Seeing the Wind: How It Feels To Be A COVID Nurse

I was lucky: I wasn’t one of the first nurses assigned to COVID patients. When I took my first COVID patient a few months ago, the nurse briefed me on things that were different and what she’d learned to make the job easier. As I charted my first assessment on the computer in the room, with my PAPR (powered air purifying respirator) hood, mask, and gown on, I noticed that no one had been charting breath sounds all day. I later asked my supervisor whether we weren’t supposed to listen to lung sounds on COVID patients.

“It’s a gray area,” she said. “Some people aren’t comfortable with it, because COVID can survive on objects, like the stethoscope in the room, and bringing an object to your ears could be an infection risk.” One of the Respiratory Therapists walked by and said, “I don’t listen to lung sounds for COVID patients. You can, but I’m not taking the risk.”

My supervisor reiterated: “You can if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

It took me a minute to think it through and realize that my ears were essentially the only exposed surface on my body when I was in the patient’s room. The only place it could approach my lungs. I’d never thought of listening to lungs as inherently risky — I wipe my stethoscope with alcohol before bringing it to my face — but, as a friend said early on, the pandemic is helping us all see the wind. The ways we are affected by each others’ breath, movement, and cells, are amplified by a virus that can kill us. We can actually see the invisible forces that have been affecting our lives for so long; we can see what we assumed to be normal.

It felt like my body was dangerous. The very things I’d learned to do to save lives and help out could suddenly kill the people around me.

That shift, I wore green, hospital-issued scrubs. Coworkers passed by and said, “Oh, you’re a dirty nurse,” with a scowl. They stayed far away. At that point in the pandemic, COVID nurses weren’t allowed to even go in the rooms for non-COVID patients, so if a nurse needed help for a non-COVID patient, or if an IV was beeping in her room and she wasn’t available, I wasn’t allowed to go in. My body moved to go help, but I had to stop myself. It was a physically jarring experience, like a pedestrian jumping out in front of my car. It felt like my body was dangerous. The very things I’d learned to do to save lives and help out could suddenly kill the people around me. Everything I’d learned about working as a team went out the window. I was a COVID nurse and could only attend to COVID patients.

I learned at my first job that nursing assessment was the cornerstone to my practice. My preceptor said, “When you enter a room, what are five things you notice?” I learned from her that we are always noticing things about other people’s bodies: whether their lungs move symmetrically, whether they make eye contact, whether they move their limbs and with what kind of strength, how awake they are, how the color of their skin reflects their lungs. “Is her skin blue or grey?” she asked pointedly. “If someone is dying, you’ll see it in their skin.” I learned how much the human body communicates if we’re willing to pay attention.

Lung sounds were a mindfuck. I struggled to discern between what the words “rhonchi”, “coarse” and “crackles” meant: the difference between congestion requiring suctioning, versus pneumonia requiring antibiotics, versus fluid filling the lungs, requiring medication to help the kidneys move fluid out. The sound I heard communicated the texture of moving air. When I finally got it, my assessment was how I felt grounded; it was how I knew I was doing my job. My assessment allowed me to speak with confidence about the condition of the patient with doctors, nurses, and the patient’s family members. Without listening to lung sounds, I wondered if I was even doing my job.

I felt fortunate when the pandemic hit: I work staff in a place where case numbers were initially low, at a hospital where I felt genuinely cared for and supported by the management. Despite that, the first weekend I took care of COVID patients was so hard because I had to reroute everything about how my body moves through space. I had to change my scrubs before taking report on the patients. I couldn’t help my coworkers; they couldn’t help me. I had to strap a mechanical filter onto my hip, weave the tubing up my back, and don a PAPR hood, before putting on a gown and gloves. I had to tuck the gown in extremely specific ways so that it wouldn’t get caught in the filter’s air vent.

Even if the patient was in danger, I had to put my PPE (personal protective equipment) on before rushing into the room. Putting PPE on itself was a process of trial and error – the filter beeped angrily at me while I was caught in the COVID room, unable to figure out which position I could stand in to free up the vent without touching my “dirty” gloved hands against my scrubs. It took minutes to enter a room and, when I was getting ready to leave the room, I found myself talking to myself. I triple-checked the volume left on all the medications running through IV pumps; I used my fancy nurse-walkie-talkie to call out for supplies if I’d forgotten something. I clustered care like I’d never done before because the stakes simply felt so high. Every time I left the room, I knew I’d have to go through the laborious process of donning PPE on my way back in. When I was finally ready to leave the room, I read the nine-point list of instructions on how to properly remove PPE to avoid exposing myself.

As I’m writing this, I’m thinking, this is kind of boring, right? The actual experience of what it’s like to be a COVID nurse in a pandemic isn’t particularly easy to talk about. It’s fucking hard. It’s hard in unexpected ways; it’s hard because I’ve been trained to care for others while using a framework of evidence to say, “This is why we’re doing exactly what we’re doing.” And yet, when there’s something so new that there’s not enough evidence to support any kind of interventions, or, when caring in the ways we’ve done before could put our lives in risk, or, when the government agencies that are supposed to guide us through evidence are being silenced, underfunded, and redirected because it’s an election year, well fuck! I feel like I don’t know what to do!

What I’m trying to say is I felt helpless.

What I’m trying to describe is that every professional you trust to care for you feels helpless sometimes.

What I’m trying to say is that our systems fail us, yes, but that when the foundation of my nursing care —assessment — is called into question, I feel like I’m failing myself. My patients. Everyone who’s relying on nurses to be “heroes” without acknowledging that within each hero is a human with emotions.

Nursing has taught me that care is the foundation of human connection. It’s how we are able to feel seen, held, and worthy of love; it’s when we are cared for that we become free enough to heal. It’s what allows us to rest, to receive, to recover. As a caregiver, this makes me feel both competent and connected to the hurt, pain, and vulnerability that all humans go through. I learn from the difficult processes that I witness. It’s an immense privilege to be able to offer someone the means to heal or a listening ear when they’re struggling, and I don’t take the power I hold, or the amount of trust that’s required for someone to be cared for, lightly.

The first time I took care of COVID patients, I felt helpless. I’d lost access to my purpose, to my spiritual practice that lives within deeply connecting to my patients and their bodily processes. I felt undeserving of human connection.

But, the first time I took care of COVID patients, I felt helpless. I’d lost access to my purpose, to my spiritual practice that lives within deeply connecting to my patients and their bodily processes. I felt undeserving of human connection. I’d become a “dirty” nurse. I cancelled plans with people because I didn’t want to put them at risk, even a little bit. I was cancelled on by people who I’d thought would pull through for me. It was only other nurses who physically showed up, who said, “We understand the risks, but COVID mamis need love too!” It was other nurses who also knew how important care is to both give and receive, and who saw me struggling with being able to receive care when I felt like I was so unprepared to give it. It was my nurse-friend Claire who cooked for me, took me to her lake, gifted me salmon she’d caught herself, and even gave me a masked head massage.

The week after caring for COVID patients, I developed hives with no discernible cause — hives which kept me up all night scratching, hives which made me scared to go to bed, hives which made it hard to even walk down the hall at work without tearing my skin off. Hives etched scars, built thick callouses onto my inner elbows and thighs. Hives made me turn the A/C to 63 degrees because it seemed like cold could help. Hives pushed me to the edge and made it hard to imagine living like this.

I woke up every night scratching and, in this space of unconsciously hurting myself, when I was simply trying to rest, I felt so, deeply unworthy of being around other people. I couldn’t think about anything other than the hives. For almost two months, I stayed away from friends, cancelled plans, or straight up didn’t respond.

The hives consumed my entire life and then, required I restructure everything. I’d had hives before in college, when I was trying to fit into a new vegan friend group and tried soy milk. I kept drinking soy milk and eating tofu, despite my obvious allergy, and waited for my body to acclimate to my desire to be liked. Now, as a COVID nurse in a pandemic, I was working harder than I ever had. Grief and despair and helplessness were bursting through my skin as I worked to save lives, but I gained a new understanding: I should not have to do anything to fit in; the world should be catering to me. I don’t deserve to be treated like shit anymore; I don’t deserve to spend my nights scratching so someone else can live; I deserve to be catered to.

Grief and despair and helplessness were bursting through my skin as I worked to save lives, but I gained a new understanding: I should not have to do anything to fit in; the world should be catering to me.

What do we do when we’re in crisis? When the challenge of caring for COVID patients is compounded by a physical crisis of raging skin? These last eighteen months of personal crisis — leaving an abusive partner, caring for a dying family member, helping my family completely restructure, confronting my own codependent tendencies, tearing everything away so that I might live anew — alongside the global pandemic and the Uprising for Black lives have made me somewhat of an expert in my own coping mechanisms.

A couple years ago, I would have spent my time at bars, gotten drunk and adventured on mountaintops, and pretended nothing was wrong. Now, four months into Pleasure Coaching with Che Che Luna, I turned inward. Pleasure felt so out of reach, but my skin was calling my attention. I foraged for wild medicines on Dena’ina Land. I looked at my own pussy every day. I drove myself to the ocean, so my skin might feel a blast of cool salt air. When I felt myself itching, I placed a hand over the spot and breathed deeply—sometimes grunting with each exhale—until the itch went away. I massaged poultices and salves and ointments and lotions on in half hour intervals. I drank lemon water. I slept with an ice pack at my bed so that, when I inevitably woke up scratching my broken skin, I could cool it until I fell asleep.

It didn’t take the hives away, but those self-soothing mechanisms made me not want to die. They required I become honest: I confronted dynamics at work that both frustrated me and compromised the safety of my patients; I opened up a conversation with lovers who I’d felt neglected by; I communicated with the people I’d been avoiding. I recognized that despite the immense amount of suffering in this world, my suffering also mattered.

I still have hives. I’ve had so many theories about them: that I’m allergic to my asthma medication, that it was all a healing crisis, that COVID nursing itself gave them to me, that I’m allergic to whatever the hospital-issue scrubs are laundered in. My unit still has COVID patients. More often than before, some of them get better. It feels like a miracle every time it happens — I’d gotten so used to misery and death. We know more about what medications to use, but many of us still don’t listen to lung sounds.

I’ve listened to breath sounds for a decade, but it wasn’t until a pretty girl asked about the stethoscope on my floor that I heard breath through a non-nurse’s ears. I bent the eartips into her ears and held the diaphragm to my chest. I took a deep breath and exhaled, letting her hear the whoosh of my clear lungs, air pushing only through the spaces it’s always known. I held my breath and let her hear my heart, just my heart, and then I breathed in normally. “It sounds like the ocean,” she said, and I physically leaned back because I knew then that I was falling in love. I smiled and said, “Yeah, you’re right, I never thought about it that way.” In the isolation that caring for COVID patients brought me, I’ve shed my own layers of self-protection and the assumption that I must give care in order to receive it. I’ve let myself love someone who is consistent, present, and caring, even when I’m crying over COVID deaths and scratching my skin off.

Since the night she heard my breath, I’ve listened differently. When I hear a heartbeat, a strong heartbeat, I feel all the fibers contracting and expanding that make that blood flow. In lung sounds, I feel the texture of air. I feel the reverberations against my ear, one person’s heart and breath transmuted into my own body, the vibrational impact of life onto life. My body has been imprinted with thousands of people I’ve taken care of. I’m only now seeing the wind.

14 Knuckles: Always A Fistee, Never A Fister

14 Knuckles, about a scorpio femme of color fucking their way through power dynamics, boundaries, and caregiving, as an exploration of who she is and how she relates to others.

