Our new monthly column in which Jake Hall harnesses the power of queer thought to move past boundaries and shape sexy new narratives.

Viewing sex according to cultural scripts and binaries places limitations on our experiences and our pleasure – queer sex helps us deconstruct myths around sex and ultimately choose more satisfying and sexy alternatives.

How We Can Use Queer Thought to Reimagine Sex and Pleasure – A Column by Jake Hall

Sex Beyond Binaries

 have attempted in roundabout ways to answer this question. Nobody has ever nailed down a single definition –– and that’s kind of the point, right? Like queerness more broadly, the concept of queer sex is necessarily fluid. It can’t be policed, boxed in or defined by strict parameters. Those two words mean something different to all of us, and that’s a large part of their beauty.

It took me years to feel like I was having anything 

to queer sex. But before I explain what that means to me, it’s worth looking at what we’re collectively told to expect from sex more broadly.

I first stumbled across porn as a sheltered, sexually curious 12-year-old, way back in the early 2000s. I came back –– and came –– to it repeatedly. Over time, I started to internalize a series of scripts dictating what sex 

be like: basically, ‘foreplay’ followed shortly by ‘intercourse’. The vast majority of gay porn I found followed a similar trajectory, but now there were new binaries at play. There was the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’. In some role-play porn, I found ‘dominants’ and ‘submissives’.

 and queer porn-makers doing things differently. There’s more gloriously smutty variety than ever, but I never came across this diversity when I was younger. As always, there were exceptions to the rule, but the majority of on-screen sex I saw taught me I could ultimately either fuck or be fucked. That was pretty much it.

“The majority of on-screen sex I saw taught me I could ultimately either fuck or be fucked. That was pretty much it.”

This is where in-depth sex education comes in, right? Wrong. The extent of my sexual schooling was a sheepish substitute teacher pulling a condom onto a banana, followed by a graphic slideshow of sexually-transmitted infections. Kids spread rumors about a mythical infection named ‘

’ –– according to some of them, it could kill you. The main takeaway? Sex is bad, don’t do it. Of course, knowing sex was badmade me want it more. I continued to delve deep into the web’s filthiest corners to learn more, but all I ended up with were more questions. Gay sex looked terrifying. In fact, 

sex looked terrifying. I remember watching a hardcore gay scene and thinking: can my butthole 

stretch that wide? It all seemed mystifying, confusing but, simultaneously, 

Meanwhile, I was internalizing yet more fucked-up ideas –– namely, that there’s any such thing as ‘normal’. If you’re straight, white and cis, you’re the porn site homepage. Gay men get their own separate homepage but even then, the majority of those guys are still white and cis, too. If you’re a person of colour, you’re trans, you’re fat or you’re disabled, you’re filed into separate categories –– and they’re usually outdated at best and hideously offensive at worst. These norms are obviously tied to ideals of beauty and desirability; if you don’t fit them, you feel like shit.

Given this early messaging, it’s no wonder that my first sexual experience was receiving a lackluster blow job in a supermarket car park. I did it because I wanted to get it out of the way. In retrospect, I now know the other guy was similarly clueless. He asked if I came in his mouth, which is pretty hard to miss if you happen to be sucking off somebody with a penis.

I had to really wrap my mind around all of this in order to start having what I would describe as queer sex. In my eyes, it’s spontaneous, funny, messy sex which starts from a place of comfort and communication. It means understanding that someone’s junk doesn’t dictate their gender. It means holding onto the fact that 

There’s no such thing as ‘foreplay’ –– blow jobs, hand jobs and mutual masturbation aren’t just warm-ups for eventual penetration –– and great orgasms don’t need to involve putting anything into any of your holes. Research has consistently shown that the majority of cis women 

cum through penetration alone, yet millions of clueless cis men continue to jackhammer away at their partners without knowing or caring about these facts.

Shitty sex education has perpetuated countless myths. The joy of thinking queerly is that we get to identify them, deconstruct them and find the ways of fucking that work for us. Queer sex means coming up with your own language, routines, turn-ons. It might involve mutual masturbation, dousing your body in baked beans or shitting on a kinky stranger. Maybe it involves affectionate kisses, hand-holding and multiple head rubs.

“Shitty sex education has perpetuated countless myths. The joy of thinking queerly is that we get to identify them, deconstruct them and find the ways of fucking that work for us.”

I asked a few folks online about their interpretations of queer sex, and received a heartwarming reply from a cis woman named Nicole. “I’ve been (almost) straight my whole life, and having sex with a non-binary, butch person is blowing my head open,” she told me. “We stop for snacks and carry on! We check in with body parts constantly! It’s amazing. They made me cum so hard I soaked the bed, and then cried.” It’s a fantastic endorsement of queer sex, to be honest.

This column will strive to keep unpicking normative standards of what we’re told fucking 

be, and it will suggest sexy, queer alternatives in their stead. It will be rooted in lived experience, sex education –– the helpful kind, 

 the blue waffle kind –– and, hopefully, more stories of dry-humping ending with tearful, soaked-through orgasms.

Iconic scholar José Esteban Muñoz once described queerness as a “horizon” –– a place of hope and potential, which we can all continuously work towards. Think of queer sex as a horizon, too. The closer you get, 