A Message to Gay Sluts and Radicals on the Cusp of a New Revolution

Robert Owen Hawk
Sep 6, 2018 · 9 min read

For a long time gay sexual culture was largely underground — found in the public parks, bars, nightclubs, and darkened alleyways of crime-ridden industrialized cities. This is no longer true. The gay community has moved from being a highly repressed and semi-legal underground to a mostly accepted subculture of American society, at least in urban areas. As part of this process, gay sexual culture has become increasingly seen as a market for commercial exploitation. Porn, clothing, and other lifestyle products have all carved out status as premier brands. Cruises, circuit parties, and gay destination travel bring in millions around the globe. Apps like Grindr and Scruff that offer “social networking” are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

This strikes me as an odd destiny for a community born of an act of rebellion. The culture of the ’70s that sought sexual liberation and birthed what we now know as the gay community was inspired by leftist politics and the Stonewall riots. Back then, gay folks were often critics of power structures that excluded and policed them. The community they sought was one that not only accepted their gayness but also had revolutionary potential. Celebrations of individuality, self-determination, and creative expression were themes of the dancehalls of Harlem and queer artists working in pre-gentrified New York City.

Much of this community and the people who made it up were destroyed in the 80’s and 90’s by the AIDS epidemic. While their influence on our present day culture has not totally gone away, much of modern gay life feels more like an exercise in consumer capitalism than any kind of liberation. What brand of gay are you? I’m a bear! We construct whole identities for ourselves based on these brands, and then seek to associate ourselves with particular products and attitudes in order to communicate to other gays who we are and what we are into.

Sometimes this pokemonization of gay life seems cute and harmless, other times it strikes me as terrifying sign of deep economic colonization of our sense of self.

The influence of decades of assimilation has not only been to construct our sexuality around imitations of heterosexual scripts (marriage, monogamy), but also to recreate capitalist structures within our sexual culture.

While it’s great that we have used our economic power to sustain a thriving community, the commercialization of gay sexual culture has not come without costs. Gone are the socialist-inspired notions of utopia and free love. In their place, we have an intense stratification of within a social hierarchy based on the commercial appeal of our bodies.

How we are ordered in this social hierarchy can have effects and consequences that reverberate through our whole life stories and psyches. That this social hierarchy happens to reflect many of the dominant paradigms of attractiveness in the straight world, such as white supremacy and hyper-masculinity, is an observation not lost on anyone paying attention.

I was not popular in High School. I was a quirky outsider prone to social awkwardness and anxiety. When I found the gay community everything changed. No longer was my place in the social order derived from the awkwardness of my personality and somewhat bumbling social skills, it was now derived entirely on my looks. As a 16 year old white boy who had been playing tennis every day since age 6, I had a lean athletic body. I was instantly popular. I went from being the social outcast to one of the cool kids. My whole sense of self and self worth changed overnight based on nothing other than that fact that my body happened to reflect a dominant idea of hotness and as such I was afforded a huge amount of sexual currency within the gay community.

In the gay community, sexual currency means privilege. It means people will pay attention to you, follow your social media, care about what you have to say. It also means that you will occupy a specific place in the imaginations, fantasies, and consciousness of other gay men.

Just as we come to imagine that the richest people have the greatest happiness, we imagine that the hottest guys have the best sex — that by virtue of them being at the apex of the sexual economy, they have more sexual pleasure. Our Instagram and Facebook feeds are full of guys showing their feathers in displays of physical hotness and opulence. #Blessed They live their “best lives” by attaining physical perfection and economic privilege. We imagine that by so doing they not only have the most sex, but the best sex. Likewise, we imagine that those at the bottom of the ladder are nearly incapable of giving or receiving pleasure.

This is, of course, all bullshit.

Waiting at the top of the hierarchy is not more amazing sex, just more work to maintain your body, greater insecurity, and fear of losing status and privilege. This is because, unlike sexual currency, sexual pleasure is a subjective and temporary experience that cannot be commodified. Sure, you can buy sex, but the aspect of it that’s pleasurable must be created in the act of sex itself. It is experiential — the product of human connection. A good sex worker can give you the experience of sexual pleasure, but you can’t hold onto it or possess it, it is only to be experienced temporarily.

Some of the best sex I ever had was in sex clubs where I would end up playing with guys that I would not have met if I had run across their profile on an app. Often these experiences were aided by darkness and anonymity, where I was only able to perceive my sensual feelings. Because I was not able to judge these guys, to typecast them into their social status, I was able to have sexual experiences outside the bounds of the sexual economy, free of its limitations.

