot, sticky, dark, and cramped. It was just like teenage me to fool around with someone two years older, in the tiny attic of a high-rise apartment in the middle of a humid Korean summer. Everything smelled like moth balls and fabric softener, but my newly-acquired girlfriend*—yes, I thought, a girlfriend!—smelled like Marlboro Ice Blast and rice liquor. To both my delight and terror, my partner’s aggressively homophobic mother was just downstairs. Something excited me about how blissfully unaware she was, how she had no idea that directly above her, her child had me shaking at their fingertips, how her child had to cove my mouth to muffle the moans. For the first time in my life, I felt dirty in a good way. My partner made me feel things in places I didn’t even know existed.
I had never been touched. I had wanted to be for a long time. But I hadn’t known who, or what, I wanted to be touched by, until that moment.
All I knew was that girls comforted me immensely and also scared the living shit out of me. They were closer and more familiar to me than anything in the world, and yet, for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to change with them in the locker room. At the time, it seemed to me that girls had some kind of lovely secret that I wasn’t supposed to know, and maybe I’d instantly catch on fire—or possibly go blind—if my unworthy self were to discover that secret, somewhere among the training bras and panties and Charming Cherry Blossom body spray in the locker room.
But honestly: it was the goofy girls, the tough girls, the troublemaking girls, the girls who always played soccer with the boys and had shaggy hair and wore cargo shorts, that made me melt completely. The way men stared at me had always made me want to disappear; seeing their looks of approval turned my stomach, and the few times their hands ended up on me, they felt clumsy and eager. To me, men lived in the shadows of tomboys—those rebellious, heroic girls whose attention I wanted more than anything in the world.
Then, when I was 20, the love of my life (who I did not know was the love of my life yet), gingerly unlaced my shoes and took them off. She smelled like Camels and crisp denim and fresh herbs. She kissed my ankles, my legs, then my thighs. I dragged my long nails through her short, curly hair, and traced her strong shoulders. She slid her hands over my curves like she already knew my body, with a tenderness and a strength I had seen many, many times, but had never felt like this before. When she put her mouth on my pussy, the air left my body. It was just like me to fool around with someone five years older than me, then immediately fall in love.
I had been with women before, but no one had ever handled me so gently and fucked me so good. I never would have thought someone could assert dominance in bed in such a soft and sensual way. The love of my life later told me that she lives by a mantra: “”Always fuck like you’re doing an audition.””
I’ve fucked more times than I can count, and I knew I was gay since my very first. But it took just two of those times to make me want to be somebody’s femme. Later, when the love of my life was reading Stone Butch Blues to me, a quote caught my eye: “”Butches are the tenderest lovers.””
*I called him my girlfriend back then. Two years after we broke up, he started transitioning and came out to me as a gay trans man. By then, I had figured out that I’m a lesbian. We’re friends now! Funny how things just work out sometimes, but never the way you expect it to.
Reneice Charles Writer
I was really nervous about letting partners eat my ass for years and finally trusted myself and someone else enough to try it. Wow. That night changed things! I felt things I’d never felt! Made sounds I’d never made! I thought it would take warming up to but it was an immediate success and I never say no when it’s offered now. Plus knowing how good it can feel opened me up to offering others the experience as well.
Shelli Nicole Culture Editor
I’m gonna get right into it, the first time I was strapped by a woman — the correct way.
I had sex with my ex who was my first real relationship. With her was the first time I had ever been strapped and it was not good. I was nervous and confused as I liked the penetration but the idea of having a penis inside me made me uncomfortable in my sexual identity. She didn’t fully understand that but I continued to do it because I wanted to make her happy.
Obviously we broke up.
After we did I started to actively figure shit out for myself what I liked as a queer woman when it came to sex. I learned and listened to my mind and body, I listened a lot and biiiiiittttccchhhhh I was ready.
I met a woman who I wasn’t in a relationship with but we hung out a lot, chilled and had a lot of sex. We met on OkCupid and at the time were both working retail on the same schedule – so it worked.
She told me one night she wanted to strap me and I agreed because I was ready and at first I was nervous – but she talked to me, she asked how I was, asked if I actually wanted this and it made me relax. She made me feel safe in wanting to be penetrated by her and I didn’t feel confused by wanting the sensation. I wanted to be filled by her, this woman and the phallic object that she had strapped on between her legs.
No confusion, just orgasms.
I learned that it was something I was allowed to want and still be a lesbian-identifying woman.
The more we had sex, with or without the strap, I learned to say what I wanted. We practiced saying what I didn’t like as well as listening to her in what she wanted as well.
She taught me to love communication.
I do like strap-on sex still and because of her I feel strong in saying that because before her it wasn’t something I was ok with admitting – or requesting – to and from others.
In the end we didn’t work because she was ready for something far more serious than I. We didn’t leave on bad terms but she said she wasn’t able to be friends and I had to learn respect that.
I reached out a few times and she never responded I think of her here and there but mostly just happy for what she taught me about myself.
Vanessa Friedman Community Editor
This is a fairly quiet story in the realm of my sex stories – it’s not about fisting, or rope, or the beautiful bruises that bloomed on my tits the first time someone finally hit me hard enough. It’s not even about owning the label kinky, one that I didn’t feel comfortable grabbing onto until fairly recently, if we’re being honest! Nonetheless, when I think about sexual encounters that really taught me who I am and what I like, this one comes to mind.
I was still a baby dyke, had not had too many sexual partners yet. I’d had one major breakup and was dating someone new, and this new girl fucked me like I had never been fucked before. She made me feel so good in my body, so present, so available for whatever she wanted to do to me and whatever she wanted me to do to her. I can see the layers now, obviously, can trace back the truth of being a kinky bottom to the very beginning of all the sex I’ve ever had, but I didn’t know then. I just knew there was this thing inside me that I wanted to explore, and I hadn’t had the words to tell my first girlfriend but I desperately wanted to tell this girl. I was nervous, but I had a feeling she would know what to do with my desire, not because I thought she was an expert top (I didn’t know what those words meant, then!) or even necessarily had the same interest, but because I felt like she cared about me and wanted to make me feel good. I felt so safe with her.
We went on an overnight trip to a nearby town a couple of months into our partnership and we were sitting on an unfamiliar sofa in an unfamiliar living room when I decided to try to tell her. I was so shy and nervous I couldn’t make the words do what I wanted them to do. “Um,” I started. “Can I tell you a thing I like in bed?” She nodded. She kissed me. We couldn’t stop touching each other, she felt so good all the time. “I think I would kind of like it if you treat me like… uh… like I don’t want it? Or like I’m like, uh, bad? Like kind of like a slut, maybe? UmdoyouknowwhatImean?” She nodded again.
We were not all on Instagram talking about being tops or bottoms or posting that meme about liking vanilla sex vs needing to stick your foot in a bear trap to come (which, LOL) at this moment in my own personal gay history, and I was extremely terrified that she would think I was gross or weird or actually bad, not just the kind of bad you tell someone they are when you want to make them come, if they’re into that, you know? We didn’t delve into a major conversation around what I had said – we made out on the unfamiliar couch and we went to the unfamiliar bed and fooled around a little but we were tired and I was anxious and soon we fell asleep spooning. I wasn’t sure what would happen next, what she was thinking.
In the morning we woke up in the unfamiliar bed together and started fucking in that sleepy morning way you do when you like someone so much you can’t keep your hands off each other, even before you’re really fully awake, and soon I was on my stomach and she was on top of me, her hips pressed into my ass and her fingers finding my wetness and sliding in, first two, then three. She held herself over me while she fucked me and then she leaned down and said, very quietly, directly into my ear: “Do you like that?” I moaned. I did. “Yeah,” she continued, with a hard edge to her voice I had never heard before that exact moment. “Of course you do. You would.”
I don’t know how to explain what that did to my guts, to my cunt, unless you know exactly what I mean in which case, youknowwhatImean. It was so mind-blowing – however minor the shift, the fact that she had heard my request, listened and taken it in, and was willing to meet me at the edge of my desire so quickly and seemingly effortlessly filled my entire heart with gratitude. That morning was the beginning of something new, both for the way we would continue to fuck for the rest of our relationship and for my own brainheartcunt when it came to exploring my desire and what turns me on and how I can ask for exactly what I want and then – and this was the truly wild part – receive it.
