When my gay Southern Gothic novel Summer Sons came out way back in 2021, I entertained myself by collecting phrases folks used to describe its particular ambiance. The vibes, if you will. My favorites were always the double entendres involving temperature: sweltering, sticky, scalding, scorching, or the tried-and-true classic, “fucking hot.” Anyone who wanted to talk about the book had to acknowledge the intensities of queer masculinity that animated it—whether within our protagonist Andrew Blur’s codependent relationship to his dead best friend, or within his growing attraction to the men he meets after he moves down South. However, this concern with queer desiring isn’t limited within my work to Summer Sons. If anything, what I’m going to broadly refer to (only a little tongue-in-cheek!) throughout this essay as horniness crosses almost everything I do as an artist.
While some readers might recoil on instinct from that commitment, perhaps clutching a pearl or two, there’s a reason for it. Writing as I do from the perspective of a trans gay man, practicing frankness and generosity about the topic of queer desire remains both a personal and a political project, one dedicated to sexual and gender liberation. After all, as Juana María Rodríguez writes, sexuality is more than just an individual thrill, it’s a “social world-making practice.” Eros can provide the energy that “lifts us from the puddle of spent tears to drag us out to the rally, to the sex club, to the dance floor, to the streets”1—which is a hotter way to say, horniness matters. And despite the fact that, as Nguyen Tan Hoang further argues, exploring sexuality itself with a queerly utopian eye in our arts and scholarship is “instrumental in shaping how we think about what is normal, natural, and possible in regards to sex, sexuality, and gender”2…living in the right-now of U.S. America, we are swamped under a wave of moral panics around those same objects and orientations.
So, what does making unabashedly horny queer art have to do with it? To borrow from the brilliant L. H. Stallings, “dirty moments of political or cultural resistance, which combat the sexual conservatism that continues to harm racial, gendered, and sexual minorities” can help to build our critical literacy around desire.3 Art helps us challenge—but also change—deeply ingrained repressive beliefs about queerness, desire, and how we build our communities, one step at a time.
Horniness as Craft
Whether in doorstopper second-world fantasies or slim literary-realist novels, mainstream Anglophone publishing often holds a cringing unease with the queerly erotic. If you’re on the Internet at all, let alone the mind-altering-substance exposure level most writers are subjected to, you’re likely familiar with the endless discourse about art that contains fucking (or even thinking about fucking)…especially if the fucking is being done between queers. Arguments trend along the lines of, the sex has to be tasteful, or educational, or plot-advancing, or miserable, or “good representation.” If the scene falls within those parameters, maybe we’re allowed some delicate sensuality. But writing about queer desire and sexuality that embraces the erotic—that is unashamedly horny—never fails to provoke much nastier responses.
I’m reminded of Kink: Stories edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, a literary short fiction collection released a few months before Summer Sons. At the time, it was so refreshing to see sexuality treated seriously without ceding its horniness by writers whose work I already admired. Kwon and Greenwell write that their aim was to “bring the full power of literature to bear on depicting love, desire, sadomasochism, and sexual kink in their considerable glory,” while exploring how “bodies are always situated in the realities of history and culture, the crucibles of class, race, nationhood, and gender” and interrogating “power, agency, and identity.” Smart, obviously—but needs-must be said that some of the stories are also hot. For example, the second piece (“Best Friendster Date Ever” by Alexander Chee) is a mouth-watering narrative of a gay hookup so physical that the protagonist snaps the support beam in his futon while banging his bottom. However, the aggressively negative responses Kink: Stories received from some ends of the reading world snapshots the mixture of moral panic and respectability politics that come to bear on queer desire in fiction.
And that’s without even touching the misogynistic, homophobic undertones of dismissing romance and erotica as genres entirely while simultaneously insisting there’s no appropriate place for (certain kinds of!) sexuality in art. More recently, I’ve written about how inspirationally horny, honest, and goddamn sharp the queer television and cinema coming out of Thailand have been in recent years—while online discourse about these pieces of media in English treads the same offensively censorious loops over, and over, and over again. In a compassionate but taking-no-shit essay in Teen Vogue,4 K-Ci Williams writes, “Forcing MLM sex and queer stories to play by the rules of heteronormativity and purity culture is a losing game. You will never win it, and the cost is high.”
