I expect there would be many that would be uncomfortable reading Alexander’s reflections on his life – talking honestly about drug use and about fisting, although the title is “confessions” these are not things Alexander is repenting.
He talks about “the yelp” of a bottom during sex (p96) – a moment when pleasure and pain coexist – giving a language and voice to the experience of the bottom is empowering. He goes on to say that “when every pig in the city was playing, I was curled on my friend’s sofa, asleep. What comes back to me now when I think about most of my sexual adventures and discoveries are not the intensities or boundaries crossed, but the rests, the points of warmth, the feeling of a blanket after a breeding, morning light after a fist.” (p100) That tenderness and extreme sex can be found together is an important fact that is often underplayed – you don’t automatically find both, but the idea that extreme sex inherently denies the possibility of tenderness needs to be rejected.
He writes about the attack on Pulse in Orlando – and since I read it we have faced Club Q killings, as well as all the toxicity around the World Cup in Qatar – he says “I didn’t know how to react. It felt like a sickening indoctrination into an antiquated concept of life as a faggot. This was something that happened in decades past, not now. I was a millennial; my generation was hope.” (p142) I really recognised that confusion.
As Gay White Cis Men we fooled ourselves into believing the work of liberation was over, we could quit with the protest and focus on the party – but the work was never done, and in the last few years progress is rolling backward – that attacks may be focused on Trans people, on people of colour, but the lack of back bone on display from so many at the World Cup is a reminder to all of us of how quickly many people will abandon all of us.
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