Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  She passes the test. But whose? We’re jaded, shaded, judged every day by everyone else’s eyes, given pass or fail, a glance over, an examination. What I feel now, think, sense, and have had shown to me is that I pass as a straight white girl with long hair and a thinnish and roundish body, with paint on my fingers toes eyes lips. What do I base this on? The fact that men are the only ones who will make eye contact with me? The fact that I look more now like women I see in the magazines or on TV (or around me everywhere) than I did when I was a boy? The fact that my attempts to flirt with or be recognized by women I read as gay are often passed by? Maybe these women aren’t gay. It’s my own conflation of masculine with womanhood that makes dyke in my eyes, anyway; I’m still unlearning that myself. What I see are the boidykes, the butches, the ones I was (trying to be): the flamboyant excursion into queerness.

  It’s true that I appreciate, viscerally, how my lover passes (as butch and as male, thereby already accepted into the community I longed for), and at the same time, sie constantly battles through society’s antagonism in response to hir gender-ambiguity, the blurring confusion that sharpens to anger through fear when someone has assumed hir male and then reads hir as female. As black male, that is, and then as black female, that is: and all the threats to hir safety that slam up on one side of that wall and fall down on top of hir on the other.

  We two face physical threats emanating from the same beam of power, that solid rise of sexism and racism. They are not the same threats. They are the flip sides of one another.

  I question myself regularly in my need for that deviation from whatever a norm could mean. It’s true that I am outside of things and my lover, sie is more so, and so we are more familiar with the fringes, with looking through for the blades of grass in a current of sludge.

  A single experience of visibility and un-invisibleness breaks the ice and anger of me. Someone, a stranger to me, reads and approaches me, assuming queerness. But is it my burgeoning comfort with myself that allows for the connection?

  I’ve recently gone through a mourning period for my passing-dyke-hood and have come out on the other side of resistance, to resignation. I don’t pass (and I do). I want to stop trying to make friendly communal eye contact, that establishment of casual community, the thing that extends home into body, onto the bus, onto the street, or the straight bar or the doctor’s office or the mall. The look that says, Sure, you’re safe here. Not that I’d know that would ever be true. But as a survivor, for this survivor, I was looking for safety and home. I wanted the strangers who would first read me and then protect me, wanted “family” that meant more than devastation.

  Thus the mourning period. I’m unmarked now and, as before, as when I was a high school student being regularly raped and held psychologically captive (but read at school as only a slut or excessive or eccentric, but not “troubled,”—it was the white skin and class privilege that got in my way there), I am unseen. I pass away. I pass into the nothingness of white, middle-class straight normality, of invisibility.

  Once again, I decide I will defy my own training and offer my looks and smiles only at the apparently-feminine-gendered beings I see around—we will pass into each other through our own swollen eyes. But they are swollen shut. Feminine-gendered beings don’t look at one another; we have been taught that we must look to the masculine-gendered beings for approval. We look to make sure we pass with them. And, okay, it’s a safety issue—not passing (which way?) can mean violence: you must be the right balance of gender and body. Too much feminine is dangerous, even on an XX body, but particularly if the body is XY.

  There is nothing cautious or delicate about the fact that I pass as a straight woman. It’s the default setting, brute force algorithm: yes or no. Check it against the model, and if it looks all right, throw it in that bin over there. I pulled out of it for a while, but I have fallen back.

  I am resigned to being read as more normal than I really am. I learned that passing lesson during the mornings I came to school still sticky with my stepfather all over me, the days I knew I’d have to go back home to more of the same. Not allowing my terror to be read was a survival skill, a lifesaving necessity: it’s true. And, for Christ’s sake, I passed to the mother—why shouldn’t I pass to the guidance counselors and teachers? I thought I was that good. I thought I could do it again and again, re-incarnate again and again.

  But I got tired. And lonely.

