Category: a Love: Rose
I was recently answering a question in a queer poly FAAB/woman/feminine-oriented group I’m part of and thought it would make good blog fodder. I have a ton of posts I keep working on and meaning to finish, but keep putting off, so I figure I could slap this one up. I have no idea what my readership is like these days (not that there’s many of you since my writing gap has grown larger and larger), but I imagine this might not be new information. Oh well!
Question posed: What is your story with your sexual identity? What’s your relationship with being queer?
My post:
(tl;dr, early bloomer. much queer, but always awkward. so genderqueer. much kink.)
I had my first sexual experience around third grade with a female friend of mine at the time: kissing and rubbing our bodies, including genitals, against each other while sleeping over at each others houses. I fooled around with a few people in middle school and high school, had my first boyfriend in middle school, where we ended up in a polyish relationship where he was dating me and another girl for a period of time. We weren’t together for very long, but mostly because it was middle school and less because of the poly. I had a few girls who were maybe sort of almost girlfriends, but who were mostly friends who were girls that I made out with or had sex with once and not really ever again. I was horribly awkward and shy and I didn’t know how to approach girls, or anyone for that matter. I did experience some discrimination and uncomfortableness from others because of my visible and unapologetic queerness, but I was used to being othered for most of my life anyway.
Being attracted to people regardless of gender was always a non-issue for me to some extent. When I learned the term bisexual around 6th grade I began calling myself that and coming out as bisexual, which lead me to being the President and Co-founder of my high school’s Gay/Straight Alliance (as they were commonly called then), and also lead most of the people in my school and my hometown thinking I was a lesbian. I came out to my mom somewhere around freshman year of high school and her response was: “oh, I thought you were a lesbian.” A non-issue. My older sibling identifies now as queer, as I do, and they were where I learned the term bisexual from all those years ago.
I discovered the concept of bdsm/kink around 6th grade as well, having had fantasies about it for as long as I’d had fantasies. That became and has always been a central part of my sexual identity as well. I first believed I was strictly a Submissive or Bottom, but have been identifying as a Top and Switch for the last seven or so years now.
I started playing consciously with my gender in high school as well, probably also leading a number of people to assume queerness from me (even though the conflation of gender and sexuality is inaccurate and not useful for anyone, imo, it is unfortunately pervasive, and gender does in fact tie in to sexual identity, since sexual identity is based on it, e.g., one cannot be homosexual or heterosexual without having a gender to base the homo or hetero aspect of that identity on. But, I digress). My genderfucking once included a fellow student that I didn’t know once asking me if I was a guy in drag (I was wearing a wig and “feminine” clothing). This was highly amusing to me, even though it was obviously meant to be offensive (I didn’t take it that way, though). I also did a lot of acting all through school (elementary-high), and basically during the plays in 6th and 7th grades I went through a phase where I only wanted to play guys (a big part of that, I think, was that I was always taller and larger than all of the girls and most of the guys in my age range at the time, but also probably something else).
I started identifying as queer around when that became common language, somewhere around 2005ish while I was in my undergrad in Gender Studies. I started identifying as genderqueer around the same time, though I had played with gender for long before that.
Onyx and I met when I was 19. It was my first real long-term relationship, and we have been together ever since. We’ve been poly since we met, and I had a long-distance relationship at the time we met as well, and that was also a non-issue. I wasn’t familiar with the term polyamory when we got together, but I knew the concept of an open relationship and was happy to expand my identity to include poly as well. We were only theoretically poly/monogamish for the first few years of our relationship, though.
For the first few years of our relationship I also had a difficult time with him being cis male and us being in a seemingly heterosexual relationship. I was not used to experiencing heterosexual privilege and it was really uncomfortable for me. I felt invisible and ignored by both queer and non-queer communities and people. I began feeling uncomfortable in queer circles and queer community because of my primary partnership with a cis guy, and I experienced individuals change their way of relating to me once they found out about that. I had my first serious girlfriend when I was 23; an attempted triad with me and Onyx that ended horribly. We were mostly monogamish for a while after that, until over a year ago when I met Rose.
