There are cruising spots everywhere for those with the eyes to see
an essay about sex i meant to finish a month ago
Folsom was a few weeks ago, and of course it wouldn’t have been Folsom without discourse. For the unfamiliar, Folsom is an annual BDSM and leather subculture street fair in San Francisco that ends the city’s Leather Pride week. For the not-chronically online, the discourse often revolves around a random Twitter account with an anime profile picture who went to folsom despite, as a long thread always reveals, thinking public sex and fetish culture are inherently “disgusting” and “unsavory.” Conversations around the “tender queer” who went to Folsom and complained about kink despite knowing it would be present lasts for days and almost always devolves into commentary (as everything from Sex and the City to Kafka does these days) on Gen Z and our supposed sex negativity. In all honest, Folsom discourse is not something I care about, and no one needs my analysis of it. Though, I will say, it is funny that we have more rage to spare for stupid Twitter accounts than the weapons companies who use Pride merch to pinkwash. But I digress.
I bring up Folsom and the opposing viewpoints around sex and kink in the queer community because I think it points to a need (or desire) to legislate a specific, all encompassing position on it. Everyone, regardless of where they stand, wants to speak, or feels they should speak, for everyone else. Whether it be the “No kink at Prid” crowd or those who are diametrically opposed to them, there doesn’t seem to be a huge desire to exit in—or purposefully seek out—the contradictions in our attitudes toward sex.
How we talk about queer media is one of the predominant measures of this discourse. Each year, without fail, we do cyclical discourse about Heartstopper marketing itself as a “clean” expression of queer love and whether or not that is dehumanizing those of us who do like to engage in a bit of casual sucking and fucking. If I seem blaise about this it’s not because I don’t believe there is a real danger in describing chaste queer media as “clean” but rather because Heartstopper’s existence isn’t pushing out “grittier” queer content. If it were, Ryan Murphy wouldn’t have a job and I wouldn’t have spent weeks in 2022 hearing that clip from season two of Euphoria where the words “I want you to cum with my tongue in your ass” were uttered with a surprising, and not entirely unattractive amount of conviction.
Brandon Taylor—novelist, literary critic, Twitter menace—writes about this in a Substack post on A Little Life:
“Like, the mean internet homosexual socialists and the tenderqueer Heartstopper Tumblr goblins are ostensibly arguing over how the cis white gay male should be represented in narrative. Where the field of combat is Twitter, the narrative in question is, well, movies and television or whatever streaming counts as these days. Where the venue of combat is the essay, then the narrative is often a novel or a film you might watch with your Mubi subscription or whatever. Yet the terms of engagement often remain the same. How best to let our white dolls fuck in the made-up stories we play in our minds. Or not fuck. Or do ketamine. Or not do ketamine. Whatever. Like, when these people are arguing about gay fiction being humorless or gay fiction being too sad, they are not arguing about, like, a genre of gay fiction that includes my work or the work of someone like Bryan Washington or James Hannaham or Saeed Jones or Robert Jones. Jr, even. They are arguing about depictions of white gays. Cis white gays. And they dress it up in concerns re:what is bourgeois or what is not bourgeois enough, etc.”
Nowhere is this sort of concern with how much white queers do or don’t have sex more present—at least in a commercial literary context—than Casey Mcquiston’s fiction.
My relationship with McQuiston is complicated. Red, White, & Royal Blue changed sixteen-year-old Emilio’s life, and I genuinely enjoyed One Last Stop. Their writing, especially at the line level, is so rhythmic and soothing, especially when going off on a tangent about the landscape or a particularly funny side character. I actually met them last summer in New York City and we bonded over how we use the same brand of pimple patches. However, I do have genuine grievances toward their latest novel The Pairing.
A lot of my critique can be distilled into the fact that I don’t believe writing about sex is inherently revolutionary. Just because the right wing in this country have declared war on anything they deem “deviant” does not mean a ten page blowjob scene becomes a statement on refusing to allow the ghosts of conservatism to tell us what we can and can’t enjoy. There are certainly things like cruising and glory holes that arose as responses to repression and criminalization of queer sex, particularly regarding gay men, that speak to how sex has a weight and history for queer people that it might not for our straight counterparts. But the issue is that those histories are largely absent in The Pairing, whereas Red, White & Royal Blue included digressions on queer members of the British monarchy and One Last Stop heavily-featured a character involved in the queer liberation movement of the 70s.
I want to be clear here. Queer fiction does not have to do any specific thing to be valid. In an interview with W Magazine, McQuiston said this when asked about not using identity as a plot point: “I was interested in challenging the idea of what a piece of art about queer and trans love had to be to exist. Sometimes, the important thing can be that it’s delightful, sexy, and about people existing as they are with how the different facets of their identity enhance and enrich their lives. But it’s not necessarily the point of the story.”
When I think about the sentiment McQuiston voices, the first thing that comes mind is Fire Island—a gay retelling of Pride & Prejudice. It is both a departure from coming out stories and a rom-com unabashedly rooted in tangible queer community. And that is the difference between it and The Pairing. While the latter must go to Europe and rely on the suspension of disbelief underlying a sex pact between people old enough to be normal to create a story of queer hedonism, the former acknowledges these places already exist. The idea that hedonism and sexy gays with perfect pores are underrepresented ignores the reality on the ground that there are places where lesbians own waterfront property, queer people wear BRAT tank tops while doing ketamine before the underwear party, and have sex in the darkroom with the guy who lives down the street from them in Park Slope but who they couldn’t muster the courage to proposition until the lights were dim and the clothes were off. Booster’s Fire Island finds a way to be sexy and escapist while remaining rooted in the very real histories and contemporary dynamics of place and queerness.
