The V-Word (12 page)

I felt more nervous than I ever had before. I had been out as trans for years but I still hadn't had any sexual or romantic encounters with another trans person. And there I was on the sofa bed in my living room with the most attractive man I had ever met, a man who happened to also be trans. We undressed each other slowly and deliberately. Drew held me gently but securely. As he took my nipple into his mouth, waves of joy pulsed throughout every inch of my body. In all my experiences I had never felt anything quite like that. He took control in a way that was not dominant but confident and comforting.

We spent the next several hours exploring each other's bodies, affirming our own identities. Every time we touched, I felt the masculine leave my body, a wrong being righted. He climbed on top of me, gently kissing my neck and telling me how beautiful I was. With his weight on top of me, I felt my body transform from linebacker to ballerina. He held me closely as we rolled around the bed, unable to distinguish up from down as two people passionately became one.

If a stranger had seen us having sex, their description would be almost unrecognizable to us. An outside observer would say that I penetrated Drew, that I was the
man
and he was the
woman
.

But nothing could have been farther from the truth.

It felt as though our genitals had switched places. I felt like he was entering my body. For one brief night, I felt that the errors made in my mother's womb had been corrected. I had known intellectually that my womanhood could exist and be powerful regardless of what I had between my legs, but for the first time in my life, I truly felt that I was really a woman.

The next day we all went out for lunch at a nearby Tex-Mex restaurant. Drew and I sat next to each other, holding hands as we ate. After lunch, my roommate and I walked our guests back to their car. Drew kissed me and held me in an embrace that felt as though it would never end and then he and his roommate began their two-hour drive home. I hoped we would see each other again, but that was not meant to be. A few months later, we both moved to different cities a continent apart from each other.

Drew and I haven't spoken in almost four years, but few days go by where I do not think of him and of the beautiful night we shared. A girl never forgets the time she lost her virginity, even if that experience defies the definition as we know it.

Sex has the power to transform us. Being intimate can add connection to relationships, and it can also make us feel independent and powerful—

Look what I can do with my hands, my mouth.

Look how I can give you pleasure.

Look at me taking charge.

Sex can also bring us to a deeper understanding of who we are and what we need.

In the last story, Alex had to embrace her own identity before she could experience the kind of sex she wanted. In the next one, Chelsey's first-time sexual experience confirmed and celebrated what she knew to be her truest self.

I
don't really notice any funky smell. And the taste isn't terrible, either. It's kinda like iced tea with a dash of salt. A vague, sweet sort of salty. My basketball teammates swore it was going to be all rotten and fishy down there. I don't get that. Why they would say vag is like rank tuna? Doesn't that mean they, too, smell like dead fish? Besides, none of them have ever dived into a muff as I am diving into a muff right now, so they don't know what they're talking about. Carpet muncher, they'll call me tomorrow. Jealous, I'll say. Because you can take my word for it, I've never before smelled nor tasted anything that's as full of life as this is. Though yesterday they did get me all afraid of what this was going to be like. And so, I feared my girlfriend's vagina would be a mucky swamp.

It is not.

Vagina smells like vagina.

Vagina tastes like vagina.

And I like it.

I don't know why I like it. I don't know why I'm only attracted to girls, not sure why I think dudes are gross. But the definition of gross, i.e., men, is not what I'm thinking about right now. Right now, I'm naked and lying stomach-down, my belly pushed into the green scratchy carpet of my bedroom floor. My head is between my girlfriend's legs and I'm finally having sex. Here's my tongue. Here's my girlfriend's vagina. Here's my tongue on my girlfriend's vagina and here I am having my first sexual experience. Ever. And it's awesome.

“But how do you
know
you're a lesbian?” Basketball teammates asked me yesterday. “You've never even had sex with a woman. How do you know that's what you want to do for the rest of your life?” I just knew. And, well, now I am having sex with a woman. And I was right. A proud dyke.

