I Wish I’d Known There’d Be Straight People at The Sex Party.

Bronzed beach bodies, southern-cross tattoos and beige chinos.

This piece was performed live at the Brisbane Comedy Festival on 26th of April as part of ‘Queerstories’, a national LGBTQI+ storytelling project curated by the magnificent Maeve Marsden. If you like storytelling podcasts with frank vulnerability and gay shit, you should check them out »HERE

---

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán...
I fucked up… again.

I’m starting think my life is just some Judy Blume parody. I’m a two-hour drive from home, unshaven, hair like a bird’s nest and dressed in the finest five-dollar-Kmart-basics my (lack of) money can buy. I’ve crossed the border into New South Wales for a sex party only to discover I’ve booked a hotel room for the wrong date. So, when the curtain comes down on this sordid affair, I’m sleeping in my car.

Are you there, God? It’s me Seán…
Fuck, I hope my mother didn’t get a ticket for tonight.

Should’ve seen the signs this was gonna be complicated. Seen it in the stars, the cards, the fucking tea leaves. Hell, I should’ve realised in the vetting interview. A zoom call with two stunningly attractive cisgendered women, when I, in my obnoxious bullshit blurted out “I’m the gateway drug to queerness!”

They stared down the barrel of their web cams, silent.

Believe me, if you make a joke like that in an interview, any interview, you better believe you’re gonna be asked to clarify: “I’m femme enough for the boys, masc enough for the girls, I just show up and people start turning a little gay!”

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán…
When will I learn to keep fucking mouth shut?

And yet, they approved me. In the interview no less. No five-day waiting period for ya girl. Charming, funny, sexy, I made the cut… So, here I am. In Coolengatta. Nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to dress. Nowhere to shave.

But this is fine, right? Us dolls are a resourceful sort. So, when I stride into the hotel suite to the sounds of Australian pub rock, I look magnificent in backless emerald green. The very embodiment of the terrifying ocean deities tattooed that are across this ivory skin. Fearless, I wade into that sea of bronzed and buffed beach bodies, of southern-cross tattoos and beige chinos. No one would dream that I’d just been diligently rinsing my five o’clock shadow down the sink in a Maccas ambulant toilet, no. All they see is the bounce of golden curls and the bounce HRT-plump tits. I’m an ocean myrmidon from the depths that’s tucked and plucked and ready to fuck.

I’m ethereal. I’m other-worldly. I’m a fascination to them.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán…
Remind me later that the flinty look in a man’s eye might not be interest, but could just him feeling the kick of his double dose of Viagra.

This is fine!

Welcome speeches are made. The reminders about enthusiastic consent were great though slightly undercut by the sound of the hotel suite’s vintage Galaga arcade machine choosing that exact moment to do the 8bit “whistling bomb explosion sound”.

But it so fine!

I work the room, I flirt and chat, I make jokes, I smile and laugh. And then I realise, I’ve been hanging around with too many queers. I realise something is off… Oh, I’m at a HETEROSEXUAL sex party… it’s a room full of people who’ve never met a trans woman before. Turns out it’s a little hard to graduate to intimacy when you’re the first trans person someone’s ever spoken to, let alone seen in lingerie, let alone even considered as an option.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán…
Please give me the grace to remember how small and sheltered heterosexual lives can be.

But all is not lost. There’re hopefuls, the ones brave enough to declare that, yes, they’re on the back foot but certainly curious about what I was bringing to the table.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán…
Thank you for making some of these straight folks neurodiverse, there’s no way the neurotypicals you usually churn out are up to the task.

You can see the want in their eye, not just the want of this body but the want to understand it. The want to be kind. The want of something unique, something new. Sometimes that’s all it takes for me: gentle curiosity.

This is what I meant when I said I was the gateway to queerness. Feminine enough for a man not to feel emasculated, masculine enough for a woman to not feel unfeminine. A body with most of the delights of a woman but with the genitals still set to “the easy mode” I was born with. The perfect body to test the waters, a stepping stone for a straight person to discover something inside them.

