It’s Pride month, and fittingly, I got a text the other day from the person I half-jokingly credit with making me queer. We’re in touch semi-regularly, so this was no earthshattering communiqué, but it made me smile nonetheless. They wanted to let me know they’d brought me up recently in a conversation about “first serious crushes.” My phone screen cast a glow on my face as I read the text, but I was also glowing inside – who doesn’t feel flattered by being someone’s first serious crush?

Admittedly, I was also glowing because this person was my first serious crush, too – my first, at least, on someone attainable, someone I could conceivably kiss (and did). It’s been 12 years and they still sit gilded in my heart like a bust on a mantel: immortalized in lust, limerence, and the lyrics of the many, many songs I wrote about them, before, during, and after our flash-in-the-pan fling.

This person had been on my mind even before they texted me, because it’s Pride month and I’ve been thinking about my queer crushes. The girls whose strong fingers and tanned forearms I’ve stared at across lecture halls; the enbies whose boots and swagger I’ve eyed in bars and cafés. The girl who fingerfucked me in the alley behind a pizzeria, the girl who blushed when I told her I’d like to flog her, the enby who took me over their lap after a tense game of Scrabble. The queer sex in closets, in sex clubs, in my imagination. These thoughts cloud my mind with societally-unsanctioned ardor.

I’ve been thinking lately, too, about how even my relationships with men have sometimes felt queer to me – because I’m queer, and my attractions are. Almost every man I’ve ever dated has felt disconnected from his masculinity and attached, instead, to something softer and less defined. Some have confessed they’d like to be born again as women, born into a better fit; others have enjoyed toying with feminine names, pronouns, and clothes sometimes, just to try, just to see. I went out with an old beau recently, and when I mentioned I’m most often drawn to masculine people, he scoffed – all broad shoulders, bulky beard, and beer in tow – and said, “I’m not exactly masculine.” I hadn’t seen that before, but I saw it now: a softness, a low-grade flamboyance, a genderlessness under the outward trappings. I felt such tender fondness for him, as I always do when someone slips into my heart who strays from the beaten path. I take pleasure in seeing everyone’s nuances instead of flattening them into a monolith, dim and small.

I mentioned to my partner recently that I’d been having some “1950s housewife feelings,” i.e. that I wanted to bring him a drink and suck his cock at the end of a long work day, after his return to an abode I’d made sparkle. He wanted more details, so I wrote this…

A lot of the pushback against the heteronormative ‘50s nuclear family lifestyle, rightfully so, is about the servitude the woman offers the man, focusing so much of her effort and energy on making him happy. It’s seen as disempowering for her to essentially devote her days to making someone else comfortable.

Granted, I don’t want my life to revolve so singularly around a partner – but I am drawn to the idea of my partner’s comfort and happiness being a goal of mine, in a domestic setting and in a ritualized way. Rituals and routines have always comforted me because they give me something to cling to when everything else is in chaos. So much of life is full of unclear goals – your manager may not tell you what they want from you, your customers may not know what they need, your parents may not articulate the ways in which you disappoint them – so it’s nice to imagine living in an environment where the expectations are very clear, and the rewards of meeting those expectations are known to me. This type of structure can both calm me down and turn me on.

Heads up: this essay references suicidal ideation as part of depression.

I find myself at a crossroads. Should I pursue happiness, or should I pursue sex?

The past year has been one of the worst of my life for my mental health, for mysterious neurochemical reasons. My depression has been crushing, my anxiety has gone haywire, and I’ve spent many days too dysfunctional to even get out of bed. I started on Wellbutrin last November, and while it initially lifted my mood (and my libido), I’m no longer convinced it’s doing much of anything. The tears and fears remain. I often want to die, or at least don’t feel strongly that I should continue to live.

When my current roommate was contemplating moving in over a year ago, we had a discussion about our various living-quarters quirks, anything that might make us annoying to live with, so we could decide together whether we’d be a good fit.

