A Queer System
I want to comment on a phenomenon I’ve seen with many of my gay friends and experienced myself. When you’re gay and in the 16-21 range, older men hit on you. A lot of older men hit on you. Being a newly minted queer, you’re flattered by the attention, and (to varying degrees) entertain these men. These men “show you the ropes” of queerness and give you sexual, romantic, and sometimes professional advice (because who doesn’t like networking). They attempt to use their authority to normalize things that aren’t normal, like unprotected sex or emotional and physical abuse. You later learn that you were not special, that this happened to all of your friends, and in fact it happened to basically every gay person you know.
Much has been written about the causes of this dynamic. Some anecdotally cite a lack of non-sexual socialization spaces for gay youths or a lack of age-appropriate romantic partners (because who was out in high school?). Another possible explanation is trauma being rehashed: as abused gays get older, they reenact their abuse on younger gays, and the cycle repeats. Regardless of the cause, it continues to happen, and no one sees it coming. Queer people aren’t afforded basic sex education in many contexts, never mind a heads up about a complex communal dynamic that is simultaneously a rite of passage, traumatic, and seemingly essential (who else is going to teach you how to be gay? Wattpad?). (More on this here). Throw in the fact that we lost many of our elders in the AIDS crisis, and you’ve got a real problem.
My comment is this: we desperately need to change this system, because it works. Older gay men, in the process of hitting on me, taught me more about gay sex than my high school ever wanted to or could. I have learned so much - about healing from family trauma, navigating toxic masculinity, authenticity - all from people whose primary intention was to have sex with me. It should go without stating that things shouldn’t be this way. And yet, it’s effective. What makes this system so pernicious is that as a trickle-down economy of knowledge, it works.
That being said, I do have some questions. To paraphrase scholar Gabriel Rosenberg, have we foreclosed on the possibility of mutually-pleasurable, nontraumatic sex over gaps in age or experience? When and under what circumstances do such gaps become significant? What sociocultural forces enable these gaps to take on significance or remain insignificant? My intent is not to dismiss the very real violence that can exist in these arrangements (as I’ve discussed above), but to call into question our refusal to acknowledge young people’s sexual agency. An 18-year-old can, under certain conditions, agree to pleasurable sex with a 30-year-old without having been manipulated, coerced, or failing to comprehend what they’re consenting to. These relationships warrant careful scrutiny because there is often a power differential involved, but scrutiny in the interest of protecting the young is different from outright dismissal. We should be providing resources for young people, queer or not, to help them navigate sex, trauma, and relationships in a variety of contexts while simultaneously shielding them from all the violence we can. (I’d recommend adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism as a great place to start).