So you take them in your arms. You whisper that yes, this body is unlike any they’ve ever experienced, that they don’t need to be nervous. You tell them if it makes it easier for them they can think of it as like all the other bodies they HAVE experienced… Some parts made from the softness of a woman; others made from the firmness of a man. You guide hands and mouths to where they need to be and you whisper to them that it’s okay, they’re not going to accidentally hate-crime you, leaving out the bit where you kinda feel like you’re hate-crime-ing yourself in the process.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán…
Why is it that gifting someone this unusual body is the only time I feel like “me”?

This is fine! It’s more than “fine” it’s fun!

The women seem braver. The men seem to be wrestling with the concept of “how gay it makes them”. But not all. One in particular, a mountain of a man. Sidling up to that substantial bulk of his body, I couldn’t help myself from slapping the meat of his chest with my flats of my hands. “Honey, you should be so proud of this thing you’ve crafted.” Bashful, he looks down at his dinner-plate sized hands, mumbling that he wants to ask me something.

I can see it in the way he bites his lip… He wants to be alone. I lead him away and lay this mountain down on a bed and kiss him. “Whatcha you wanna ask me, honey?”

And he stammers out the most romantic thing a man has ever said to me. He tells me that he wants to wrestle. He’s so large he always worries that he’s going to hurt someone… but with me? He tells me that I “look like I could take it”.

I leap on top of him. I wrap my roller-derby-strong thighs around his waist and squeeze the breath out of him. I witness his shock and delight as I pin his wrists to the bed, holding him down. He surges, picking me up flipping me onto my back. I return the favour and flip him back. We wrestle. A titanic clash flesh and strength, throwing each other around the room till we lay panting in each other’s faces, a tangle of limbs.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán…
Fuck. This trans lesbian may have just fallen in love with a straight cisgendered man!

This is fine! It’s nothing, of course I’m not in love! It’s just a bit of harmless fun!

But I wanna get down on my knees and suck this man’s soul out of his body, so help me. Go down on a straight cis man? How does that even work? I assume it’s just like sucking girl-dick, right? Surely, it’s similar enough? We just wouldn’t be wearing cat ears and long socks, right?

Clearly, this is the heterosexual agenda. Their perverse attempt to normalise “straight people sex”? To strip it of our gender entanglement, to unblur the boundaries of man and woman? What? No in-betweens? No “boths”, and no “neithers”? Just clearly defined Man or Woman… non-queer… straight sex? Look, I don’t care what people do in the privacy of their own homes but… gross.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Seán…
I think I found the one good man in all the world and it’s at a beachside heterosexual sex party in Tweed Heads.

But no, I’m far too gay and he’s not gay enough. I’m happy to throw him around a room but we aren’t each other’s “type” for anything more than that. He just wanted to see what it felt like, just testing the waters and I was happy to oblige.

The night wore down, the women covered their magnificent lingerie, the men politely explained to each other “I think those are my beige chinos, mate.” Guests began filtering away. I bade farewell to those curious souls, those gorgeous women, those terrified men, informing them I was off to “go walk into the sea.” A girl needs some mystery about her after all.

And it’s not like I was gonna tell them about sleeping in my car.

3AM and the long stretch of sand to the waterline was waiting for me. My discarded clothes dark patches in the night, stepping stones marking my path down to the water. Naked, I wade in. No need to test these waters, still warm from the day.

The sea fizzes around me, pulling under my heels, drawing me in. I let it. Solitary in the night the waves wash over me, the salt and the sand scour this unusual body, luminous and pale in the moonlight. Looking up to that silvery glow of my god hanging in the sky, I say…

Oh, there you are… It’s me Seán.

And I ask her…

Should I have been more honest? Should I have told them that what really happens in “the straight world” is that this body is seen as too masculine for men, too feminine for women, too odd to be of interest to anyone. Should I have told them that on those rare occasions that I AM the “stepping stone for a queer person” that I’m just grateful for intimacy to have happened at all?

Maybe I should have told them I wish I wasn’t ‘the gateway’?

Because really, I just wish I was ‘the destination’.

–S

---