I was racing through my own erotic life.
I want to tell you something I've never really said out loud before.
For a long time, my sexuality had a kind of speed to it. A narrowness. Like I'd built this very specific internal checklist — if someone touches me like this, if they look like that, if there's enough intensity in the air — then I'll feel something. Then it counts.
And I got very good at chasing that intensity. I knew how to find it, how to build it, how to keep it going. What I didn't notice — for years — was that I was basically racing through my own erotic life. Using intensity as a shortcut to feeling. And anything that didn't deliver that hit fast enough? I'd check out. Start questioning. Am I even attracted to this person? Was I ever?
It happened in hookups. It happened in relationships too. The more safe and loving things became with someone, the more the intensity would fade — and I'd mistake that fading for a sign that something was wrong. With them. With us. With me.
It took me a while to understand what was actually happening. I wasn't losing attraction. I was just refusing to slow down enough to feel something more real.
Slowing down, it turns out, is one of the most radical things a queer man can do.
Not slow as in passive. Not slow as in less. Slow as in: actually feeling what's happening, rather than performing your way through it.
I had a moment with a lover recently that I keep coming back to. We were in it — we both knew the moves, we knew what would turn each other on, we were doing all the right things. And we stopped. We looked at each other and both admitted: we're not really here. We're in our performance. We're showing off how well we can do this.
So we started again. Slower. More honestly. More vulnerably than either of us expected.
It was edgy as fuck. Because actually being present means actually being seen. And that's a different kind of risk than physical intimacy.
But it was deeper and more beautiful than anything we'd experienced before together.
What I'm learning — and what I want to share — is this:
When I stopped racing toward intensity and started actually paying attention, my whole erotic life opened up. I connected with people I might have written off. I discovered parts of myself that I'd bypassed for years. My hookups got better. My relationships got better. And somewhere in all of it, I started to feel less needy around sex — because I was actually being fed by it.
If any of this lands for you — if sex often leaves you wanting more rather than truly satisfied, if you find yourself checking out mid-encounter even with people you genuinely find hot, if intimacy and sex feel like they happen in different rooms of your life — then you already know what I'm talking about. And you already know there's something more available. You just haven't had the space to find it yet.