On Being a Masc Top From Rural Oklahoma

This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.


Let’s call her H.

She took me to dinner at the horse racing track. Twenty-four years my senior and from a family of jockeys, she looked it — small, stacked. I liked the way she leered at my cleavage, the fullness of my chest I often hid, and encouraged me to finish what was on my plate. The deep set crinkles at the corner of her eyes and her leopard print heels.

In her car, she said: Can’t we just make out a little? And when we did, because I liked her wheedling tone most of all, she bit me, and I liked that, too.

Kayla says: I’m surprised they haven’t run you out of Oklahoma yet, and we all laugh.

In my bed, she says: I’d like to fuck you. When she texts me anything sexual she spells fuck, “fck,” as if this clears her of all culpability.

I’d like to fuck you, she says. With a strap-on, she clarifies. Would you like that?

She makes no move to even try to finger me, or to remove my hands from her body.

Sit on my face, I say, instead of answering.

In the afterglow, I lay on my back, head propped up by a pillow. The same pillow she had steadied herself on while she moaned and, at the end, screamed. What noises did I make? None, most likely. The sound of the blood pulsing in my ears was the only thing I could hear, the rest vibrations I knew how to interpret.

Where’d you learn to eat pussy like that? she asks.

I laugh. A book, I say, and mean it.

This happened before, when I was in college. You’ve fucked every lesbian sorority girl in Oklahoma, someone tells me on an app.

Well, I said. Probably not all of them, right?

What happens, this time, is I meet a girl for ice cream, and she’s fine, if not awkward. Under the table, my legs are spread. I don’t want anything serious, she says.

Of course, I say. Me either. But I like to be very clear about these things.

Sure, she says. But isn’t that making it serious?

It’s just a conversation, I say. No one is asking anybody to get married.

She laughs, and I am gratified.

For a long time, I half-convinced myself I was a bottom. Or, not that, but something that removed the personal responsibility of my want, of the full force and brunt of it. What I wanted, in fact, was to be nothing at all. For didn’t I know better than anyone to take on an identity was, in some way, to damn yourself over and over again?

What do you want? someone asks.

To make you come, I say.

And?

I’ll think about it.

The girl from the ice cream parlor comes over to my house on the first snowy day of winter. We sit on my couch and talk about our days. Mine, writing, suffering in the hands of the federal government. Hers, talking to her sister, thinking about where she would like to go next. She seems uninterested in my writing, in my books, in my cats. I don’t mind this. There is, of course, a reason we’re here, in my little blue duplex.

I don’t touch her, just watch her from where she sits across from me. Her hands shake a little.

Are you alright? I ask. You know we don’t have to do anything.

She is silent for a moment. It’s just, she begins — my last relationship with a woman, it wasn’t great.

Ah, I say. I’m sorry.

I think about the word, woman. I think about the ways in which it has never applied to me, and all the ways that it does. Mostly, though, I think, we’re definitely not fucking today. I feel fine about this. It’s better this way. When she leaves, I’ll go to my room and pretend that I have a dick, and that will be fine, too. The sour taste it leaves in my mouth, the deep discomfort of my body — I am most beautiful in my suffering.

Instead of making her exit, though, she surprises me. She begins to describe, in great detail, why this relationship was bad, and what this person, this woman, had inflicted upon her. Apparently, this woman’s ex, who was not really an ex, was tall, broad, didn’t cry when they broke up (over the course of three hours), and had, it seemed, fucked her up beyond recognition, emotionally, by the sheer fact of breaking up with her, though they only “dated” for two months.

It sounds too familiar, and I am curious to my very bones, and so, I can’t help but saying, a little drolly: This state, man, I bet I know her.

The girl from the ice cream parlor laughs, says: You probably do. Her name is C.

Oh fuck, I say.

Thank you for letting me process with you, she says.

Sure, I say.

It’s terrible how she treated you, she says.

I probably deserved it, I say.

Sometimes, when writing an essay, I switch to the second or the third person. This distance, the ability to stretch what I mean and what I say into something that someone, somewhere, could technically embody, makes me feel better about everything I have ever done. When people ask me how I write about what I do, how I choose what to share and what to keep hidden, I tell them that what people connect with most, what they email me about, is my shame and my grief, my humiliation, and perhaps most of all, the gentle prod of humor in those worst moments.

A masc top born and raised in rural Oklahoma, that early death capital, walks into a bar and —

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Autumn Fourkiller

Autumn Fourkiller is a writer and mystic from the “Early Death Capital of the World.” She is currently at work on a novel about Indigeneity, the Olympics, and climate change. A 2022 Ann Friedman Weekly Fellow, her work can be found in Atlas Obscura, Majuscule, Longreads, and elsewhere. You can follow her newsletter, Dream Interpretation for Dummies, on Substack.

Autumn has written 20 articles for us.

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