Member-only story
The first time I heard someone refer to themselves as a top or a bottom, I had just come out of the closet. I went from having zero friends in the LGBTQ community to being surrounded by my new girlfriend’s friends, all of whom were members of the alphabet mafia. The experience was a whirlwind and sometimes overwhelming.
Jessica and her friends had met at college five or more years before. They all came out in college, some in high school, and were confident and knowledgeable in ways that I wasn’t as a baby gay. But they included me as best they could, and this included trying to bring me up to speed on everything they felt I needed to know as a newly out person.
Frequently, we would find ourselves out drinking on a weeknight, when the bars aren’t that loud, and they would start quizzing me. Having me guess what different terms meant or just explaining all the queer things to me.
The one that I remember the most because it made me, a very sheltered girl from southern Iowa, blush, was finding out what the terms top and bottom meant. I came from a town and a school that had almost zero diversity. Then I went to a state university that was only an hour away from where I grew up, and while it was a bit more diverse, I was still pretty sheltered. The most compromising thing…