Queer Sex is Not ‘Resistance’

The most radical form of resistance may be to inflating what gives you life with political meaning it does not have to bear.

image courtesy of Katie Rainbow

Post-election cope is now in full swing, and there seems to be a surprising consensus in favor of retreat and self-care.

I find this politics-adjacent—or, rather, politics-saturated—processing of personal emotions and stances more interesting than the properly political analysis of why the Democrats lost. (The most plausible answer to that so far seems pretty straightforward and boring: constraining macroeconomic factors, i.e. inflation.) It leads into the questions like: What is the political? What it should it be? What are its proper relations to other dimensions of life? And a sub-question to that one is: what political meaning does gayness—OK, if we must, queerness—have right now, if any? Not in the the narrow sense of “what it means to be gay under Trump,” but in a broader historical sense: does being gay or queer have any unique or specific political meaning anymore? Can it? Should it?

The sex writer Tracy Clark-Flory has furnished some excellent raw material for examining these questions in the form of a survey of how her readers are feeling about sex and politics:

I asked, in the broadest of terms, where folks were at right now when it came to sex, desire, and their bodies.

The answers tended to fall along two separate lines: an impulse toward “yes” or “no,” moving toward sex or away from it. It’s clear that sex right now can feel like an act of resistance and affirmation—here, that notably seems to be the case with respondents who are trans and/or non-monogamous. Sex can also feel undesirable and entirely out of reach in the midst of despair, anxiety, and fear. Clearly, too, announcing the wish to not have sex can be a form of protest.

A question I’m thinking about a lot right now: What does it mean to bring this energy of resistance—whether the impulse toward “yes” or “no”—beyond the private bedroom and into collective action?

I found the general tenor of this formulation irritating, especially the portentous language of “resistance” and the talk about having sex or not as a “form of protest.” I’m going to explore why that is as I discuss the comments from Clark-Flory’s readers below. But I don’t think the general question or enterprise is absurd. I wouldn’t put it in terms of bringing resistance out of the bedroom and into collective action, but it does seem worth examining how one should think about sex—and in particular, gay or, again if we must, queer sex—in relation to politics, if there are better or worse, helpful or less helpful ways of doing so.

I will proceed now to quote from Clark-Flory’s readers and examine what is more or less helpful in them. My intent is not to pick on any of these individuals, but to use their thoughts as paths into some underlying questions.

The first type of response is the most obvious and understandable: the simple recognition that sexual desire is framed by the context of one’s general emotional state, which obviously include hows one feels about the state of the world. Even if I think some of the ways people nowadays narrate their lives in relation to their political emotions is misguided and potentially destructive, it would be ridiculous to expect people’s feelings about the election not to affect the way they feel about sex. One of my guiding principles for thinking about these matters is the conviction that, at least in a loose sense, everything is political, and there is no such thing as “apolitical.”¹ But the loose sense of political—as opposed to the strict sense—is a crucial distinction.

The second type of response is what I will call “hyperpolitical.” Many of these responses amount to a version of the first type with a political twist, and they run in both directions, both “toward” or “away from” sex. A couple of quotes with relevant portions bolded:

1. I'm with a new partner, having, truly, the best sex of my life… and while I do feel some sense of conflict about that because, as a group, I'm furious with men post-election… I also think there is something fucking radical about centering my body and my desires in this hellscape of a country that wants to control and erase both.

2. Sex with this partner is almost a revelatory act of world-building. It's a place where I feel seen, where there is beauty and ecstasy, where I can cry as I orgasm and be held in that depth where joy and grief coexist. I think sex is an act of resistance. … We need those spaces now more than ever if we are going to survive. A place where we can transmute the rage, the fear.

I’ll start with a side point that a political emotion like “I’m furious with men post-election” is idiotic, tribal and willfully incurious about the actual political forces of this election, reflexively blaming an entire category of people based on their gender rather than seeking a more precise target for political anger.² But perhaps the worst part is that this person is needlessly introducing conflict into their own private relationship, feeling in some way obligated to see their intimate partner as a political abstraction and thus allowing a misdirected political emotion to undermine their own sexual pleasure.

These two responses share the claim that enjoying their sexual desire is “fucking radical” or “an act of resistance.” But is it? I agree that there is something loosely political about continuing to enjoy sex in grim political times. It is potentially an expression of strength and a commitment to deeper values to assert that things that matter continue to matter regardless of whether the historical moment around us “good” or “bad.” It is potentially a rejection of the facile, historically narcissistic assumption that we have it so bad we simply can’t function, that we can’t do X or Y thing we otherwise think should be done “in the age of Trump.” What anyone does with their life is their own choice, of course, but we should train ruthless skepticism on anyone who claims we can’t read novels or have sex or have children in a particular historical moment because things are just too bad.

What I’m describing there is a resistance to hyperpolitical reasoning, that is, to defining one’s personal life and actions primarily in relation to a political moment or, to wit, basing the meaning of your life on the news. In many cases we’re not just talking about basing one’s life on the news, but on the most stylized, emotive narratives to emerge therefrom. Our private sex lives might be loosely political if they, on the contrary, remain a space that resists overlaying every meaningful human activity with a thin, flimsy coating of politicized emotion. The two respondents above articulate something like this: they see a potential depth of meaning in “centering the body,” ecstasy, or “revelatory acts of world-building.”

