Unless you live it, you have no idea what it's like to be in your twenties, single, queer, and free. Many people can say you don't know what their life is like until you walk a mile in their shoes. I'm not talking about personal life experiences, and sappy emotional moments where music swells and you have your first heart break. I'm talking in the over-generalized sense of what I experience.

There's a collective conscientiousness among young gay men. Be thin, beautiful, tan and tight. Dance well, hold your liquor, never hesitate with a witty come-back, and above all else, make "it' about you. This has existed since time began; when the first neanderthal looked out over the rocky plain and saw a young man sunning himself on a boulder, He felt a quiver beneath his beaver pelt, and next thing you know the rocks are covered in cum.

Sex is everywhere in our culture. It drives our purchases, our likes and dislikes, and is the reason every gay man thinks he's fat. With us, sex is so in your face because for so long we are told what we desire is abnormal. Sleeping Beauty didn't wake up because some big burly butch Dyke kissed her and built her a deck. Though you knew they were fucking, Batman and Robin never kissed each other after they saved a life.

So our PRIDE parades have 95% naked men dancing in bubbles, and if you ever watched the L Word, you know that getting fingered at the Opera can create white the climax during the Aria.

On top of all this sexual aggression and pressure to fit into it, drugs are everywhere you look. Pot, cocaine, and crystal being the en vogue drugs of today. One can abstain from any or all of these and be fine, but there is something magical about a Rihanna Remix at 1:30 AM mixed with too much booze that tends to make one lose their inhibitions in a quick hurry. I've seen young kids be carried off of a dance floor covered in their own vomit, and no one misses a beat.

Danger is the third lady at this table. Danger and thrill are what make everything worth it. It's why you go home with the guy you just met at the bar 15 minutes ago. It's why you drink too much around sweaty people you don't know and dance so hard your legs hurt the next morning. It's walking down the street holding hands with your significant other. It's hanging a rainbow flag from your office balcony. It's getting a rainbow tattoo. Danger is the lube that makes everything slip into the place where it feels just right. Danger is the fear that you won't be able to pick up anybody at the bar, and that's why you work out ten times harder, and eat one less meal.

Sex, drugs, and danger, everything we hold dear. This is a slice of what it's like to be queer, young, and beautiful.

Sex, Love, and Fucking

Sex isn't just sweat and an exchange of fluids. Sex can mean so much more, or sensationally, so much less.

Sex can mean hello. Fiercely fast and unemotional. Dripping with curiosity and the fervor of discovery.
Sex can mean goodbye. One last shot at holding on to ten years of devotion. Silence breaking in where screams once stood. Ten thousand paper cuts bleeding out painfully.
Sex can mean I love you. A tooth paste kiss leading to me mounting you on the sink. Your head banging against the mirror, legs wrapped around Me. Hungrily clinging to one another in mad passion that only thought can describe. Your arms needing to hold Me, while my lips must melt into yours.
Sex can mean red hot critical mass. Up like a redwood lasting for hours. Coming once, twice, then three times until you collapse, thoroughly spent and tired. Falling asleep with him still inside you.
Sex can be inappropriate. Vigorous fear of being found out. Knowing what feels right is wrong. If only for the moment, letting yourself go with tactile abandon with the rush of hormonal adrenaline. Forgetting that you are fucking yourself rather than truck number ten thousand.
Sex can remind you that you're alive. When hands flush and tingle. Fingertips igniting sparks on skin that erupt into uncontrollable flames.a forest fire as hot as hell telling you that today is all there is. That this world is too much to worry about how you're surviving in it.
Sex can be a declaration. Announcing to yourself and the great wide universe that you'll do whatever the fuck you want, when you want to do it. Forget 'em if they can't handle our kind. Leaving the deniers behind to forge a brave new existence.
Sex can be a dire contradiction. Grinding unabashedly on one thinking of another. The question of who you came across the one in your bed or the one in your head. Haunting you stiffly.