I love ears and nipples. My mouth has a thousand surfaces: my firm outer lips paint your ear with my latest color as those same lips soften, opening into wet inner edges; a smooth surface is revealed beneath my tongue; cautious teeth hold the power to pull and destroy; my lips press to suck until you come, if I let you.

My mouth has the ability to sense in ways that other parts of my body don’t. I want to let you come. I’m on my left side, you’re on your back, I cradle your neck with my left arm and my right fingers trace down to your thigh. You’re sweating — the hottest thing to me is sweat and you do not disappoint. I feel you drip, your heat radiating as I approach, my mouth can’t stop sucking your earlobe, your eyes are closed, you’re moaning, and when my fingers get to your pussy I feel how wet and open you are, so fucking thirsty for me. Your cunt flush, your lips spread. I trace my fingers from your pussy to your clit and back, I want to bury my face in your wet, but I can’t leave your most sensitive spot, where we flow together.

I flutter my lips open so that any breath I give you will flow straight inside your ear canal. “Do you want me inside of you?” I murmur slowly, melting my tongue against my lips to make that juicy pussy sound into your ear. You moan and nod. One finger, then two, you get what you want.

My fingers lose themselves wandering inside of you and my thumb is pressed between your lips. I can’t feel anything, my right hand barely has any sensation, so I pull out slowly just to see you squirm. I glide back in, you’re so open I barely have to move. You’re grinding against my hand and it starts to hurt. I want my face between your thighs, but I know you’ll tell me if that’s what you want, so instead I thrust into and out of you, trying to feel deep inside, but all I know is you’re soaked and open and I can’t feel a thing.

You want more. You gasp and make out the words, “Four fingers.”

I sit myself up and kiss your trembling face. You’re surprised I’m moving away. “I gotta change positions,” I say, and you nod. I switch hands — I’m better at fucking with my left since some of those nerve endings still work and it doesn’t hurt as bad. From this position, sitting between your legs, I slip four in you, but this angle isn’t quite as good for you, you want the skin-to-skin, chest-to-chest contact. My left fingers slip into you and your cunt starts to pulse around me, rounded edges and curves colliding and releasing. I know you won’t come yet, you need me to keep it up, you need momentum, but I just can’t. The pain escalates and I’m distracted. I love your insides, but these angles are impossible and my hand is cramping — I can’t be here for much longer. You sense it, you pause. I ask for a pillow under your hips, to lift you up to me. But the moment’s gone, you’re out of it.

It’s so hot until it’s so not.

I first acknowledged the extent of my nerve damage when I started having queer sex. I couldn’t feel clits. When someone said, “Not there,” I couldn’t comply because I couldn’t feel where I was. The awkward sex prompted me to get a nerve conduction test, an MRI, and three months of physical therapy, but nothing brought my sensation back. I got fucked by tops and that seemed like a solution, until I realized how emotionally unfulfilling it is to constantly open myself up for people who won’t enter a vulnerable space with me.

Despite the ways I can, and do fuck — using my mouth, vibrators, and my fingers in positions where I can clearly see — I’m still scared of doing so many things. I often pull out when pain starts because I’m scared I won’t be able to follow through. This is the scene that lives in my imagination: someone asks me to give them more and I can’t keep up, I fail to make it fun and comfortable and sexy. I love topping in ways that can allow my partners to release control, to move into vulnerability, to trust me deeply. I fear not using the control I’ve been given in a way that brings another pleasure. I fear bringing my partners into a space where my actions cannot match my intent because my physical body won’t allow it. It keeps me from even approaching fisting, something that feels so good when done to me.

Telling someone about my numb, weak fingers is so not a cute message on Tinder. It’s also awkward to even bring up with people I’ve been seeing a while — sometimes, I’ve been fucking them despite the pain and, when they realize it, it can be made out into a whole thing. With no diagnosis or explanation for my pain, it’s hard to talk about, but it affects the kind of sex I can have comfortably.

I’m very much at the beginning of a lifelong journey to love every single part of myself, even the parts that are most flawed, not cute, and physically painful. Disability justice organizers and thinkers have had the most wisdom about this specific situation: when something hurts and you’re horny, how do you fuck anyway?

Sami Schalk, in an interview with adrienne maree brown in Pleasure Activism, is quoted to say, “Disabled people’s sexual and intimate lives teach us that sex and pleasure are not merely about penetrative, goal-oriented sex…sex for disabled people often means throwing out the norms and working with a partner to discover what their body can and cannot do, what they do and do not enjoy. Often for able-bodied people, there is an assumption that there are certain things everyone wants or enjoys, but when you have an atypical body or mind, it makes potential partners pause, ask more questions, take a little more time. We would all benefit from such an approach that takes each partner’s body, each sexual interaction, as new, figuring out what is best with this person in this moment given how their body feels, what’s on their mind, etc.”

It’s also been disabled folks who have taught me that, truly, anything can be sex. Acts of sensual care — like, a massage where I can avoid using my fingers and, instead, use a massage ball or my elbows or closed fist — allow my femme caregiving tendencies to be received, honored, and celebrated, even when it’s too painful to move my fingers in and out of a tight hole. Sometimes, it’s even moments of service — when I plan a bike ride or camping trip — and the recipient is open to receiving my care, that I enter a very similar space as to when I’m topping. I have control, I’ve made the plan, I get to direct someone else’s body, and my partner gets to relax and find themselves having experiences they never thought possible.

But it’s not fisting.

Fisting is something that makes me feel infinite. It explodes my insides and sends tender vibrations out to every nerve ending; it makes me sensitive to the presence and movement of another while listening to my body as my guide. I love topping because I get to gift sensory experiences to other people and it has felt heartbreaking to acknowledge that I might never get to gift my fist to another. It’s been three years since I first investigated my nerve pain and numbness and I’m finally learning: it’s okay. I might always be in some sort of pain, but I don’t need to be fixed or painless or healed in order to love others or have sex. I might never totally be healed because the barrage of pain and heartbreak and wounding continues every day in white supremacist, cis-heteropatriarchy; as soon as I reduce triggers for my hand pain, a global pandemic sweeps through and asks me to show up as a nurse and writer, both of which exacerbate this pain.

There’s a cultural narrative around being fixed that Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha critiques in her book Care Work: the idea that “healed,” “well”, or “no-longer-traumatized” is an achievable goal for everyone. In recognizing myself as having this pain, I accept that “painless” as an end-goal might not be achievable for me. I’m unlearning a cultural and personal narrative of my pained body as broken. To top with pain has required I also unlearn my own misperceptions of tops as in total control and infallible. I never hold so much power over another that I abdicate responsibility for myself, nor does my power or control in sex mean that I owe someone something that ultimately harms me. To top does not mean that I have to be superhuman or anything other than who I am.

Being in pain does not make me less human: I exist even while I have pain; I can serve others even if this pain is my company; I am exactly perfect as I am. I can learn to move exactly as who I am, with my needs and wants and triggers, with my trauma and with my pain, and find sites of love and joy and delight. My being unable to fist, to do what I imagine other tops can do, does not make me unworthy. It is in the acceptance of exactly who I am that allows me to access my own ultimate power. My acceptance of my own pain allows me to have the kind of sex that is rooted in the specificity of my body.

Prentis Hempill on the Fortification podcast talks about how disability justice work has taught us to learn to tolerate sensation. That we can have pain and move forward. That we can have pain and the world doesn’t stop. This is a guide for all of us who have had an uncomfortable, messy, growth-filled 2020 — which is to say, this is a guide for all of us. So much of what we’re going through collectively is uncomfortable, painful, and often feels like our skin is burning off. The pain might not end, so can we tolerate the sensation? Can we ask what it can teach us? And, as we move forward, can we do it in a way that is exactly, delightfully us?

I don’t love the idea that I’ll never fist, but I do love the idea that every act of sex I engage with is collaborative. Queerness reminds me that there is no standard way to fuck or live. Instead, I have the challenge and opportunity to live, fuck, and expand in the creative possibilities of my body and others.

14 Knuckles: Femme Top Revolution

Z slowly kissed down my chest like no one ever has before while I sunk into the corner of the sectional. They traced the wet of their mouth all along my skin while I played with their hair, a smirk forming on my lips. “Oh, you want to worship me, huh,” I said.

Their singsong, appeasing voice, mouth finding my hip bone, hummed, “Mmmmhmmmm,” and continued to my belt buckle. “Can I take this off?” they asked.

“Yes,” I said, giddy. “But if that’s the case, I’m not gonna do any work at all.”

I let them peel off my jeans and crouch on the floor between my legs, I let them curl their lips against my still-there underwear, feeling myself get wetter as I observed. I set my feet on their shoulders. Had I ever been served like this? Like I am indeed royalty, worthy of devotion, a precious golden gift treated with care?

They would have stayed there as long as I let them, but I couldn’t imagine their broad shoulders slumped in such a small space for much longer. We made it up to the loft of the cottage and they undressed. Shirt off, revealing their blonde chest hair, ring against pink nipple, and a comforting belly. Pants off, exposing the lacy thong they’d described to me the week prior.

“Wow, you look good in that,” I said, mesmerized. I touched, grabbing their sides, feeling the thong’s sharp fabric against my skin, the way it defined an edge to their body, a delicacy to their strength. I kept pulling and, soon, they were on their stomach. I stroked their ass cheeks, pulling them away from each other, asking them what they wanted me to do with them.

Z and I have talked about so many things. We’re open to doing damn near everything to each other, but sometimes it’s our switchiness that wants everything and when the moment comes, we aren’t sure exactly what first. Who has power, who’s initiating, who’s willing to be vulnerable right now? It’s constantly shifting, our sexualities as mutable as the temperature, and in this loft it was hot.

“I mean, you can do lots of things.”

I rubbed circles on their asscheek with my right hand and brought my face up to theirs. I want to spank them but, more than that, I want them to tell me what they want. I lean down and bring my lips close to theirs. I whisper, “Okay…but what do you want me to do?”

“I feel like you’re trying to spank me, so let’s try that,” they said, wrapping their arms around a pillow and sinking in.

ABRA played as I sat up, rubbed their ass, and hit them. I started soft, I started awkward. The last time I spanked them, they hadn’t been particularly into it. It’d been six months and many lovers since then and this felt so different, this time they grabbed the pillow and clutched it in their arms and closed their eyes, this time their lace thong gave me guidelines, framed their body into zones, and I hit them harder and harder. Their tender flesh turned pink and started to swell on each ass cheek. I rubbed them slowly and traced the untouched skin.

“How does this feel?” I asked.

“It’s definitely doing things,” they said in the way that queers can put glitter into even the simplest words. “You can keep going.”

I hit them increasingly hard until my own hand stung so hard, but I kept going. The pain I gave felt connected to the pain I was receiving — I can’t usually feel my hands, they’re numb or tingling in a constant state of vague tightness. This pain was different, this pain was from the transference of energy from one fleshy body to another, love moving between us.

Somewhere along the line, I realized that Z was offering themselves to me. I could do anything to them that I wished someone had done to me. Flash, to when I’d gotten spanked recently and my lover kissed my ass and it felt like a blessing, but their lips left my skin too soon. I kissed Z’s ass where I’d left marks. I stroked their asscheeks with my tongue and suckled on tender points like nectar, pulling the pleasure living inside of them to their skin. I massaged, I traced the edges of their thong with my lips, tongue, fingers. I let myself linger, cool down, let the pain drift from my fingers and the energy seep back into Z’s body. My tongue traced down their crease and shifted every single hair, letting them feel what happens when we stay slow. I buried my face in their ass until I felt them open for a finger, I tenderly traced a coconut-oiled fingertip in circles around their hole.

