(FIFTY) SHADES OF PINK

For many of us, sex is a process of trial and error. Sex, like gender, is subjective, something that requires nuance and space to be explored. Also like gender, sex is confusing, a process of trial and error that many assume is automatic. More often than not, sex as a form of intimacy and euphoria is policed by cisgender, heterosexual social norms which in turn leaves a lot of pressure on us to have sex that isn’t necessarily fun or comfortable. But how do we know what we like when it comes to sex, especially in an era where it feels like we must constantly conform to others’ notions of sex?

Baby Pink/Purity

My high school’s sex education class and smutty fanfics were really the only sources I had when it came to questions around sex. Sex is awkward. Pink dusted my cheeks as I continued perusing queer fanfics since my classes only talked about cishet couples. Exploring my sexuality was confined to the Internet, through a screen that fit in the palm of my hand.

There was a lot of pressure around sex in high school. Unfortunately, growing up AFAB (assigned female at birth) meant I was forcibly enrolled in the virgin/whore dichotomy, harsh labels ascribed to you based on your perceived promiscuity.

These labels added all the more stress to sex, and most discussions around it were based on cisgender, heterosexual experiences. It left out those of us who didn’t fall within those labels.

Orchid/Desirability

I didn’t start having sex until I was 18 and in college. The unfortunate process of puberty graced my body at nine years old, which meant that by 18, I had a good idea of what my body looked like. I was a bit of an ugly duckling in high school, hiding my body behind large sweatshirts and jeans that never quite fit right. I was a bit jealous of the teenagers I saw in movies and TV shows, whose bodies were beautiful and skinny. They didn’t have awkward hip dips, crooked teeth nor did they seem uncomfortable in their bodies. Western society (ugh, Western society) gives us a very clear understanding of what the ideal-gendered body looks like from a young age. It’s pretty bad already for cis folks, but it’s a lot worse for trans folks in general. Black and Brown trans folks have to struggle against more than just the norms of cisheteropatriarchy. As Jamee Pineda notes in the book, “Trans Sex,” they must also reckon with how “white supremacy and colonization forced many to normalize white European gender roles and standards of beauty.”1 At the individual level, there are many ways to resist the conception of certain bodies and certain body parts as inherently masculine or feminine.

Think about language. If you aren’t a fan of how society tries to label your parts, find or make up new words and explicitly ask your partner(s) to use them! There are already plenty of these mental shifts existing within trans communities; for example, a transfeminine person referring to their penis as a clitoris and vice versa for a transmasc person. Like Lucie Fielding puts it in “Trans Sex,” “A re-naming can be a way of reclaiming a part that would otherwise be cloaked in dysphoria.”2

Same with adjectives or names — if it’s a turn-on to be referred to as a “boy” or a “girl” in certain scenarios, even if that doesn’t match up with what you’d want to be called in everyday life, go for it. Let your partner(s) know!

Rose/ Communication

Many movies and shows tell us that sex is something serious and erotic, often a pact between two lovers or two strangers letting all their sexual tension out. It came as a surprise to me that sex isn’t like this, not most of the time anyway. Your body makes a weird noise, prompting laughter from your partner while you’re shocked that your body can even make such a noise. Kisses on certain parts of the body can feel ticklish and you must repeat to yourself, “Don’t laugh,” lest you ruin the moment.

The most important part of communication during sex is consent. Even if you don’t consider yourself particularly kinky, having a safe word or some sort of check in system planned ahead of time is a great idea. Checking in with your partner, ideally, should just be a regular part of sex. Come on, you’ve made it this far in life by adapting cis folks’ conceptions of sex: you can definitely make seeking consent sexy.

Again — sex is awkward. No matter how many movies, porn videos, or romance novels try to depict it as some fluid, graceful act, they can’t change the awkwardness of real life human bodies. Add in genderfunky feelings about your own body, and the awkwardness can be a turn-off more than anything else. But here’s the thing: many of the anxieties about sex with a partner(s) can be relieved by openly communicating with them.

Coral/Beyond the Body

Under the covers, the brightness of my phone screen illuminates my face, almost embarrassed that it’s Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fanfiction website — but where else could I find something specific to my fantasies? Where else could I discover new things in the bedroom that I liked?

