SEXIS WRONG

A Perverted Utopia
It’s the End of Queer as We Know It,
and I Feel Fine
Annalee Newitz
I always knew I was a queer, ever since I got a thrill out of
chasing the boys at lunchtime in elementary school. I would
run as fast as I could after those preadolescent objects of my
desire, grab them in the fists of my seven-year-old grip, and
kiss them hard, on the lips or the shoulder or anywhere. It
didn’t matter. I just wanted to give in to the delirious, seductively
violent wrath of a feeling I couldn’t quite define.
During those same so-called innocent years, I began playing
horsey games with a group of wild, outcast girls. We would
wind jump ropes—the bridles, we called them—around one
another’s bodies and lead each other around, occasionally using
an extra jump rope as a whip. After all, horses are supposed
to be whipped, right? I had no other choice if I was
I was coming out as bisexual,
kinky, and radically, massively
genderfucked. I didn’t even have
words for the thing I would be when
I came out.
going to play the game in a fashion true to my beloved Black
Stallion novels.
I had no choice, in my teens, but to follow my proto-pervert
desires into situations far weirder than those I heard described
by my peers in the local Orange County gay and lesbian center’s
youth group. I wasn’t just dealing with coming out as a
lesbian, which would have been blissfully simple, although no
doubt just as painful. Instead, I was coming out as bisexual,
kinky, and radically, massively genderfucked. I didn’t even
have words for the thing I would be when I came out.
But I had actions. I wore men’s clothing. I initiated threesomes
with my gay male friends so I could watch them fuck.
I begged my girlfriends to have sex with me. I begged my
boyfriends to let me take them by force. I refused to be monogamous.
Even to my homosexual friends, I seemed like a
sexual deviant.
But I knew, somehow, that I was a damn fine queer, and I
dreamed about coming to San Francisco, where I imagined
that my confusion would give way to coherence. I didn’t
make it to the city of my dreams for almost a decade, however,
and spent the intervening years languishing in East Bay
queer circles, where gay men dominated the scene, lesbians
had their own separate spaces, and bisexuals and transgendered
people showed up at events once in a while only to
find themselves part of such a small minority that they never
came back. A gay male friend I had at that time
tried to explain my sexuality and finally said
helplessly, “Well, you’re the kind of woman
who gay men have sex with.”
It was all too much, and I fled to San Francisco
in 1997, hoping to find what seemed at
the time like science fiction: a radically queer
community of bisexual, transgendered, kinky sex freaks who
would do anything that moved (as long as they found it attractive,
of course). And I found it, buried in the hidden cracks
of the “legitimate” queer community, which seemed to be
all about legalized marriage and adopting kids and earning
enough money to keep up with the dot-commers next door.
Members of the group I found sometimes call themselves
the “sex community,” a relatively unused term that seems to
designate all the unassimilated sexual minorities whose lives
don’t inspire HBO specials, national sex-advice columns,
or life-affirming novels. And yet nearly everyone in the sex
community could also be called “queer,” an outlaw word that
316 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG