Where Did It Go?
A Touchpoint True Story About Exploring Your Gender
This story was originally told at the Touchpoint Town Hall in New York City in July 2018. You can listen to it on our podcast on iTunes.
I was at a party in some garage. A grungy little spot. Lots of string lights, speakers, glow sticks, and awfully mixed jungle juice. I was dancing with my friends. And that’s when I saw Sam.
He was this lanky little man, sleeveless shirt, bunch of bracelets and a sleeve tattoo. I just remember seeing this wonderful creature dancing in the corner, and I really liked how on point his cateye and glitter were.
I thought to myself, “Oh hey, you’re comfortable in your skin. I want to see more of it.”
I was feeling brave. I approached him.
We danced. He vogued. We totally meshed. You know that feeling, right? When you meet someone, you click so hard, and the chemistry is just fire? It was like that.
Hours later, we headed back to my place. We had some conversation, followed by some passionate, intense groping, which I’m pretty sure just looked like drunken fish gasping for breath.
Then, I pulled out a condom and we had the standard negotiation.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah!”
Through a hardcore session of making out, we aggressively stripped each other down, and made our way into my bedroom.
Looking at Sam’s naked body, I couldn’t help but feel a bit startled. Sam had a vagina.
I’m a big shouldered Dominican boy from ‘the hood’ that likes Disney princesses and Pokemon, so I’ve always thought of myself as pretty woke.
I have my preferences, yes, but I never thought of myself as biased or toxic. But in that moment, I could feel the most insensitive, judgmental side of me start to creep up. It was the voice inside my head.
“Abort! Run! Abandon ship!” That’s all I was thinking. But sitting there with Sam, his naked body so vulnerably laid before me, I couldn’t help but open my heart and wonder what he must have been experiencing.
“Where did it go?” I asked. They were the most honest words I could come up with in the moment. He laughed. And then, in his radiant, self-assured style, Sam told me his life story.
When Sam was born, it was decided that he was a girl.
After all, Sam had a vagina, ovaries, and all of the pieces that makes one a female. But in his head and heart, Sam was very much a boy. He had to discover it, as many trans people do, on a lonely journey through childhood.
“I always knew I liked guys,” he said. “Just in a gay way. I feel very much like a man.” he said.
As I listened to Sam speak, I couldn’t help but think of the times when I had to explain my sexuality to another person; moments where I had to help another human understand that I was born this way. I just never had to have that conversation with my pants off because whenever it’s gotten to that point, everybody in the equation had felt very much informed of where I was at.
But there was Sam, fully naked, fully exposed.
At that time in my life, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on what kind of person I was into. Of course there was always spectrum and variety of how that looked, but there was a small commonality, a constant feature. Dicks. I liked guys. Men. Dudes. Y’know, masculine, penis wielders and stuff.
That wasn’t Sam. But it felt like Sam.
We started kissing again.
We started groping again. The connection was intense. And then we had sex. Gay sex. In a very gay way. The way two men do.
