Sexual autonomy.
It’s not a sexy phrase but it’s a good one. It means that you get to choose what you do. You’re in charge—every kiss, every stroke, every time you rip your panties off, or don’t.
It’s all you.
This is a book about first times. Consensual first times. Chosen first times.
When you don’t choose and sexual things happen anyway, that’s not sex. It’s violence. An unwelcome kiss. A hand grabbing your ass. Coerced oral sex. Rape. If you don’t want it to happen, it’s assault. (And if this has happened to you, I urge you to report the crime and visit RAINN.org, a support organization for survivors.)
Just as sex can make us powerful, it can also make us vulnerable, naked in every sense of the word. This is especially true for survivors of sexual abuse. Some respond by choosing abstinence because it is so difficult to contemplate letting anyone touch their bodies again. Others respond to violated boundaries by giving up on boundaries altogether. Sometimes flashbacks of abuse accompany their consensual sexual experiences for years.
For survivors, reclaiming their sexual selves can be a long road. In the next story, Christa lets us walk beside her for a while.
6
I Would Have a Heart
Christa Desir
I was six years old the first time a man put his hands on me sexually. It wasn’t the first time I’d been exposed to the idea of sex, but it was the first time I was a participant. Exposure to trauma at such a young age left little room for the milestones of “firsts.” As a teenager I did not care about rounding bases or giving up my V card, I cared about trying to fill the part of me that had been taken away, the part of me that was unprotected. I cared about being wanted, as if that could provide protection. And sex became a means to an end, a way to feel wanted.
I became the girl who would give a guy a blow job in a living room with people walking in and out to get their coats. The girl who gave a guy a hand job underneath a thin blanket on the lawn of a completely packed outdoor concert. I became the thing people wanted more than anything else, if only for a few minutes.
I wanted to be wanted with the voraciousness that addicts approach a fix. But after years of multiple hookups, male and female, I still had no balm for my many broken parts. At nineteen years old, I had no notion of what love looked like.
I decided to get away from everything and everyone. I would spend the summer after my sophomore year of college on Block Island, a small island off the coast of Rhode Island. I had a plane ticket with a return date at the end of the summer, eighty dollars in my pocket, and a tent to sleep in. I was alone because the friend who was supposed to spend the summer with me backed out at the last minute. I had no job and no real plan. But I was stubborn and determined to prove that I was fucking fine and could take care of myself no matter what.
The first thing I saw when I stepped off the ferry was a giant sign that said, “Absolutely no camping on the island.” Twenty thousand tourists descend on Block Island every summer, and the few year-round residents wanted to discourage drifters like me. So I found the police station and pitched my tent in the woods about fifty feet behind it. I had something to prove, after all.
Within two hours of setting up camp I landed a job as a cashier at Bella Pizza. I talked the owner into hiring me like I did everything else. I made him think I was invaluable to the sale of his pizza. It was a strange sort of bravado I carried inside. And one I had with men much more than women. Men were easy. In my mind, all I had to do was make them feel like they were the most important person in the room and that I was lucky to be around them.
My first night on the island I was sitting at the pizza parlor chatting up my new manager about housing options when he introduced me to some employees from the nearby hotel, including a gorgeous waiter named Brian. He was one of those tall, lean boys who wore close-shaved blond hair and a smirk. He was nineteen, had a deep golden tan, and smoked Marlboro Lights between his thumb and forefinger—the guy way. Sexy as hell when you put the whole package together.
In spite of my girlfriend back at college who had sent me to the island with a book of Sappho’s poetry and long, wet, good-bye kisses, the sight of that smirk awoke the voracious and desperate she-demon inside me. I wanted to make him crave me.
So I did what I always did, I played to my strengths, or at least what I assumed my strengths were to guys. Mostly, I knew how to give good blow jobs. I had a really big mouth, and I swallowed. Surely these made me worthy of being craved. Because what guy doesn’t want sexual services from a girl who swallows?
I dangled fat, sexual innuendos in Brian’s face. He didn’t blink. I did the cherry stem trick with my tongue. He didn’t fall for it. I hung on his every word and made him feel important. He lit another cigarette and waited. Brian waited all that first night. He waited for days. He was waiting for me to become me.
At first, I was certain he’d decided I was only friend material. But he spent every free minute at the pizza place. He let me talk. He asked questions. He batted my efforts at seduction away and clung to the other parts of me, the big brain and the thoughtful reader and the girl who told funny stories about all the stupid shit she’d done. He dribbled out little pieces of himself that I snatched up and cherished. He kissed me, he held my hand, and then he walked me back to my tent every night. Brian hadn’t friend-zoned me, but he wasn’t fucking me either. This was different.
Two weeks in, I decided he wasn’t sexual. I wondered if he was smoking pot or drinking a lot. I’d heard those things could cause a guy’s sex drive to wither. The fact that Brian had spent so much time getting to know me and very little time being sexual with me had me convinced that he wasn’t quite right.
