On stand and model, part 2

My sex life sounds like the setup for a riddle from a gay wizard: I’m a top and a bottom, yet I’m not a switch or vers. That’s actually just a self-description of a person in a leather scene existing within a greater queer community existing within a heteropatriarchy.

Lemme back up.

We’ve all noticed straight people appropriating queer terminology to describe their vanilla sexual activities (“top” and “bottom”) or gender identities (“Can straight women be femme?”). A lot of us have also noticed a version of this phenomenon happening between the greater queer community and queer leathersexuals.

Before COVID, when I was still going on dates and shit, I regularly encountered self-described ~kinky~ queers who didn’t know that top and bottom mean different things in vanilla and kinky contexts, as well as ~kinky~ queers who didn’t know the differences between “top,” “bottom,” “dominant,” and “submissive”—let alone what any of these words can mean on their own. I’ve read indignant articles by queers who think that straight men can’t ever identify as bottoms (they absolutely can in BDSM contexts—what else would you call a straight man being whipped by a straight woman?) and gone on dates with queers who start out the evening identifying as sadist tops only to cringe over my bruises and ask me to fuck them once we’re safely back at their place.

It’s easy—and fun!—to mock straight people who think they don’t look ridiculous in their vain attempts to enjoy the filthy sexiness of gay sex with none of the consequences. But we could just as easily mock the queers who are confident in an erotic ignorance that’s almost as extreme as that of their straight counterparts.

Take my own anecdotal experience. I am a person who tops in vanilla sex (for me, that’s kissing and fisting and rolling around in a bed with a hot babe, usually) and bottoms as a masochist (for me, that’s getting whipped and pierced and humiliated by a hot babe I will never have sex with, usually). Among most other leathersexuals, this lil dichotomy, while not exactly typical, is not too terribly difficult to understand. But in the vanilla and ~kinky~ queer communities in which I travel, it’s almost inscrutable.

I don’t think this issue is about education. A lot of people who stay confused about queer and perverted erotic positionalities could easily educate themselves or have even been educated by other perverts, but they don’t need to go through the effort to self-educate or to retain the information they’ve been generously given because they won’t ever need to put it into practice. Frankly, a person who doesn’t actually have kinky sex, invest time and energy into their local leather community, or move in social circles with sex-working and trans people probably doesn’t really need to understand the nuances of “top” and “bottom” and “dominant” and “submissive.” Why would they?

The joke about “S&M” being short for “stand & model” for pervert posers rings true as ever. As a masochist, I long ago stopped taking for granted that self-identification as such was enough to determine if someone who expressed a desire to play with me was telling the truth. This is not me being “gatekeepery,” by the way. For one, I’m a person and not an institution. For another, not even I can personally gatekeep secretly vanilla people from showing up at play parties and using dating apps to waste my time, even if I wanted to—like, shit, I can’t even gatekeep abusers from showing up at parties!

Identify however you want, I guess, just don’t be surprised when your date who showed up ready to bleed is annoyed because you didn’t clearly communicate your true desires, which are almost invariably a vanilla pounding from someone who “looks” like a top, which usually means a certain kind of trans/masculine, among other things. (Someday I’ll write an essay on that certain strain of baby queer—AKA queers of straight experience [h/t @Daemonumx for that new phrase!]—who have not yet unpacked their straight entitlement and believe that they are owed sex with more experienced queers who maybe just maybe aren’t interested in fucking someone who doesn’t yet know what they’re doing. Someday.)

Heteronormativity divides our lives between private and public, general and intimate, normal and abnormal. Among straight people, and even many gay people, “sex” is a stand-in for intimacy in adult relationships. Through this lens, there is nothing more intimate than a specific kind of penetrative intercourse, which is why even the language we use to subvert these norms can be reappropriated and leeched of meaning, so that gender essentialism worms its way into language that is supposed to describe actions, not identities. It’s why the uninitiated might not think to describe a brutal caning as also romantic, or fail to see the perfectly pleasurable un-intimacy of a bar bathroom hookup, or conflate the eroticisms of fisting a girlfriend you love dearly and having your face bruised by stripper heels.

For a long time, I puzzled over why someone would risk agreeing to unwanted activities rather than simply learning to understand the words they were using to cruise. If you aren’t seeking to feel pain, for example, calling yourself a masochist and throwing yourself into a pit of sadists is a very stupid thing to do. It’s also just plain embarrassing to be caught in a lie you told to look like someone you’re not, whether it’s about a band you’ve never actually heard of before to what the word “bastinado” means.

Then one day it dawned on me—after another encounter with a queer who told me they wanted me to beat them when I had just finished explaining that I was a strict masochist—that these people are willing to take this kind of risk because they don’t genuinely believe that other people mean it when they say they are a cruel sadist top, a foot-freak sadomasochist switch, or an insatiable pain slut. They use these shibboleths for a chance to participate in that same “stand & model” scene, tourists in a subculture where they can sample some of the thrill and pleasure, with a fraction of the danger. This desire to maintain respectability, or lack of imagination, or disinterest in real kink is why those people aren’t leathersexuals—which is just fine, by the way! It’s not for everyone! (Someday I’ll write the essay about why I generally prefer to play with sex workers over civilians because they are unable to be BDSM tourists by the simple fact of their career.)

Studies show that cishet men struggle with high rates of loneliness because they’ve been socialized to believe that their only intimacy can be with the straight cis woman they monogamously partner with. We’ve all seen the memes and TikToks joking about straight men who secretly enjoy being the little spoon—the joke being that men are ashamed of or unable to be sexually or intimately provided for by a woman. Because that would make her the top, you see. Which would make him the bottom. Which would make him gay. Or a woman. Or something.

These associations and beliefs are deeply ingrained in all of us, and must be intentionally rooted out, usually over many years. Part of that rooting process is education, which I think is wonderful and beautiful, and should be nourished and supported. But there is a difference between the eager leather neophyte and the leather tourist, and at least in the leather scenes of which I’m a part, one is much more common than the other.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.