miscellany

How Does it Feel to be Gay?

Posted on by Sinclair Sexsmith

I ran across this on Queers United a while back, and it’s stuck with me. (There’s an approximate transcript in the comments on that QU post, if you need that.)

Published by Sinclair Sexsmith

Sinclair Sexsmith (they/them) is "the best-known butch erotica writer whose kinky, groundbreaking stories have turned on countless queers" (AfterEllen), who "is in all the books, wins all the awards, speaks at all the panels and readings, knows all the stuff, and writes for all the places" (Autostraddle). ​Their short story collection, Sweet & Rough: Queer Kink Erotica, was a 2016 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and they are the current editor of the Best Lesbian Erotica series. They identify as a white non-binary butch dominant, a survivor, and an introvert, and they live outside Seattle as an uninvited settler on traditional, ancestral, & unceded Snoqualmie land.

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3 thoughts on “How Does it Feel to be Gay?”

  1. Awakenings-Jen says:

    Pretty powerful stuff Sin, thanks for sharing. I've been MIA for a while, I see i've got a lot of catching up to do around here:)

    Reply
  2. North says:

    I've heard a number of different versions of this type of exercise – another one asks people to imagine the many types of harassment they'd experience if they were gay. But I have mixed feeling about them. It's good for straight people to think about, but too often queer-positive educators use such exercise on a mixed group. That's especially rough if, when you're doing these exercises designed to elicit sympathy about how miserable it is to be gay, some members of your group are queer. High school and middle school kids who are trying to figure out their own sexuality can end up convinced that being gay is a totally miserable fate to be avoided at all costs, and get that idea reinforced by exercises that are supposed to be making their lives easier. Since avoiding that is basically impossible, I wish educators would make sure that their pictures of what being queer is like include all the really awesome (and normal/ok) things about queerness too.

    Reply
  3. diane says:

    thanks so much for posting this; i'd been looking for it for the last week or so after finding the broken link on many other blogs too.

    Reply

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