I tested him. I told him of my now ex-girlfriend (who I’d written to break up with on day eight of island living), of my checkered past, of being a sexual violence survivor. I recounted the number of blow jobs I’d given to guys I barely knew. I pushed him as hard as I could. I poured myself out and set it at his feet and waited to see if he would spit on it or reject it, but nothing seemed to talk him out of me.
His want was so different than what I’d ever known.
“Do you want to stay the night in the tent?” I finally asked him on the fifteenth day.
“No,” he said. “It’s starting to smell in there and I’m working in the morning, but I’ll see you after.”
I slipped my hand in the waistband of his jeans and he inched back. “Don’t you worry about the cops?” he asked.
“Not really. What are they going to do?”
He kissed me then, and it tasted like cigarettes, mine and his, and I pressed myself against him. But he didn’t press back. He never did. Always so soft and gentle. Even half hard, like he was when I rubbed against him. He never asked for anything.
And day by day, my desire to make him want me sexually dulled. Being with Brian was a strange sort of reprieve. Every day would start with me holding my breath, waiting for him to decide I wasn’t worth the trouble. But he didn’t. He wanted to know me completely. He treated me like a gift, a whole person who fascinated him. No one had ever cared for me like that.
And I loved him for it. Deeply.
As the weeks passed, we slowly became more physical. It was almost inevitable with the way I pushed, but the way I desired him felt different—not clingy and voracious but new. Like this was a real milestone, a first I’d never even considered.
So one morning in the middle of the summer—before I had to work, before he had to work, when he came to see me because now we were desperate to see each other as much as we could, fighting against the inevitability of summer’s end—I pulled him into my tent.
“Please,” I said and slipped off his shirt, tugging at him, unbuttoning the top of his khaki shorts.
Morning sun streamed through the green walls of my illegal tent behind the police station. The light illuminated the planes of his chest, his flat stomach, his beautiful jawline. I almost couldn’t believe wha
t I was doing. It wasn’t furtive or dark, shadowy to hide my dimpled thighs. I wasn’t trying to get it over with. I wanted this moment to be different than how I’d always been.
I undid his zipper while he unbuttoned the front of my sundress. When we were both naked, I covered myself with my hands, squeezed my eyes tight, and waited to be found lacking for my doughy body.
He kissed my eyelids and whispered, “Hey, open up. Let me in.”
I opened my eyes.
He trailed his tongue along my neck. His hands moved over me, and I tried to move them away, covering myself again.
“My stomach, my thighs,” I choked out.
“Your skin is beautiful,” he whispered.
Everything uncoiled. I dropped my hands and let him lick and touch. But the clawing feeling started up again, a different kind of anxiety now. I felt myself growing desperate, unhinged by the unknown. I had to get back in control. Sexual services—that’s what I was good at. So I slid down his body, lower, almost past his stomach. My mouth ready to open and swallow.
He stopped me.
“You don’t want me to?”
He shook his head. “I want to be with you. Not like that.”
Because he knew what blow jobs meant to me—or didn’t mean. A blow job was easily given away. He wanted connection, not servicing.
Now I had nothing to hide behind. I was an onion, the layers peeled back under his fingers to get to the heart. I was paralyzed with worry that he’d find no heart at all, that when he’d peeled everything back he’d just have smelly hands and tears and air.
He moved over me in this soft and patient way. He got hard and pressed against my thigh but still only touched me. If I reached for him, he batted my hands away.
I loved watching how his hands skimmed over me, even though I couldn’t feel it—not the physical part of it—I was too numb still, too empty from years of unkind touch. Yet I loved seeing the trails of his gentle fingers because it felt like worship.
He fitted himself between my legs and it was easy and slow and like no sex I’d ever had. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t rough or hard or deep. I was wet and it was an easy fit and I arched my hips because it made him grunt in this way that I liked. And I listened to us slapping together and it didn’t feel like anything at all.
He came and I didn’t because my heart and mind weren’t connected to my body. My body was incapable of registering touch that wasn’t pain. But my heart was so full of him. And afterward, maybe ten minutes later, he curled into me and the cool air from the tent door plus the mingled sweat on my skin made goose bumps pop up.
“I love you,” he said. And he meant this. I understood it and knew that it had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with whatever he saw in me.
“I love you back.”
He used his shirt to clean the cum from my inner thighs. We went outside to smoke cigarettes and walked to the pizza place for coffee, holding hands.
I thought, This is what happy feels like. It was a better high than being wanted. It was better than anything because I didn’t think I deserved it but he made me feel like I did.
Soon after we had sex the first time, I rolled up my tent and moved into the employee housing where Brian lived. Think of overly crowded freshman dorm rooms and you’ve got a pretty good idea how it worked. The rooms were crapholes at best. Never cleaned. Dark and dank and hot as hell. We had sex in a single bunk with Brian’s roommate, a barbecue chef at the hotel, snoring twenty feet away from us. It didn’t matter. I could be quiet as a mouse having sex.
Because I hadn’t found my voice.
I couldn’t ask him to go down on me, though he would have gladly. I always stopped him before he even got close.
I didn’t have orgasms, though his made me happy.
