Femme4Femme Intimacy
An Excerpt From My Book "Touch Me, I'm Sick"
Hello dear ones,
On Fridays I share excerpts from my forthcoming book “Touch Me, I’m Sick,” a memoir-in-essays that map my healing journey from a traumatized adolescent to a chronically ill adult. My book will be published in the fall of 2025, so you’re getting to see it before anyone else does! Today’s writing comes from Chapter 5: Femme4Femme Intimacy” and is all about healing sexual trauma through queer sex and navigating hookups in a pandemic. TW: substance (ab)use, rape, sexual trauma.
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Monthly co-writing hangs, first Monday of the month
Summer 2020
“So what’s your dissertation about?” he asks me, lying on his bed, wearing a black lacy thong.
“It’s about trauma and chronic illness and intimacy and queer sexuality,” I respond, doing my best to give my Cliffs Notes version.
“Are you gonna write about this?” – and by “this” he means us, two strangers, both of us femmes, one non-binary, the other gender fluid, having sex during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I laugh, “Yeah, actually, I am.”
“Good,” he tells me, a smile across his face.
☾
It’s late August 2020, seven months into the pandemic. I’m in Toronto for a few weeks to support one of my best friends as they have top surgery. I knew that returning home during the pandemic would look different from the last trip I took back in December, just a few months before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and cities across the world began to shut down. There would be no hugging. No touching. Losses that I would feel deeply within my touch-oriented friendships. But we were committed to figuring it out, not wanting to pass up the opportunity to be together after seven months apart.
The trickiest part of my stay is figuring out how to navigate hook ups. In Calgary, where I’ve been living the last year, the queer community is small and the queer polyamory community is even smaller. I want to make the most of my time here and so I create a Tinder profile: “Polyam femme witch/switch, cancer sun, sag rising, aries moon. Super into talking about feelings, transformative justice, and the queer utopia. Looking for playful makeout sessions, sexual chemistry, kink super welcome. Am in Toronto until the end of Aug and would love to navigate COVID connection with consent and care.”
I quickly matched with Jamie. I immediately thought he was beautiful, with his long curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and nails painted a sparkly black. But it was the presence of the word femme in his bio that made me excited to swipe right. We exchanged Instagrams and then quickly started texting. As we discussed a time to meet up and see if the chemistry was there, he offered to send me some nudes, to which I enthusiastically said yes. The next day I woke up to a number of photos of Jamie in various stages of undress. In my favorites, he is wearing fishnets and a thong. In another, there is a jeweled butt plug in his ass. I send him some of me in lacy lingerie.
In between nudes, we discuss our boundaries and what we need to feel safe.
“You don’t mind being around someone smoking weed do you?” he asks.
I pause and reflect on this question. I knew he smoked weed because in many of his Tinder pictures there’s a joint in his mouth. In the past, this would’ve been a deal breaker for me.
“It’s something I can be around,” I text back, “but just for full disclosure, I’ve been sober from drugs for ten years. Addiction was something I really struggled with and so I tend to not spend time around folks who’re smoking weed. But given the circumstances I think it’ll be fine.”
I hit send and then nervously compose a follow up message: “Hope that’s okay—always feels a bit vulnerable to disclose that.”
I first got high when I was fourteen. After dinner, I’d walk to the park near my house, where some older boys hung out, smoking cigarettes and joints. I’d never been the pretty popular girl, but was doomed to like the boys who’d date those girls and hang out with me in secret. When I return to the diaries I kept when I was thirteen and fourteen, I find poems where I write of unrequited love: “But your love goes to that of another; you are her world, you are her lover. You hold her, you kiss her, you are in love. I will wait for the day for you to love me.” I used to think that my longing to be loved by those who couldn’t or wouldn’t love me didn’t start until after my mother’s death. Either I didn’t keep a diary before the age of twelve, or they didn’t make it in the eviction from our home.
One day, I’m going through old report cards that my mom kept, and I find a poem that I wrote. There’s no date, but the penmanship tells me that I must have been eight or nine. I’m charmed by the title “heart bet” – clearly a misspelling and yet it perfectly captures the wager that is intimacy.
When your heart bet’s like thunder open eye and see your heart bet for love. Open your eye and see the man that you love like you love like crasy. Give him a big kiss. Then tell him that you love him. Over years and years you tell him that you want to marryed but love stoped’s there so stop rint there the love is gone he doesn’t love you any more kiss your love goodbye.
For my thirty-sixth birthday, I ask my friends and loved ones to read things they wrote as kids, and I surprise them all with a rendition of this poem, accompanied by my friend’s bango. It is meant to be playful, but I also want to retain the sense of sadness I felt upon finding this poem: proof that my desire to be loved by another pre-dated my mother’s death. I don’t know what to do with this information, as it gives a new beginning to the story of my attachment wounding.
Maybe it’s the case that I’ve always been needy. In her book White Magic, Elissa Washuta, a fellow Taurus north node, writes that “what we Taurus north node people want is to merge with another person; what we need is to stop feeding our power to another.” Washuta goes on to quote Jan Spiller’s Astrology of the Soul: “The first step toward self-acceptance for Taurus north node people is to acknowledge that there is a needy person inside and to take personal responsibility for fulfilling those needs.”
The website Astrology Owl offers another explanation: “The North Node in Taurus is helping you achieve the sense of self-worth you feel you have been denied.” I think about how my south node is in Scorpio in my twelfth house, where Pluto also lives. My past is the realm of the ineffable. An underworld of ghosts and spectral wounds that need healing. It makes sense that I’m needy. I have spent lifetimes attached to ghosts. Now, I am hungry for bodies that are of this world.
Or maybe my attachment wounding has something to do with the fact that Chiron, the planet of the wounded healer, is in Gemini in my seventh house of committed partnerships. I once read somewhere astrologer Chani Nicholas’ description of those with this placement: “Your bruises include moments where you find yourself searching, again, for your twin – where you doubt, even for a minute, your own wholeness.” Chiron is conjunct Venus in my chart, meaning that I will find beauty in pain, that I will let myself be hurt again and again in the name of love. You can call it the fate of the stars, or the fate of being a human being trying to love under the cisheteropatriarchy. In reality, it’s both.
Before boys started to use me, I was already an object in my own home. My mother’s death turned me into a surrogate mom. In her absence, I’d be the one to make the meals, do the house chores, ensure my brother finished his homework. As my dad’s illness progressed, I’d be expected to do more: help him eat, bathe him, complete whatever tasks he’d told friends he’d do for them. There were so many moments where I wanted to tell him I’m your daughter, remember? The drugs I used weren’t just a response to the rape. They were a response to my life. Sex, care, intimacy, and substances became inextricably linked. I needed the substances to access connection. Or, to pretend that what I was being offered could be called care.
I feel like I’m being given the opportunity to untether sexual intimacy and drugs from my trauma. With Jamie, this will be the first time I’m allowing myself to be with someone who uses substances since I got sober at twenty-four. The last time I did this, I ended up getting high again. And while I no longer feel that same urge, I worry that being around drugs will trigger a trauma response.
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