But is that “fucking radical” or an “act of resistance”? I think such phrases make jumps into the hyperpolitical by insisting that what might be loosely political is in fact strictly political, something like—plenty of others have said it even if they don’t quite—“fucking is resisting fascism.” Private copulation may have a political meaning if it provides a respite from facile ways of relating one’s life to politics, but it is not itself an “act of resistance” in any properly political sense. I think we should respect actual politics—and actual political resistance—by not making cope-moves like redescribing everything that gives us meaning or pleasure as always already “resistance.”

This may be just as true of queer sex as any other kind. Let’s turn to another respondent to introduce that wrinkle:

I’m pretty numbed out emotionally, but sex is one of the best ways for me to ground myself in my body. Also, as a queer person in a t4t relationship, all the sex I have is resistance to all the oppressive systems that have and continue to marginalize us & instill shame in us.

Our queer sex is liberation, our pleasure a big middle-finger to the cultural forces & people who voted against our interests or want to see us extinguished.

I struggle more with this one. As a cis gay man whose life has certainly been affected by “oppressive systems,” I don’t think of the sex I have as resistance to anything in particular. But that is probably because I don’t regard it or my sexual identity as actually, materially under attack. Gay men taking to Instagram to indulge in victimization hysterics is over the top at best. But would I say that if J.D. Vance was cooking up some kind of federal goon squad to raid gay bars? Probably not. So I’m more hesitant to say the same of transgender people, who have in fact very pointedly, centrally, and systematically been made scapegoats in contemporary right-wing politics.³ I don’t personally believe that anti-trans animus is a driving force of Trumpism for most of its adherents and I remain optimistic that in spite of everything, contemporary Americans lean toward tolerance even of people they don’t like very much. I don’t think any federal goon squad is forthcoming. But if a trans person feels that sex is a “big middle-finger” to their political tormenters, if it renews their personal life-force and helps refreshes them for actual political battle, then it’s surely not my place to tell them otherwise.

Here again, though, I would make the same caveat: even if here the line is somewhat blurrier, we should still keep in view a distinction between what is actually political and what, by providing us with personal meaning, i.e. may have political implications or be indirectly political. Transgender people or gay people or women having sex does not equal “liberation” in any substantive political sense. It is not organizing, not political engagement, not material resistance. In and of itself it has no power against right-wing reaction. When we talk about what is strictly or directly political, we should be talking about what has or creates tangible power to make political demands.

Perhaps this is the moment to make a broader point about queer politics. Sex is surely part of it in that it is the basis of our self-conception as a minority and remains, even today, low-key reviled by straight people.⁴ But fucking in itself is not radical. What gets closer to that is collective self-identification, a community-based self-consciousness and confidence. It is considerably more “radical” for a trans person to continue boldly going about their life in public, refusing to be cowed by the threat of judgment or violence, than it is for them to fuck in private. I don’t know if any particular action is “radical” for cis gay men, but if anything is, it is probably still the same old basic things: refusing to be closeted, to hide from our families or society, to accept sanitized narratives imposed from the outside.

Let’s turn to a third and final type of response to Clark-Flory’s survey—the type I think has the most promise as a political view of “sex under Trump”:

As a trans person, I am feeling pretty connected to my body and having sex with myself and my wife. One thing testosterone does is make you chronically horny so I am not struggling too much with desire. I think the election reinforced for me that joy and pleasure are primary values of mine and I will continue to pursue those things. …

And, honestly, I wish Trump followers real pleasure and joy from a generative place too. I honestly have no desire to be resentful and I’m long past angry. I just don’t want my life to be like that. I think I finally understand non-violence as a spiritual concept.

This strikes me as a self-possessed person with a psychologically healthy view of the relation between politics and private life. Which is not to say one must embrace their zen-like magnanimity toward their opponents or that any anger whatsoever is inappropriate. I don’t care if anyone privately hates Trump voters as long as they don’t allow it to lead them into public political idiocy.

But I do think there is something better about this response—and something more radical and truly political—than others that frame the political implications of sex in terms of “anger at men,” “middle fingers” and “resistance.” For one thing, it expresses a confidence and assurance that is resistant to hysterics of the moment. It keeps its eye on a higher prize than punishing people whose votes one imagines to be personal or identitarian attack: pleasure and joy in their fundamental richness, not instrumentalized as a self-congratulatory, self-soothing, ersatz form of politics. And a wish for that richness to be preserved and defended for everyone, even for those indulging in a deformed version of it by voting for a right-wing fever dream.

I expect we’ll see much more discourse along the lines of “self-care is radical resistance” the next four years as people attempt to give their exhausted retreat the faded radical sheen of Resistance 1.0. First as tragedy, then as farce. Perhaps the healthiest and most political alternative to that is to allow ourselves to enjoy sex without inflating it with claims it is neither able nor supposed to bear.

1. As a general rule, what is most loudly asserted to be “apolitical” is usually in fact highly political.

2. This is a version of the stupid social media meme that runs along the lines of “Black women should get to sit this one out and go to brunch because they voted for Kamala.” “Men” in some abstract sense are no more responsible for Trump’s victory than gnats or honey badgers, and for this person to make their own partner an avatar of that already-meaningless categorical judgement is clearly the result of imbibing a hyperpolitical narrative. If this person had said right-wing male politics or reactionary patriarchal politics that would be more defensible, but would also render impossible the gesture of extending that category to their own partner.

3. Some will surely disagree, but I don’t think it makes any sense to claim the same thing is true of “women” in general. The Republican assault on abortion rights is real and serious, but I don’t think it’s right to interpret this as some kind of identitarian attack on “women,” but rather the infringement of religious dogma on rights and the rights and freedoms of everyone. As the cliché goes, abortion is not just a women’s issue.

4. Even, or perhaps especially, the man-on-man kind.