Conversely, the pairing is framed as a two week fantasy from the moment the main characters (Kit and Theo) realize they both picked the same time to redeem the European wine tour they bailed on when they broke up. The only time we see anyone from their normal life is briefly in Paris (Kit is a dual citizen living in France) and during Theo’s phone calls with their sister. Otherwise, they live in a nebulous world of wine and sex. A great setting for a rom-com but one that further entrenches Kit, Theo and their sexcapades as singular. This is exacerbated by the fact that both of them are distinctly NOT working class. Theo’s familial drama quite literally revolves around their status as a nepo baby who is too proud to take their family’s money and frames that pride as some sort of hardship. McQuiston’s characters have historically run the gamut in terms of socio economic background, but what makes The Pairing a departure from their other rom-coms is that there’s no class analysis or attempt to connect it to how their characters build community. And how could there be when we are never with someone who knows our main characters well for more than half a chapter? In trying not to make the book about coming out, or a referendum on queer identity, McQuiston scrubs the book of any meaningful analysis considering this is a book about sex, and sex, for better or worse, is often caught up in questions of identity. If not sexual orientation than ones of socio-economic status, race, geographic location, etc. The Pairing results in a sort of liminal space where obviously you do not have to be rich, white and in Europe to have copious amounts of sex, but this celebration of “hedonism” seemingly has no room for any other expressions of it.
The lack of community stands out in other ways too. Like most romance novels that don’t use them as plot devices, none of Theo and Kit’s hookups are mediated through apps. They are so sexy and so rich and so charming and so cultured that everyone they meet—from a burly wine hand who likes to be pegged to a yacht-owning daddy with a penchant for threesomes—immediately wants to fuck them. Again, there is no “correct” way for a book about queer sex to define itself but it is interesting that a novel so concerned with intimacy and its long term consequences erases the intimacy of community all together. Because sex just sort of happens, it still feel exceptional, something that only happens in a rom-com, when we know queer people are finding ways to hookup and explore their embodied sexuality in various real life ways.
But perhaps I feel so strongly simply because I’ve never had the luxury of this CW-esque sex-life. Over the past two years I’ve shed my teenage aversion to casual sex. I embraced sex positivity. I delete and redownload apps like Grindr and Sniffies with a frequency that would make gay Twitter proud and would probably give every Mcquiston character who think they are freaky a heart attack. I have walked home at one in the morning after hooking up with a married man in some bushes on the side of the road and I have had really nice conversations with some of the sweetest boys I’ve ever met. However, none of those experiences—no matter how vanilla or kinky—just happened out of thin air. I had to scroll through endless messages from fake profiles, clamp down feelings of dread, and finish hookups that stopped being fun after I walked through someone’s door and saw a collection of action figures. Sex and community are inextricable. You see people on Grindr who sit behind you in class. The cute bisexual barista who flirts with you has probably also flirted with your lesbian friends. The webs of queer community are entangled with our sexual and romantic escapades. The reason Folsom and Heartstopper discourse turns into a month long affair is that they touch so many different people who then interact with community in other ways too. The Pairing takes queer sex and makes it a rich, white, millennial fantasy of European decadence. Something full of sex yet sexless because everything real has been stripped away.
Community aside, the entire book reminds me of the scene in the Red, White & Royal Blue movie where Henry is bouncing on a horse, which is obviously meant to evoke the image of him bouncing on Alex’s dick, except the resulting hookup in a stable is picture perfect and sterile. They are surrounded by riding crops meant to imply kink yet their skin is flawless, their bodies are completely smooth, their teeth are blinding, and their dirty talk is perfunctory. There is no doubt that media like this has its place, is necessary even, but it’s disingenuous to say Heartstopper erases aspects of queer experience when no amount of sex shoved into a book or a movie makes it inherently more realistic. No narrow depiction of queerness encompases everything, especially rom-coms with sex scenes reminiscent of the early scenes of Riverdale.
The biggest issue, though, is that the book and its hedonism are marketed as some sort of departure for queer literature. There is nothing wrong with writing something escapist. But you can’t claim something is about community or even about challening certain sterotypes about the community when the community is entirely absent from the novel. Furthermore, this idea that we need to be able to escape and see sex as something meant to be indulged in falls flat when white people with the money to go to Europe are our main characters. They can have hot sex whenever they want regardless. They have all the power! Essentially, it boils down to this for me: a book cannot both be breaking new ground and a retread of uncomplicated sex. We need books that are fluff and nothing else but I think we are past the point where queer sex on the page—divorced from reality—is shocking or revolutionary. We have to learn to talk about these books like normal people. No one opens an Emily Henry book and says it’s revolutionizing how straight women have sex. Likewise, we should be comfortable enjoying McQuiston’s work as smutty and fun but also recognize that at times it is too shallow to offer a nuanced view of the hedonism it’s going for. We can’t make a book into something it isn’t just because we like the author. Is it something that’s never been done before or is it just something your favorite author wrote?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go rewatch Fire Island.