And I never asked him to use protection.
After sex, we’d hold hands and smoke cigarettes. Cum would leak onto my underwear and I’d hope I wasn’t pregnant.
I never had one conversation with Brian about condoms. I’m sure he thought I was on the pill, but I was not. I was so seemingly in charge of myself sexually, so brazenly confident in what I’d done and who I’d done it with that he no doubt assumed I would never risk pregnancy. He didn’t understand how, for so long, being wanted overrode risk. I wrote my best friend that I was practicing lunar-ception, hoping my cycles lined up with the moon and avoiding sex when the moon was waxing and I was ovulating. My best friend wrote back that I was a lunatic and needed to get my shit together.
So I spent the summer in this strange place of being deeply loved and still not safe.
I loved and Brian loved, but it wasn’t perfect. Because he had to dig through so many layers of me. I think he kept waiting for my voice to come out, wanting me to be the same person in bed as I was in other parts of my life. But I didn’t have it in me. Not yet. I handed him what I could because I loved him. And the sweet man did the best he could with my broken bits, sealing them together with saliva and cum and booze and smoke.
That’s the thing about spending so much of one’s life unprotected. You lose the ability to ask for protection anymore. You accept brokenness, and even if you search for healing you forget that when someone cements you back together you can still be broken again. I didn’t need glue. I needed to be crack-proofed. I needed to coat myself in a seal so that if anyone dropped me I wouldn’t break. But I wasn’t thinking about that at age nineteen.
Brian was my first great love. He bridged a barrier within me. He added a new dimension to relationships that made me hope for more. He was imperfect and wonderful, all at the same time. He could not protect me, of course, but he showed me I was worthy of having my own voice, even if I couldn’t find it with him.
Our relationship peeled away enough layers for me to know that when I got to the middle, I would have a heart. That was enough for me to begin the search for myself. To pursue a different kind of want, a better kind, the kind that would make me whole. Along the way, I found a voice to tell this story.
So often, first-time sex is laced with awkwardness. Where do I put my hands? Is my breath bad? How do all these bits line up?
Beyond the body and under our skin is the complicated rest of us, the wanting-wondering-worrying self. Does she want to kiss me there? Will he stop loving me? Am I okay?
But the thing about sex is that we are not alone.
That person—
The one there on the bed beside you—
The one you’re planning to have sex with—
The two of you are in this together.
All those questions and worries are things you can talk about. In fact, once you and your partner start talking about what you want and why you want it, you might be surprised how sexy and powerful words can be.
7
The Lion Poet
Laurel Isaac
The first night at writing camp I answered my dorm room door wearing boxers and a half-pulled-on T-shirt with the word QUEER in large letters. A counselor held out an Ethernet cord.
“Tech said you wanted one of these?” She eyed my laptop on the bed and my state of dress (or undress). I explained that I’d already found another cord. A slight tension hung in the air. Probably she knew I’d been masturbating.
The program director had already given us the hands in pants rule. “While at the Young Writers’ Retreat, you can put your hands in your own pants but no one else’s.”
So, fuck, I was following protocol. Not that I needed guidance.
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “I got the connection working on my own.”
I met Scott the next day. He was a seventeen-year-old aspiring novelist from out West. Very white and serious looking with dark glasses and scruff on his face. We became friends in that way you sometimes do with the first person you meet in an unfamiliar place. A college campus in Massachusetts was certainly unfamiliar to both of us.
Scott towered over my fifteen-year-old self, but I felt relaxed with him. I told him he looked like Jonatha
n Franzen, which he liked. For the next two weeks, we sat together at every meal.
During the day, Scott and I wrote and critiqued drafts in different workshops. Mine was taught by a friendly nature writer named Wally who liked to have us journal without pause, the less time between pen and paper the better.
“If you get stuck, just write any words down,” he said.
My journal was filled with sudden references to sex, awkwardness, and being the worst writer.
On weekends, the program offered outings to the lake or the cramped bookstore downtown. You had to sign up after breakfast on Saturday. There was always a long line. By the second Saturday, I felt at home enough to wait sprawled out on the grass outside. Two girls sat down near me, complaining about the wait.
“Where do you want go?” I asked.
“Bookstore.”
“Same.”
They were the first girls I’d really spoken to at the retreat. I always found it easier to talk to boys. But they seemed cool. I noticed the one with short red hair had a rainbow bracelet around her wrist. My heart leapt.
“Is that bracelet about pride?” I asked softly.
“Yeah, I’m gay.”
“Cool. Me too,” I beamed.
“I’m bi,” the other girl said.
“Awesome!” said the redhead, grinning.
We introduced ourselves. Meghan, the red-haired one, was a playwright, and Maya, who had long dark hair, was a poet. We checked each other out. Though I could rattle off the names of dozens of queer authors, I’d never met a queer person my age.
“Are you out at school?” I asked.
“Duh.” Meghan pulled up her shirt to reveal a rainbow belt.
“Kind of,” Maya said. “They’re assholes, so it doesn’t matter. I’m out to my dad and brother.”
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