The journey I took to inhabit the Queerness of my identities today happened relatively recently, but there are moments from my past that slowly edged me towards who I am today. It all started with thoughts here and there of kissing my male friends, for seemingly no reason, I didn’t feel sexually attracted to them at the time. These thoughts would never crop up with strangers or acquaintances, only with close friends. I ignored these thoughts for the most part, I had no intentions of acting upon them, despite how open my friends were to the ideas of exploring their own identities, I still felt some sort of shame around mine. People bullied me in high school already for being what they defined as less masculine by wearing tight clothes, having …show more content…
After I had started dating more and becoming sexually active, I engaged in conversations about sex with my friends and partners, who I found had conservative attitudes about sex. For example when talking about anal sex or butt play many people I knew at the time insisted that “Butt sex is only for gay guys and weirdos,” and one partner shamed me for being interested in anal sex or anything remotely non-normative in the bedroom because of these …show more content…
I went back to the classified ads for casual encounters on Craigslist, and I met up with two different people, one scenario where I was the top and one where I was the bottom. The first experience where I was the top because it felt more like sex I familiar with, straight sex. I left the experience feeling odd, it felt like something was wrong about it, and this ended up being a repeat with the experience where I was a bottom. Despite enjoying myself in both of these encounters I had these residual feelings, for lack of a better word, shame. It wasn’t until I became more involved with less normative practices of both relationship and sexual practices, polyamory and kink-fetish culture, that I moved away from my stigmaphobe world of shame and into the stigmaphile world in Warner 's words. “The stigmaphile space is where we find a commonality with those who suffer from stigma, and in this alternative realm learn to value the very things the rest of the world despises--not just because the world despises them, but because the world’s pseudo-morality is a phobic and inauthentic way of life” (Warner, 1999, Pg