When they asked for things, I gave it to them, and when they asked for a break, I lay beside them. Their eyes remained closed, so relaxed like I’d never seen them. “How are you feeling?”

“I think maybe it’s just, it makes sense and it’s so obvious but maybe it’s just my Taurus — I’m so comfortable and taken care of. The music, the temperature, everything is cozy, I don’t have to do anything, and I think that was the first time I’ve gotten anywhere near subspace, like I’m so relaxed and I don’t even know what you were doing and I don’t really have words, but yeah, I feel good.”

I felt a rush in my chest and almost started crying. “Babe!” I exclaimed. I took them into my arms and held them until they opened their eyes and returned to adoring my body.

Later, Z told me they were startled when I pointed out that they wanted to worship me. They said that I voiced the pure earnestness of what they wanted without shaming them for it. I gave them permission to step into devotion. Their reverence helped me claim my place — a new place, as a femme top worthy of worship, capable of inflicting pain and exchanging love, and responsible for their wellbeing.

In an email, they wrote, “I inherently assumed that for someone to get me into subspace, it would take some wearing down (possibly in rough physical ways that I wouldn’t enjoy) for my defenses to soften enough to reach that sort of submissive space. But what happened with you was that all my concerns and needs and considerations were tended to, the worrying nerve endings clamped off for the evening. I saw it as the femme-daddy-top long game: I’d been fed, we’d chatted, you’d put music on, the loft of the Airbnb was warm (perhaps even too warm, but in a pleasant way), I felt safe, etc. the anxiety stilled to nothingness…I realized it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t move as I couldn’t imagine why any part of me would want to. Where I imagined an overcoming, I got an easing into.”

God. When I got this email, I was speechless for weeks. I’ve been through a sexually abusive queer relationship; I’ve had casual encounters where people pushed my boundaries; I’ve topped people in ways where I’ve lost my sense of self and ended up really hurting people. After all that, I am so, incredibly concerned with not transferring my own sexual trauma to other people, and with making sure my bottom feels safe and empowered. Reading this email made every cell vibrate in gratitude for Z’s openness and vulnerability. And it’s weird, I don’t really feel that “I want to buy you a black matte Audi” energy with Z — that energy that became so all-consuming and toxic with others. I’d do so much for them, but that’s not what they need from me. They don’t want me to give up my life for them. Instead, they want me to know that I am deserving of their service, they want to know that they’re doing a good job, they want me to experience power.

If I fully step into my power, they can know that their role has been fulfilled. They know their work, as a white masc queer, is to uplift people of color. When our friendship first started to deepen, they talked about how they see themselves as a stable support to facilitate the art and lives of people of color in their personal world. They know that part of their creative and sexual existence is in service to their POC lovers.

After that night, we talked about our race and sex dynamics in ways we hadn’t before. By having a sexual role that is in service, they can transmute the energy that would otherwise be guilt, shame, or anxiety, into a kind of action that tangibly uplifts the people of color in their life. They do this with me by worshipping me, with other lovers by topping them hard, and with their husband by continuing to explore how deep their husband’s dick will go down their throat. Z is a shapeshifter, enabling transformation through deeply, but temporarily, becoming what their lover needs to grow their power.

And because we’re both switches, I feel them returning the femme top energy that I give them. They check in about how they take up space as a masc person within our dynamic and I tell them something I’ve felt since day one: “I’m so used to doing emotional labor in relationships, but in our dynamic, you were the one who first reached out vulnerably. You were the one who offered gifts, information about yourself, who asked questions and listened intently even when I wasn’t easily reciprocating. You were the one who was consistent and, I know you present as pretty masc, but I just want to acknowledge that throughout our relationship, you’ve been doing a lot of femme labor, especially when I was in a place where I couldn’t be vulnerable.”

There’s a kind of femme-top long game that they’ve reciprocated back to me, in curating the kind of soft, slow, consistent intimacy that has allowed us to grow closer over time. I can feel their femme top energy in those moments of worship: they, too, are claiming their ability to care for another as power. In offering themselves to me in these nuanced ways, I can own a piece of myself that is deeply powerful and actually decide what I want to do with that power. There’s a difference between domination as a way to take control or claim power over another person — the way certain lovers have done with me — versus domination as a way to provide comfort and care, and to grow one’s power without harming anyone else. With Z, there’s space to explore how we claim and release power in a way that honors the multiplicity within each of us.

14 Knuckles: Can Two Switches Have Sex?

14 Knuckles is a series about a scorpio femme of color fucking their way through power dynamics, boundaries, and caregiving, as an exploration of who she is and how she relates to others.

I’m sitting on their lap. I pull the sharp edges of their blonde hair to angle their head up to me. I don’t feel them hard beneath me, their body isn’t asking me to grind up on them, their body is asking me to do what I want with them, but I don’t know their body yet so it’s time to explore

I run my fingers into their mouth, kiss their jawline, watch them close their eyes. I’m slow, they’re receptive, neither of us know where we’re going. I trace my fingers against their back where their lower ribs end and they giggle. I pull away, do it again, and they say, “It tickles, that spot.”

I laugh, thinking, Okay, so what I know how to do is not the norm here, I can’t pull moves. We make out, kiss and bite and I’m nervous, knowing I’m in control, not knowing what happens next.

I’d been flirting with Z since I met them at a writing workshop. I was immediately drawn to their grace, creativity, and Food 4 Thot tote bag. One night, I asked, “Are you and your husband in an open relationship?”

“We’re monogamish…there’s an understanding that if the right opportunity came along, I should go for it,” they said. (They’d later claim they weren’t flirting, just answering the question, which helped me claim my truth as the kind of forward-ass femme who will never ask about someone’s relationship status unless I’m flirting.)

That night, I ended up in the arms of the person who’d become my ex, but I’d already found Z on Instagram. Soon after the workshop, Z was sending texts and memes and books by mail; within a few months, we became the kind of friends who knew each other’s kinks. When I found myself moving through different kinds of power dynamics in ways I’d never known, Z was one of the only people I wanted to tell. Once we realized our astrological charts were extremely aligned, it became second nature to get their perspective.

The next summer, after my breakup, I posted an IG story that basically said, “Shoot your shot, I’m open.” They messaged me, saying “Is this considered a shot?” with the see-no-evil monkey emoji.

But, it’s different to talk about your kinks with someone than to actually sit on their lap and do something about it. My relationship had fucked with my sense of normal and I was (and still am) intent on centering consent with every interaction. What did Z want?

The beginning of the date was fully in my hands – I’d taken them to dinner and they told me about their crushes, their exes, and the fuck bois who’d done them wrong. They’re cute when they’re chatty and a lot of time, I can’t follow how quick their brain moves from one thing to another. They don’t always make sense, but they do such a good job being the center of attention that I like to watch. I want to give them the kind of unconditional attention that tops had given me, but I’ve never been in this position before.

Back at their apartment, I keep asking questions — how did they meet their husband, what kinds of sex do they like, what are they curious about? And in their answers, I slowly start to realize that they hadn’t had sex with many people. They hadn’t done a lot of the kinky shit we’d talked about, it lived more in their brain than in their body. Even though both of us see ourselves somewhere in the middle of this top/bottom spectrum, we’ve never had our switchiness play out with another switch.

I run out of questions and ask to kiss them.

We make out until it’s no longer reasonable and I ask if they want to go to their bedroom. “Is there anything in particular you want to do tonight?” I ask as I put on an adrienne maree brown sex playlist.

“We’ll see,” they say. This is one of the first times I feel like I’m really running the show and my nervousness, coupled with the way they look at me with adoring, waiting eyes, is threatening to bleed into frustration, but oh it is fun to kiss. We slowly take clothes off. I kiss down their chest to their nipples, play with their ring inside my mouth, and tease with my teeth. They stroke my hair and say, “Yeah, nipples don’t really do much for me.” (They don’t know that nipples, one day, will do so much for them.)

I laugh. It’s all so awkward, it’s all so start-stop, and I don’t quite know what to do. I offer and go down on them for a little while, but it’s been so long since I’ve had a human dick in my mouth that even this feels awkward. We lie side by side and they ask if they can go down on me. I consent with a smile and a nod.

With Z between my legs, I grind myself into their face and feel like I can suffocate them with my orgasm. I lock their head between my thighs and could hurt them if I wanted. My pussy holds the power and will only give them what they want — an orgasm to drown them — only if they treat it right. An image flashes through my mind: my own face down in someone’s crotch, me sucking a dick. I suddenly imagine Z is sucking my dick.

I gasp. “Can I grab the back of your head?” They nod and I pull their skull into me to ride it, to move myself against everything that feels good, to move myself with total disregard and pure pleasure. I bring my other hand down onto them and thrust over and over again until I come.

Collapse.

In a minute, my brain starts to work again and I’m back to feeling awkward, back to wanting them to feel good. It’s hard to know if I’m actually a switch — I tend to top tops and bottom for bottoms — but either act alone often leaves me wanting more. The hard thing is that there haven’t been many people with whom I can be all of myself; so few people I’ve been with are genuinely switchy with me in bed. I most crave a give and take that feels limitless.

The hard thing is that there haven’t been many people with whom I can be all of myself; so few people I’ve been with are genuinely switchy with me in bed. I most crave a give and take that feels limitless.

I rattle off a list: Choked? Slapped? Do you want to be spanked? They ask me to try it but then stop me; they’re not into it. (Less than a year later, spanking will bring them to a place they’ve never been before. But that’s another story!) I try one thing after another and they very honestly tell me every time when they want something to be done another way or when it’s just not doing it for them.

“Can you just fuck me?” I ask. I’m tired of thinking and I want their cock inside me, to blast through the anxious thoughts and expectations and pressure I’m imposing on myself. Luckily, their husband had bought condoms for the occasion, so I rub their cock as they put it on.

When they fuck me, that’s exactly what I need. That’s what feels good right now, not us trying to rush towards something when we’re still getting to know our own bodies in relation to each other. It feels good to push at the wall above my head and feel them deep inside me, to stay slow and move at a pace I’ve never felt with a dick. When I’m beneath them, I love the view I have of their wedding band, this present reminder that I’m having sex with someone who’s married, whose husband is okay with everything happening, and that we can create whatever relationships we want, even if it’s strange and unfamiliar. I get on top and they give me feedback, let me know what they like and what they don’t, I close my eyes and feel how deep and big they can get.

They come only when I grant permission.

When I leave the next day, I’m confused by how I feel. I’d hoped to have that giddy, floating, connected feeling I get when I share sensuality and orgasms with someone, especially when our bodies move in ways that are unexpected and illicit and feral, when I can become engrossed with another person’s body and not have to think at all. The connection didn’t flow in the ways I’m used to and in this unfamiliar space, I’m vaguely disappointed in myself. There was so much on the table, but I feel like most of it didn’t feel good to them. And I’m glad they told me when things didn’t feel good, but I also just wish it had. I wish I’d been able to take charge or intuitively just know what to do with them. Despite our desires for kinky sex, part of me feels like we ended up fucking in missionary.

One of the many things I learn from Z is how to not overprocess with them. They’re married, they have a job, they’re a writer. Over the next few weeks, I work through feeling like I personally failed while they show up, consistently, lovingly, and with care. There’s an implicit confirmation that nothing is wrong. They ask when I’m coming back to see them and it’s clear that I did not fail. It’s my own feelings I have to work through. I realize that it’s not that we didn’t have good sex, it’s just that we both have a lot to learn: neither of us have a friendship quite like this and we’re both concerned with respecting each other’s boundaries and creating safety for each other.

