I Lost My Virginity to a Straight Boy

I was 19 when I first had full-on sex with another man. I was at college, living in dorms, and the experience—aside from the usual horrifying awkwardness and somewhat spontaneity of the occasion—was completely and utterly unremarkable aside from one thing: the guy I slept with identified as straight.

The whole thing went down near the end of my freshman year at a party, at which people from the whole dorm floor were drunk and celebrating, carelessly streaming in and out of each other’s rooms, following the various different pop songs until one room took their fancy. I can remember, although I'd had some drinks, sitting alone in my friend’s room on a single bed, the mattress overly springy and with a coarse plastic coating, attempting to stream a song over our dorm’s spotty Internet connection.

It was late (or early, depending on your outlook on the world) when I was joined by the boy who was living in the room next to mine, way back on the other side of the building. He was clearly intoxicated, but it was a party after all and who was I, quite drunk myself, to judge. The minutiae of exactly how things developed from us being together in that room to us having slightly unsuccessful sex in a bathroom in a different corridor have since escaped me. All I know is that one moment we were talking and the next minute, well... we weren’t. I didn’t tell him that I’d never had sex with someone before; instead, saturated with vodka and inflated by nerves, I was swept up in the motions.

Before that night, I had hardly been a nun. When I was a teenager, I was precocious and restless. As the only out young gay kid at my school, I took the advancement of my sexual experiences into my own hands and I did what we all do: I bought a fake ID and hit the gay clubs. Out on the scene I had thrilling and, now looking back, precarious hook ups with guys, going far but never all the way. I know now as LGBTQ people we can define exactly what constitutes sex for ourselves, but when you’re young and your only sex education comes in the shape of illegally downloaded Sean Cody videos, penetration seems like the end all be all.

Still, as I grew into my late-teens, venues started to crack down harder on underage drinking, and it soon became increasingly difficult to go and hook up with guys much older than myself. I felt, in my increasingly anxious and deflated state, that I was being left behind. My first year at college, apart from being grueling mentally, was hardly a sexual smorgasbord of one-night-stands and hook-ups. Instead, I reverted to my teenage years, pining after straight boys who I knew I had no chance in hell with... until that night.

I’d love to say that I felt empowered by fucking my first guy, but the whole experience left a lot to be desired. While I knew it wouldn’t be like a gay college erotica I’d read on Nifty.org (gay canon, really), I rather naively wasn’t expecting the fall out. The boy told his then-girlfriend (who I knew about), saying I had come on to him but that nothing had really happened. Although one thing I can vividly remember was that it was quite literally the other way around, the visceral shock of being somewhat shoved back in the closet and denied the celebratory expungement of my virginity was palpable.

For the next year, we’d hook-up on and off, usually at 3 a.m. after we’d been out partying. We’d meet surreptitiously in dark and make out in the cold British weather on a park bench before venturing back to his place to have sex. And while at the beginning I felt like I had the upper hand in the situation—I was the one who was out and comfortable in my sexuality, right?—after each time we met became more secretive and more dirty, I began to feel secretive, dirty, and most of all shameful. I’m not sure whether I really fell for the guy or not, but I do know that at the end of it he was just using me to get off.

I never learned whether the boy I lost my virginity to was struggling with his sexuality. I think, when I look back now and occasionally find myself tumbling through his Facebook page, that he wasn’t. I believe it was just sex, or at least that’s what I have tell myself now to avoid slipping into a memory induced k-hole. I realize I fell into that old gay adage of placing my feelings on a person who, for whatever reason, was never going to invest them back in me. Worst of all, though, the shame attached to the memories of those first times marred how I would approach sex for years.

It was listening to Years & Years’ new song “Sanctify,” and seeing the band’s out gay singer Olly Alexander talk about how the song was inspired his sexual trysts with straight men, that I realized that these feelings are way more common than people let on. Sure, I know all about gay guys having sex with straight guys, but it felt reassuring to see him describe the “saint and sinner role” he embodied during those experiences, and to hear the uncertainty and melancholy weaved into the song.

More than anything though, was the repeated lyrical mantra of “I won’t be ashamed.” Because as queer people, we’re buried in lifetime’s worth of shame so vivid and searing that oftentimes it’s crippling. Bursting through that shame is our badge of honor, our beautifully united experience. And maybe, like the song says, that does sanctify our sex lives and makes us just a little bit holy.