Welcome to Love, Us, a column for telling queer love stories in all their glory. (And by glory, we mean all the big, beautiful moments and otherworldly little details that make making and falling in queer love so, so fun.) Read more from the series here.
Recently, I was making out with someone on the dance floor of a very dark, very sweaty bar somewhere in the SoMa district of San Francisco, exactly as God intended. It was one of those perfect summer night dalliances. A few drinks. A text. Hey, I’m at this bar. Sure, I’ll be right there. Walk a few blocks. Wanna make out? Of course. A little sloppy, a lot of fun.
Halfway through our makeout, somewhere between taking breaks for sips of beer and taking breaks to make jokes about our gratuitous PDA, a new, gorgeously intrusive thought I’ve been grappling with recently came slamming down out of the cosmos and back into my brain like an elephant doing a jackknife into already choppy waters:
What if you take them home and your dick won’t get hard? Again!
Again, even. Brains really do have a knack for taking on the most viscous afterthoughts as a means of driving home their point, don’t they? As the thought ricocheted around the poison-gas-filled-meat-sack that occasionally attempts to function as my brain, I did my best to get it the hell out of there. But, famously, that’s not how brains work, so, naturally, I drank more, which is also not how brains work.
But enough about neuroscience and back to my new intrusive thought, the ever-looming fear that my dick won’t get hard, should I want or, I guess, need it to. This particular intrusive thought wasn’t entirely unfounded, like others I’ve had. “I’ll never be able to breathe underwater...” and “What does it mean that an old Selena Gomez song is in the new Olive Garden commercial?” aren’t particularly distressing. The dick thing, unfortunately, is.
The first time I brought home the person I was last dating, I was both so excited and so cold I could only manage to text my roommate “bringing them home” before shoving my phone in my pocket and then my hand into my date's armpit to try and warm it up. We’d been drinking and kissing in the park, and by the time we finally realized we were the only two still outside, they said, Wanna go back to your place? And I said, Obviously.
Twenty or so minutes later, laying on my bed wearing considerably fewer clothes but still considerably warmer, I noticed that something was — or rather, wasn’t — happening. For the majority of my life, I’d get hard if someone looked at me the right way. I would put my lips on someone else’s lips, and my dick would be like, hey, hi, hello, yes, you like this person very much, and I can tell, even if I didn’t. And yet here I was, with someone I actually liked, very much even, and, well, nothing.
I haven’t always been the kindest to my body. I haven’t always said the nicest things to it in public or in private. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to disappear it both in pictures and in real life. I’ve tried doing that thing where you stare at yourself naked in the mirror and try and think nice things, but I always just end up looking away. As I laid there, naked and embarrassed, I thought to myself that maybe this is its revenge. The particular kind of shame that accompanied my body not functioning how I wanted it to at that particular moment is hard to elucidate, but know that I would have gladly melted through the sheets, through the mattress, down through the floor, and continued melting down through the foundation of the building and into the earth, should that have been an option.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to unlearn all of the things we’re conditioned to believe about how gay men’s bodies are supposed to be. But unlearning it in your head and unlearning something in your body, bones, and spirit are very different things. All the time, we are taught that we are supposed to be hard. Both our bodies and our dicks. Hard and smooth and tight and vascular and manicured and poreless and and and and and. And when we are not, we are broken and bad, and so, that night on my bed, I felt broken and bad.
I was so mad at myself, and at my brain, because there are so many things you can do when you’re naked with someone and there are stars in your eyes. So many of those things don’t involve hard dicks, even if you’ve got one (or none). And we did so many of those things that night, and for two seconds, I zoomed out to look down at myself, naked and tangled and buzzing in my bed with a partner who was generous and sweet, and then I fell back into myself and thought, what a disappointment you couldn’t get hard.
When my roommate-slash-best friend-slash-platonic homosexual life partner asked me the next morning how the previous night had gone, I told them it was great. And if I believed myself, then that would have been the truth. But I didn’t, and so it was a lie. I lied out of shame — to someone who had seen me pee my pants walking up a hill because I couldn’t make it home fast enough, no less; to someone who had sat with me while I cried about dumb breakups with even dumber boys. I was too ashamed to tell someone who I’d drunkenly run away from and into a bush while wearing cargo shorts in college that I couldn’t get hard the night before.
