Ode to “Gwenivere”
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The first time I came out as bisexual, I was 14 years old.
The year was roughly 2005, and I posted on my Xanga, a blog platform that predates MySpace, that I was like a “swinging door.” I went “both ways.”
I was already hypersexual, though I had never had a sexual experience. When I was alone, or bored in my US History class, I stitched together fantasies from R-rated sex scenes and a single porn magazine I found when I was 11.
I already embraced the title “writer” by then, so what I lacked in porn access, I made up for in my audacious imagination, which, of course, eventually ended up on paper.
I wrote a piece of erotica called “Gwenivere,” in which Gwen/Gwenivere gets fingered by a woman named Tonia but goes by Toni, and she was obviously the top.
They were in love.
The last word in the piece involves Toni whispering Gwenivere’s name as Gwen climaxes. I had at least given myself an orgasm by this point, and knew how a body would respond.
But besides that, I didn’t know the moves. I didn’t know how to be “sexy.”
In the third-person, past-tense piece, I used words like “inserted” and “lodged.” Words that were clinical and dry. Pun intended.
Because I was so proud of the piece, I showed everyone. I even told my mom about it. It was a creative exercise, I told her.
Although she knocked on the door if I stayed in the bathtub too long, to interrupt me in case I was masturbating (a sin!), she weirdly and uncharacteristically took this in stride, and we never spoke about it again.
“Gwenivere” circulated my school and church.
Before I continue, readers, I want to assure you that zero grownups punished me for writing this story. If any authority figure came upon it, they never brought it up to me.
In that way, I was safe.
However, the boys in my life brought me their feedback.
One boy, whose name I believe was Josh, told me, basically, that I needed to better understand my target audience: This was a lesbian sex scene. Boys wanted to read it and skip all the love stuff. They wanted the sexy sex.
Before I knew words like “male gaze” and “patriarchy,” I instinctively dismissed this statement.
Another boy I went to church with, whose name is definitely Tyler Harris, who later became a youth pastor, told me, red-faced and nearly sweating, that I didn’t need to be writing “stuff like that.”
He crumpled up the paper and threw it in the trash.
I rescued it then, but time took it from me, and I have mourned its absence ever since.
In preparing for this piece, I even went through my special box, which is not a euphemism but a shoebox that holds the notes I passed in high school, before unlimited texting incurred no additional costs; the letters I wrote in swirling cursive to my future boyfriends after getting grounded from my Nokia phone; and birthday cards from ex-friends, who signed their letters to me with “love you dearly, not queerly.”
But “Gwenivere” was nowhere to be found.
It lives on in my heart—and in the first time, I actually experienced what I wrote about. Both the fingering, and the love.
Though there was a single butch girl in my grade at the time, who I did absolutely have a crush on, she was not the first person to finger me. (She was the fifth.)
I got fingered for the first time later in the same year I wrote “Gwenivere,” by a boy, who once signed an actual letter he sent me in the mail with “P.S. If the world stopped and it was you and me forever, I would be the happiest man who ever lived.”
We had both seen movies where people “do stuff” in swimming pools, and it seemed hot and maybe even a little romantic.
I put on my orange bikini top and matching swim trunks and got in the water, my boyfriend trailing in behind me. It was an oval pool, and we swam to the far end where we thought we wouldn’t be seen.
My boyfriend leaned against the edge of the pool, and I leaned back against him. He wrapped his arms around me, like we were just holding each other, very normal, but he untied my swim trunks and slipped his hand over all my pubic hair, wavy in the water.
He pawed around until he found my “special box.”
I kept waiting for it to feel good, but it didn’t.
It was just awkward.
We weren’t looking at each other or kissing, and the water added to the friction instead of making it easier to go inside like we thought. The in-and-out motions felt kind of like taking a tiny, sharp poop.
We were just quiet, both of us breathing normally, until finally, I guessed that enough time had passed to politely stop him.
When it comes to first times, your imagination is almost always better than the real thing—though the truth sometimes lodges its way inside. It’s OK for things to be awkward. It’s still part of the growing landscape of your life.
And for what it’s worth: #ItGetsBetter