Those examples are only a sampler platter of the pressures I feel when approaching the page, as a queer man, and practicing “horniness as craft.” Broadly, I want to illustrate the sometimes-difficult relationships characters have with their own desires. While those desires often include the sexual, they also encompass other forms of wanting: hunger for connection, recognition, intimacy, safety. Uncanny has published two pieces of short fiction by me (“The Span of His Wrist” and “Anything with a Void at the Center”) that sift through the erotic needs of wildly different characters, while traversing narrative arcs about emotional growth, survival, and the ways queer bodies move through the world. Both stories center the relational, healing possibilities that queer intimacies can provide—even a one-night cruise fuck!—though none of them match heteronormative patterns or assumptions about what sex has to be, or do, or feel like.
Rendering the visceral—often deeply vulnerable—realities and nuances of desire on the page requires as much craft as any other significant interpersonal scene. First and foremost, writing sexuality requires attention to the affective connections strung between people, places, and things. How does the text understand and depict one character’s attraction (or, lack of attraction) to another? How does the sociocultural world around them influence, condone, restrict, or pressurize those attractions? What relational formats do these desires mold themselves around: romantic, sensual, erotic, friendly, familial, therapeutic, maybe others best labelled as rivalry or mentorship? Odds are good there’s a messy grab-bag of threads knotted together. And of course, some of those desires aren’t necessarily sexual, though their physicality and intensity might be off the charts otherwise.
Horniness-as-craft also doesn’t retreat from the intimate fact that the body feels those desires, either. What physical sensations does the character experience through acts of seeing, touching, grasping, smelling, tasting, imagining? If fucking does happen…what’s the scope of the action, especially within queer sex and its infinitely inventive bodily permutations? Power dynamics are an inevitable part of the equation, even if only because the characters are trying to mitigate them. On that note, are there fears or ingrained discomforts the character would flinch away from…or, fling themselves at headlong for the raw thrill? As the person doing the labor, the artist’s own relationship to desire inflects the scope of their characters’ perceptions, and might necessitate further research into alternate ways of being/doing/knowing the erotic. Because desire is, ultimately, a lens through which the world is seen and interpreted.
Which is also why I’m resistant to the implications underlying a chunk of mainstream “tolerance” chat, as in: it’s one thing for queers to theoretically exist, and maybe it’s acceptable if they’re monogamously married couples with kids or chaste wholesome teens whose predominant affection is through holding hands. God forbid the queers have queer sex, though. That’s gross, dangerous, downright icky—and other LGBTQIA+ folks aren’t exempt from swallowing that belief down to their bellies hook-first. Labelling desire as a private matter unfit for public discussion, one that is embarrassing or sleazy or suspect if it appears in the arts, when the desire in question also happens to be socially proscribed under systems of homophobia and transphobia…makes the question of craft always, fundamentally, a question of politics.5
Horniness as Praxis
At the 1982 Barnard Conference, an event later marked as a major conflict in the “feminist sex wars,” Gayle Rubin delivered the ground-breaking talk “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Rubin has since written clarifications and critiques of “Thinking Sex”—two in 1993 and one in 2010—but given our current climate of moral panic about sexuality, portions of the original remain relevant. Reading Rubin’s collected essays during my doctoral dissertation research, lying on a concrete porch in the shade and listening to the fuck-crazed cicadas screaming, I felt simultaneously comforted (“oh, thank god, someone’s already laid out the critiques eating the inside of my brain”) and existentially horrified (“how on earth are we doing all of this again? Are we incapable of learning?”).
I’m a firm believer that knowing history helps us understand the present and, maybe, change our possible futures…but queer histories go missing, or get erased, with a real quickness.6 In that spirit, let’s get academic about horniness with Rubin, who writes:
This culture always treats sex with suspicion. It construes and judges almost any sexual practice in terms of its worst possible expression. Sex is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Virtually all erotic behavior is considered bad unless a specific reason to exempt it has been established, […while] the exercise of erotic capacity, intelligence, curiosity, or creativity all require pre-texts that are unnecessary for other pleasures, such as the enjoyment of food, fiction, or astronomy. […] Popular culture is permeated with ideas that erotic variety is dangerous, unhealthy, depraved, and a menace to everything from small children to national security. (148-150)
The essay then details various heteropatriarchal assumptions that create legal and cultural restrictions on even thinking clearly about sex…including some that still make people squirmy-uncomfortable, like the ethics of explicitly fucking with power through BDSM/kink practices. It’s also worth remembering that Rubin was regularly pamphleted and protested by the “radical feminists” of the time who caricatured her writings as supporting rape and pedophilia, among other things, based on her being an S/M dyke who critiqued social paranoias while being chill with trans folks, leathermen, and other supposed perverts.
