I had a hookup late Saturday night with a man I had just messaged over Grindr half an hour before.
I was inspired by my friend to finally make a move — partially because I was hanging out with her before two of her hookups, and we were trying to have a “twinning” moment by hooking up with someone in the same night. I realized that my Tinder matches of 30 or more miles away would not cut it; I needed someone quick and accessible.
Even though I did not end up hooking up with someone the same night as my friend, I finally found someone the very next night. It was around midnight and I was heading home from my other friend’s going away party when I stopped in a dark neighborhood close to my house and decided to give Grindr one more chance. And to my surprise, it worked.
I messaged a man around 12:30 a.m. and got to his apartment at around 1:00 a.m. On the way over, my body was shaking uncontrollably. My past hookups have always come to me, and this was the first time I was entering someone else’s place and doing anything this late at night. Before I came over, he mentioned that this would be his first time doing anything with a man, which in some ways worried me.
The sex only lasted around half an hour, but I didn’t really do much of anything beyond giving him head until he came.
We tried anal, but he quickly became soft, which is why I resorted to giving head. And while I know that it was not necessarily because of me, I still felt as though I failed. I failed at giving him the experience he wanted, or perhaps wanted to try. Queer sex did not seem like something that enticed him, and I felt somewhat ashamed.
Normally, I don’t think sexual attraction is necessary for a hookup, but there is something incredibly validating if someone wants to have sex with me even if they are desperate. But this man was not desperate, and from the moment we started talking, I realized that there was no attraction between us in the slightest. The hotness of the moment was completely drained as I realized the gap between us.
In some ways, it felt as though I were having sex with a straight man; I was his experiment — a body for him to use. And it’s not that I mind being a body, but I felt a certain level of indifference from him toward me but not the same indifference of my other hookups. I do not want to say that he isn’t queer or that he was just bicurious because no one can ever truly know another person’s sexuality, but I will say that his queerness and my queerness were not the same.
Whereas my other hookups were already established within their queerness, he was new to everything and surprised by my use of sex toys, but not in a way that indicated attraction. Rather, he was unknowledgeable of anal play and queer sex and had an aversion to sex toys and jockstraps, whereas I was entrenched in these things.
Queerness — or more specifically in my case, gayness — was always something that was attached to me. I walked throughout my life as a gay boy, whether I wanted to be labeled that way or not, but he had just newly emerged or perhaps was just experimenting with queerness. Hooking up with this guy made me realize how alone I actually am in my experiences, and how queerness failed to unite us. The gap was too obvious for me that it ripped me from my hookup fantasy and again reminded me of my own position as an outsider.
This is not to place blame on my hookup nor is it to say that he was a bad person; the situation just happened at the wrong moment. He was actually pretty nice and understanding when we were talking and was curious about the “gay scene,” as he had called it. Still, when talking about queerness with him, he seemed to talk about it as if it were not a part of himself, and while I appreciated the short conversation, I realized that we were incompatible at that moment in time.
He still needed to figure out his own sexuality and attraction, and he needed to view himself as queer before I could ever relate to him. Of course, I am not saying that he has to do anything, but rather, I wish him luck in his journey. I do believe that if we had met at a different time in his sexual exploration, our experience would have been better and there would have been more of a mutual understanding.
In the future, I don’t want to be someone’s experiment. But this is not to say that I discourage people to experiment with queerness; rather, I think it’s necessary to explore one’s sexuality and I encourage more people to learn about themselves. I just don’t want to be constantly reminded of my own isolation as a gay man and the struggles I experienced coming into queerness when all I wanted was some fun.
Joaquin Najera writes the Tuesday column on sex. Contact him at sex@dailycal.org.