Why All Sex Should be Queer Sex

A Manifesto

Photo by Mahrael Boutros on Unsplash

The first time a girl asked me how I liked to have sex, I was stunned. “What do you mean?” I asked. She hovered her hand over my groin and asked if it was okay if she touched me. She asked if I liked penetration, then she fucked me against the wall.

It’s one of the things I love most about being queer — this opportunity to negotiate what sex can look like, with every new partner. Especially as a queer woman, it can be thrilling to try and answer the age-old question: “So, what exactly do lesbians do in bed?”

The answer to this question often leaves the asker frustrated because the answer is ambiguous. It certainly frustrated me when, at the age of 17 and armored only with the new-found knowledge of my attraction to women and a laptop, I first set out on my quest to discover what my sex life could look like.

The Wikipedia page that I landed on was vague at best. It primarily mentioned tribadism (colloquially known as scissoring), which is, in my experience, rarely a thing. Then it mentioned oral sex, which is often a thing.

Dissatisfied with the answers I found there, I turned, as many teens do, to porn. There I saw women performing acts that, even before I was sexually active, I understood were not meant for each other, but for men who were watching. I saw a lot of strap-ons and dildos, and tongues, a pantomime of straight sex, but with more boobs. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the boobs. But I knew that there had to be something more out there.

But you might not think so if the only thing you know about lesbians is from pop culture. I’ll never forget visiting a friend in college and looking up at the television to see Garrison shouting “Scissor me timbers!” on South Park, showing a complete lack of understanding not only of lesbians, but also of trans women. Or watching Glee before it became a train wreck, only to have Santana throw more scissoring jokes at the audience.

But these jokes miss the point of queer sexuality, the imagination, the primal response when she puts her mouth on my breast, or when I slide my fingers inside her, when she goes down on me, or when I strap it on, when I run my hand over the head of his clit, which we call his cock, or her cock, which we call a clit.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

While I have definitely participated in my fair share of lights-off-hoping-for-the-best fumbling, having consent-driven, queer sex has taught me that if I want to have sex, I need to talk about it. After all, we have no definitive sex act, no script forged for us in middle school hallways or high school sex ed. To have successful queer sex is to mutually decide on pleasure and to try to inhabit it together.

And this plays out in the data. A 2014 study showed that while hetero women orgasm 61.6 percent of the time, lesbians orgasm 74.4 percent of the time. And according to Psychology Today, that is partially because straight couples rely on penetrative sex for orgasm, which only a small percentage of women can orgasm from. In contrast, when I have sex with my girlfriend, we only strap it on when we’re both in the mood. Penetration is not the end goal, and neither is orgasm. Pleasure is. And when pleasure itself is the goal, I’ve found that orgasms usually aren’t far behind.

However, this was not a lesson learned overnight. Queer women still live under the heterosexist expectation that women are supposed to be silent on matters of the body. And many of us still assume that if you have to talk about sex, to ask for guidance, then you must be bad at it. But as I have gotten older, I’ve learned that there is nothing sexier than a girl leaning down, whispering in your ear, saying, “tell me what you want.” Good sex becomes a conversation, whispered in desire, demands, and delight.

And queer sex should not be restricted to queer people. Instead, it is a mindset, a way of approaching sex with enthusiastic consent, of not assuming the narrative, or the goals of any particular sexual encounter. It’s a sexy negotiation that says not only, “I’m in the mood,” but also, “I’m in the mood for…”