“I work from home, so I’m here most of the time,” I admitted, knowing this had been a sticking point for some potential roommates in the past. “I also have a long-distance partner; he comes and stays here about one weekend a month, and I have giggly phone calls with him at night a lot. I think that’s about it.”

My future roommate nodded and told me, “I’m a loud sex-haver.” She didn’t seem ashamed, nor did I think she should have to. Working in sex media, I am well used to the sex shame most people harbor, and I don’t think it serves us.

I shrugged. “As long as you’re respectful in the times you choose to have sex, that should be fine for me.”

How many times did I say “Step on me, queen” out loud to a gif of Stephanie Beatriz or Olivia Wilde before realizing I might actually want someone to step on me? I don’t know. A lot.

My boyfriend, as ever, went into Intrepid Researcher mode when I made this proclamation. He searched on Google, KinkAcademy, and the various kink wikis, but there just wasn’t that much practical info on trampling safety or technique. Here are a few basic things we learned:

1. A carpeted surface – and/or pillows on the floor – makes the experience more comfortable for the “tramplee.” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a good thing.

2. The trampler should wear either shoes (ouch) or bare feet (less ouch) – not just socks or stockings, which are too slippery for this task.

3. As with any kink activity, care should be taken to avoid putting pressure on the kidneys, spine, and other bones. Large fleshy areas are best for stepping on: the upper thighs, the butt, and the non-bony parts of the back, for example.

4. Orient yourselves in an area where the trampler has lots of things to lean on, on all sides – banisters, cabinets, whatever – so they can keep their balance and moderate the amount of weight they’re distributing.

Why did I want to be stepped on? The typical narrative about this activity is one of humiliation and domination, being squished into the ground because you’re a lowly worm who only deserves to be under your tormentor’s feet. But I didn’t want a punitive or degrading experience; I wanted the slow, measured, meditative calm of someone gradually moving their weight from one part of my body to another. I wanted the peace of momentarily being not a very messy person but instead a very useful floor.

1.

It’s makeout o’clock. But housekeeping is in our hotel room. We grab a drink at the bar in the lobby – bad cocktails, good company – and then make another attempt. Still, our room isn’t available. “Should we make out next to the ice machine?” I joke, but his eyes go dark and he isn’t joking.

We go exploring, and find a hallway by the service elevator, deserted and clean and white. He shoves me against a painted brick wall, already growling, and kisses me hard enough to make me gasp. My body responds instantly in familiar ways: a hot drop down, a warm pooling outward.

His hands travel wherever they want, roaming, claiming, cupping my ass and squeezing my tits. Roughly, he tugs up the hem of my dress and shoves his hand down the front of my panties to find my clit. He rubs it in stunning, perfect circles until I’m woozy and my knees aren’t working so well.

Content note: This essay deals with consensual but not-entirely-wanted sex, as well as dissociation during sex.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of responsive desire, as laid out by Emily Nagoski in her earthshattering book Come As You Are. This type of desire, in contrast with spontaneous sexual desire (i.e. getting randomly turned on and then wanting to fuck), involves getting turned on in response to sexual stimuli – porn, erotica, touching, kissing, what have you – and then wanting to have sex. It’s not our culture’s favorite narrative for how the so-called sex drive works, but it is fairly common.

I think a lot about how my own mostly-responsive desire affected what I affectionately refer to as my “slutty phase”: the period from about November 2015 to August 2017 when I dated and fucked many people in quick succession, mostly from Tinder or OkCupid. Most of that sex was bad, as hookups are wont to be, and I think that’s largely because neither I nor my flash-in-the-pan partners understood how my desire worked.

I dated a boy two summers ago who was as introverted as anybody I’d ever met. He required long hours in the dark with his video games daily, not speaking to anyone or being spoken to. He encouraged me to be comfortable just hanging out with him in silence, doing my thing while he did his. I could have managed this if I felt safe and stable in the relationship, but I didn’t. I chattered on and on as if to tug the rope of connection between us, to assure myself it was still there.

