In “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality,” Patrick Califia makes passing mention of bottoms outnumbering tops in the San Francisco leatherdyke scene of the late 1970s. Califia wasn’t the first to notice the queer “top shortage” we’ve heard so much about. But I once read, somewhere, that at the dawn of leather—or maybe even before “leather,” what we call the gay sadomasochist subcultures born of American postwar veteran and biker clubs—this phenomenon was reversed. A half-century before Califia was on the scene, according to my source (Maybe it was Mark Thompson? Maybe you can track it down?), it was the bottoms who were in short supply, forcing tops to compete for their flesh and attention.
Though in the past I’ve had to do extra legwork in order to weed out the fakes and the freaks, I’m a good masochist who’s lived in big cities for almost 15 years, which means I have both the ability and the privilege to avoid said top shortage. But of course I’ve noticed, or thought I’ve noticed, an imbalance in the roles that anchor our erotic lives. For as long as I’ve been in leather, my sadist and top friends have been in high demand, the inverse of pass-around Pattys, servicing a bevy of needy pincushions and thirsty holes. This imbalance appears—or is at least bitched about—in the broader queer culture, too, brought to more mainstream attention in gay thinkpieces over the past five years, though these seemed to have peaked not long before the pandemic began.
Has a fad discourse receded back into the ether where it belongs, or has something real shifted? Recently, my friends and I have been going through a gangbang phase, and in the process I’ve realized that there are more tops and (true) switches than strict bottoms in my life. For instance, it’s been no trouble staffing our gangbangs, where tops will outnumber the bottom by at least 5 to 1. On the other hand, finding bottoms to take all our cocks and boots is, if not difficult, a disproportionately taller order than finding said cocks and boots. By the logic of the so-called top shortage, it should be the other way around.
What gives? I have my theories. For all the blood and guts-rearrangement, bottoming isn’t necessarily harder or riskier than topping, but when you reach a certain level of play, where experience takes precedence over a willingness to try new things, a seasoned bottom is as much of a luxury as an expert top (an open-minded novice can only bring you so far—getting good at being used takes a lot of practice!). Perhaps inflation has gotten us here, too, rendering the bottom’s skill set more dear than ever and skewing its value in relation to the top’s, like the dollar superseding the pound.
Then there’s the makeup of our gangbangs, which this summer have happened among friends and friends-of-friends. We don’t have a greater responsibility to our bottom’s welfare because we know their name, but there is a difference, I think. Among strangers, respect is understood; among friends, love. We may sleep with our bottom after the gangbang is done. We will certainly be there for them the morning after, and the morning after that. Which is to say that in a gangbang of friends and lovers, rather than of strangers, where experience and intensity and intimacy converge, the needs of the bottom are greater than ever. If the bottom requires a satisfaction that a single top can’t provide, they will also require commensurate protection from themselves, from the ravages of their own desires.
“It takes a village,” I said as I lifted our bottom up onto the bed, their arms bound behind their back with pink rope. We laughed. Another friend helped me support our bottom’s weight, while a third held their legs apart so a femme in black vinyl could push herself inside.
Suppose there was, for a time, a top shortage. Suppose that it’s now gone, for some reason. Because bottoms have become more brave and voracious, perhaps. Or because tops crave a challenge for their caretaking skills, more developed since the country has undergone a mass-disabling event. Or because all of us have greater rage to excise, and a deeper need for connection.
Even if this reversal, from a plurality of bottoms to a dearth of them, is real, all of this is anecdotal and personal and highly speculative; if the top shortage is indeed now a bottom shortage, it may well be a phenomenon limited to my individual sexual ecosystem, which is admittedly bigger than most. But so much has changed over the past few years. Is it so unreasonable to think that this change brought about a significant, even seismic, shift in our erotic lives? Where once the role of the victim was more popular, now the role of the predator is. Perhaps it has become more difficult to need, or more appealing to control. Perhaps both, or neither, or something else.
