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.
“I remember when faggots kissed hello. We had so much to fear and so we feared nothing. I mean we feared one another but we feared fear more. Kissing one another on the lips, this was joyous and commonplace, a legacy we were inheriting, an art — how to stretch out our lips in front of our faces, how to queen it up in front of a loving or hostile public, how to emphasize connection or disdain.”
I’d been living in San Francisco for a year or so by the time I’d read this paragraph in Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door. Had I not been, I might have believed the mouth-to-mouth greeting of one faggot to the next to be an entirely extinct practice. But by the time I read it, I had been kissed hello by no fewer than three faggots and also two fairies, who are like faggots but are different. (They do things like make wind chimes out of found items and don’t actually care what you think of them. In a sweet way.)
A few of those faggots have become friends I see regularly, so this is regularly how I am greeted. The first time we met, one of them asked if it was ok to kiss me hello before kissing me hello, and said, “I know you all follow more rules than we did.” He (along with all my other mouth-to-mouth-greeters) was a generation or so beyond me, and while the rules weren’t different when they started kissing, the way consent was viewed certainly might have been. But, consent requested, and consent received, we kissed, and we still kiss hello. And every time it happens, I blush a little, in a very nice way.
I blush because every time it happens, it is a tender, immediate, physical, visible manifestation of my queerness, of my faggotdom — and because, for so long, platonic intimacy between my queer friends and I wasn’t something that was part of my life.
My non-romantic-adult-homosexual-life-partner Joe and I met in college, at a time when we were both still coming out, and, at least for me, physical intimacy with another faggot meant something. It meant attraction, or desire, or electricity, or, well, that we wanted to fuck. And Joe and I definitely didn’t want to fuck. Or, at least, Joe didn’t want to fuck me. (No offense to me.) And so we didn’t really touch.
Nearly a decade later, this is still the case. I think, predominantly, it’s because this was how we learned to be around each other. We were so careful and conscious of our physical interactions when we were first forming our friendship that by the time we were nearly a decade in, our muscle memory had learned that we weren’t supposed to touch. And unlearning is, famously, a very hard thing to do. I mean, we hug each other hello and goodbye every now and then, and, if it’s been a while, sometimes we’ll double kiss on the cheek like little Parisian faguettes. But beyond that, there really isn’t much.
Joe has come home with me for Christmas. He’s planned three of my last five birthdays. Non-consecutively, we’ve lived together for half of the ten years we’ve known each other, and we live together now. But holding hands or laying on each other while we’re on the couch hopefully watching anything other than Selling Sunset is just something we never do.
Which was never really something I thought about, until I met Bobby. Bobby has a frustrating combination of ocean-deep eyes, perfect bone structure, impeccable style, and upsettingly smooth dancefloor rhythm, all wrapped around a tender sweet personality that invites you in and makes you feel warm and known. Bobby is also a toucher. And a holder. He’s a walk-up-behind-you-on-the-sidewalk-and-slip-his-arm-around-your-waister.
“Is this ok?” he asked the first time he walked next to me on the sidewalk and took up my hand. I said yes. Or, more likely, I said something that was unintelligible but nodded yes. Seriously, his eyes make it very difficult to maintain direct eye contact and also produce a coherent verbal thought when you’re getting to know him.
When Bobby held my hand that night, I thought, why does it feel so weird to me that Bobby is holding my hand? And then I thought, pay attention to what he is saying to you and stop being so fucking weird about the fact that he’s holding your hand. And so I did — or at least, I tried. Bobby held my hand until we made it to the bar we were going to, his boyfriend and my not-boyfriend Joe walking a few steps behind us.
Like this, things continued in our friendship. We would walk places and hold hands or be at a show together and lean on each other. Or we’d be waiting for our drinks at the bar, and Bobby would tuck his chin into my neck and wrap his arms around my waist and make sure I wasn’t ordering him another shot. I went over to Bobby’s apartment not too long ago after we’d both been out of town for a few weeks and hadn’t seen each other. We ate snacks and caught up and then settled down on the couch to watch a truly insane Ryan Murphy program. (Was it Glee reruns? I’ll never tell.) Bobby picked up my hand and rested his head on my shoulder, and on the other side of him his boyfriend tucked his feet underneath Bobby, and we were all warm and comfortable, and well, we kind of just were. And that felt so, so very nice.
Recently, Joe and I were at a music festival together with some friends. Bobby was there. It was the end of a long but wonderful second day. The sky was pink because the sun was setting, and because my friends are smart, we all decided not to pretend we were too cool to see the headliner by fucking off to a smaller stage and a more obscure act, and as such, we were losing our shit to Lizzo.
Toward the end of the concert, Joe was swaying slowly in front of me, and I suddenly had the urge to reach out and hold my best friend. So I did just that. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around him, and he gently relaxed his body into mine. We stood there and swayed, and I tucked my chin into the crook of this neck, and then, I shit you not, fireworks started to go off. As they did, our friend Lara saw us and wrapped us both in her arms, and we all had stars in our eyes, and everything felt nice and good and gay.
That night in bed, I thought about how special that felt and how lucky we are. Physical intimacy, either romantic or platonic, is not something that is promised. For queer people, it is certainly not something that is even always safe, especially in public but sometimes even in private. But it is so, so important. I’ve always been bad at moderation. I eat too much and I drink too much because I want to be so full of every good thing. These days, touch is no different.
So now, I try to hold Joe, and my other friends, as often as possible. And I am also trying to relax and let myself be held. It’s not exactly a kiss hello on the mouth, like how my older new friends in San Francisco greet me. But it’s not not that, either. I like both, and I want both. And I think I can have them. I think we all can.
We (you, me, society, the women on The View, Freud, or whoever) sexualize touch, and then romanticize sex, to the point that they’ve become inextricably linked — to the point that we’ve been indoctrinated into that boring, straight edict that ThErE iS sOmEtHiNg ThErE every time someone touches us. That every single touch means something.
And perhaps there is something there, and perhaps every touch does have meaning. Maybe it means I care for you. Maybe it means I love you, and I hope you feel comfortable and safe. Maybe it means I think you look hot, sexy, and very cool, and I want you to know that. Maybe it does some of the time. God, I hope it does.
Also, maybe that is fine. The whole point of being gay is that we get to make up our own rules. We get to hug and kiss and touch our friends (as long as they want us to) and erase the lines, not just blur them. In The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, Larry Mitchell wrote, “The rule is: You get more warm fuzzies by giving away all your own warm fuzzies. Keeping your warm fuzzies to yourself results in a large accumulation of cold prickles.” There are quite enough cold pricks in the world; I think it’s best we focus on giving away our warm fuzzies.
“Love, Us” is looking for readers to reach out about your queer love stories. Have a love letter to share or a story you’d like to tell? Send a note to loveussubmissions@gmail.com with all the details, in 500 words or less, and we might just be in touch.
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