This boy was, inexplicably, dating two other people besides me. This boy who didn’t even always want to talk to one girlfriend somehow had three of them. I understand the introvert’s “eyes bigger than your stomach” dilemma – I’ve too often packed my social calendar only to later find that the sight of it makes me sick – so I can see, theoretically, how he got himself into this situation. But I still don’t think it was a nice thing to do, knowingly spreading himself so thin across three people he must have known wanted more of him.

I told him once, in a moment of insecurity, “I’m worried that you’re going to decide you’re too socially overwhelmed and you need to break up with one of us, and I’m worried it’s going to be me.” He looked affronted – of course he’d never do that! – but then he did, unceremoniously, a few months later. I knew my own kind when I saw him, and I knew his juggling act couldn’t last.

I’ve pondered this often in the intervening years, as I attempt to build my own ideal non-monogamy landscape. There was one brief interlude where I was fucking three people on a rotating basis, but that equilibrium ended in a flash with all three relationships dramatically blowing up over the course of one week. I’ve subsequently only gone as far as to have one romantic relationship and one friend with benefits concurrently, max, and honestly? I think that might be my ideal poly situation.

I’m hilariously submissive. “Hilariously” because it took me far too long to figure out what was plainly true. My 10th-grade journal entries talk about wanting girlfriends/boyfriends/crushes to climb on top of me, hold me down, kiss me against walls, boss me around, take care of me… and yet I was still saying shit like, “I wish I had an interesting fetish, but I think I’m vanilla through and through.” Oh, Baby Kate, you have so much to learn and so far to come.

One of the major roadblocks people come up against when they’re curious about submission is: Don’t you have to enjoy cleaning/cooking/shining shoes/giving head/folding shirts/~insert other service activity here~ to be a “real” submissive? Expert opinions vary on this, but my take is a resounding “LOL, NO.”

Submission is about your attitude, your approach, your desires. If you enjoy handing over your power to someone else in sex or kink situations, you might well be submissive, even if that doesn’t manifest in the ways you’d expect or hope. Submission is a spectrum, too, as are so many parts of sexuality: there are the 24/7 domestic slaves who crawl around on all fours with a butt plug in and chain restraints around their ankles, and there are the vanillish dilettantes who enjoy a little hair-pulling from time to time, and there are a zillion different variations in between. No version of submission is less or more valid than any other, so long as they’re all carried out consensually and with awareness of the risks involved.

That said, knowing this won’t necessarily make it easier to deal when you feel like a failure – as I did this morning when my Sir asked me if I’d like to iron his shirts daily when we’re in Montreal together for a week soon. Because, guess what? I’ve never ironed anything and wouldn’t know how.

I have done the math, and so far this year, my sex life is 69.9% phone sex. (Nice.)

That number feels like it should be higher, and the only reason it isn’t is that when my partner and I are together in person, we cram sex into our schedules like a game of Tetris. Three or four times a day isn’t uncommon. But those blissful stints are a sprint, and our ritual of near-daily phone sex is more like a marathon. Except more fun, and marginally less sweaty.

Here’s the secret I wish someone had told me about phone sex before I knew fuck-all about it: Like “real” sex, it can be terribly awkward, but when you find someone whose style and desires are compatible with yours, it can be divine. I always envisioned it as a nervewracking endeavor, like a two-person improv set with no suggestion where the stakes are boners/orgasms/your relationship, but in reality it’s more relaxing than any sex I’ve ever had.

Our nightly catch-up conversations are like any you might have with a partner: casual, breezy. We talk about work and family and friends, TV and Twitter and the news. But then some flirty comment or bratty remark drops his voice to a molten register. “Oh yeah?” he says, or sometimes he just growls or purrs, provoking a reaction in me that Pavlov might find interesting. His voice is a tool with which he’s stroked me off hundreds of times and my brain and body respond with this knowledge, bone-deep, worn in.