Girl on the Net

This fantastic guest blog is written by a brand new sex blogger – Quinn! Quinn goes by @OnQueerStreet on Twitter (and here on Patreon too!), and blogs about a whole bunch of sexy things. I was totally honoured that Quinn wanted to contribute a guest blog to me, and delighted that it explores so much of hir internal wonderings on sex, sexuality and identity.

Discovering my sexuality

Six years ago, I would have had no objection to going through life without ever being kissed.

As I’m now extremely enthusiastic about talking, reading and writing about sex, and I have kissed some very cute humans, something has clearly changed.

I grew up in a fairly isolated and pretty religious community, and I think this plays a part in how long it took me to unlock my sexuality. All around me, friends and classmates were falling in love and making out with each other. Girls agonised over whether boys liked them or not, and tried to find ways to hang out and flirt with their crushes. Me, though? I observed all this with at least a little confusion.

You see, I had absolutely no interest in dating, kissing, fucking, or anything else sexual or romantic. I read YA fiction filled with girls who wanted to date boys, but what I was interested in was the dynamics of the relationship rather than the hand-holding. If there weren’t enough witty one-liners, I’d prefer reading books about best friends or sisters or dragons.

Then a significant thing happened: I discovered some of the terminology that meant I could express parts of my identity. Before this, I hadn’t had the words or the knowledge to explore who I was, and suddenly I was hit over the head with something which, to me, was utterly new. I realised that hey, Jadis, did you ever think that maybe the reason you have zero interest in sexual or romantic things is because a heteronormative society means you only think about guys and… maybe you like girls?

My friends frequently make fun of me for how much fanfiction I read. However, when they do that I tend to remind them that without fanfiction I wouldn’t be the girl they know and love today. Harry Potter fanfiction, and the stories of one author in particular (who I still have a huge crush on to this day), gave me the language I needed to explore who I am. They wrote about diverse characters, and I learnt new words. I discovered what asexuality was, and that being gay or pansexual or non-binary – and even more than this, that talking about it – was totally normal. This writer’s characters were diverse and realistic, and my mind now had the terminology it needed to start working out if maybe I was like that too.

With this quietly turning over in the back of my head, a catalyst occurred to speed the process on a bit. I had a dream about the girl who was my best friend at the time, in which we kissed and held hands and weird-dream-backstory meant that I knew we were dating. Let me tell you, nothing is more awkward than sitting next to your friend on the bus to school the morning after you’ve dreamed about kissing them.

I wanted to kiss her.

From that point, if you’d asked me my sexual orientation, I would have said I was questioning. Not that anyone asked, of course, because I was a teenager in a society that assumed I was straight. I found this extremely frustrating… but it also made me wonder if I was in fact gay, or if it was just the part of me that always wanted to be different, that rejected being normal.

Then I fell deeply in love with a friend of mine, and for two years it felt like everything in my life revolved around her.

It wasn’t until I was going through the painful process of getting over her that I decided I was ready to take on a label defining my sexual identity. I had no doubt at this point that I liked girls: I owned The Whole Lesbian Sex Book by Felice Newman. I remember the first time I was brave enough to say it – or rather, to set my sexual orientation on a dating app to lesbian.

However, part of the reason I knew I was comfortable with this label was because I was more than a little scared of penises. (And also, probably, scared of the potential pain of PIV sex…) I was beginning to explore my body and figure out what I was into. I was horny, my head full of fantasies, but all the filthy thoughts that drew my hand down towards my clit were filled with girls. I didn’t really have any interest in guys.

As an aside, I do know that some women have penises and I apologise for younger me still viewing gender as a strict binary. I no longer do so.

Enter stage left: a tall skinny, nerdy guy, who also happened to be a feminist. He was a friend who was there supporting me while I struggled with depression, but he also knew that I was most definitely not straight. We talked about sex, because he also knew I was using masturbation as a coping mechanism to manage my mental health. We talked about androgynous dressing. We talked about how I was struggling to make myself orgasm. He gave me tips and hot words to jerk off to, and teased me gently for the fact I used the phrase ‘jerking off’ to describe my wanking.

Somehow, amidst making me feel more comfortable with my own body, he also made me less scared about what his might be like.

It got to the point where – solely because of him – I was identifying as queer. I was beginning to think that maybe boys weren’t that bad. He made me curious, and he made me wonder what sex with him would be like. Even though it may not have been the best decision I’ve ever made, I found out. He wasn’t my first kiss, but he was someone who’d been there as I explored my kinks and discovered that while visual porn didn’t work for me I was really into audio. I trusted him.

And when we had sex? It had touching and kissing, of course, but it also had spanking and me being tied up in gorgeous rope bondage and laid on my front while he fucked my bound together hands until he came all over my back. He fingered me, and I fucked him with a strap-on. I sucked his cock and he came in my mouth, but crawled up his body and pushed his spunk from my mouth to his in a wet kiss. I most definitely got over my fear of penises.

(However, I still don’t like the word penises, so if anyone wants to a spoiler from the guide to turning me on with dirty talk, please refer to cocks or dicks)

The most recent time I saw him, I was lying on my back, staring eagerly up at him while he straddled me and fucked my mouth with significantly more force than he had before. Pulling back a little, the following dialogue occurred:

“Is this OK with you?”

“Yes! Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because a few months ago, Jadis, you were identifying as a lesbian.”

“Oh yeah…”

I love kissing girls, but kissing boys is fun too. I don’t want a girlfriend or a boyfriend right now, but I would love friends with whom I can engage in platonic kink. I’m still exploring my gender identity, and am fully open to the possibility that I still have more to explore with my sexual identity. For now, though, I’m bisexual, and for me that means I’m attracted to people of two or more genders.

Six years later, I know my life would lack a little colour if I didn’t want to kiss cute humans.