I'm licking my way to my identity.

I feel like a natural at this.

Courtney's pubic hair starts tickling the tip of my nose, which is about to make me sneeze. Fuck! That would suck! So I push my face further into her folds. Pressing my nose and mouth more into her, I can now feel her pubes on my tongue.

They don't taste gross either.

I don't know if it's my saliva or some sort of wet coming from Courtney's vagina, but I feel a liquid starting to spread across my lips and trickle down my chin. Then she moans. I must be doing something right.

With her feet on the floor and her knees bent over my shoulders, I loop my arms around her legs and hold on tight. My hands grab onto that soft area between the top of her thighs and the insides of them. It's so very grab-able. I'm in love with it already. I squeeze my arms around her legs like they're a harness slapped down on me for a roller coaster ride. Yes. I hold on for life.

My tongue separates the lips of her vagina and I find her clit with the tip of my tongue. At least I think it's her clit. It's this hard little ball thing. I press on it, and Courtney's legs start to quiver. I'm not quite sure what to do with my chin, so I push it closer to her, dig my chin a bit further past the fringe of her lips. She likes this. She moves her hips, riding my face like the horses she loves. Her hips are bucking.

Like I said, I'm a natural.

I explore. I unwrap my right arm from her thigh and stick two fingers inside of her. Wet, warm—could be called swamp-like—but only a swamp found in heaven! So welcoming. Mesmerizing. Lush. My fingers have found their place in the world. They were always supposed to be right there. My mouth, too. It's like I'm whispering a hidden language into her body, a language I'm finally letting myself speak.

I push my fingers further in, add a third, pump away. From her increasingly loud moans and heaving breathing, I know she feels good. The further in I go, the more it feels like I'm touching a part of myself, my identity revealed. Every second in her vagina, I am more and more a lesbian. I am myself.

And this is fun—a lot of fun!

A slightly-salty wet seeps out of her as she grabs onto my hair and squeezes my head with her legs like I'm one of Suzanne Sommers's ThighMasters. I'm having a harder time hearing her moans now. The sound is all muffled because now, with her legs squishing my ears into her inner-thigh flesh, I feel like I have ear muffs on for this muff-diving adventure. But even with muffled hearing, I can still hear some epic moans. And then she pushes her wet vag further into my face, gyrating. Well, this is the best activity, ever, though my jaw's starting to get a little sore and I'm losing some tongue strength. She's wearing me out.

But with my tongue on her clit and her body squirming about, all I can think of now is
I'm a lesbian! I'm a lesbian!
This realization is on a solid rotation in my head. It's all I can think about. Yes, now I'm an official lesbian. Hell yeah.

There's another big moan and some more hard hip thrashing and more of that thigh-squeezing and then soon her hands let go of my hair and my mouth lets go of her sex as she breathes heavily, her breath heaving her chest up and down. Up and down.

I sit up and wipe her salty liquid taste from my chin. A hair tickles the back of my throat. I pull it out and stare at—it's proof that I'm a lesbian. I kinda want to keep it.

Courtney smiles at me. “Mmm. Dessert.” I imagine my chin is glistening like the fingers that were inside of her are glistening. Sparkling, even. I exhale, smile. Yes, lesbian.

Yes, that's me.

Two people can choose to have sex for no other reason than that it feels good. It doesn't have to be the next step in a committed relationship. It doesn't have to be about love. But if you tell me that it means nothing, I'll lift an eyebrow in disbelief. The essays in this book are proof enough. No matter how many years have passed, the writers remember vivid details about how it felt, what they thought, why they did it, and what it meant.

Sex can be about power or intimacy or relationship or rebellion or babies but we are a long way from a time in human evolutionary history where sex is for reproduction alone. That's why people have been writing books and telling jokes about sex for centuries.

It's also why, in the next story, Erica's first time is intricately connected to a much more complicated narrative about friendship and faith and finding our way.

