Side Please

I shared a love-hate relationship with sex. There were parts of it that brought fragile and fleeting joy that often felt like someone creasing my hair under a starry sky. Sometimes It felt like eating ice cream late at night while lonely and sad. It made me feel held, loved, desired, valid. Some days, It even made me feel like a real person. And then there were parts of it that didn’t feel like home. Isn’t sex supposed to make you feel at home? Comforted, belonged, authentic.

Like many of you, I learned most about sex from heterosexual porn as an adolescent. I was naturally drawn towards porn with plot lines and sex was contextualised. The penetration never used to appeal to me that much, though, some parts of it, cuddling, spooning, kisses, were titillating.

Eventually, as in most of such porn, the penis and penetration take the centre stage, I and my desire felt unseen. Betrayed by the monolithic penis-vagina sex I found solace in then-very-popular Emraan Hashmi songs. The sexual teasing, hiding-and-seeking, desi people claiming erotism, it was all very arousing. I particularly enjoyed the songs as it celebrates what they are doing via a song, even though those acts would typically be categorised as ‘foreplay’.

Unsurprisingly, not many of my friends in school resonated with me. As I grew up and became more confident about my queerness, I realized even I don’t resonate with many people here. In gay dating spaces, people often confine to this very idea of heteropatriarchal sex which centers around penetration.

The first question one might stumble upon on a gay dating app, is ‘are you t/b?’ top or bottom. A "top" is defined as someone who prefers the insertive role, a "bottom" as someone who prefers the receptive role, and there is also "versatile" which means someone who might prefer playing both the roles. The thing is anal penetration can be desired and pleasurable for some people, but not for all.

What if you’re a gay man who doesn’t enjoy anal sex or finds anal penetration painful, doesn’t like the feeling or the troublesome amount of preparation and cleaning up needed for it to be a pleasurable experience, or simply don’t experience anal sex as erotic? Certified Sex and Relationship Therapist, Joe Kart, worked on popularizing the term “side” in order for those gay men to have the language to express their sexual and erotic preference.

 In his article ‘ Guys on the ‘Side’: Looking Beyond Gay Tops and Bottoms, he writes ‘sides prefer to kiss, hug and engage in oral sex, rimming, mutual masturbation and rubbing up and down on each other, to name just a few of the sexual activities they enjoy.

These men enjoy practically every sexual practice aside from anal penetration of any kind. They may have tried it and even performed it for some time before they became aware that for them, it was simply not erotic and wasn’t getting any more so. Some may even enjoy receiving or giving anal stimulation with a finger, but nothing beyond that.’

The truth is —the truth that has been strategically hidden to uphold reproduction as the only sanctioned virtue of sex— you can have sex or not have sex, the way you want to. In my part of the world It's easier to claim my queerness than actually talking about the queerness in my sex, which often transcends the narrow heterosexist understanding of it.

It's not only because of the silence around sex but also the lack of vocabulary to articulate our feelings. Though I have seen many gay men using ‘side’ to describe their sexual and erotic preference, even today the popular gay dating app Grindr only gives five options for position- top, vers top, versatile, vers bottom, bottom- to choose from and not ‘side’. To claim spaces, one needs vocabulary and here is how language has tremendous potential in legitimizing as well as liberating people who live a life of marginalization and precarity.

Being an Enby person, as I navigate within the gay-queer spaces, Side helps me to articulate my state of being and that is why, I want to extend it further and advocate for its accessibility for people who aren’t only gay men, but anyone and everyone who want to emancipate from the deep-seated heteropatriarchal understanding of sex. A cis-women friend of mine once shared how she hates penetration as she has endometriosis and other chronic illnesses.

But she often couldn’t refuse sex to her tinder dates as she wanted sex, but also not all of it. She didn't know if she was allowed to negotiate sex. Yet all the times she did negotiate and all the times she didn't negotiate, it was always followed by crawling guilt of being incomplete and incompatible in sex. When I told her about ‘side’ she shared how this is affirming to think there are other people like us.

Often guilt and shame are used to police us if we don't adhere to what is expected of us. In heterosexual relationships, the default assumption/expectation is that the female-bodied person is bottom and the male-bodied person is top. As if cis-het men can never enjoy anal sex or prostate stimulation. But the sense of gender expression we attach with sexual roles often influences how we operate our desires. In the gay community, the stereotype is that the fem-presenting person is the bottom and the masc-presenting person is the top. There is no room to challenge that.

The annihilation of hetero-patriarchy in sex can only happen when people accessing benefits from heteropatriarchal systems are taking the onus to truly acknowledge how those systems often collute to sabotage their being as well as that of people from marginalised identities. People should be comfortable communicating their erotic desires without being judged or shamed. Sex is self-care, it's an integral part of our well-being if we want it. Sex should be consensual, pleasurable, and safe. Sex is supposed to make you feel at home. Comforted, belonged, authentic.