In a coffee shop in Makati, a friend is narrating his sexual encounters on Grindr with explicit, startling precision. He is a reliable source of information. He is a vivid storyteller. He is a sex correspondent, reporting live from a strange apartment in Mandaluyong. It feels like I am there as well, sucking, fucking, rimming, and cumming. I am secondhandedly fucking the 30-year-old dude through the power of the anecdote. This unnamed 30-year-old dude does not know I am psychically thinking of him; He does not know that his sex life is consumed frenzily in roundtable conversation, no detail spared. I somehow feel sorry for him. All of my other gay friends are gladly sucking, fucking, rimming, and cumming all over Metro Manila. We are all convinced that we are Samantha Jones with a stubble. (You’re not Samantha Jones, you’re just Jones!) I realize that all the sucking, fucking, rimming, and cumming takes up about fifty… sixty percent of our conversation. From the corner of my eye, another friend is on Grindr looking for trade within a fifty-feet radius. We are a beacon of erotic signals, sending out electromagnetic pulses strong enough to knock out all the prudes in the immediate vicinity.
Once, a straight girl told me that I was “such a bottom” for sitting with my legs crossed. Whatever that means. She was making unauthorized interpretations of my personhood based on my body language, but mostly her heteronormative worldview, maybe also the chick flicks she has watched. (What would Stuart Hall think?) She must think I am the sitcom-esque promiscuous mercurial gay best friend. Sometimes I don’t really feel like playing the sitcom-esque role of the promiscuous mercurial gay best friend whose primary job is to crack jokes about DL trade, douching, and other culturally relevant things. Being gay is fundamentally about sexuality, of who I am attracted to, but I find it discomfiting that gay people are frequently interpreted, presented, and perpetuated through the lens of sex. People must think all gay people do is maximize the amount of sex to have, and to optimize for the event of sex; People must think all gay people do talk about is sex, and to be fair, we do talk about sex a lot. Maybe that reputation is self-inflicted, maybe it’s not. My sexuality is indispensable to who I am, but it does not entirely explain who I am. The most interesting part about me, hopefully, is not how much sex I have and want to have.
I used to be prude myself; Now, I think I am half a prude, give or take. I have only recently stepped into my sexual freedoms as a gay man but sometimes I fear that I am still secretly conservative—that I have internalized all the religious doctrine or something—because I don’t really want my entire life to solely revolve around sex even though it feels fucking amazing. I am being pulled by different currents. I mean, my straight friends get to fuck all the time, and they’re pretty unhinged about it. Nobody bats an eye when they recount their one-night stands over coffee, and in fact, they are permitted to be a multidimensional human being. Nobody looks at them thinks, oh they’re always having sex; sex is all there is to them. Among many other things, they are still ambitious, insecure, generous, opinionated, kind, and sometimes insufferable. I am pretty sure this is some sort of internalized homophobia I have to overcome. There is a little bit of the preacher rattling around my head like a loose screw, telling me it is shameful to want a cock in my mouth and my cock in another man’s mouth. I also think it’s something deeply Baudrillardian which makes me feel like I am a walking simulacrum of sucking, fucking, rimming, and cumming… I am performing the copy of a horny gay man… But I am admittedly horny and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. Although somehow when I talk about sex to my straight friends, it strangely feels like I’m proving a certain caricature right. There should be nothing wrong about wanting and having sex—and there is nothing wrong about it at all—but I’m afraid that it becomes my sole defining trait: Gay man, exclusively, excessively, obsessively tied to sex. I was not put on this Earth to strive to sex. Some sex, sure; Not sex everytime. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. I am horny and gay but I could also be a complex person.
I asked my lesbian friend, whom I deem my “lesbian archangel,” whether she feels sick of all the scissoring jokes. She says she doesn’t particularly care but she also recognizes that sort of stereotype; she says that it’s no secret that lesbians do scissor and finger, but she says lesbians aren’t as annoying about sex as gay men. So I turned to another gay man for a different perspective: I asked him whether he indeed thought being gay is all about sex, if we’re really as annoying about sex as my lesbian archangel claims—and if it is the case, why. He told me it’s because we participate in an economy of desire. To be seen by the world is one thing, but to be seen within the community is another. I know this to be true since I find myself on multiple occasions outsourcing validation, self-worth, and a sense of fuckability from other gay men. In a them.us article, Why Some Queer Men Lead Hypersexual Double Lives Online, I found out many gay men like myself project a hypersexual image and/or persona—frequently online—in order to be “liked and desired by [other] men.” When people say they’re “sex positive,” I understand that we might operate on different meanings or nuances of sex positivity. There is sex positivity as political liberation, then there is sex positivity as maximizing the amount of sex, maximizing your own fuckability. Perhaps I tend to think about sex a lot not simply because I’m horny—though I certainly am—but because desire functions as an efficient and prominent form of social currency. I think a lot of it is conflated, entangled with what I am trying to negotiate. It makes me feel like I am stuck in ideological purgatory. I feel prudish for not wanting my life to revolve around sex when all of my contemporaries seem to really be into it, but at the same time, I sometimes feel like this is the only mode of existence in order to be visibly gay, to belong.
For so much of modern queer history, sex is political. It would be stupid of me to remove gayness from sex, or sex from gayness. Historically, homosexuality was pathologized as a mental illness, that it was sexually deviant, which legitimized the perception that homosexuality was inherently hypersexual. Early psychologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing effectively tagged homosexuality as a “malformation.” At the same time, same-sex attraction, sodomy, has historically been categorized as a crime. Because gay men were prosecuted by the law for sexual acts, public consciousness associated gay men exclusively with sex. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit in the 1980s, conservatives framed it as punishment against LGBTQ+ people for their supposed “promiscuous lifestyles,” rather than treating it as a public health crisis. For decades, people could not even admit who they wanted without risking arrest, alienation from their friends and family, and many other horrible things. I can see why and how sex becomes an outlet and saving grace for so many. Sex positivity, as I understand it, is recognizing that there is nothing morally wrong with queer desire. So to be clear, I am not disregarding sex with its importance and its centrality to liberation, nor do I want to. I am inheriting that freedom and liberation with enormous gratitude, but I think I’ve been confusing the freedom to desire with the obligation to be desirable, fuckable. Hypersexuality has been something imposed from the outside, but at the same time, I think it is also built in from the inside. The two are entangled, but they are nonetheless separate mechanisms.
I only want my sexuality to remain crucial to who I am without collapsing into one-dimensional personhood. Being gay is, definitionally, about who I am attracted to, and sometimes who I want to fuck. But it is not, as far as I can tell, a full personality of its own. I also experience things outside of sucking, fucking, rimming, and cumming! Last week, I danced badly with my friends. The week before that, I think I finished a book I’ve been trying to read for three months. I will cry, laugh, dance, sing, write… then maybe fuck again when the situation calls for it.
Limmy Limbo is a writer and multimedia artist based in Manila. He writes short essays and stories about the world around him. You can read more of his work on Substack.