I miss the feeling of steel encircling my neck. The weight of it made it difficult for me to sleep on my back, and I still have difficulty sleeping that way, even though it has now been over nine months since I last wore it. It lost its meaning long before that, though.
The garnets inlaid in the steel ring began falling out of it months before it stopped living on my neck. We replaced them, one by one, but they never stayed in place for very long. I knew that their falling out marked that the power dynamic we had crafted and worked to forge over so many years was beginning to end. We were both so tired of pushing and pulling and talking and talking and talking but never seeming to ever get what either of us wanted or needed from the other. There were problems and circumstances, as there always are. I’m sure I could have done many things better, but it was what it was.
I have only ever been good at service and surrender in my imagination, which was a large part of the problem. The reality of it has never quite worked out the way I see in my head. There is part of me that still yearns for it, though, that has always yearned for it. I’m yearning for it especially now that it has been absent for so long.
I’ve changed so much in the last few years, and so much more in the nine years since we first talked and in the nine months since I’ve not been wearing his collar. I wonder if I could do it right the next time, if I could dedicate myself to serving in whatever way I could make work. I wonder if I could surrender myself in the way that I crave and fantasize about. Or am I too stubborn, too bratty, too unreliable and unwieldy to ever experience what I really want. I wonder if I could actually do it, and I think I have changed enough that I could. I am better at relationships now, better at knowing and communicating my own desires. I have had glimpses of it in myself and see the potential of it there, but it’s never panned out in the past.
I’ve been working consciously on vulnerability, on opening up, on surrendering, but all of it outside of the confines of a power dynamic. I think that has been good in some ways, but the submission dimension of my life has been shut off for too long. I couldn’t make it work in the years that we tried, and so I abandoned the wanting of it long before nine months ago. In the last nine months, though, I let myself forget what it felt like to kneel at the feet of someone and pour myself into their hands. I let myself forget what it felt like to have consistent subtle reminders of being owned and loved in that way all in order to not allow myself to feel the pain of the loss of it.
I miss feeling owned. Claimed. Held. Treasured.
I want to sink into the comfort of the will of someone else and put myself aside with the trust that I will also be taken care of. In my work I get to do some of that now. I get to focus on what is best for them and put myself aside, but the reciprocity is purposefully not there. In the rest of my life, though, that aspect of it has fallen away.
I wonder if I have the time to add it back in, though. That’s the rub right there, I think: time. It seems that this would need to be with someone new. I’m fairly certain none of the people I’m currently seeing have the craving in them to be served in this way, or the time to make it happen themselves. Between school, work, and the partners I already have I don’t know how I could add someone else in to the mix like this, but I want to. I want to know, to figure it out. I have a wonderful girlfriend that I get to Top, and Onyx and I engage in kink and rough sex, but it’s really not the same. Due to how our lives are now I don’t think this is somewhere I can go with either of them, even though I would like that if it could happen. I could experience the occasional surrender with each of them, the bodily sexual experience of submission, but probably not the experience of a sustained power dynamic over time.
I do need to find another person to be with, in all this spare time. This deep need in me to submit isn’t getting met and doesn’t seem like it will any time soon. I would enjoy for that person to be one that I can lay myself bare to, and one that I could grow for as well as with, but this seems like it might be more work than I have the ability for. If nothing else I need someone to submit physically to regularly in a way that I am not experiencing, and maybe service in other arenas could be part of that as well.
Now that I am allowing myself to remember the longing for surrender, submission, and service that is within me it is beginning to feel overwhelming. I miss the warm feeling I would feel in my belly when kneeling next to him with my head against his thigh and his hand in my hair. The comfort of the heavy steel pressing on the nape of my neck. The feeling of being owned. Someday I’ll have that again.
