(Originally published in Dear Boy Magazine Issue 03am, May 2018)
Dawn: for some people it means sliding out of a stranger's bed, crawling around the floor in search of their underwear then skulking down a street, staring into the window of every Prius hoping to find their Uber driver. For some it means waking up alone, by choice.When somebody close to me told me that not only she but also a number of friends were saving themselves for marriage I thought it was not just rare these days, especially for people her age, but surely very difficult. I thought there might be LGBTQ+ people choosing to do the same but after reaching out on Twitter, hunting through Meetup groups, calling churches and asking old friends, I found nobody.
Just before I gave up on the notion that we're not all the sex-obsessed animals that mainstream LGBTQ+ media would have us be, three brave men stepped forward.
This is one of their stories:
Sam, not his real name, is 23, out ("I can't say two words and stay in") and living in Manchester. He's chirpy, quirky, and by the end of the conversation I think he's pretty wise beyond his years, in contrast to one of the first things he tells me:
S: Once you get to a certain age and you've still not had sex It's kind of like, you know, you're seen as immature. There is a kind of barrier between me and a lot of my other friends who are gay because they've obviously had committed relationships, some have even got married so there's always something in my head that I feel like I’m not emotionally there yet. I'm not as mature as you guys. I know that sounds so stupid but I feel like I’m a child in comparison.
JP: Have you had any relationships?
S: Maybe two years ago I was seeing a guy; he didn’t want to make it official and stuff but when he turned around and was like we're ready to, you know, do it, I kind of wanted to make it official... And I remember he just freaked out about that and ghosted me a little bit all because I didn't have sex with him that one time.
Sam has had challenges with his mental health as well; a combination of these snowballing insecurities and the struggle to fit in with friendship groups, especially at university:
S: The conversation of sex would come up and I wouldn't be allowed to talk about it because you know “you're Sam you don't do that, you don't have sex, it's weird, ew.” And I was put in a down spiral because if I'm not allowed to feel confident or sexy around people and I can’t talk about it and I can’t act in a certain way, it put me in a state of "I'm not liked by anybody" so I ended up having to go to counselling. Every time I was anywhere I was thinking people were like ‘oh can you just go away you're not on our level’ and I even find that in the gay community.
JP: What about guys in Manchester, do they expect sex from you?
S: There is a group of gay guys I go out with but they're very much "I am masc4masc only". They get offers quite a lot when we go out; I find myself standing in front of someone's back usually. The minute we walk into G-A-Y they just whack their tops off and it's like great...I'm going to go invisible.
JP: When it comes down to it, have you got close to having sex? And what is it that’s stopping you?
S: Usually what happens is the other guy wants to but my reasoning for it is I'm doing that thing that all naïve 13-year-old teenage girls do and say "I'm waiting for that special person, I'm waiting for that one person to come into my life who I can be with and trust." Because it is quite a big deal. I want to get there on my own terms. I know for a fact I'm not being frigid, I'm not being uptight, I'm not closing people off I'm just waiting. I think if you put all your cards out on the table first night. I don't think I’d ever find somebody who'd want to stick around. I know that's an exaggeration but that's honestly another reason why I withhold myself because I think if we allow this to happen will you be around next week to say let's go out for a drink? Because I don't think you will be.
At the beginning of our chat I asked Sam if he felt he'd been pressured into having sex by guys and he told me that he hadn't. So the next story he told me, of a guy he met on Grindr in the early hours of a lonely morning, was troubling:
S: He came over baked off his tits and he was drunk and I didn't realise. It was one of those ones that went on and on and I was not feeling it in the slightest, there was no desire, I was totally turned off. He was asking to do really weird things…it was a nightmare.
It took a long time and fingers were in places that they shouldn't have been. Afterwards he literally just got up and left. He didn't say anything. In that moment I'll be honest I did curl up in bed and cry for a little bit, because I was made to feel totally like a cum-soaked rag. I was like ‘I don't want to do this anymore; I shouldn't have to put up with this.’
JP: And did you feel like you could say no during it? Or did you feel too uncomfortable?
S: Any kind of uncomfortable feelings I had I had to get rid of them because in that moment he was asking me to do really quite nasty stuff.
JP: What was he asking you to do?
S: Well, he asked me to take bowel movements on him. Which I wasn't going to do! And he kept asking to bite on things, asked if I had any items he could suck on while I was doing things. He was asking weird things and then he would try to have his way with me, put it like that. And I had to say ‘no we're not doing that.’ And he said ‘no we're doing it.’ And I'd say ‘no we're not doing it!’ And it did kind of, I was hoping it wouldn't become a rape situation. I had to put my foot down and I was scared, because he was trying to have his way with me. I was losing control of the situation. Fortunately, he went a little bit too crazy downstairs and he finished off there and then and it didn't have a chance to escalate, which I was so thankful for.
I worry that Sam doesn’t realise the seriousness of this guy's behaviour; that when he set off to Sam’s house "everything but" was not an option. That this story didn't instantly spring up in his mind invokes in me a fear that this kind of thing might be casually passed off as "just another Grindr disaster" across a glass of Pinot Grigio.
S: In myself, I feel emotionally immature in that I have not gone that way with men yet but loads of them have and I seem to be the one with the level head. Again, I feel like that should be flipped around; I feel that those who have got the level headed mind should be in a committed relationship, with an interest, and those that aren't in that shouldn't be getting what they get. I feel like I’m years behind in gay years, I feel like there's still that barrier that's stopping me from being like I'm on that same level. But that's something I need to break through myself really and that's what I'm working on.
Two other very brave men shared their inspiring and painful stories with me in the hopes that others like them may read it and know they’re not alone in the world. Read the rest of the interview on https://www.dearboymag.com/stories/
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