I’m still so grateful for that quiet moment of kinky sex in that unfamiliar bedroom so many years ago; I always will be.
Riese Editorial
There’s nothing like sex to remind you that life is truly a never-ending journey of self-discovery! There was the girl who made me realize I was primarily attracted to masc women, the one who made me realize I was into loud femmes, the one who made me realize I was a submissive bottom, the one who made me realize I was an aggressive top, the one who made me think I had a low sex drive, the one who made me think I had an insatiable sex drive — all the smaller realizations too, about fisting, strap-ons, slapping, sexting, power-play — every long-term sexual relationship I have inspires me, at some point, to think “wow, how did I live without this before?” Which maybe ultimately just means there’s always more out there for us than our bodies have even dreamed of or known to dream of. Maybe it means that happiness or satisfaction with one person can be totally different than happiness or satisfaction with another person and both of those happy satisfactions can be completely fulfilling, even if it’s missing something you liked before with somebody else. Maybe sometimes the things we can live with or without are as fluid as come.
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Comments
When I finally got to slice the clothes off another person with a razor sharp knife, I knew I had found my calling. The first time gliding a blade over a woman’s skin was pure magic.
Thus spoke the Lady with at least one cutlass in her nightstand.
uh three cutlasses, actually. And a gladius. And maybe a serrated-backed machete.
Plus a hand ax.
Annnnd a half dozen knives….
And lip balm! And a nail file! Like any normal person!
….and some hand and skin desinfectant?
My go to joke re:online dating is, „You never know whether they have an axe at home..“ dum dum dum.
Thanks for that one, Snow.😂
The real terror is, “do they have Axe Body Spray at home”
*gasp* A nail file you deviant
FINE I HAVE THREE FILES AT LEAST, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW
When a file hits your nail like a shank on chainmail that’s emeryyyy
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, just a quiet request that for every ten or so articles we get of the “Sex is so great, this is how to get the kink ON!/Make it even BETTER!” variety, there’ll be a “I’m not getting any, am I even gay?” or a “Abuse is a bitch man, sex is like walking through a brambly forest barefoot” or even simply a “I have no fucking clue what I’m doing” article?
I’m all for sex positivity and emancipation and getting all of that kink on good or whatever, but I cannot be the only one who has had bad sex, difficult sex, awkward sex, sex with people who wanted completely different things, inexperienced sex, emotionally difficult sex, sex out of a feeling of obligation, body dysphoria while having sex and no sex at all.
It’s just food for thought or consideration, because I feel that there’s been a certain kind of culture around these parts (pun very much intended) that might add to pressure or feelings of insufficiency on one hand while the whole issue of sex could gainfully be explored from so many more angles.
More positions, on the subject so to speak, which might occasionally, be more uncomfortable.
“I cannot be the only one who has had bad sex, difficult sex, awkward sex, sex with people who wanted completely different things, inexperienced sex, emotionally difficult sex, sex out of a feeling of obligation, body dysphoria while having sex and no sex at all.”
You are not! I have had every bit of all of that.
Heartily seconding this request – I love all the sex-positive content, but would also really appreciate reading more perspectives from other people who have struggled, especially with things like trauma and negative social conditioning.
aaa! <3 <3 <3
yes, not to rain on the parade of this roundtable AT ALL (it's so great and yum) but i would also love to see more content like this.
Yeah I want to hear more about weird awkward and boring type experiences just because I cant really comprehend the reverse
Wow, some of these descriptions 🔥🔥🔥
Riese I LOVE everything you wrote but especially this: “Which maybe ultimately just means there’s always more out there for us than our bodies have even dreamed of or known to dream of.” YES INDEED, I’m 43 and still discovering new things all the time about what I’m capable of feeling and doing at the boundary where my skin meets the world.
More please, great topic
All of these answers are perfect, and riese your wrap-up answer is perfect perfect.
Bailey: Long distance lovers (re)unite! Thankyou for the tender and accurate reflection of sex under this lifestyle.
I don’t have thumbs anymore, I mean I still have my physical thumbs, but I ain’t got no AS thumbs, which makes me feel totally bereft. I’m so here for all of this.