The phrase “meditating on the will of someone else” in relation to service submission came, I believe, from a video of Mollena’s on Kink Academy that I watched many years ago.
I want to open you
to yourself.
Show you the beauty that lies within,
Help you fill the void inside you,
That empty place
that can be full.
I want to crack you open
like a pomegranate,
Taste your bittersweet juices
Until my fingers are
stained with you.
I will lift you up to
the mirror of my soul,
Reflect you back to yourself
So you can see all that you can be.
I will not heal you,
That is your work,
But I will point you to the key
So you can heal yourself.
For a large part of the last year Onyx and I were monogamish. There was occasional makeouts and things with other people, but even though there were a few people we were interested in I couldn’t think of venturing out into another relationship at the time. I was a wreck and thoroughly closed to myself. I could barely let Onyx in and the idea of a new relationship was daunting and terrifying.
Since Onyx and I got together we have never been strictly monogamous. Our flavor of non-monogamy has shifted many times over the years, but more often than not we have only been in a relationship with each other. When we first got together I had another long-distance relationship I was in, though that was not particularly healthy and stopped before we moved in together. For a long while after I moved in with him we were monogamish or poly-theoretical. We were not monogamous, but we weren’t actively seeing anyone else or seeking out additional partners. We flirted with a long-distance N-style relationship with a couple friends of ours at one point. Then Marla came along. We shifted into the triad and then to polyfidelitous together. Once that ended, and after our time apart, we have basically been in an open/non-monogamous relationship. We have played with/had sex with people, but we haven’t really been in any other relationships besides the one between us. This began to shift a few months ago.
At the end of September I met a couple of people at a weekend ritual workshop and began to date them. The concept of meeting someone or wanting to play with someone at the ritual was so out of my head that Onyx and I didn’t even have a conversation about the possibility beforehand. It was unexpected, sudden, and intense with both of them in completely different ways. Luckily, even though the ritual was in Portland, they both live in the Seattle area and so we have been able to continue seeing each other. More on them in other posts, though.
In light of those new relationships budding another friend and I started dating as well. She and I began talking about dating before my father died, but due to that happening it got postponed until recently. Due to extremely busy schedules and both of us having multiple partners we haven’t been able to spend too much time together, but we are working on it.
Onyx recently began dating another person as well. This is someone I am close with and knew before he did. I introduced them, which is amusing to me. It has been really lovely to watch the two of them beginning their relationship, especially since I have much love for both of them.
Historically in our relationship he has been much more open and relaxed about me seeing other people than I have about him seeing other people. He has also had more interest in the last year or two for other people than I have. For a while after the triad, once we got back together, we were primarily wanting to explore new relationships or play partners together rather than separately. I didn’t know why it was so daunting to me at the time, but there were many things going on with me and it was difficult to play with someone else with him. It has been really good to have this shift to poly happen with me finding multiple people to build relationships with after not feeling much interest for that. Having the experience of being the first one to venture into a new relationship has helped me be comfortable with his new relationship as well.
Our communication abilities are the best they’ve ever been (and I hope to continue to be able to say that as our relationship progresses), so we have been able to talk about any issues, jealousies, envies, or whatnot that come up. Because of this our experience with poly this time is much different than the last.
Each of us seeing already-poly people who have at least one (usually many more than one) other partner is really helpful as well. We aren’t exactly new to polyamory and non-monogamy, but neither Onyx or I had much positive experiences with it before now. Being in relationships with people who do have positive experiences with it, who can handle their shit, who have good communication skills, and who are seeing other people so they aren’t focused exclusively on one of us has been exceptionally good.
I currently only have express consent from one of the new people mentioned in this post to give them a name or talk about them in depth on here, so look for upcoming posts about him. More consent will be asked for, so eventually I will not have to only speak in generalities. For now, though, know that there will be more poly-focused posts in the future.