The next time we see each other, I get on their lap quicker. I smear lipstick all over their face and have them suck my fingers until I’m in a trance. We move easier: their fingers against my asshole, my dick inside of them, vibrating every time they grind onto me. We do more of the things we’d talked about, more of the things they’d wanted. We’re not checking things off a list, but actually feeling each other’s bodies and moving towards the want inside. We don’t do everything, though, and it leaves them with a longing for more. They text me after we hook up the second time, saying “I’d still really like to experience what happens when you’re more dominant.” This time, I don’t feel like a failure — I feel like I’ve planted a seed. “You will, babe,” I text back. “Slow burn slut.”

This time, I don’t feel like a failure — I feel like I’ve planted a seed. “You will, babe,” I text back. “Slow burn slut.”

With Z, “slow burn slut” has become code for how intimacy and trust can grow slowly over time. If we’re patient, we can build the foundation for the kind of exploratory sex that allows for new and intense things. Being present with each other, more than an overtly kinky experience, is a way to experience the most pleasure possible.

I believe in abundance and seek to unlearn scarcity of all kinds in my life. “Slow burn slut” also asks that I believe that my time with another human is infinite, that I imagine abundance even when it comes to my potential sexual encounters. Abundance asks that I not rush things simply because I might not see them for another year; instead, it asks that I plant seeds and allow them to grow at their own pace.

Can two switches have sex? I think so, and I think there is something beautifully different about having sex with someone with whom sexual options are truly abundant. It’s been a little less smooth, a little more negotiated and explicit, a little more intentional. In my own journey through whatever it is I am, I’m hoping to learn from other people who inhabit multiple positionalities. Maybe sex with other bisexual switches is a way for my many facets of self to be recognized alongside someone else who has done the work of bringing out all their multiplicities.

14 Knuckles: I Want to Buy You A Matte Black Audi

14 Knuckles is a series about a scorpio femme of color fucking their way through power dynamics, boundaries, and caregiving, as an exploration of who she is and how she relates to others.

They grabbed my first two fingers and put them in their mouth, then shoved theirs in mine. It was all so visual — the way she performed: sucking just the tips of my fingers before deep throating them and sucking them hard, making me so wet. I brought my left hand down to their soaking boxers and asked to take them off. She nodded and smiled. We’d only slept together a few times and even though we were both so dtf, we were so cautious, too. My mouth found their nipple; I loved licking patterns onto their sensitive nipples and watching them come from that alone. My torso up against her pelvis, her legs widened as they got more and more turned on, they stopped sucking as they lost control of their face, neck, jaw, eyes, and tilted back and moaned.

“Can I go down on you?” I asked, my chin resting on her sternum.

“Yes.” She chuckled. This was her favorite part.

Bee had always been a top. She’d said that there was some kind of fire in me the moment we met that made her want to give me control. Unlike everyone else I’d slept with, she saw me as a hot femme top, not a bottom. The first time we hooked up, I’d been in town for only a few nights. After appetizers and seltzer at a bar, they’d invited me over. As soon as I walked in, I asked to sit on her bed. She later said I moved with such ease that she thought it was natural for me to take the lead. I laughed when she told me that — my family was collapsing, I’d just left an abusive partner, and the stakes of my life were too tumultuous and unpredictable for me to feel any stress from being in the home of an extremely hot, dreadlocked stranger in a button-down shirt that fell so smoothly down their toned frame.

I’d been away for months after that first hook up, but since I’d returned, we were on a schedule of Friday night sex dates. They offered me fancy chocolate and smoked me out. Sometimes, we didn’t even get that far. When I walked in, I was always so hot from the hour-long drive that I couldn’t wait, I wanted to feel their sweat beneath me, I wanted to fuck them with my tongue.

I loved that they thought I was in control. That was a summer when my life was so broken that for me to find a space where I could seem in control to anyone felt like a miracle. I couldn’t be vulnerable with her and I didn’t pretend — I gave her almost no information about my life and I couldn’t bottom for her the way I had with other lovers. That’s not what she wanted from me. She wanted me to worship her, to live between her thighs for as long as humanly possible, to adore her constellation of hidden freckles.

I teased her inner thighs. I watched her pussy bloom before me and I stroked her lips with the tip of my tongue. When I saw her eyes glare down on me, I offered the broad surface of my tongue out to her and licked from her pussy up to her clit, over and over again. She arched her back, I closed my eyes and felt into her, every crevice inside of her as far as my tongue could reach. Up to her clit, I circled and sucked and licked and at some point, it was like she was giving me everything she had to offer and I could live off of her insides alone.

I fucking worshipped her pussy.

I could have lived between their legs and I told them that, often. When I say Bee had always been a top, I mean they’d never had someone pay attention to them, cater to their wants and needs, care about their pleasure. I also mean: they’d never done the work of being truly vulnerable with their body, the internal work of acknowledging they were worthy of pleasure, worthy of receiving, even with another human being involved. She’d succumbed to the bitterness and resentment that so many tops feel, where she felt like her role was always to be giving herself away.

I’d always have to leave. For days after I saw Bee, I’d be riled up. I wanted to talk and text and order her gifts, I wanted to drive down every day of the week. I wanted to be nothing more than a person who gave them pleasure, who figured out what felt good, who could go down on them and know that I did something right with my day.

I knew that wasn’t healthy. I saw in me what other tops had done to me, obsess over me simply because the pussy was good, as a distraction from their own lives, completely ignoring who I was as a person.

My Venus is in Capricorn, so there’s nothing hotter to me than longing to obsess over someone, but imposing rules on myself to prevent it from getting out of control. So, I did not talk and text and drive down every night of the week. I did not want to overcommit and then flake. I made my commitments clear — my life was in shambles and I was extremely emotionally unavailable, but down for weekly sex dates. They’d just left a relationship too and weren’t sure they ever wanted to be in one again. I wanted to be the top I’d never experienced. I wanted to set and hold boundaries, listen to what they said carefully, and act based on what each of our needs were, without neglecting myself in the process.

These are lofty goals.

As we exchanged podcast and reading recommendations about nonmonogamous relationships, I thought we were doing everything right. And yet, the combo of a top who’s never bottomed with a caregiving femme who’s running from her emotional life is a recipe for disaster.

By the end of it, Bee thought the pleasure they felt in their body was because I gave it to them; they didn’t realize it lived within themselves all along. I was consumed by what I can only term, “I want to buy you a matte black Audi” energy. Every time I drove away from their apartment, it felt like I was floating from my collarbones upward, bringing me a smile I couldn’t feel any other way. My shoulders and chest pulled me towards them every time I wasn’t near and, even if I wasn’t texting constantly, I was always thinking about them — what I’d bring, what I’d wear, what we’d do when we saw each other next. I wanted to dote and caress every moment of every day. I was willing to do damn near anything for them because every time they offered their precious body to me, I was so humbled that I thought the best way to show how much I cared would have been to spend many thousands of dollars on a ridiculous car. Did I mention I know this is not healthy?

While we were still pretending to be casual like Olympic champions, the cracks in the façade were starting to show. The last day before I left for a major cross-continental move, I tried to be honest and said, “My life is such a mess that I don’t think I’m physically capable of loving anyone right now.” Bee’s smile lit up, their face glowed, and it wasn’t until later that I realized they interpreted it as me saying, “I want to love you, but I need time.” They heard what they wanted to hear and I wanted them to be happy, so I didn’t correct them.

After I left, we kept up weekly sex dates through FaceTime. She’d make an extensive agenda and ask to check in, a formal process I thought was endearing. When I finally reached my new city, the accumulated traumas of the year — a close death in my family, massive unprocessed sexual trauma, and leaving my first queer relationship — felt like a swirling unbearable weight. For months, I’d filled every single day consumed with the needs of other people. Now in a new place, with no job and no permanent housing, I couldn’t breathe. I had no one to take care of but myself. I didn’t know how to feed myself, I completely lost direction. I drew tarot cards and read every day, I started therapy, I found new ways to fill my time, but I was lost and depressed like I’d never been before.

When I tried to tell Bee that I didn’t have capacity to do the work that this situationship required — even though it was long distance — she was furious. I was so confused. Didn’t we both say we wanted boundaries? Didn’t we both say we didn’t want a relationship?

It’s dangerous, this, “I want to buy you a matte black Audi” energy. It can trick me and my lovers, into thinking that because I fuck them well, that I will actually give up my life for them. It can trick us both into thinking that having good sex with someone is synonymous with a good relationship. As a femme, I love knowing that I’m taking care of my lovers and that their lives are tangibly improving because I’m in it. There were so many moments when Bee told me that she’d never experienced the kinds of pleasure that she did with me and that made me want to keep going, keep giving.

But, when I took a step back and gave myself the space to have needs, I saw that the dynamic was impossible and unsustainable. And it fucking hurts to be the person to enforce the boundary, to say, “Hey, remember how we both said we didn’t want this to be a relationship? It’s reached that point for me and I can’t do this anymore.” It hurts to become the villain.

As I date, I know that hurting others and being hurt is an inevitable part of human interaction. When I ended things with Bee, I had to reckon with my side of it. I was incredibly transparent with what I had to offer. I did not promise more than I could give. And yet, the energy that I brought to the table, the emotional caregiving tendencies that I’m prone to as a nurse and a femme, set up an expectation that this care would continue to be prioritized above my living my life.

I’m learning how to set boundaries with myself as a top. When I’m getting completely consumed by a relationship to the point where I’m giving myself away, and when I’m embodying a kind of top energy that is wholly unsustainable, I am setting myself up to have my needs ignored and to be taken advantage of. My work as a top isn’t just to fuck someone right, but to move through and past the “I want to buy you a matte black Audi” energy into a place where I can simultaneously get off on giving care to myself.

14 Knuckles: How Many Knuckles in a Fist

14 Knuckles is a series about a scorpio femme of color fucking their way through power dynamics, boundaries, and caregiving, as an exploration of who she is and how she relates to others.

She looks ravenous. I feel filleted. She’s perched between my legs, fingers circling against the edges of my pussy slowly while she squeezes her own pink nipples. I want her to reach inside me and destroy any vestige of who I was before. I whisper, desperate, trying not to show it, “I want you to fist me,” and she smiles, this pure, angelic, wholesome smile, like she’s bestowing a gift from the heavens above. She’s the nicest top I ever met. She doesn’t call me a bitch or a slut, she won’t spank me hard enough but I think it’s cute when she tries, and getting fisted by her feels like a massage from the universe goddess herself. She smiles wider, parting her lips as she looks down at me and watches her third finger slip inside. I moan. I love seeing how turned on she gets when she looks at me and I open wider.

We lock eyes. The best part of Scorpio on Scorpio sex is the eye contact; when she looks at me, I swear I can come from that alone. Her eyes won’t leave me until she goes home. Now, the way her jaw separates and her smile widens makes her look gleeful, like she’s at a fireworks show, watching collective ecstasy spread throughout the crowd instead of just mine alone. She slips another finger in.

My moans deepen. I feel so much and I want more. I push my bound hands against the wall behind me and my body floats into her, her body into mine, she’s still as I thrust her into me over and over again, holy shit her whole hand is inside of me and now I can’t move.

It’s what shuts me up and she likes it. She looks so satisfied and I know I look like maybe I’m in pain but it feels good. I feel the edges of everything, where I end and she begins, where the wrinkles in each knuckle slide against the expansive opening of my pussy. Something happens, an air pocket forms and it sucks her further in and somehow now there’s a little more space and I love it, I love being able to feel everything with her.

She starts to move.

One at a time, I feel her knuckles curl tenderly inside of me. I push myself down onto her as she makes micromovements, first from her knuckles alone, then from her fingers, they start to swirl inside of me, then her whole hand is moving, then I’m pushing down and thrusting and it’s hot and fast and it’s so much, then her whole hand is moving in and out as she’s turning and —

“Holy shit, stop,” I say, breathless.