In a gangbang, the bottom receives more attention, stimulation, focus, and (after)care than their tops do. This isn’t to say that their top(s) do not also receive these things, but the one who gets fucked, who struggles, bleeds, weeps, and withstands, will need first aid, comfort, tenderness, and relief that the top will not, in ways that the top will not. What has changed, over the past few years, to have altered the resonance of these experiences?
For the summer’s first gangbang, I shared my girlfriend with my friends, negotiating, managing, and running her turnout for an intimate group leatherdykes. It felt like being an auteur directing my favorite actress—a star is born! I felt very close to Jade, and very close to my friends, all of us together, a family, focused on our bottom—our main attraction, our doll, our charge. Afterward, we ordered french fries and ate them in a big hotel bed, lingerie traded in for oversize t-shirts, talking about this and that until we fell asleep.
I have not always liked sex, but what I’ve always appreciated about doing it in a group is the redistribution of responsibility. Less pressure, without diminishing returns. In some circumstances it can feel communist, utopic. With a gangbang in particular, everyone other than the bottom can tap in and out as they like. Sometimes you participate (co-starring as fist-fucker, or playing a supporting role with tongue or toy), and sometimes you sit, watching actively as a voyeur, or passively as you rest, maybe with an arm slung around someone’s shoulder (this is a time when I feel so comradely, so fraternal). You step in and out as you’re needed, restoring yourself with a snack, a drink, some drugs, a piss.
Two dear friends have recently had their first child, and I haven’t spend as much time around an infant since my youngest sister was born when I was 18. Even with two adults (two-and-a-half with me, someone who is not as helpful and can’t breastfeed, but can hold, bottle feed, burp, and entertain), the work of a baby is very demanding; even with all of my years of caretaking—my whole life, with babies of many ages, and people of many needs—I marvel at the effort required to be someone else’s universe.
I have never wanted children of my own, but I adore them, especially infants. After I met my friends’ baby, I told my therapist about how good it felt to care for someone whose requirements, while extreme, can be completely and entirely met. I love that their need is not in vain with me. Unable yet to question whether they will get what they want, I can ensure, as long as I am with them, that they won’t have to.
If America’s incest fantasy could be peeled apart, like a banana, the fruit inside would be thick, sweet, and less convincingly phallic than its exterior might suggest. My theory is that the substance of this edge fantasy is an intimacy that can be taken for granted. Imagine.
The urge to break the incest taboo suggests a powerful craving, one highly gendered but ultimately plastic, for sexual and filial certainty that can never be rent asunder, no matter the risks—such as being caught, whether by another family member, or your friends at school, or the authorities. To fantasize about incest suggests the fulfillment not just of desires, but of needs. I want this so badly that I need it. And it’s right here, provided for me by someone wise enough to know, and strong enough to give. Maybe it’s punishment. Maybe it’s nurturing. Maybe it’s an orgasm.
As a lover, I strive to take taboo desires on their own terms, doing my best not to assume that they are facades for something more real. But as a writer, I’m curious about the affects smuggled inside them, hidden below the surface like a cooking pot’s nascent simmer. I suspect the incest taboo contains an aggression that’s at turns righteous and indignant. In scene, it feels to me like a furious demand for authenticity. By that, I mean: the great harm of child abuse (which is really what we’re talking about when we talk about the incest fantasy) is the betrayal. The second great harm is the denial of the first, the universal gaslighting by family, church, TV, school, doctor, policeman, and culture. To embrace the incest fantasy affirms that you are not crazy (or maybe you are, and who gives a shit?), that harm really was perpetrated by those entrusted with your care and growth, and that while your response to it was not of an uncomplicated and uniform rejection, that that’s okay, too.
You don’t have to be a survivor of literal CSA to see the appeal in that, I don’t think.
When I look around me at the reading, the rave, the sex party, I see gay people of all backgrounds, the vast majority of whom have survived some kind of schism from their natal family. Even those who retain those connections completely do so under duress. But this is not unique to gay people, though in a way it’s reassuring to pretend that it is. As much as “chosen family” has arisen to describe a specific solution to a certain kind of gay abjection, people are exiled from their natal families all the time, and for all kinds of reasons. The nuclear family is created by the state, only to be broken by it—by foster care, prisons, and mental facilities; by the institutions of marriage and divorce; by wage labor, debt, and poverty; by gendered, racialized, and ableist divisions of labor and love.