I was also able to see for myself that the whole idea of sexual pleasure as a resource that can be concentrated at the top of social order was a lie. Seeing sexual pleasure as an abundant resource, one that could be found and experienced anywhere, is a truth that I came upon through my sexual rebellion, a result of my desire to resist assimilation.

This is one of the things that most troubles me as the sexual culture of public sex has faded: It provided a means of meeting other men through which you could at least feel their vibe, their presence in the material world, or use the anonymity to let go of inhibitions. It was possible to feel a connection based on something other than a virtual representation of their body. As this world has been assimilated by apps, these experiences have become less and less possible.

Apps present a new, terrible darkness for gay people.

What app culture has done is to take the experience of public sex and cruising, long a pivotal and central part of gay life, and intensify the degree to which it is dominated by sexual hierarchy. As part of the need to pass the censors at the iTunes store, our sex apps must pretend not to be sex apps. Nope, they are social networking tools. Instead of openly and honestly marketing sexual experiences, these apps encourage us to market ourselves, to present our bodies as products for each other’s sexual consumption.

We are encouraged to seek sexual excitement and experience as a consumptive process — we are told to “get” hot guys, to “Man Hunt.”

Along with social media like Instagram and Twitter, these apps have caused sex-seeking and status-seeking behaviors to merge. If the hot guy on the app wants to fuck us, we are hot, and thus we have the same value. If the pic we post on our profile gets a lot of likes and responses, then we take that as confirmation of our social standing.

I can’t help wondering how much of our app use isn’t even about sex at all, but just the need to confirm or fight for status. It explains why so many people ghost, why once they have you wanting to fuck them, they vanish. They never really wanted to fuck, they just wanted to know they were hot enough to get you.

The same processes are part of catfishing.

For a long time there was a guy in NYC using my photos to trick these younger guys into having whole virtual relationships with him. He pretended to be a successful businessman looking for a boy to spoil. Occasionally, these boys would find my actual social media profiles and message me as if I were this guy. I had to break it to them I was not, that this guy was fake, that he was using my photos to live out an elaborate status fantasy in which he was a hot, successful man at the apex of the gay hierarchy. It was never about sex — the boys were props in his fantasy of status, pawns in his lust for sexual currency, if only virtually.

In the half century since the Stonewall Riots we have moved out of the darkness of the public parks and baths and into a new darkness of app culture, an environment rife with toxicity, phoniness, and exclusionary attitudes that cause many men to suffer and feel unwelcome in their own community.

Far from being a refuge for gay men to seek comfort and healing after the painful experience of life in the closet, our community encourages us to view each other as sexual competitors playing a game of who can get the most attention, the most followers, the hottest bodies..

Was this the goal of the Stonewall Riots?

Yet our community still contains many liberated notions left over from the years as an underground subculture. We sexualize our bodies and embrace sluttiness in interesting and wonderful ways. We have not one but many standards of beauty. The availability of PREP and scientific acknowledgement of U = U allows us to experiment sexually without fear of HIV transmission.

But if your personal philosophy of sexual revolution starts and end with “I can do what I want don’t judge me,” your missing much of the point. We need to do more than justify our right to have abundant sexual experiences, we need to tie our personal philosophies of sexual liberation to a critique of systems of power.

We should be more than ambassadors for underwear, we should be ambassadors for a better way of life — one that is less scripted in norms and traditions, and challenges exclusionary attitudes and commercialization of our culture.

It’s great we have PREP but we also need Medicare for All, or else the availability of it will fall along lines of class division. It’s great that we have gay friendly brands and products, but we more than that. We are a people with a rich and powerful history as activists and agents of change. We must also never forget that without movements for racial justice and equality we would not have a movement for gay liberation and equality. Black Lives Matter, Act Up, Silence = Death is the same fucking fight and we need to get with the program.

We are a community born from rebellion in country born from revolution.

Together, we stand at historical moment rich with social unrest, government corruption, and a sexual culture bursting with newfound energy after decades of repression from HIV / AIDS. Yet we are backsliding politically. There is a significant chance that abortion will become illegal in this country again, that gay marriage will be rolled back to the states. It’s easy to sit back, enjoy the abundance of sex, cute jock straps, and watch the social unrest from the beaches while we scroll through gay twitter. But commercialization and sexual escapism are part of pacification. These tools that connect us also can work to repress us.

So my message to my fellow gay sluts and radicals is this: live your best gay lives. Have all the sex you want — take all the cock, loads, fists that your merry gay holes can take. But do not get caught sleeping on this revolutionary moment — be ready to take the abundant, rebellious energy of sexual revolution and channel it into political rebellion, if needs be.

That is the legacy of our community.


Originally published at schoolofthot.com on September 6, 2018.

Robert Owen Hawk

Written by

Former sex worker and adult industry entrepreneur.

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