Love Is Like Oral
“CAN I HELP you?” a stranger asked, appearing to my left in the dark.
I was sitting on the ground in my underwear and a sweater, perched in front of a headstone. I was breathing heavily, processing, which my spirit guides had called me out of my tent to do in the middle of the night at the queer “sanctuary.”
Go to the Ancestors’ Circle, they’d said, loudly. So I’d gotten up, pulled on a pair of boots, and walked through the woods, past tents holding more than 500 queers over Beltane last year.
Only three of us, though, were in the clearing that honors our dead.
When I’d arrived, the stranger had been standing at the back with another person, trying to light a taper candle in the dark. It looked like two people in AMAB bodies getting up to something, which I ignored as I walked around, slowly, listening for more instructions. I sat down where my guides directed, and soon, I swelled with griefs. Big ones. Hard ones. Suddenly, the stranger was at my side.
“Can I help you?”
They wore a long, puffy coat, their long brown hair pulled back. They were asking the question I’d been dying for someone to ask me since the ’80s.
“No,” I said. “I’m fine,” meaning, I guess, that I was capable of doing what I was doing on my own, because I wasn’t “fine.” Had I ever been fine, then? I didn’t even know what that meant.
The stranger moved away. Sadness ripped through me. I dealt with it alone, as I long had.
Until, finally, I decided not to.
“I changed my mind,” I called to the stranger, starting to cry. They’d dismissed the person they’d been with, a would-be sex partner, because the candle they’d lit had fallen over in my direction several times in a row. So they’d waited, close by, holding space for me among the trees.
MY DICK IS what comedian Deon Cole refers to as “chokey.” In one of his standup specials, he jokes about ladies faking choking sounds to make men feel like they have chokey dicks even when they don’t. The first time I heard these sounds in real life, they came out of a boyfriend’s mouth. Because my dick was in it.
I hadn’t yet heard Cole’s bit. But I couldn’t help but laugh at the sound, softly. A smiling, sort of almost-scoff.
It was amused disbelief. What a world!, in which you can go from having a half-bean-size dick to having one someone is choking on.
Making someone gag was not a dream, or a goal, or even a thought in my dick-acquiring journey. I don’t myself give chokey blow jobs, to even the most sizable dicks. My gag reflex is lax—possibly adaptively, after a childhood of sexual abuse—but also, I grew up before streaming internet. I didn’t spend my sexual development watching porn stars intentionally gag on penises. Though I was still socialized to peg my worth to sexual skill, it never occurred to me that gagging was a sound-effect anyone wanted. The opposite, in fact.
Gabriel Mac
Before I heard that boyfriend gag, an earlier boyfriend had taken me into his mouth first. He hadn’t made any such noise. My dick is run through with nerves connected to my natal penis, often called a clit. But those moments when I watched his lips stretch quietly, elegantly around me, they felt mostly like marvels, too. Not like something I liked or didn’t like—but pure, literally incredible, experience.
THE STRANGER CAME over and crouched in front of me, next to the ancestor’s headstone.
They asked if I was on any substances they should be aware of. I informed them I was stone-cold sober. I said that I wanted them to help—for someone, for the love of every holy fucking thing, to finally help—by sitting behind me.
I watch porn that contains this configuration. Or, I have watched it, in periods when I was watching more porn: A person with the parts I was born with sits in front of a person with the parts this stranger was born with. The presumed female is between the presumed male’s legs. “Her” legs are spread. “He” (I don’t know these people!) is rubbing her off.
The stranger unzipped their long, puffy coat, revealing that they wore nothing underneath. I tell myself that they had to do this to get their legs around me. If they had asked, Are you comfortable if I expose and press my bare genitals even nonsexually against your body or would you rather I keep on this giant coat?, I would have preferred the giant coat. But I didn’t say anything. I felt like I couldn’t make additional requests of someone who was already offering more than I was used to.
They got their body against mine. Chest against my back, straddle of their legs outside mine—like I’ve searched Pornhub for a hundred times. My parts aren’t like those parts anymore. But the memory lingers in my tissues: figure behind me, like a protector and pleaser. Instead, a father and torturer.
Neither the stranger nor I were hard. This pose, finally, was not sexual. I opened my body up, though not obligatorily and not to them. It was to the sky above us. The kind of emotional and spiritual work I do isn’t easy to explain. But they tuned into it, wordlessly, breathing with me. Moving with me as I swirled my torso lightly.
They stroked my legs. They ran their hands up from my knees—stopping, suddenly, when they reached the scar on my right upper thigh. I felt how they were shocked for a moment, before they continued on touching and breathing with me.
“Ooooh,” they said, this total stranger. Not because I’m sexy. Not because of sex. Because they could feel how much energy I was moving and channeling, letting through and letting go of so much pain around abuse and death and transness and queerness. Mine. The universality of them.
“You’re so generous,” they said. “You’re soooo generous.”
It turned out they were an energy healer. They could feel the size and scope of what I was processing, and I could feel them feel it. And for once in my life, doing a special thing I do and have done so often, someone had my back.
“It can be so lonely,” they said, as I collapsed back against them in tears, “to vibrate this high.”