Sometimes I’m struck by the eerie sense that we’re doing the 1980s: redux! in both queer politics and the world at large. As Rubin notes in one of the follow-up pieces, “Thinking Sex” was an imperfect but necessary product of its time, written before the depths of the plague years; before Queer Nation and ACT UP; before the explosion of anti-assimilationist queer theory, when inclusion within the straight mainstream stood as a popular front of gay and lesbian activism. The main argument she was responding to, fueled by frustration, was the anti-porn (and, frankly, anti-horny) feminism proliferating under the guise of protecting women and children…but directly leading to the creation of laws with serious knock-on effects, like criminalizing teenagers consensually sending each other nudes, or allowing police to seize all the material assets of women suspected of doing any sexual labor.
And doesn’t that sound ever-so-familiar?
In the 1980s, the morality crusaders succeeded—while we’re surviving inside the aftermath. Their beliefs are codified in legislation that sprawls forward into the creation of SESTA/FOSTA, as well as in transphobic and whorephobic aggression among exclusionary feminists and the policing of acceptable (or, respectable) desiring within queer communities around everything from fandom to Pride marches. As with the “cleaning up” of public spaces like Times Square in the ‘90s, the current “cleaning up” of digital space to scrub adult content—which always labels queerness as inherently NSFW—is corporate, white, religiously funded, conservative, and first harms the most visible and vulnerable among us. Drawing from Cathy Cohen’s classic essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”: queers and other people “outside the norms” of desiring due to race, disability, and class get the short end of the moral panic stick without fail.
What are some alternatives, though? One approach I chew on as a critic and artist is horniness as praxis. This involves treating bodies, sensuality, and desire as a casual and “unremarkable” constant; refusing to over-determine sexuality as either a demonic threat or a damaging contagion; and questioning the belief that all public culture must either be “wholesome and family-friendly” (oh, the assumptions that phrase carries)…or, must serve the sole purpose of “good clean representation.” If desire is a neutral thing, rather than a monolith overburdened with paranoid suspicion, it’s also easier to see real-life issues around coercion, abuse, and gender/sexuality-based violence—while freeing others, like folks on asexual spectrums, from the assumption that everyone must experience sexuality in one predetermined “normal” way, with the exact same necessity or centrality.
To draw from Rubin again, “a democratic morality should judge sexual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide” (154). Feeling good gets to matter. That’s an even bigger deal for minoritized peoples whose access to personal agency around pleasure is typically restricted, policed, misrepresented, or disregarded. So considering that background, and with my scholar’s cap stuffed securely back into my pocket, let’s close on the question of horniness as a craft practice again.
While a thousand paths lead toward better “sexual futures”—thanks, again, to Juana María Rodríguez—there is always a living, breathing politics embedded in the act of writing openly about queer desire. Approaching horniness as craft requires an artist to approach sexuality with a balance of seriousness, silliness, criticism, and mundane affection; it requires engaging critically with the ethics of desire, without forgetting about pleasure and eroticism. And it might also require unearthing, then releasing, the artist’s own deep-seated fear and shame around their queer desires.
Culture grows from the organic matter of the arts; the things we make end up making us. So, when those pieces meet their audience, the words on the page carry desire within them. The feelings sprawl and spawn conversations, critiques, or even—if you’re on the same frequencies—a shivery tingle of interest. Because ultimately, I’m disinterested in media and art that have been ground down to a dull, sanitized surface in service of repressive heteropatriarchal norms. I’d much rather reach for a sweltering, sticky world that’s got room for us all to be strange and vibrant, decadent and industrious, caring and communal.
Embracing the breadth and depth of queer sexualities in fiction helps create that possible future, by treating our sweat and skin as significant—whether alone in our imaginations, or while touching one another.
1 Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, 183-186.
2 Nguyen Tan Hoang, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, 3.
3 Stallings, L. H. A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, 6.
4 Williams, K-Ci. “On Red, White & Royal Blue, Heartstopper, and the Insidiousness of Purity Culture.”
5 I recommend a good long read from 1997 that remains significant today, in the face of book-banning and legislation like KOSA: Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship.
6 The recent Netflix documentary, Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hated, provides some additional viewing here as well.
© 2023 Lee Mandelo