V
erse one

The first boy I ever slept with just tried to friend me on Facebook, but I didn't friend him back. I'm not saying this will happen to you. I'm not saying that the first boy you have sex with will grow up and have a sketchy profile picture and try to friend you in that way that people who Google their ex-girlfriends do when they're bored or horny. I'm not even saying that just because he's posing in front of a window covered with a makeshift curtain it necessarily means that he's a lonely guy living in a dingy apartment googling his ex-girlfriends. But it does make you wonder.

verse two

I'm one of the nobodies at my school. The girl who cries a lot. The girl with a big nose and a weird best friend. The girl who might be easy but who cares? I don't care. It's summer. School's out. Mel's doing my makeup. We're going downtown to the underage nightclub. We've been planning it for weeks. We have no idea what goes on there.

I have these stories about that time in my life. I tell them when I talk about dropping out of high school or my parents' divorce or why my teenage years unfolded the way they did. I think adolescence is this unbearable waiting until one day you go to a party or kiss another kid or take a drink of alcohol, and then—
all of a sudden
—it's like you're on a roller coaster. You want to remember every minute of that first kiss or that first party but then there's another and then another. Things happen, all kinds of things, and when it spits you out again you're twenty or twenty-two or twenty-six, and you can't remember actually choosing to get on that ride.

I have these stories about Mel and me, dreaming in the basements of our parents' homes, as though we would be these in-between people—these fourteen-year-old explosions waiting to happen—forever.

Mel's really good with makeup. She wears all the colors: silver-purple, purple, mauve, purply silver. Her own eyes have plum-colored eyeliner and purple mascara. Her glasses are superthick and have a pinkish-purple tinge. Her eyes are startlingly beautiful beneath, strangely large and brown and intelligent, full of all these bottomless things, unspoken. I have no patience for makeup, all the little brushes. I use my middle finger to apply plain brown eyeshadow to my lid. Mel takes over. She makes me sit still. She's “highlighting my brow bone,” she says.

I have a new outfit. The skirt is a black cotton miniskirt, really straight with zippers all over it, and I have a yellow tank top and a red shirt made out of netting over that. The whole outfit is brand new, bought today at the Galleria by my mom. It's weird. She never does that. But I tried it on and she bought the whole outfit, right off the rack, not even on sale.

If you unzip the zippers, there's nothing underneath but skin.

The thing about downtown, the thing about living in the suburbs, is that nobody from our school will be there. Nobody at our school has even heard of the club. Mel and I could be anyone. And it's night and we're downtown and nobody knows that her mom dropped us off or my mom is picking us up or that I've never had an outfit like this and most of my clothes don't look anything like the girl I want to be.

It's strange, right? How well I remember that skirt, how I came out of the dressing room looking like a totally different girl and how, even now, the thing I remember the most is that pulsing longing to be seen, really seen, by my mom or my friends or by strangers, anyone. And while everything else has changed, this feeling has not.

verse three

It's a hot weekend night and the line outside the club winds around the corner. We feel good. Me in my zippered skirt. Mel all peaceful and smiling. I have three earrings in one ear and one in the other. Mel has even more.

And—Mel!

Shy Mel, starts talking to the boys behind us in line.

Zoom in.

They're smoking clove cigarettes. Mel's teasing them.

Now I'm the quiet one. I take the cigarette out of one of the boy's fingers and hold it in between my own. This will become my signature move. I will smoke this clove cigarette and then another. I will smoke cloves and then cigarettes. This is the inhale and exhale that foreshadow a decade of smoking and then a decade of quitting.

His name is Aaron and he has a big nose too. Not sharp like mine but flat and wide. We have the same haircut, short in the front and longer in the back.

I fill with the sweet, spicy smoke. A kind of recognition happens. We are two girls, and they are two boys, and we don't know anyone they know, and they don't know anyone we know. There's nothing to lose. It's the moment that separates everything that came before from everything that came after.