Queerness & Virginity

There’s no comfortable way to learn about sex. Whether it was a fumbling male P.E. teacher telling you how to put a condom on, or a Catholic educator telling you that the best contraception is abstinence, your introduction to sex education was probably pretty sub-par. Along with the awkwardness and the laughter though, is a large number of us who were just completely left out. If you’re queer, trans or any person that falls outside of the classic P into V situation, you may have launched into your sex life with no proper knowledge on what the fuck you were meant to be doing. 

I’ve known I was gay for a while, and a lot of my high school experience was spent kissing girls, wanting more, but not knowing how to go about it. This confusion and fear led to my first proper sexual experience involving me completely black out drunk at the age of 16, I woke up naked on top of my girlfriend at the time and slowly the events of the night before came back in patches. I want to emphasise that the experience was consensual, we were both just drunk baby gays scared to do the thing sober. When you’re queer there’s no clear way to define virginity. Penetration? Orgasm? Getting head? I’d definitely done a couple of those things that night, was I no longer a virgin? It sent me into a bit of a spiral about the validity of my sexual experience - did it really count as sex if there was no penis-like thing involved? To this day I’ve still never had sex with a man, I’ve never even touched someone’s dick. I can’t help but wonder if this makes my sex life less important than those gay people who have tried stuff with the opposite sex. 

The stupidest thing about all this, is that virginity doesn’t actually even exist. Just like my sex ed teacher’s religion, virginity is a made-up concept with sexist and homophoboic origins. With that being said, there’s no denying the social weight it carries in our society. We know it’s meaningless and stupid but that doesn’t stop us from wanting our first time to be magical. For most of us however, ‘magical’ is not a word we use to describe our first time. “It was pretty good, I mean my ass hurt but it felt like I had done it,” notes The Tatted Twink, a Massey student. Although their actual ‘virginity’ taking was fairly pleasurable, their first sexual experience was anything but. “My first actual queer experience was a terrible hand job, I’m talking the kind only Edward Scissorhands could give”, they recall. As much as first queer experiences can be uncomfortable and maybe even regretful, they can also be incredibly validating. “I felt validated that I knew I liked the taste of a woman. So weird to say it that way, but I really did feel a sense of security that I knew myself and knew I would like fucking a woman.” Liv, a third-year student shared with Massive. That feeling of validity or security is something a lot of us feel like we have to chase. It puts a lot of pressure on the encounters that we do have. Like, what does this mean? Have I just convinced myself this feels good? How the fuck am I meant to touch a boob? I feel like straight people (or maybe just straight men) don’t feel this same pressure. In a cis-hetero context, sex and virginity have a pretty clear-cut finish, like the guy lets out a bit of a grunt when he’s done and that’s that. To be fair I’ve never had heterosexual sex, but that’s what all the coming-of-age movies make it look like. 

This brings us back to the issue of what the fuck sex is when you’re queer. All the movies and the atrocious high school sex ed we received told us that there’s really only one way. “My 16-year-old self concluded you could only lose your virginity through penetrative sex. That it was more a concept than physicality but, either way, I wanted it gone,” The Tatted Twink told Massive. Liv had a pretty similar perspective, but realised that you can define virginity however you really want to. “There are like two different types of virginities in my eyes, physical and mental. Because the first person I fucked, really fucking hurt so it wasn’t enjoyable and I don’t like to remember that one. The second time was with someone else who I really liked and had less painful sex. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve taught myself how to define virginity based on the experience that was actually pleasurable rather than the first time a penis rammed into my poor little fufu-falafel.” This way of thinking is pretty fucking dope. I’ve had a few sexual encounters since that first time (wow, brag much?) and they’ve been a lot more enjoyable, and also sober. So I’m gonna start defining virginity however I want. Maybe it’ll be the time that lasted the longest, or the time I laughed a whole lot, or maybe that time I cried. Point is, it’s just sex, if it feels good and it’s consensual then who cares what you call it?