After the Hook up Revolution

Eroticism as Liberation?

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There was a period of my life when I believed eroticism was going to save me, and I don’t think that made me unusual. A lot of queer people arrive at adulthood carrying an impossible amount of hope in their first experiences of being wanted. When you’ve spent years being told your desires are shameful, your body is a problem to be solved, and your future is something other people get to vote on, the discovery that somebody can look at you with genuine desire feels enormous. It feels like history changing direction.

I didn’t get there through recklessness. I got there because I was exhausted. Before I ever had the chance to make one choice about my own sexuality, other people had already made it a public issue. They debated whether people like me should exist, whether transition was real, whether my relationships would always count as deception, and whether my body could ever be ordinary, and by the time I reached adulthood my body already had a political biography. So when sexual liberation found me, I heard it as permission to breathe.

Shame is one of the oldest methods anybody ever invented for controlling women and queer people, and if the shame could be dismantled, something deeper might loosen with it. Fear might stop organizing the whole life. Intimacy might become a place without surveillance in it. I still believe that part. Nobody gets healthier by learning to despise themselves, guilt is no virtue just because it’s old, and queer people owe nobody an apology for loving each other or for living in bodies that have always made other people uncomfortable. Those are victories worth defending, and I will defend them.

I eventually realized the surveillance hadn’t disappeared. It had changed uniforms. Instead of parents or pastors or politicians watching us, it became the people we’d slept with, their friends, our exes, the group chat, the Discord server, the local scene that somehow knew where everyone woke up before they did. The institution changed. The feeling of being watched didn’t.

Rejecting shame held up. The promises that quietly accumulated around it did not. Somewhere along the way, sexual liberation stopped describing the freedom to choose and started working as a language for nearly every other human longing, for confidence and healing and belonging and eventually for politics itself, until sex was expected to accomplish an extraordinary amount of emotional work. I never once heard anyone say so outright. It was in the air. You absorbed it through conversations and apps and the stories people told about themselves, through the quiet assumption that experience is inherently transformative.

You also absorbed it through the way queer communities narrate each other. Hookups rarely stayed between the people having them. They became lore. Somebody always knew somebody who knew somebody. Every relationship accumulated footnotes. Every breakup acquired witnesses who had never been in the room. The promise was freedom from judgment, but what often emerged instead was a remarkably efficient system of social observation.

If you still felt lonely, you hadn’t found the right people yet, or you needed to become more open, and if something still hurt, another breakthrough was supposed to be waiting just past the next encounter. For a while I believed it.

Transition changed my relationship to my body in ways I remain grateful for, and there are moments from those early years that still feel miraculous to me: compliments and flirtations that arrived without suspicion attached, my own reflection becoming a woman I recognized instead of a problem I negotiated with. Those moments mattered because they interrupted years of believing my body existed to be inspected. And being desired after so long feeling undesirable is intoxicating for a specific reason. It reads as evidence that the story you were told about yourself was incomplete.

Looking back, I can see what I was actually asking those rooms for. I wanted confirmation that I belonged somewhere, and I kept trying to collect it in a currency that only ever proves you’re wanted. That’s the distinction I wish somebody had handed me sooner. Desire and belonging overlap sometimes, and they are different experiences. One can happen in an evening. The other usually takes years.

It also took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize how difficult it is to feel genuine belonging in a culture where intimacy so often becomes public knowledge. In small queer scenes, your romantic history has a way of escaping you. What begins between two people slowly becomes community information. Sometimes that’s necessary. Communities should warn each other about violence, coercion, and abuse. But most of the time it’s something much pettier. Who’s seeing whom. Who used to date whom. Who has “been around.” Before long, your private life develops an audience you never invited.

I didn’t recognize the difference for a long time because I wanted both so badly they blurred together.

The more I lived, the more the two slowly came apart. I had encounters that were exciting and awkward and disappointing and ordinary, and some of them left me feeling connected to another person and plenty of them didn’t, and none of them, on their own, answered the questions I’d been carrying since I was young. They couldn’t tell me who I was, they couldn’t build a life with rent and furniture in it, they couldn’t replace friendship, and they couldn’t manufacture trust where none existed. The quieter loneliness stayed untouched through all of it, the loneliness of wanting to be understood outside the brief intensity of being wanted.

Part of that loneliness came from realizing I wasn’t only navigating another person. I was navigating the imagined future audience that might eventually hear about us. The possibility that this moment would become somebody else’s anecdote, somebody else’s cautionary tale, somebody else’s gossip. It’s difficult to feel entirely free when intimacy is always threatening to become public record.

That realization brought clarity. I lost surprisingly little in the process. It let me stop asking erotic experiences to perform work they were never built for, and it let me stop reading every encounter as a verdict on whether I had finally been repaired.

Sex kept every promise it ever actually made. I had asked something the size of an evening to carry something the size of a life.

I also expected a culture built around liberation to feel less observed than the one I’d left behind. Instead, I found that surveillance doesn’t disappear just because the people watching you become queer. Sometimes it becomes more intimate. More decentralized. More difficult to escape because it arrives dressed as friendship, concern, community memory, or simply “keeping people informed.”

Erotic freedom still matters. It was never going to be enough on its own. I wasn’t looking for another audience. I was looking for a place where I could finally stop performing altogether.

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