  Hir black passing butch and my white femme: we make quite a calculated couple. Newly visible, but what do they see, and how much does that matter? Our passings are entirely different. We walk through two completely different consignments of our bodies, the public designation of myself and yourself. How sie is seen as vagrant and threat and I am seen as property and waste.

  I have been fighting for many years against (becoming) how I am seen now. When do we know what we are is not how we see(m)? When did I know I was being seen as my stepfather crafted?

  I get so tired of trying to explain what I’m talking about. I say the same things over and over and I don’t care anymore in this bedroom, in this office, on this bench. Did the door to my deep desire click open when I was seen, clocked as both gay and feminine, or did it click when I set myself free with hir, or when I just knew why I was doing so? I am this gay queer entity, even if sie is a man, even if I am pressed in skirts. It’s not a straight thing, and it doesn’t matter if it is. I’ve grown tired of wanting to be masked. I don’t know if you will see me and I don’t know if I will care anymore. You never see me; I never see you. Behind your surfaces are all of your multiplicities. It takes time to be there.

  Sex and the Single Septuagenarian

  Liz Langley

  A few years ago there was a popular Pepsi commercial featuring presidential candidate and Viagra spokesman Bob Dole watching Britney Spears dance on TV. At the end of the ad, a dog sitting at Dole’s side barks at the set. “Easy, boy,” says Dole to the pooch—though I always thought it was slyly implied that he was actually talking to his own reanimated wiener.

  This three-alarm image of the senator erect is uncomfortable on a lot of levels, but the most obvious is that people aren’t used to thinking of seniors in a sexual way and aren’t in a rush to start. We love to see Grandma and Grandpa running marathons, volunteering, and taking tap class. But imagining them doing the mattress mambo is another story.

  Senior sexuality is certainly important in Florida, the oldest state in the country, and where, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 17 percent of the population was sixty-five or over as of July 1, 2005. And those seniors aren’t just sitting home playing bridge: In “Sexuality at Midlife and Beyond,” a 2004 update to a 1999 AARP survey, more than half of respondents, aged forty-five and up, cited sexual activity as a critical part of good relationships and as an important factor in quality of life. Eighty-four percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that “sex is only for young people” and reported having intimate experiences once a week, ranging from kissing to intercourse. In September of 2006, the CNBC Special Report “Boomer Nation” reported that over-fifty singles make up Match.com’s fastest-growing demographic. “People are orgasmic well into their nineties,” says Sallie Foley, director for the Center for Sexual Health at the University of Michigan Health System, author, and “Modern Love” columnist for the AARP magazine. A sex therapist, Foley recently had a client who experienced her first orgasm at sixty-seven.

  Of course, lives—and libidos—don’t end at fifty. But a growing concern is that the same parents and grandparents who once scolded their kids for playing outside without coats may not always be covering up where it counts beneath the sheets. According to Tom Liberti, chief of the Bureau of HIV/AIDS for the Florida Department of Health, 16 percent of newly reported HIV cases in 2005 were in people over fifty. Numbers on other sexually transmitted diseases don’t suggest that they’re spreading like wildfire among seniors (though not all STDs are necessarily reported to the DOH). Still, with more older singles than eve
r, well, you know the sex talk your parents dreaded having with you when you were a kid? Now you might want to have a similar one with them. (Well, want might be taking it a bit far.)

  Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs have enabled seniors to have active sex lives longer into their golden years, but those same seniors are typically not targeted with information about safety. “People don’t want to think about it,” says Jim Campbell, president of the National Association on HIV Over Fifty. It’s an attitude he likens to “Everyone else’s kid is having sex except mine.” Campbell’s group recently helped one nursing home establish a room for conjugal visits that couples can reserve like a hotel room. He doesn’t want to say which nursing home, though, because talk of sexual matters tends to cause such consternation.