“What? You want me to stop?”

“Yeah get out of me.” I’m almost panicked, it’s too much, we don’t have a safe word, I’ve never asked her to stop like this.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I gasp for breath and whimper, not in a sexy way, in a subspace vulnerable — so fucked — can’t talk way. I swallow. “Can…you…undo…my hands?”

She looks worried. “Yeah.” She unbuckles the bike strap from my wrists.

“Can…you…lay on top of me?” She lays her whole body against mine and I feel her pull the blankets up. She strokes my hair. My heart is racing, my whole body is shaking and releasing. Waves of numbness float around my body like bouncing electric light illuminating places I never think about, behind my knees, my calves my skull. Different muscles tense, totally outside of my control, and then release, over and over, and I repeatedly shudder, sometimes shooting my eyes open for a second and shaking my head, saying “What’s happening to me?”

Rachel’s the first person to make me shudder like that — wild waves flow through me even when sex is long over. When I’m lucid enough to actually see Rachel’s face, her brow is furrowed. “Hey,” I say, and try to reach my arms up around her, but can still barely move.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I just…it got to be too much.”

“Should I have not done something?” she asks.

“No, everything was great up until that last moment it just got to be so intense it stopped feeling good, it was like something bursting—”

“The corkscrew?”

I smile. “Yeah, I guess that was it.” I can finally move and I squeeze her and kiss her. “You were great.”

It takes a while, but when I’m able to form coherent sentences, we talk about what happened. She tells me all she was doing was moving her fingers, but it feels impossible that I could feel such a small movement everywhere. I can’t stop thinking about her knuckles. It felt like there was so much inside of me, so much moving. Does everyone have that many knuckles? How many distinct joints are in a fist anyway? How many knuckles are in a fist that can fit inside my body?

I can’t stop thinking about her knuckles. It felt like there was so much inside of me, so much moving. Does everyone have that many knuckles? How many distinct joints are in a fist anyway? How many knuckles are in a fist that can fit inside my body?

Rachel has never been a top before me; she’d never fisted anyone before me. We’d met on Tinder and I became her bottom as soon as we kissed, as soon as she took my clothes off, as soon as I told her, “I really like sucking fingers.” She later revealed that with her last girlfriend, she was a chatty, bubbly bottom; with her husband, she gets tied up and blindfolded. With me, though, topping comes naturally—she takes control, she trusts me to tell her what to do and when to stop, she feels her way in and through my holes.

The only other person who’d fisted me was a sexually abusive ex. As I’ve gotten to know Rachel and shared certain sex acts that could link back to my ex, I’ve had to pull myself into the present. I remind myself: I am with a wholly different person than my ex, I have lived so many lives since my breakup, I am capable of healing. Just because one person hurt me and used my vulnerability as a weapon to harm me does not mean that everyone will. Staying present with the person in front of me, in this case, Rachel, has allowed me to see a person for who they are, to notice when a dynamic is becoming a chaotic disruption to my life, versus when someone is trustworthy and capable of respecting me.

Rachel was the first person I truly bottomed for after my ex and this is, partially, a timeline thing. Before I met Rachel, I wasn’t ready to have something as big as a fist inside of me, I wasn’t ready to be vulnerable or release control. To let myself be penetrated is a profoundly vulnerable experience. It has required doing so much internal work that so many people simply refuse to do; it’s the work that undermines American capitalism and dismantles internalized racism, queerphobia, sexism, and self-hatred. To open up, I have to feel my body. I have to access an understanding of what I want and, somewhere in me, believe that I deserve to get what I want. With a sex partner, I have to voice that desire, which requires that I trust my perception enough to believe myself, a femme of color, worthy of being listened to. This alone has been a huge learning process. There’s so much involved in trusting another person to enter my body, to leave the memory of their body against my mouth, ass, or pussy.

The work of healing is in service of the collective, it’s the kind of work we need more and more of as we attempt to collectively heal our relationship to the earth, as we’re confined into smaller spaces and are building relationships across distancing that some of us couldn’t have imagined before.

The work of healing allows for the vulnerability inherent to penetration. When Rachel enters my body, she becomes part of me and yet, I still know where we end. By knowing she will listen, and leave me when I ask her to, I can let her in.

The work of healing allows for the vulnerability inherent to penetration. When Rachel enters my body, she becomes part of me and yet, I still know where we end. By knowing she will listen, and leave me when I ask her to, I can let her in. Because I can trust that my boundaries and requests will be respected, I have a safety net onto which I can fall apart. I can open up because I know she won’t push me into anything I’m not ready for. I can let her in deep enough to feel her vibrate in every cell of my body.

After my abusive ex, I couldn’t wholeheartedly trust anyone with my body like that. And that’s not to say that the lovers I had in the interim weren’t trustworthy — it’s just that I’m going through my own journey based on the experiences I need to heal from, just as each of my lovers are. In slowly building a relationship over time, I’ve learned to trust Rachel, to breathe into the spaces she makes within me, to not speed myself up to just have an orgasm so it’ll be over. It’s in this space that I’ve learned to let go.

Rachel had never had someone abruptly stop sex like that. I’d only safeworded out a couple of times, but enough to know that I need someone to cover me up and weigh me down. Rachel did an amazing job responding to my needs without guilting me or making my response about her performance, the way other lovers have. She tells me I’m a good bottom and it’s in the ways that I know what I want, know what my limits are, and what I need when they’ve been reached — like when I ask her to stop — that lets Rachel be the top she never imagined herself to be.

Healing my relationship to my sexuality, including my sexual trauma, is truly transformative. When I teach Rachel how to tie me up and fist me, when I ask her to tell me what to do, when I teach her exactly how I want to submit, I give her permission to go on a journey with me and dive into an exponentially expanding world of pleasure within the connection we build together. While Rachel had always been a bottom, she’s found a world of toppiness within herself. I was able to gift her an experience of witnessing someone else’s vulnerability beneath her touch and the thrill of controlling another’s pleasure safely — something that I truly hope all bottoms can experience. So much sexual space has opened up within her that she hadn’t discovered before, and that’s how I know that my individual healing is collective. My lovers are able to inhabit spaces they’ve never known.

Some days, I ask Rachel, “How many knuckles are in a fist?!” We laugh through impossible questions whose only correct answer was, and will forever be, infinite.

14 Knuckles: The Bad Domme

14 Knuckles is a series about a scorpio femme of color fucking their way through power dynamics, boundaries, and caregiving, as an exploration of who she is and how she relates to others.

When I walked into Ships in the Night, a QTPOC dance party in Oakland, I was looking to get fucked. I’d just broken up with someone I’d later name as emotionally and sexually abusive but who, at the time, I was completely heartbroken over. I couldn’t let the last fingers that grazed my pussy be theirs, I wanted those cells to be scraped away by someone new, someone who hadn’t hurt me.

Before I’d come to the party, I’d intentionally left my phone at my friend’s place and dipped the edge of my pinky into a microdose of molly. Now on a dim, red-lit dance floor, strobe lights bouncing off my glasses, I was surrounded by babes. I rarely go to bars; the people and the lights and the energy flying around tends to be too much stimulation. Now, though, I knew my purpose: I wanted someone to finger me in one of the booths, I wanted to make out in a bathroom stall, I wanted to be the queer, single, slut that I’d never been.

Now, though, I knew my purpose: I wanted someone to finger me in one of the booths, I wanted to make out in a bathroom stall, I wanted to be the queer, single, slut that I’d never been.

I saw a girl staring at me. Her long, straight black hair flew out from the sides of her backwards-baseball cap. As soon as she caught me staring back, her eyes widened and she walked away. I wandered the club with my friend and saw her talking to someone else at the bar downstairs. She moved with an ease and grace that only West Coast East Asians have, a fucking cool that comes from being surrounded by people like you — the same kind of cool that my ex had. I assumed she was dating the girl she was talking to, but as I walked by, shot a look her way.

Upstairs, I danced with my friend. When we took a break, I saw her staring again. This time, I waved. She pointed to herself and gave me a quizzical look like, “Who, me?” I made a “come on over” motion with my first finger and she shook her head, but then pointed at me and motioned for me to come there. I shrugged, walked straight up to her, and shouted into her ear, “So why are you staring?”

She laughed and turned away. “It’s that obvious, huh?” I nodded and smiled. “You’re really hot.”

It was less than a minute before I knew her job, a nurse like me, her three major star signs, and that she liked my tits. It took five minutes for us to start kissing, ten for me to get on her lap in a booth. I wanted her to fuck me right there; she wanted to take me home. She asked key questions that made me trust her: “How high or drunk are you?” and, “Who are you with? I want to make sure someone knows where you’re going.” We found my friend, they exchanged numbers, and I got in her car.

By the time we got to her bed, the cool that I’d seen had dissipated. She was awkward and repeated that she never went to clubs, never brought girls home. Forward-ass femme that I was, I interpreted that shyness as an opportunity to initiate. My technique didn’t quite work, though — she wanted to review my STD history and sexual activity, she wanted to know my triggers.

A week out of a relationship that had been so abusive, this was hot. Like, yes, daddy, make me wait so we can find out how to respect both my and your boundaries. We made out in-between questions, clothes came off, and by the time her fingers grazed just below my clit, I was soaking.

“So, you seem a little too comfortable,” she said. “I want to get you out of your comfort zone.”

I grinned. This is what I’m here for, I thought. “What do you want to do me?” I whispered, tilting my chin up at her earnestly.

“I want to tie you up,” she said.

I retracted instantly. Of course she does, everyone wants to tie a Scorpio up. “Yeah, no, I don’t want to do that.” I explained — I’d only done that with certain people, every time I’d cried and it was an incredibly emotional experience, and she was literally a stranger. I had no reason to trust her with that level of vulnerability.

She kept her finger just below my clit. “Has anyone ever touched this spot while you’re falling asleep?”

“No,” I said, annoyed. “I just want to fuck, I’m not going to sleep here.”

“Well, it’s nice. You wake up so ready to go. I think you’re just too comfortable and you could really use getting tied up.”

This went on for over an hour — her asking to tie me up, me becoming increasingly frustrated and repeating, “It’s a hard no.”

I didn’t leave, though. Desperation, loneliness, and boredom are never the best reasons to engage sexually—it’s scarcity by another name—and because I didn’t want to leave my previous relationship damaged, closed off, or traumatized (read: I was all three), I was willing to put up with the kind of boundary-pushing that I hadn’t even started recovering from.

So, when she finally set her fingers against my clit, I hate-humped her until I came.

So, when she finally set her fingers against my clit, I hate-humped her until I came. Since I’d been there for over an hour of being teased and pushed in extremely not-sexy ways, it was now four in the morning and I wanted to go home. I asked her to order me a Lyft, since I didn’t have my phone.

“Well, I don’t have Lyft or Uber. I uninstalled them and I don’t want to go through the set-up process again. But, if you let me tie you up, I’ll drive you home.”

“No.”

“Well if you stay the night, maybe I could tie you up in the morning and drive you home.”

“No.”

“Well, how do you want to get home, then?”

I was livid. I asked for her phone, called my friend, and she ordered a Lyft to pick me up. I got dressed quickly and rushed out of the house — what the fuck just happened.

The next day, I nervously told the story to a friend and asked, “Is that normal in kink communities? To just be down for whatever? Should I have expected that? Is there something wrong with me that I said no?”