Not to speak for all the queer folks out there, but a lot of us have gone through something pretty similar. Like . . . how does sex work for trans people? It’s not as though they show us on TV. Most porn is absolutely not a healthy or realistic example. So what does that leave us with, as horny, curious, anxious teens and young adults? Fanfiction and fanart.

Ah, Tumblr, Twitter, AO3, you beautiful, wonderful cesspools and purveyors of smut.

I’m not trying to say that all the queer sex in fanfiction and art is inherently healthier or more realistic than in other forms of media. But, surprisingly — or not, if you consider how many trans creators there are — some fics are the encouraging, trans-inclusive, sex-positive sex education most of us never had. Trans creators, of both erotica and adult entertainment, also produce many examples of how trans people can be seen as desirable. While some depictions do fall into stereotypes or align with societal norms, there are many multiply-marginalized trans folks out there who write or draw desirability onto Black and Brown trans characters, fat trans characters, disabled trans characters, and trans characters who haven’t yet gotten or don’t want to get surgery. Taken in their entirety, these works are revolutionary and empowering because they reject what society deems as “normal.”

And yeah, a lot of trans folks are kinky, too. So whether your fantasy is having a stable life with a loving partner or seducing several tentacled aliens, fic has got you covered.

Hot Pink/Blossoming

“It’s why I’ve arrived, your sex god,” Mitski sings in my headphones, as I jam out to “Stay Soft” from her album, “Laurel Hell.” I straighten my shirt, taking a peek at myself in my jeans. Confidence, formerly anxiety, runs through my veins as I await my partner’s arrival. Sex isn’t always guaranteed during our time together, but when it does happen, I no longer feel pressure to perform a certain way or to conform to cishet sex norms.

Sex is about what brings you and your partner pleasure. But part of the work of unlearning restrictive structures of sexuality is decoupling pleasure from the purely physical and the confines of the arousal-to-orgasm pipeline. Instead, pleasure can unexpectedly involve turning away from the fear of dysphoria and towards the experience of gender euphoria.

Content warning: child abuse, homophobia, racism

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong (he/him) unearths the life and history of a young gay Vietnamese-American man, Little Dog. Though the novel moves between his grandmother’s and mother’s lives in Vietnam to his life in the U.S., it isn’t only an “immigrant story” or a “gay story.” Rather, it encompasses his queerness, race, class, family, and humanity.

Throughout the novel, Little Dog struggles to feel human. Not only does American society other him for being Asian, but he faces homophobia both in and outside of his ethnic community. For instance, as a child, he wears his mother’s dress to resemble her, but this innocent imitation exposes his queerness. His peers call him homophobic slurs until he realizes they mean “monster.” He learns that wanting to look like his Asian mother is queer and to be queer is monstrous. Subsequently, fear and shame drive many of his actions.

Encouraged by his mother to be quiet and unassuming, Little Dog shields himself behind this invisibility. Yet he longs for love, unachievable unless he allows himself to be seen. Trevor, the white boy he falls in love with, disarms him — and when he is seen, Little Dog finally feels real.

Queer love both grants and denies Little Dog the safe haven he searches for. He finds companionship and pleasure in Trevor, but both of them are haunted by their pasts. Their love alone can’t save Little Dog.

Violence pocks their lives. Just as Trevor’s father beats him, Little Dog’s mother beats Little Dog until his conceptualization of love neces- sitates violence. When everything in his life, including his own family, is a threat, he shies away from genuine intimacy to prevent himself from being unexpectedly hurt again. Instead, he chases the familiarity of controlled physical violence at Trevor’s hands and finds a twisted freedom in choosing how and when he is hurt.

In contrast, nearly every time one boy attempts to show the other boy kindness, the other boy pushes him away.

Beyond the deep-seated effects of their trauma, Trevor and Little Dog’s shame plagues their relationship. In particular, Little Dog’s shame of being both queer and Vietnamese coalesce into a general shame of existing. One of the first instances of racism Little Dog experiences is when a white boy on the bus demands he speak English and the white boy’s name. After Little Dog repeats the boy’s name, the boy mockingly calls him “a good little bitch.” The bully confirms that an Asian man can never meet white American standards of masculinity and that failing to be a man is “gay.”