  “One of our counselors has a one-hundred-year-old man with HIV,” says Jolene Mullins, an early intervention consultant with the Broward County Health Department’s Senior HIV Intervention Project. “He’s newly diagnosed and how he got it we’ll probably never know,” though she does say sexual contact is the prime transmission method of the virus in the older population, along with some needle sharing. But consider: even if he had been infected twenty-five years ago, it still would have been at age seventy-five.

  Hang on to that thought and now remember how resistant older people can be to new things. I once asked my own mother why she didn’t use the microwave and she said, defiantly, “Because I’m too old.” If seniors are slow to adapt to cell phones, how about using condoms? In their day they were strictly for birth control—perhaps the one health concern that seniors, luxuriously, don’t have to worry about.

  “I never heard the word ‘condom’ till I don’t know when. We whispered the word ‘rubber,’ ” says Jane Fowler, seventy-one. Even now, she jokingly rushes over the word in a phone interview from her Kansas City home. Jane has a sparkling laugh and the sweetest, most Marion Cunningham voice I’ve ever heard. She was diagnosed with HIV at the age of fifty-five and eventually cofounded the National Association on HIV Over Fifty, is cofounder and director of HIV Wisdom for Older Women, and works as an HIV/ AIDS educator, speaking to groups all across the country.

  In 1991 Fowler got a letter from an insurance company she’d applied to for coverage and was shocked to find she had been denied. “My blood had disclosed a significant abnormality,” she says, though the letter didn’t say what it was. She remembered someone had come by and stuck her finger. “He left with my application and my deposit and my blood and I didn’t think any more about it, especially the blood, until I got this letter.”

  Using datebook diaries that go back to 1958, Fowler was able to trace not just the approximate time she was infected, but the day. After twenty-three years of marriage, she had unwillingly been divorced, and after a while she started dating. “I had a few intimacies,” she said. “[I wasn’t] out there sleeping around…I didn’t fit the stereotype,” Fowler explains, and so wasn’t the kind of person anyone would figure to test. The man she was seeing when she was infected was someone she had known for a long time. “He is not alive today,” she says.

  It makes Fowler cringe when she hears about seniors who practice what she sees as a kind of willful naïveté. She picks a few names “out of the thirties” to illustrate her point. “So, you’ve got Betty and she’s announced that she started dating Jack and she’s so comfortable because she’s known him for so long. She knew Jack when he was married to Mary. Then Mary died. Betty does not know what Jack was doing or what Mary was doing. You don’t know what’s going on in somebody’s bedroom, or outside of it. I found that out myself.”

  People tell her, “I’m so thankful that I’m with Herb because I just never have anything to worry about.” Fowler laughs. “And you think, ‘Okay, Marge, okay.’” Still, she says, “It’s hard to stand up in front of women and suggest to them that their partner, significant other, whatever, might be having experiences outside this primary relationship.”

  Jolene Mullins, of the Broward County Health Department, says another concern is senior men who are gay or bisexual and may not have been able to be open about their sexuality in the past—and might not think of HIV as affecting their generation. “I can’t tell you how many seniors say, ‘This is not my problem,’ ” Mullins says. “[They ask], ‘Why are you even talking to us?’ ”

  A big part of that attitude relates to America’s timidity in talking about sex, in Fowler’s opinion. Older people are especially reluctant to do so—and often their health-care providers don’t ask. Doctors see someone who looks like their grandmother and think, “I’m not going to ask this person about sex!”

  Tom Liberti, of the Florida Department of Health, says he’s spoken to med students at Florida State University’s School of Medicine about that very issue. “If a sixty- or seventy-year-old presents at a doctor’s office with medical symptoms like losing weight…the doctor isn’t necessarily going to think of HIV,” but the virus doesn’t discriminate. Jane Fowler offers doctors another way of looking at it: “An older person, in the confines of a provider’s office, might even enjoy bragging a little bit.”

