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  • My FirstsOn Gaysian Sexual Ethics
  • James McMaster (bio)

They say you never forget your first love. There's a reason for that. When you first find yourself taken with another you're taken by surprise. So, when you fall for them you free-fall and usually to the bottom of adolescence's hormonal wishing well. You don't go in guarded because you don't know that falling in love is a thing to guard against, at least not at first. And this is especially true when you're queer: no one tells you that the feelings you feel for your best friend might be more than the feelings of friendship. You have to parse the pain to figure that out, and the trauma of this first romantic drama will coauthor your love stories for the rest of your life. What I'm saying is: you never forget your first love because, in a manner of speaking, and if you're lucky, your first love is also your first nonconsensual sensual relation. Mine was, and it wasn't my last either.

What you're reading is my attempt to grapple with this fact in the form of what Andrea Long Chu has called a "coincidence report."1 Unlike an incident report, which is a series of putative facts legitimated by the cops after a crime, the genre of the coincidence report attempts to cobble together, aesthetically and affectively, an event—in this case, events—whose ontological status is unstable even for those who experienced it. Was that person being racist to me, or was I just being oversensitive? Was the kiss we shared ethical? Was the sex we had? I'm not talking about differences of opinion between two parties involved in an encounter; I'm talking about sincere uncertainty. Maybe by the end of this report we'll be closer to knowing the difference. [End Page 51]

I won't tell you the name of my first love but I will tell you these three things: he was my best friend, he insisted he was straight, and the way I loved him hurt like nothing in my life has hurt since. Teenager that I was, though, I didn't know I'd fallen for him at the time—not for certain. What I knew was that my desires were at war with each other. On one side, the desire to be normal made its last stand from a foxhole dug by the promises of state recognition, family acceptance, biological children, and privilege, pure and simple—being Asian in America was hard enough already, I thought. On the other side of the war, the stronger side, the desire to touch and to be touched by this beautiful boy marched unstoppably over the battlegrounds of my mind. It is this psychic strife that fills my head whenever I read Chu talking about desire like it's something "childlike and chary of government."2 "Most desire is nonconsensual," she writes, "most desires aren't desired."3

Tell me about it. One autumn day, the beginning of the end for my first love and me, we sat in his parents' driveway, my car providing our only privacy. He spoke first: "What do you need from me?" My engine was running, the heat was on. A moment passed; it felt long. Then I said, "I need you to kiss me." If I'm being honest, dear reader, I didn't need him to kiss me to know how I felt, I wanted him to kiss me to know how that felt. A question for my fellow former closet cases, those who know what it is to search a not-quite-queer body for answers about ourselves: what is the difference between experimentation and instrumentalization? Even then I knew that I was using this boy the way a mountain climber—exhausted and exploring unknown, harrowing heights—might use a rope to pull themself to a new plateau. He was my lifeline and I loved him, but he was also a means to an end. And what do I owe him for that? My gratitude? An apology? Something more severe?

After a long pause we...

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