Is it any wonder that incest has an appeal for some of us? We were promised a family, and a home, an unconditional love that can never be broken, no matter what we do or don’t do. We were promised that harm, should there be any, would always come from without. We were promised that there was recourse for injustice and failure. We were promised, if not safety, then community.
We were also promised that the closest intimacies happen in families; if it happens within the family it is, by definition, love, even if it hurts or is scary. If love does take place outside the family, it must be legitimized by the family’s legal reorganization, via marriage or adoption. One is bred to question if you can really have love outside of your birth family, which means that losing it means losing love, all of it. If you manage to overcome these terms—which constitute heteronormativity, among other things—and replace that love, is it any surprise that that love feels like the family you lost?
In times of fear and disaster, the bonds that don’t break are strengthened, or so they say. Jade and I started dating not long before March 2020, so we can also joke about COVID fast-tracking our romantic relationship. Where would we be, as a couple, without it, I wonder? Would we still be at this gangbang, with these people?
One of the linguistic patterns of gay hookup apps like Grindr, I’ve noticed, is the inclusion of the term body contact on a list of desired activities. Kissing, oral, rimming, body contact—as if the first three can be accomplished without the last. The language is both unappealingly clinical and yet endearing to me, functional in its straightforwardness, but almost too useful to be erotic, to my ears, anyway. And yet, as someone who has felt starved for touch for years now, I understand it. I use it myself.
I want to walk into the room where my friend is being fucked, take off my clothes, and fuck my friend, too. I want Jade to stroke my hair while someone gets pushed against the plate glass, their body flush with the skyline. I want to conspire with another top about swapping girlfriends, radiating laughter. I have been telling men whose names I don’t know that I love them. I take the person that I love the most and I give her away. I can afford to be generous; it feels good to have someone, and it feels good to share the having.
Incest, as the state understands it, was never about child abuse. The taboo is somehow big enough to contain sodomy, gender nonconformity, non-whiteness, the reasons for which we’re accused of grooming everyone around us, yet it’s not big enough to stop children from being harmed, particularly by their legal guardians, whether those are natal family or the state. Under suspicion of love, what you have to offer is criminalized, explicitly or tacitly.
This summer’s gangbangs weren’t my idea, but after COVID, which for me meant years without other lovers and months without my girlfriend, I was ravenous. Then monkeypox happened. Still reeling from one plague, here was another. I could feel the deprivation in my body. Could others too? I’ve been fucking a lot, unable to decide if it’s good or bad. But it feels good, so who cares? I know how close I am to losing it again.
Of those who have survived AIDS, COVID, and MPX, many have been permanently affected, not just directly in their bodies, but by extension: by stress, lost jobs, worsening work conditions and healthcare, the constriction of social services, skyrocketing rent and the shrinking dollar. The nuclear family, our supposed safety net, is further exposed for what it is, the bones splitting the offal from below. It was never going to work, for us, anyway. Is that why desire for incest in our porn has skyrocketed (I promise I’m not just revealing my personal curation)? Why it continues to shock, despite featuring in our most popular mainstream TV shows and films?
As the emotional valence of the family changes, so must the anti-family. Our erotic lives are never untouched. Is that why the top shortage went away? Is that why?
What does a top (or bottom) shortage tell us about the world? I don’t know. I don’t want you to think of this is a diagnosis, much less an attempt at an explanation. In times of change, I leave that to the experts.
I’ll leave you with this: instead of “chosen family”—an expression that I’ve come to loathe—I prefer the unwieldy but much more beautiful “consensual sentient state of relationship,” as Rena Davis-Phoenix puts it in Michelle Handelman’s BloodSisters. But what does that accomplish, I wonder, that gangbang doesn’t, and so much more succinctly, too?
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David Davis