  Though methods of diagnosis (like the thirty-minute HIV test) and medication have improved considerably, testing can still be a scary experience for anyone—but especially for seniors who are uncomfortable discussing their intimate secrets. Fortunately, Miriam Schuler, an eighty-seven-year-old Fort Lauderdale widow, is the adorable embodiment of the Sue Johanson/Dr. Ruth effect (the one that makes frank sexual messages seem easier to hear from older women). “I’ve been called ‘the Condom Grandma,’ ” Schuler says, for her volunteer work handing out condoms on behalf of Broward County’s Senior HIV Intervention Project, mostly at health fairs. She even gives me a handful, a sign she is clearly more optimistic about my love life than I am.

  Schuler tells me she shows passersby a picture of a dress made out of condoms and asks, “Do you think I should wear this to my granddaughter’s wedding?” Sometimes senior men will tell her, “I’m too old for this,” and she’ll give them a condom anyway and say, “Put it in your pocket. Make your friends jealous.” She encourages grandparents to send condoms to their grandkids with the birthday check and a note that says, “We love you. Be safe.”

  Tom Liberti says that when the numbers of HIV-infected seniors in Florida climbed up to 11 percent, the Department of Health started looking at ways to reach seniors, like putting more mature faces on their health posters. Schuler is a perfect example of what an asset older people can be to their own community, simply by communicating the idea that condoms aren’t just for birth control anymore.

  “I can tell you the attitude of the men,” says one sixty-six-year-old woman I speak to on the phone. They come from an era where they didn’t use protection, and “they think, ‘I’ll be dead from old age before I die of AIDS.’ ” She protects her friends’ identities and doesn’t want hers used, but says some singles insist on sexual safety, and even knows one couple who broke up over the idea. “She said she wouldn’t have sex without protection. He said he wouldn’t have sex with protection. That was the end of that.”

  A few days later, I’m tooling down the Florida Turnpike for an evening out at the Villages, a retirement community so large it covers part of three counties in central Florida. Dozens of golf carts are parked outside the shops and restaurants of the Spanish Springs Town Square like a parody of the motorcycles that line the streets during Bike Week in Daytona. My companions and I have been invited to Katie Belle’s Resident Club, for Villagers only, and the vastness of the two-story nightspot and the din inside come as a surprise. The saloon-style interior is heavy on carved wood and stained glass, as if you dropped a disco into a Bob Evans, only more posh. Our hostess is a well-dressed bundle of energy, and her generosity in introducing friends—and theirs in chatting—makes it a disarmingly warm and welcoming place.

  The crowds are so dense that people stand on the staircase, their ages ranging from collegiate to septuagenarian, though
heavy on the latter. I get ankle-deep into the merlot with a number of residents, a band called Rocky and the Rollers plays classics, and the emcee announces that Katie Belle’s will be open all the way until 11:00 p.m. Turns out there are other clubs people typically move on to when they’re looking for a late night. I ask a woman sitting beside me if she does much dating.

  “What?”

  “Dating.”

  “What?”

  “Dating.”

  “Dancing?”

  “DATING!”

  To be fair, it’s loud in there.

  She’s single, loves life in the Villages, but needn’t date as she has “a steady” whom she calls “my fiancé.” When I ask when the wedding is she looks at me like I’m bananas. “I was married for thirty years and engaged for fifteen,” she says. At her age she evidently has no interest in making another such commitment.

  Another woman, trim and prim, isn’t nuts about the dating scene, partly because there’s just too much competition. Everyone I talk with consistently cites female-male ratios of around eight-toone, making the men sound like kids in a candy store.

  One Village guy tells me that he’s “very concerned” about STDs, but doesn’t use protection all that much. I ask one of the women if her friends worry about protection.

  “Yes,” she says, “but they don’t follow through” on their concerns.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  “Because I didn’t. I said I would, and I didn’t.”

  After hitting three clubs, throwing back quite a few, hearing karaoke—not to mention a lot of thoughts about love, life, and lingerie—and dancing with a charming seventy-five-year-old man, I conclude that my new septuagenarian friends and I have more in common than I imagined. I remember how, days earlier, one of my sources had asked me my age.