When other good friends asked how things were going, and specifically how the sex was going — because word travels fast and inquires get specific when people you’re dating start spending the night — I said similar things. “Really good! And fun!” became common replies, because “We’ve now slept together three times and I still haven’t gotten hard and now I’m starting to have anxiety that is manifesting as a near-constant upset stomach!” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
The person I was dating asked, after the third time, if something was wrong. Not with me, but with the situation. If there was something that they could do, if there was something else that we could try. The answer was just no. No, no, no, and no. To have someone who wanted to talk about it, rather than ignore it or ignore me, felt like getting a gift so generous you’re embarrassed to accept it. The only thing to say was that sometimes what you feel and what your body chooses to do or not do are two separate things. To know so certainly that I was interested in this person physically, emotionally, intellectually, and not have my body react in the way that I wanted only felt like betrayal.
Rather than turn to my friends, because again, I was living in a limp-dick shame vortex, I turned to the internet. And, for once in my life, it was actually a source of comfort and help rather than a black hole of nonsense. As it turns out, gay and bi men experience erectile dysfunction (or, as sex therapist Dr. Reece Malone prefers to call it, erectile stress or erectile disappointment, which I do think is nicer!) at a higher rate than straight men (can we just have, like, one thing!), and some research has indicated that one in four gay and bi men experience it every! time! they fuck! And it happens for, like, essentially any reason you can imagine.
“The penis can be a barometer for how we're feeling that day,” Dr. Malone told me over email, “how medication interacts with the body, whether our mental health needs some care, the quality of our relationships, or simply stating no to sex or penis play. It's normal and common for penis owners to experience erectile disappointment. That's normal and part of the human experience.” Never, truly never, did I think I would delight in being called normal and common, but baby, I felt alive.
Emboldened by this new information and a couple of tequila sodas, I brought up my dick issues over drinks with friends. “Oh my god, borrow some of my dick pills,” one of my friends said. “They’re five milligram Viagra. I was dating this guy for a while who wanted me to fuck him, and you know I’m a big bottom, so I needed… some assistance.” As it turned out, everyone at the table had needed some assistance at one point or another, some in the form of dick pills, some by switching things up with their partners, and some by just ending things because they couldn’t make it work. I don’t know that “have you ever had trouble getting hard?” would be a great icebreaker for new friends, but with good friends, who I trusted, it felt nice to be totally honest, to not live alone in my little vortex of shame.
And being honest with my friends also meant I now had access to dick pills, which, surprise, worked. Science! I’d put two in my pocket and took them extremely clumsily the next time I spent the night. Being open with my friends was one thing, but I wasn’t yet ready to tell the person I was dating that I was trying out dick pills, so instead, I sloshed water down my front, trying to hurriedly, secretly get them down. That time, and the next time, and the time after that, I took them, and they worked, and I felt myself coming back into my body and settling down and thinking, ok, maybe this is going to be ok.
Of course, because not everything can be planned, something that very much displeases me, I eventually found myself getting naked with my partner sans Viagra. My first thought was, sink into the floor! But my second was, just be here and see what happens. And guess what? I eventually got hard in bed. And then also in the shower, and then also in a park once when we were making out there after a few drinks (even after drinks! Brag). I don’t think it was some problem that magically went away, but I do think that once my body realized I could, and after I let go of a little bit of the shame that I felt after talking about it with friends, I unblocked something in myself that just let me have fun.
In the spirit of being totally and devastatingly honest, that relationship still ended, and part of it was definitely because of the sex. That wasn’t the only reason, but it was part of it, and that’s life, babe. Was it nice to break up? No. Was it fun to end a relationship knowing that part of the reason it was ending was because, try as I might, I couldn’t make my body do in this relationship what it had done for so many far worse relationships before? Yeah, no. But it was, in some small way, nice to learn that me and my body aren’t alone. That it is normal and common, in a good way, and that there are ways to talk about it that are freeing and connective, rather than just embarrassing.
For what it’s worth, after my dance floor make out, as we were making out again, this time on the sidewalk, my new intrusive thought was pushed out by another. Oh my God, I thought, am I getting a boner in loose-fitting pants? And also, is it still legal to say boner? Honestly, I don’t know, and I also don’t know if my body and my mind will ever be on the same page. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at myself naked in a mirror and see what’s really there, or if I’ll ever truly appreciate it when I feel like it’s hard and soft in all the wrong places and sometimes at the wrong times.
But what I do know, at least now, is that with time and kindness and communication, I don’t have to suffer in a vortex alone. I can recognize that, just like that one dude sings, my body is a wonderland and also sometimes a total nightmare, but it is possible to come back to it, ground myself, and just have fun.
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