Sexual Identity
Friends or Lovers? The Complexities of Queer Love
Relationships, like gender and sexuality, don’t fit into a binary. The phrase queer platonic, which comes from the asexual community, means a deep and meaningful intimate relationship which isn’t based on sex. You can have this with anyone – no matter their gender or sexuality. Perhaps if the term were more normalised (I hadn’t heard of it before researching this article), more people would be comfortable with such a relationship.
My One and Only
The number of people you choose to sleep with isn’t the crux of sexual liberation. People who choose to have sex with fewer (or no) people shouldn’t be ashamed, and neither should people who choose to have multiple partners. It’s all about the choice - having the agency to sleep with as many or as few people as you please. It doesn’t make you naïve or boring or a slut or a whore; it’s just a choice that you’ve made, and that in itself is sexually liberating.
Under Pressure: Apps Can Perpetuate Unrealistic Sexual Expectations
Dating apps are part and parcel of modern life. Those marketed to the LGBTQ+ community are particularly handy if you don’t have a conventional way to meet others with whom you identify. But I feel like spending so much time using apps twisted my perception of what a whole relationship should look like.
Impurity Culture: Masturbation Is Self-Care
Masturbation is a topic you might need to do a little extra work on defining your values around if you grew up in purity culture being told that it was a sin—and that’s especially true during the pandemic, when pleasurable touch from others is not always safe or accessible to us and self-care has become more important than ever as we try to process all the painful things happening in our world. Self-pleasure can be an extremely important aspect of self-care even during non-pandemic times, and right now that is especially true.
Hi, Bi Guy: Coming Out to Your Girlfriend
Even when you're with a supportive partner, coming out as a bisexual guy to a girlfriend or another kind of woman partner isn't always easy and might feel awfully intimidating. Adam England has some support, help and solidarity to spare.
Connecting with LGBTQ+ Elders
There’s this feeling of smallness - that your world is confined to secrets you tell in your diary, or to the few people you know in real life that are brave (or perhaps foolish) enough to come out - that I identify as a part of my theory on queer orphanhood.
You spend so much time contemplating your identity that you don’t have time to wonder about people out there. There’s a kind of spiritual displacement in being queer and young.
Machismo: How Toxic Masculinity Harms Latinx People - an interview with Laura Carlsen
Machismo is an expression of exacerbated masculinity that has caused lingering pain and trauma to generations of Latinx people. Many young people are still struggling with it today.
A Sexual Miseducation
Sex positivity should have given me the courage to ask for what I wanted. Instead, I thought it meant accepting what I got.
We Are Currently Living in an Active Trauma State: An Interview With Jimanekia Eborn
"Those of us that identify within the QTBIPOC community cannot take off our skin the same way we cannot remove our gender and/or our sexuality. We have to continue to have conversations about all of the disparities that are going on. There is not just one way we are affected."
A Series of Letters I Wish I Could Send to My Younger Queer Self
Letters from the author to himself in his teens and early 20s, as he tries to sort out multiple facets of his identity.