queer advice #106: sleeping with a cis guy
"Never really saw this one coming..."
Hey! Here’s a new advice column for your Wednesday. If you’re new to this newsletter, queer advice is a reoccurring feature where I answer questions about love and life from confused gay people. Today’s question is from an avowed lesbian who’s sleeping with a man and feeling a lot of turmoil about it. This is a genre of question that I get all the time, but my first time answering it. Hopefully I did a good job? Let me know in the comments, lol, but be nice with your discourse.
Just a reminder that every edition of TV Dinner takes many days of sustained, gay labor for me to get exactly right. If you’ve been thinking of supporting this work as a paid subscriber, yearly subscriptions are 30% from now until the end of June as a Pride month kinda deal. Also makes a great gift!!
Send me a question anytime. xoxo, Maddy
P.S. The new season of The Ultimatum: Queer Love is streaming on Netflix as we speak! I have some pressing housework to do and cannot watch until later this afternoon, but I will be opening up the chat this evening 😈
*small tw for a passing mention of abuse in the 5th paragraph*
Over the years I’ve wondered if I should ever write you with any of my gay problems. Never really saw this one coming but here goes:
I’m 30, I’m a cis woman, I’ve identified as gay since I was 17-18, and I just started sleeping with a cis guy for the first time in my life in a way that is uncomplicated and pleasurable. I had early sexual experiences with guys in my early-mid teens that did nothing for me; when I started dating women, I acknowledged the mountains of evidence for my queerness since age 9ish. I had one kind-of-hookup 6 years ago with a cis male friend — I was curious about the vibe between us but called it off midway because I wasn’t enjoying it. Other than those experiences, I’ve spent the last 13 years dating and sleeping with women and not really thinking twice about it.
Well — I’ve been in a very fun "slut era" after really hitting a stride in how I practice non-monogamy (I know, I know). I met this guy through shared activism not too long ago. We got close through organizing an action together and—in what I imagine is a time-honored tradition—hooked up after the action. We’ve slept together two more times since then. As much it’s been novel/sometimes strange to me, the sex has been great and I honestly like him a lot. We connect more on values and politics than anyone else I’ve dated and slept with all year. He likes me a lot and has been very thoughtful about all of this.
As you can probably imagine, it’s bringing up a lot of weird feelings for me. On the one hand, I actually don’t think sexuality is always that deep. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m interested in men any more than I was before — there haven’t been any surprises, it’s not like I didn’t “know” what I was getting into and now I do — I just enjoy our dynamic, I know how to pursue my pleasure, and the rest kind of shakes out as wanting it to be mutually pleasurable for us both. I don’t see myself wanting to date him seriously (I feel totally non-oriented toward that—though I have some fear that this could shift as we continue?). I went through these thoughts re: my guy friend 6 years ago; I think that the way my sexuality works is that it’s just extremely, extremely rare (but not impossible?) for me to find a man attractive *and* actually want to do something with him. I’ve been friends and intimate with my fair share of lesbians and I don’t think that this occasional interest is *that* unusual, although I certainly know plenty of lesbians for whom this never happens, period. People and sex are complicated!