When she replied, “That is not normal. That is a person who doesn’t know about consent.” I cried. I’d internalized so many toxic messages: that my only value rested in being fucked and in pleasing whoever was telling me what to do; that as a femme, I’m here to perform pleasure for someone else; that if someone wanted to push me past my limits, it was my own fault.

The thing is: sometimes I like feeling disposable, in feeling like I’m just a bunch of holes that someone else is using for their pleasure. I like getting fucked. I’m a femme of color who’s biked across continents; I’m the only one who determines what happens tomorrow, next week, and next year. I know I’m fucking powerful so, sometimes, I like to release control, let someone else do the work and have the power, and let me relax until my pussy and ass open. That only works, though, when there’s a history of boundaries having been respected. That only works if I’m not scared and stressed. That only works if I’m not angry because my boundaries are being repeatedly disrespected.

The vulnerability I offer through my body is a gift. No one is entitled to the vulnerability I grant them when I release control or the softness I can embody when I trust them. Just because someone wants that from me — just because I seem “too comfortable”  — doesn’t mean they’re entitled to it. When I offer my body to a lover, there’s a sense of responsibility with this gift. Vulnerability cannot be forced. If, and when, I choose to be vulnerable with someone, my body will relax, open, and drip.

I didn’t know I was being violated until it was happening. This was true with my sexually abusive ex; it was true with this random girl; it’s been true in emotional and sexual situations since then. It’s taken a long time to figure out what boundaries feel good and how those shift depending on how much I trust someone.

When I have casual sex, I’ve learned that I’m often not having sex with the person, but imposing a series of emotions onto other people based on what’s going on with me at the time. They’re doing the same to me. Hell, I’ll be the first to admit that I was using that girl to help get over my ex, but that doesn’t mean that I deserved to be coerced into anything that I don’t want. It doesn’t mean that anyone should assume that just because I’m a femme, that means I’m a passive, receiving bottom, or that just because I’m a Scorpio means I want to be tied up (honestly! stop doing this people!).

It does mean that when I’m having casual sex, I do not offer the kind of vulnerability I might give a partner. My boundaries shift depending on what relationship I have with a person.

It does mean that when I’m having casual sex, I do not offer the kind of vulnerability I might give a partner. My boundaries shift depending on what relationship I have with a person. When I walked into Ships that night, I was excited to be the single slut of my own dreams, but what I’ve learned from this period of casual dating is how delicious it can be to take it slow, how affirming it is to know we’re on our own journeys as we learn and share experiences together. Slowness doesn’t mean that I don’t get tied up (yes, I like to be tied up by very specific people!). It means that I ask for it when the time is right, when I actually trust someone and know them to be capable of doing it respectfully, and when I know that’s something that they might be into. I approach things differently — often, via text, to give people time to think about it — rather than demanding immediate responses to new, potentially triggering, sex acts.

And yeah, still, there are times when something doesn’t feel good, when I have to ask a partner to stop, when something that felt good last week doesn’t feel good now. It’s okay that I often don’t know if something’s wrong until I feel it. I love that I have sex partners who I can now trust enough to voice what’s going on with me. I’ll never put up with the kind of coercion the domme from Ships put me through again.

Lesbian Meme Culture Normalized My Abusive Relationship

At 28 years old, I was deep in the throes of my second adolescence. I didn’t know how to dress or flirt or what kind of sex I liked. It felt like there was an entirely different language I had to study to even talk to queers and the more I tried to live my desires and learn from experience, the more I did it wrong. I remember when the first person I slept with gave me a post-sex lecture on why real queer people call themselves gay, and not lesbian, because “lesbian” is inherently transphobic but “gay” is not. I anxiously stayed up all night wondering where these definitions had come from and how much research I would have to do in order to not offend lovers. Everyone else suddenly became the authority — by dating a man, it was as if I’d negated my lifelong queer friendships and organizing work. The next day, I called my queer and lesbian friends crying, deeply ashamed. They gently explained that that person was speaking for themselves, and that anyone who wants to say that ‘lesbian’ is an inherently a transphobic term was erasing trans lesbians along with decades of lesbian history, activism, and trans solidarity.

I was so ashamed about what I didn’t know, what I hadn’t tried, and, most terrifyingly, what I was feeling. Every time I tried to date, flirt, or have the kind of sex I wanted, there was someone on the other end to make fun of me, talk down to me, or tell me I was doing it wrong. I felt out of sorts and insecure, I had a constant low-grade vulnerability hangover.

I’d been single for over a year when I was at a writing workshop in California. It came at the end of a four-month storytelling tour, where I’d been flirting and fucking and, despite the heartbreak and instability along the way, I felt like hot shit. On the first night of the workshop, this short, qtpoc babe approached the podium barefoot. To an audience of primarily white, straight women, they announced they were drunk, introduced the faculty reader in lush, adoring terms, and talked for way longer than anyone else. I felt an immediate energetic pull — this person was being goofy and subversive and taking up space in front of a bunch of stick-up-their-asses white folks, and it was hot.

Over the next few days, I found NJ. They invited me to go to the beach with their friends. We laid on my yellow sarong just inches from each other and gazed into each others eyes. They were cute and funny and obviously adored me. I was so flattered that a queer, gender nonconforming, POC was attracted to my baby-gay ass and, maybe that feeling of being desired and validated in my queerness shielded me from seeing them for who they were. After the workshop, I visited. After I visited, I took a job close to them. Because U-Haul.

Newly in my first serious queer relationship, I felt all these things I hadn’t felt before. Some days, I felt so seen and adored that I wondered how I’d lived without this kind of devotion before. Other days, I felt enraged, jealous, betrayed. I was obsessed and in a full-on emotional rollercoaster. I could barely keep up with what had just happened before a new onslaught of confusing emotions hurled my way. I didn’t have any coping skills to move through this strange and confusing emotional landscape.

NJ had a decade’s worth of queer relationships under their belt and pinned themselves as an expert on what I was going through. When I shared my surprise and fear about all the intense, scary feelings I was having, they said, “That’s because gay love is different from straight love. You’re gay and you haven’t known what gay love is until now.” In the depth of my own obsession, I couldn’t see that they were re-writing my romantic history in a way that put themselves on a pedestal. They needed to invalidate my previous relationship because they needed my identity to hinge on their approval.

As I subtly resisted, insisting that I knew myself to be queer and bi and to have a sexuality that lived beyond binaries like “straight love” and “gay love,” NJ used queer culture to prove their point. Specifically, they sent memes showing that it was normal in gay love to be jealous, codependent, possessive, and completely lose track of your life. And, because I had no other queer reference point for relationships, I bought into it. I wanted to think they were right because I didn’t want to leave a relationship that had become a surrogate for a queer self-acceptance I hadn’t yet developed.

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Six months ensued in which NJ slowly, but persistently, tried to control everything I did. I had to ask for permission to sleep after my 12-hour night shifts, to go for a run, to hang up the phone. If I didn’t, NJ whined, cried, started fights, or insulted me, saying they were allowed to act that way because they felt emotionally abandoned. (This sounds so over-the-top but it’s true: they once called the police to check on me, a person of color living in rural California, at my house when I went to sleep without calling them back.) When I questioned the ways they’d taken control of my life, they’d share memes about U-Hauling or how lesbians go everywhere together. They tried to prove that in gay love, it hurts to be apart, so it was my responsibility to be with them all the time.

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I got used to cancelling plans with queer friends because NJ persistently said, “You don’t know it, but that person wants to fuck you.” It was a subtle form of telling me that my value only rested in being fucked. They gradually minimized my worth and cast suspicion onto all of my queer friendships. If I insisted that the person didn’t want to fuck me, they accused me of wanting to fuck the other person. Once, they lashed out when I scheduled a phone call with a queer friend to talk about a book we loved, saying I was cheating on them. I’ve always believed in the lushness of queer friendships and, even though it went against everything I knew I wanted from my life, I cancelled the call.

I got used to cancelling on myself — when I scheduled time for writing, or put my phone on airplane mode, I was emotionally punished for days through fights, criticism, and being regularly told that they needed me to teach me how to love because I didn’t know how.

When I got out of the relationship, I felt like all my skin was burning off. Leaving was one of the most painful parts of it. I didn’t have this language then: I didn’t know it was emotionally and sexually abusive. I hadn’t put together that I was part of NJ’s pattern of preying on women of color who’d only had relationships with men, love bombing to gain their trust and set them up for abuse, and eventually raping them. Instead, I thought that if I couldn’t make it work with NJ, I was rejecting gay love. If all-consuming obsession is what being queer is about, then maybe I deserved this pain for being so incapable of loving.

Out of the relationship, I could look back and see what had happened with new eyes, without the fog of their voice controlling my narrative. When they told me that I wasn’t giving them enough — even when I spent every single day off with them, even when I spent hours on the phone with them when we were apart, even when I called them on every break from work and answered their texts immediately — the only thing I thought I had left to give was my body. In the days before they raped me, they’d said, “I’m willing to give you my whole life, but you aren’t willing to do anything for me. If this relationship is to continue, I need you to love me more than you love yourself. I need you to be willing for you to give me at least what I’m willing to give you. That’s what love is, that’s what a relationship is.” I gave up agency to my body because I believed them when they said that’s what made gay love different — I didn’t have a self anymore, I didn’t have a right to say no.

Even though I knew they’d violated me, even though I knew the violation was rape, I stayed with them. They had the memes to prove that in gay love, we process together. We work through the hurt. We stay with people who cause us pain. We’re all traumatized, and it’s okay if someone else’s trauma causes me trauma, it’s not their fault.

I didn’t leave when they raped me but when, a few months later, I asked to go to sleep and they refused. While I’d had my right to my body stripped away, there was something inside me that still acknowledged that taking away someone’s right to sleep was a close to torture. My inner voice told me I didn’t have to remain in a relationship that felt like torture.

I had, and still have, so few representations of people like me, who are queers, femmes, and people of color. I was, and still am, starving for any possible representation. I know this is true for so many of us, and I know that one way queers build accessible cultural work is when we create memes. We are looking for images, for humans who look and act like us.

As the relationship became increasingly emotionally and sexually abusive, NJ weaponized lesbian memes against me. So many lesbian memes normalize giving up your entire life for a pretty girl or a hot backwards-cap wearing babe, spending every minute with your girlfriend, and the kind of violent jealousy that makes you want to hurt anyone who looks at your partner. So many lesbian memes make a joke of codependence, U-Hauling, and possessiveness, so many normalize femmes as automatic caregivers and emotional saviors of shy butches who can’t express their emotions directly.

And, so many of these lesbian meme accounts are by and for white women, so there’s little nuance when it comes to the complicated experience of being an immigrants’ kid severed from homeland and how culture plays into gender, sexuality, attraction, and communication styles. Coming into the queer dating world as a femme of color, a child of Malayali immigrants? It felt damn near impossible for me to figure out how I was supposed to exist in a relationship at all, let alone a healthy one.

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I had to unfollow lesbian meme accounts in order to begin healing from an abusive queer relationship. Once it was over, once we stopped talking, once I blocked NJ, once I started to realize how abusive the relationship had been, lesbian meme accounts felt dangerous. Whenever I’d see them on my feed, I’d think, “Wait, but that’s actually not healthy! That’s what happened to me in my relationship!” I noticed memes that made me think that I had to be friends with my ex, that I had to work through their emotions with them, and that I had to remain intertwined even after leaving the relationship. The memes didn’t feel like a joke anymore, they felt like a manifestation of unhealed queer relationship trauma.