So what happens when you’re gay and Asian? The bully’s usage of “bitch,” a term for a dog, answers that you become more animal than man. You fail to be human, twice. Little Dog internalizes these harmful ideas about himself and seeks to escape them via Trevor.

However, Trevor accepts his father’s toxic masculinity, which develops into internalized homophobia. Trevor’s shame of being gay leads him to hurt Little Dog. Trevor tells Little Dog he cannot bottom because he’s not “a bitch” and that it is a role exclusively for Little Dog. Overcome with shame and disappointment he cannot verbalize, Little Dog mourns the crumbling sanctuary of their queer love. He believed that despite their relationship’s secrecy, they had created a sacred space, free of the world’s rules. Instead, Trevor’s implication that Little Dog is meant to be “the bitch” because of his yellow body shatters the illusion of a pure, harmless love. “The rules,” Little Dog says, “they were already inside us.”

While Trevor never explicitly cites Little Dog being Asian as the reason he should bottom, he echoes the boy on the bus’s racist emasculation of Asian men and then frames being “feminine” and gay as unwanted. Thus, Trevor reinforces society’s marginalization of Asian and gay individuals. As a gay man himself, Trevor only mires them further in shame.

The desire to be saved by love is nearly universal. I think of the Thomas Yingling quote: “This homosexual dream of perfect metaphysical union is not so much a reflected heterosexual ideal as it is compensation for having wept in the darkness.”

But eventually, Little Dog grasps that he and Trevor cannot be each other’s refuge. Neither boy has been given the guidance or space to unlearn hate. Without healing, they cannot engage in the communication and vulnerability healthy love requires. Little Dog learns that growth must come from within. His story displays that while the people in our lives can aid our healing, we must firstly want it for ourselves.

Seeking healing, Little Dog recounts his life in a letter to his mother — the letter being the novel itself. As he guides her through his beginnings to his first love to his career as a writer, he expels his pain and shame by allowing it to take shape outside of him. He comes to understand its origins and effects by speaking its name.

Without turning away from the negative impact his mother’s abuse had on him, Little Dog makes peace with her actions. He describes her beatings as preparation for war. Reacting as a woman raised in a war-torn nation, she sought to ready him for life’s cruelties. Recognizing their inescapable link of blood, especially as immigrants in a foreign country, he calls himself and his mother “monsters” but recounts the word’s root meaning as “divine messenger[s] of a catastrophe.” Little Dog doesn’t view monstrosity as evil, but rather, he writes, “To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.” He reclaims his position as the “other” and reframes it into something beautiful. By the novel’s conclusion, he tells his mother that they come from beauty, not violence, and that living is enough.

Thus, no lover absolves Little Dog of his fear and shame. Queer love and its accompanying human touch do empower him to feel real and beautiful during the years he needed it most, yet writing to his mother — not loving Trevor — is what grants him catharsis and the ability to acknowledge his past in order to live beyond it. Queerness becomes only one aspect of his varied, nuanced life, and the novel does not end conclusively. Vuong doesn’t provide easy answers to the looming questions of race and gayness, but he confronts its intersection with an unflinching sincerity.

When I’d burnt out from reading last year, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” reignited my love for books. The lyricism of Vuong’s prose is not only hauntingly transcendent, but the truth behind it unveils the duality of beauty and blood, love and loss. It doesn’t shy away from the shame that can eat away at queer people’s cores or the racial divisions between people of color and white people, regardless of their shared love. It reveals what it’s like to not feel real and how wanting to save someone is sometimes not enough.

Vuong’s novel will move you and change you. For those of us who are queer and Asian, it will force you to face difficult parts of yourself, but as Little Dog says, “We look into mirrors…to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here.” Regardless of who you are, I encourage you to read this novel and embark on its heart-wrenching journey.

“All this time I told myself we were born from war — but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.

Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence — but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

Ocean Vuong, “On Earth

We’re Briefly Gorgeous”