IN 2017, BEFORE I started medically transitioning—but after I realized I needed to—I had a vision. Those late-fall days, alone in my Oregon apartment after I threw out my second husband, I would wake up, journal, touch myself, and cry for hours, desperately trying to find myself among the persona and portfolio I’d constructed. One of those mornings, masturbating while knowing that my body was about to change—but unable to know exactly how—I glimpsed a future where a male-presenting person, long brown hair pulled back, put their face between my legs.
Not like all the people who had done it, all the times before. But a person who was able to see who I was.
ULTIMATELY, THE STRANGER couldn’t stick it out.
They guided me to wrap up my processing. I wasn’t ready, and it was well before I would normally stop. They were going to leave, they said.
Given what we’d just shared, I felt shocked, and also dropped. The stranger asked if I felt like they were abandoning me.
OBVIOUSLY, YES! my insides screamed. I chewed on it, as I have every other feeling that felt unsafe or not-okay or too-much to express, ever. I swallowed the bulk of it.
“Maybe not that you are,” I responded, “but that everyone will.”
And so, they stayed. Long enough that we got up and walked out of the Ancestors’ Circle together. It wasn’t until we headed back toward my tent to get some water that they asked, asking if it was okay to ask, about the scar they’d touched on my thigh.
“Oh, that’s the part my penis is made from,” I said. I saw them try to work out what I could possibly mean, and I understood then that they didn’t understand: “I’m trans.” They’d run their hands over my bulge multiple times—unsexually—and was shocked that the thick warmth they’d felt beneath my underwear wasn’t cis.
When I told them I had both a penis and a vagina, they were more shocked than before.
“I didn’t know such a thing was possible,” they said. And so, I asked the stranger if they wanted to see.
I OFFER TO show my dick to transmasculine friends; another transmasculine person did it for me and changed my life. (“It changed my life,” another transmasculine person said, in turn, to me.) But it’s another level of offering—of exposing—to show the perfect, perfectly impossible integration of my vulva underneath.
I’ve shown it to lovers. But I thought this stranger might have a more mystical appreciation.
I pulled down my thin, black underwear, pulling myself out as the sun started to come up.
They dropped to their knees. “Can I kiss it?” they asked. I said yes.
They took me into their mouth like a sacrament. Not deep. Not trying to complete the standard B.J. actions or outcomes—not in the ways I’ve been taken in before.
I was stunned, they told me later, on a plethora of realms. The only sensible thing to do was to worship.
I’ve given lots of sacramental blow jobs. To a husband with a cis penis; to a boyfriend with a trans one. In my ex-husband’s case, I took him in like a slow dance. The intention was still climax, but I lay all the way down and swirled him absent any technique, moving him around intuitively, an act of communion with his penis. It lasted a long time, and we both felt our dark bedroom get thick with magic.
“What was THAT?” he asked after he came, panting.
My ex-boyfriend, I’d been advised by the moon ↓, was my teacher, and I loved him more acceptingly than I’d ever loved a lover. Though we had less in common than I’d had with any of them, and he objectively had more needs ↓↓, I did not presume (FOR ONCE) that I could or would ever change him. I loved him exactly as he was, not as he might be later. And every time I took him into my mouth, I did so as an act of pure devotion, pouring love and respect into his tender, sacred parts.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
“I can feel you pouring love into me,” he said, perceiving it precisely.
The stranger in the woods on their knees before me was a male-presenting person with their long brown hair pulled back. They held my penis in their hand like a miracle. They opened their lips softly, tongue-kissed: reverence. Brief, like Communion. I saw them, looking like the vision I’d had seven years prior, and then I looked up and away, shaking my head in disbelief. I could only take in so much of them taking me in.
LATER, THE STRANGER told me that when we had been sitting together in front of the gravestone, my back against them, them backing me up, my body shook with soul work, I had worn them out. That’s why they told me to wrap it up and said they were leaving. But before that, for a fleeting moment, I had felt, clearly and for the first time:
This is what love feels like.
To me.
To other people, it feels like something else. Love is like oral that way—different people need different things. For years, I had a partner who wanted to be gone down on in a way I obliged but didn’t understand, at all. I had an ex who outright said that love was starting fights; I’ve had others who wanted a mommy. I learned in the Ancestors’ Circle how love to me is backup. Is someone really being able to support me in what I do.
I long accepted less than what I wanted and needed because a) I had been doing it forever in my nuclear family and/so b) I didn’t believe I could get it. That it existed for me in the world. But a stranger did it, if briefly. And if turning a sacramental moment into a nonconsensual one by ending their communion with my penis by then, without permission, running their tongue across my vulva.
Here is what I want: I want to be honored, in all the magnificent specificity that entails. I want to be held and supported as much as I need by people who can actually provide it. I want to be touched only and exactly like I want to be. It’s time to make as many additional requests as necessary.
I’m demanding love and oral the way I give them.
My friends right now give love that is so, so good. I’m the best I’ve ever been at giving it to myself, too, wrapping myself in words and feelings of self-adoration I long sought from others. I’m not going to have sex unless it’s the way I really want. “I know what I’m looking for,” I told my wise friend Riviera the other day. Finding that standard feels daunting—like a big part of the reason I’ve accepted so much less. But as Riviera reminded me, it’s the knowing what I need itself that took this much of my lifetime.
“Well,” she said, “that’s the hardest part.”
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
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