I knew I had to get these toxic messages out of my brain or I’d always associate love with abuse. I’ve learned to seek intentionally different kinds of messages, ones that affirm my wholeness, ask me to heal my own trauma rather than someone else’s, acknowledge the importance of boundaries, and do not pin down queerness as one thing. I ask myself questions when consuming any cultural product, like music or movies or memes: Is this healthy? Why am I drawn to this, and what would love look like if I didn’t consume toxic messages?

Since then, I’ve sought healthy representations of queer love that centered my experience as a femme of color in a way that white queer memes could not, like through @queeringdesi and @femmecollectively. I’m also a huge fan of @gayslutswhoread because the four queer thots on the podcast are *so* different from each other that it validates moments when I feel different from the queer stereotypes I might trap myself in. There might not be a singular cultural representation that fits my multiplicities, but I now know that I don’t have to compare myself to other queers on the internet in order to be seen.

In my healing process, I’ve realized that the difference between this relationship and all the others in my life wasn’t that this was “gay love.” It was that my previous relationships were relatively healthy: I hadn’t felt this whirlwind rollercoaster of emotions because I’d never been in an abusive relationship. My ex used the term “gay love” to normalize their abusive patterns. When we normalize abusive tendencies and call it queer culture, we are traumatizing ourselves and our lovers.

I’m in a deep process of unlearning unhealthy behaviors, avoiding chasing dynamics and obsessive tendencies, and learning how to move towards people who are good to me. Who treat me well. Who are not obsessed with me and who have their own lives. Who are not willing to give up everything in some grand romantic gesture from which they’re looking for an emotional payout. Who aren’t trauma bonding. Who are as deeply invested in healing as I am. And if that means I have to reject big portions of queer culture in the process, that’s okay. My queerness doesn’t hinge on anything outside of myself anymore.

Unlikely Hikers: Creating Space For Everyone On The Trail, One Group Hike At A Time

all photos contributed by Mary Ann Thomas

It’s Saturday and I’m kicking pebbles on an uneven dusty trail. I touch the gray rock to my left, and peer off the trail down to the right. Browned shrubs and scraggly vines work their way out of the dirt and rock. Southern California is parched; the stream that once carved this path is dry. I’m walking single file with fifty Unlikely Hikers towards the waterfall at the end of the trail.

This morning, I followed a GPS point off the Unlikely Hikers website. There was no RSVP required, I just had to show up. The hike would be a mile and a half round-trip and involve free snacks. Two queer friends of color came with me; none of us had ever been on a group hike before. Even though I’ve backpacked, hiked, and biked for years, my interactions with people along the way have taught me to dodge outdoors culture.’

When I bicycled across the US and Canada in 2014, I spent a few days, here and there, riding with bicyclists who I met along the way. I’d often meet them at campgrounds on Adventure Cycling Association routes and we’d follow the same path up and down mountain passes, day after day. It only took riding with a few straight men to realize that I, a queer brown woman, couldn’t really feel like myself while with them. Most of them asked me whether my boyfriend had “allowed” me to go on this bike ride, even before asking whether I had a boyfriend. One, a fifty-something-year-old guy, took his tools to my bike every night, assuming I couldn’t fix it myself, even when he couldn’t either. Another went on a racist rant about indigenous people when we rode across reservation land. Some of these actions were tiny, momentary, while others felt more disturbing. After riding with these guys, I avoided ACA routes. I didn’t want to be on a bike highway with people who would not see me as a human independent of a boyfriend, assume that I was ignorant about bikes, or subject me to their racism. I avoided anything to do with bike culture, or outdoors culture.

This past October, I saw that Jenny Bruso, the founder of Unlikely Hikers, was hosting a group hike outside of LA. Jenny is a fat queer hiker and writer who originally created Unlikely Hikers with the goal of changing her Instagram feed. Representation of outdoor culture has long mirrored the exclusionary attitude of many who play outside, and Jenny’s purpose in creating Unlikely Hikers was to reclaim the term and create a community centered on diversity, inclusion, representation, and body liberation in the outdoors. The mission of the group resonated deeply and Unlikely Hikers grew quickly. The community now has more than 58k followers on Instagram, and Jenny leads group hikes all over the country.

When I looked at the Unlikely Hikers website to learn more details about the group hike, I saw that Jenny set up intentions clearly by writing: “Absolutely no diet or weight loss talk. Be mindful of gender pronouns, group dynamics, microaggressions, cultural appropriation and different physical ability levels.” With this laid out for me, I decided to go on my first group hike ever.

When we arrived, we found a dozen grinning people of various genders, ages, races, and body types. Some people had hiking poles and backpacks, others carried just a water bottle. Jenny, in her neon Unlikely Hikers shirt, welcomed each person with a smile, a handshake, a hug. She encouraged us to introduce ourselves casually while people filtered in.

Within a few minutes, there were over fifty hikers present. Jenny asked us all to sign a waiver and then had us stand in a circle. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we looked at the faces of those who would be our team on this hike. Jenny introduced herself, gave a brief description of Unlikely Hikers and the work she does, and presented the temporary world we would be a part of. “Maybe you’ve never heard this language on a group hike,” she said, “but this isn’t just a regular group hike.”

Here, Jenny invited us to behave differently than we would in the world outside of this. She acknowledged that women, femmes, and people assigned female at birth are often conditioned to relate to each other by saying disparaging things about our bodies. So, instead of doing that, she asked us to “refrain from diet and weight loss talk, notions of good and bad bodies, good and bad foods, or being in shape and out of shape.” When I asked her about this intro, she said, “My intention isn’t to silence or censor anyone because they can do this, literally, any time in their lives. But for this window of time we’re spending together, we’re going to revere what our bodies do for us. I invite everyone to try to be in their bodies as we hike.”

Jenny guided us through introducing ourselves. She acknowledged how courageous it is to show up to exercise with a group of strangers. She reminded us that we don’t know someone’s story just by looking at them and explained why asking pronouns matters. For folks who have never asked before, she acknowledged that it might be initially uncomfortable, but said: “Our individual discomfort doesn’t trump another person’s lived experience.” As we shared names and pronouns, I witnessed each smiling face beam. It seemed like so many of us were amazed to be on a different kind of hike.

Jenny acknowledged that we were on Ancestral land of the Tongva and that in North America, we are always on stolen land. She reminded us not to refer to indigenous ownership of this land in the past tense. “Colonization and displacement of Native peoples isn’t a thing of the past as many of us are taught in school, but something still occurring to this day,” she said. She then asked us all to behave as guests on the land and to acknowledge the privilege of being in these beautiful places: “It isn’t something we’re owed, despite all we hear about ‘public lands.” As people who adventure in the outdoors, we need to actively work against narratives that erase indigenous people’s claim to the land.

These things — setting guidelines for the kinds of conversations we’d be having, acknowledging gender diversity within the group, and honoring the indigenous people on whose land we walked — helped address so many of the concerns that I, as a queer brown femme, have about engaging with outdoors culture. I can’t explain how unreal it felt to be able to let my guard down with a big group of strangers on a hike. By raising these things upfront, Jenny allowed me to be fully present, to relax a little, and to have joyful conversations with new friends.

The hike itself, then, was encouraging and fun. Jenny partnered with a local group, Black Girls Trekkin’. For black women who were local to the area, this became an opportunity to learn about and become involved with Black Girls Trekkin’, whose goal is to “build a community that will show the world that women of color are a strong and present force in the outdoors.” The founders of that group, Tiffany Tharpe and Michelle Race, led the hike with Jenny; they kept track of the pace and called for breaks when the group was drifting apart while Jenny stayed in the back of the group and ensured that everyone was drinking water, eating snacks, and going at a pace that felt good for their bodies. Jenny said that when starting these group hikes, she realized it was vital that no one get left behind. “The fear of being the slowest gives most people anxiety,” she said, “regardless of body type or ability.”

Black Girls Trekkin’ and Unlikely Hikers

Because my experiences with outdoor culture have been laced with misogyny and racism, it has been rare for me to find outdoors community in which I don’t have to minimize myself. When I asked Jenny about how she learned to create this intentional space within a hike, she told me that at first, she had few examples to go on. “I’d only been on maybe two group hikes ever, with other groups, and didn’t have great experiences,” she said. “My hike pre-talk has evolved a lot from the beginning, mostly out of trial and error.”

Her willingness to try has made all the difference. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face while getting to know other queer folks of color who backpack and hike. Here, with Unlikely Hikers, I could show up as myself.

While it wasn’t explicitly a queer hike, the principles of what we were there to do — love our bodies and each other, slow down so we can intentionally choose to stay together, encourage each other to voice our own needs and stay positive about whatever our bodies are experiencing, and never see each other as a burden — that’s queer as fuck! It was the first group hike I’d ever been on and, knowing that outdoors culture places blame on women for not being good enough, strong enough, anything enough, it was a revelation. Hiking with Jenny Bruso and Unlikely Hikers helped me see tangible ways in which we can create space for each other, even in the woods. 🌲

Jenny Bruso and Mary Ann Thomas

edited by vanessa.

Food and Water, Silence and Solitude: The Bike Trip That Returned Me to Myself

all photos contributed by Mary Ann Thomas

I always knew I wanted to travel for work while contributing to the places I visited. While applying for college, I heard that nursing could be that profession. I figured I’d try nursing school; if I hated it, I could back out. I clicked a box on my college applications for “School of Nursing.”

I didn’t hate it. I’ve been an Intensive Care nurse for seven years. The day-to-day job involves monitoring ventilators, titrating medications to keep blood pressures within a certain range, and assessing patients for any changes. It’s more than that, though. We are the receptacles for multiple layers of anger, grief, and miscommunication. We are expected to be kind to doctors despite the rage or indifference they might throw our way, to be generous with our coworkers when they’re frustrated during a busy shift, to be compassionate with patients and family members when they’re experiencing the extreme emotions inherent to a hospital stay. I learned that part of my role is to be a wall: people need to fling their emotions somewhere and, if I can give someone a sounding board, we might be able to work together in a way that helps a person live.

I learned that part of my role [as a nurse] is to be a wall: people need to fling their emotions somewhere and, if I can give someone a sounding board, we might be able to work together in a way that helps a person live.

Just before I started my first job as a nurse in 2011, I went on my first bike tour. I rode from New Jersey to Nashville over the course of a month with a friend from high school. We camped in fields on the side of the road, crossed the steep Appalachian Mountains, and used cue sheets tucked into our sports bras to navigate before Google Maps had bicycling directions. I finished that bike trip and moved to Washington D.C. It was a huge pivot. I went from spending my days pedaling, drinking coffee on the side of the road and stretching in parking lots to working night shifts where I drew medication from ampoules, explained liver failure to patients and families, and scrubbed the sticky residue of hospital devices off people’s bodies.

Mary Ann and her friend, Sheena, as they bicycled from New Jersey to Nashville.

I spent two years at that first job. I was nurtured through the process of becoming a nurse by compassionate, brilliant women. I asked questions, advocated for my patients, and acknowledged what I didn’t know. After I gained my professional experience, though, I wanted to return to bicycling.

So I planned a tour: six months and 6600 miles from San Diego to Montreal. I planned it alone so that I could go wherever I wanted. I invited friends to join me along the way, but my route wasn’t dependent on anyone else’s needs. I became a travel nurse to allow myself a flexible schedule, to allow all the time off I’d need for this bike tour.

In 2014, after learning how to care for a person on the edge between life and death, I went on the bike ride that would, ultimately, return me to myself. It required pushing myself across mountain ranges, deserts, and plains. Some days, I felt miserable. I questioned why I was putting myself through this impossible task, why I couldn’t just work full-time like a normal person. On those days, the miles were slow. It felt like I’d never get to where I wanted to go.

In 2014, after learning how to care for a person on the edge between life and death, I went on a bike ride that would, ultimately, return me to myself.

Alone with my bicycle, there was no one else to notice my misery. No one could soothe me, no one could tell me how to take care of myself. Without the distraction of another person, I noticed that my moods were intimately tied to my physical needs: food and water. Often, I faced real physical challenges: headwinds of 30 mph, busy roads with semi-trucks zooming a few feet from my body, steep roads, deserts through which I carried 20 pounds of water. When it was hard, the difficulty wasn’t because I was underprepared, or ill equipped to deal with the challenge; it was simply because the tour was hard. I had to learn how to make my body function well enough to take on what I asked of it. I learned that my body performs best if I give it what it wants: food and water, silence and solitude.

On a long bike ride or hike, I often encounter what I now fondly call my “you-ain’t-shit” voice. This voice asks me: Am I going fast enough? Did I bring enough food? Why is my stuff so heavy? Is this a way to recreationally destroy my body? Will I ever make it to the end of this day, the end of tomorrow, to my destination? There is no messaging from mainstream outdoors culture that silences my “you-ain’t-shit” voice. There is no one who can convince the insecure, socially anxious, queer brown girl within me that I’m strong and capable and tough enough to bike across continents.

I learned that my body will perform best if I give it what it wants: food and water, silence and solitude.

On my most recent bike tour in India, when Himalayan mountain passes tried to convince me I was an imposter, when men staring at my fragile body made me feel exposed and vulnerable, when impossibly hot days gave me heat stroke, I returned to the basics. Food and water. Silence and solitude. Taking care of myself pushes the “you-ain’t-shit” voice to the background. Often, I simply need to take care of myself, and I need periods of quiet in which I demand nothing of my body. Rest is how my muscles repair themselves, how my saddle sores heal, and how my body regenerates in a way that allows my confidence to grow. By the end of that ride across India, my travel partner and I scheduled rest days after every three days of riding because we learned to respect our bodies’ needs.

Mary Ann and her travel partner, Daniel Baylis, as they rode through Andhra Pradesh, India.

Nursing formally taught me how to perform customer service for strangers in the ways I’d already implicitly learned throughout my life. My professional life involves giving care for everyone but myself. That’s part of my role as a nurse, but it’s also part of my role as a woman, a queer woman, a brown woman. I’m taught to minimize my needs in favor of others’, to ensure the comfort of men in my space, to blame myself when men react with anger or violence because they are uncomfortable. I’m taught to hide my queerness if I want to stay safe, to dress down in order to blend in, to not be so loud with my desires. And everywhere I go, I’m brown. I’m taught to be kind to people when they ask tokenizing questions, to empathize with people even when they don’t see me or my people, as fully human.

My professional life involves giving care for everyone but myself. That’s part of my role as a nurse, but it’s also part of my role as a woman, a queer woman, a brown woman…the outdoors help me prioritize myself and give care to my body.

Through my work as a travel nurse, I’ve had the opportunity to live in many different places: San Francisco and Anchorage, San Diego and upstate New York. I’ve spent time in cities with millions of people and rural places with more horse-drawn buggies than cars. Travel nursing allows me to take time off between contracts; I can take three, six, eight months off of work and be guaranteed employment when I’m ready to go back. I’ve used my time off to bicycle over 10,000 miles in the last five years, road trip across California and Canada, hike and ski to remote cabins for the night. The life I live between gigs is radically different from what my life looks like when I’m working, but since my 2014 bike tour, I’ve made the outdoors a bigger part of my daily existence. These moments in the outdoors help me prioritize myself and give care to my body.

Being outside in any capacity can teach us so much. Outdoor recreation allows us to notice our bodies and to understand our bodies’ needs in ways we’ve never acknowledged before. We can witness the rhythms and cycles of our physical body in ways that we can’t when surrounded by millions of people in cities, or when expected to give care to the other humans at work, home, and in public. We can give care to ourselves. Being outside taught me how to care for myself.

Bicycling Across India, Learning About Queerness and Intimacy Along the Way

all photos contributed by Mary Ann Thomas // feature image by Daniel Baylis

Last year, a series of emails between me — a queer brown woman of Indian descent — and my buddy — a white dude who dates dudes — led to us bicycling across India together. We’d never spent more than a cumulative month in the same place but had maintained a friendship through emails and Skype calls. For each of us, there was the appeal of an adventure and few obligations in our way.

We were two queers traversing a subcontinent on bicycle, through barren deserts and muggy cities and hippie-filled beach towns. I was newly single, out of a long-term relationship with a guy. India was a place I’d been a dozen times with family, my experience filtered through aunties and uncles and cousins. Danny was a long-term adventurer, a single guy who had made writing and travel his priority for much of the previous decade.

The moment we hit the Bay of Bengal, and officially had biked from the Mountains to the Ocean

Early in the trip, when men held Danny’s gaze with an intimacy we considered flirtatious, we talked about the potential for him to sleep around. There’s legally a ban on “unnatural” sex acts in India, which has been used to marginalize LGBTQ folks. The law was initially created by the British and repealed in 2009, but was reinstated in 2013. We’d heard of this law, and later learned that the ban is likely to come under review again this year.

“In Kolkata, Amra Obdhuth is a pop-up queer café and event space, meant to be a home for queer women and trans folks who have been pushed to the margins of mainstream gay movements.”

Despite the ban, there is a growing LGBTQ culture in cities all over the country. Most of the major cities, including Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, have Pride parades. Mumbai, the home of Bollywood, is the home of KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival and Bombay Dost, the country’s first gay magazine. In Kolkata, Amra Obdhuth is a pop-up queer café and event space, meant to be a home for queer women and trans folks who have been pushed to the margins of mainstream gay movements. On the legal front, India’s Supreme Court has recognized transgender as a third gender, creating the legal framework for trans folks, including India’s hijra population, to receive healthcare, unemployment, and government assistance.

Camel friends in Jaipur

LGBTQ culture is intertwined within the history and art of India, too. More than half-way through our trip, Danny and I visited the 13th-century Konark Sun Temple, renowned for the explicit sex acts carved into the temple’s façade. One theory, our guide told us, was that the sculptures were designed as sex-education. Alongside carvings of erect penises in vaginas, we found depictions of big-breasted women fondling each other and multiple men’s penises out within a single scene. There were more orgies than we could count, and our guide delighted in showing us that no sex act was off-limits for this temple education.

“LGBTQ culture is intertwined within the history and art of India, too.”

As we rode from the Himalayas to the tip of India, we gradually became more comfortable. We communicated with hand gestures, pulled out our maps to tell the story of where we’d been, and repeated where we were from to dozens of onlookers at chai-stalls and open-air lunch counters each day. We became accustomed to how unpredictable each day was; anytime we thought we had something figured out, India would throw us a new obstacle. For example, when we thought we had our process of finding a good hotel figured out, we ended up in a town where every single hotel denied us entry.

Descending from Zoji La, a rugged mountain pass, into the Kashmir Valley

Rules around hetero couples can be strict in India. Dating isn’t common outside of major cities; arranged marriages are the norm in many places. Public displays of affection between men and women are rare, unless you’re in certain corners of certain parks, where couples hide their touch. Since we were read as a straight couple by many, we were subject to some of these rules: many hotels would not allow Danny and I to stay in the same room because it was against “hotel policy” for an unmarried man and woman to be together. We were questioned by religious men, police, and curious strangers about our relation, and we were met with disbelief when we explained we were just friends. Most of the time, they’d accept our explanation: We were on a “special project” to see India by bicycle. In the town that rejected all our explanations, two teenage Indian adventurers came to our rescue at sunset. They rode motorbikes from hotel to hotel, talked to the managers, checked prices, and finally found a place that would take us.

“Constructs around coupling, marriage, and the why of it all are different in India, so for women to nurture relationships with other women, and for men to seek love from other men privately, wouldn’t surprise me.”

Some of the rules around coupling are understandable to me: marriage in India, especially when arranged, connects families, cultures, communities, and religious groups. It’s not exclusively a relationship between a couple. Because there is a sense of obligation within marriage, I rarely saw a husband and wife relying on each other the way that I do couples in the US. Married couples fulfill their obligations of raising children and caring for their families together. For the emotional turbulence of life, each partner is able to rely on huge extended networks of family, friends, elders, and religious ties to help them. Constructs around coupling, marriage, and the why of it all are different in India, so for women to nurture relationships with other women, and for men to seek love from other men privately, wouldn’t surprise me.

Bicycles proliferate West Bengal, one of my favorite states. Physical touch isn’t as stigmatized between men in India.

In this environment, Danny and I were both interested in how queers found each other. He downloaded Grindr, I downloaded Tinder, and a week of dates ensued. Grindr proved to be a source of information, a way to join strangers on a night out, and, of course, a means to hook up. While I was worried that there could be predators on the app, like people who were trying to trap gay men and violently enforce religious fundamentalism, Danny didn’t run into that at all.

For me, within a few hours of downloading Tinder, I had a date. She was studying abroad, but Chennai was home. We met up at a waffle café, where we shared an order of the most decadent waffles I’d ever eaten: chocolate syrup and chocolate ice cream saturated each crevice of the waffle with sweetness. We talked about our international travels, our experiences away from India, and what it was like to return. She told me that when she came out, she expected friends and family to be surprised, or to shame her. Instead, they expected it, she said. “I was the one surprised at how it was actually not a big deal at all.”

Sunset in Orissa (now known as Odisha)

On a dinner date with an American ex-pat another night, I was told that queer women were motivated on Tinder in most of the major Indian cities. Compared to other countries, she found Indian women to be more responsive, engaged, and actively interested in going on dates. While queer culture isn’t out and proud with gayborhoods in every city, people seem to find each other covertly.

“That night, I texted her: ‘I don’t know who you’re interested in, but I’m leaving town in two days. I want to kiss you.’ She responded with a coy, ‘I’m curious.'”

Outside the apps, I ended up on a date with an Indian traveler who happened to be at the hostel I was staying in. She invited me out dancing with her friends and, since she put her hands on my waist, kept close all night, and had an asymmetrical haircut, I assumed she was queer. That night, I texted her: “I don’t know who you’re interested in, but I’m leaving town in two days. I want to kiss you.” She responded with a coy, “I’m curious.”

photo by Daniel Baylis, a photographer, writer & my travel partner

We met up the next day, ate pizza and talked about our pasts. She told me that she’d always wanted to be with a woman but had never had a chance. I told her I’d known I was queer since I was a teenager, but ended up in long-term monogamy with a dude, which only broke recently. She took us to her friend’s empty apartment, which she prearranged, where we made out with the lights on in sweltering heat. Lying in bed, she asked why I thought she’d be into women, and I tried to explain that Indian norms are full of moments Americans consider to be flirting, like sitting so close that your thighs and arms touch, dancing up on each other, and holding hands. “Holding hands doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “It must be so sad to not touch your friends.”

“There’s something beautiful about going to beaches where men lie in each other’s arms, walking around festivals where people of the same gender hold hands, and seeing young women drape their arms around each other.”

After four months in India, I had to agree. There’s something beautiful about going to beaches where men lie in each other’s arms, walking around festivals where people of the same gender hold hands, and seeing young women drape their arms around each other. There’s something sweet about an intimacy that reveals itself physically, about people being unafraid to show warmth through their bodies. As someone raised in New Jersey, where even shaking hands seems like too-intimate an act, India reminded me that the boundaries between our bodies are malleable, cultural. Physical love does not need to be bound up exclusively in sex; we can give and receive intimacy from friends and family.

The way I see it, relationships, friendships, and family structures are conceptualized really differently in India; as a result, there is room for queer folks.

Beach along Bay of Bengal