Risk and the erotic

Or, gay men have orgies while queer women have call outs

There have been many failed attempts to create a cruising culture or hook up app for queer women that is equivalent to the cruising and grindr culture of gay men. Those attempts have failed for a lot of reasons, in part because queer women’s sexuality tends to be different than gay men’s sexuality (and there is nothing wrong with that difference). But there is a lot of lamenting on the part of queer women (and other queers) that we don’t have the same rich and varied sexual cultural spaces that gay men have access to. We have a tendency to blame gay men for this, citing them as the ‘most privileged’ queers. Calling gay men ‘privileged’ is absurd to me for a lot of reasons, but here I would like to invite consideration that the reason gay men have these rich and varied sexual cultural spaces is because they fight for them. Overt, explicit sexuality is important to gay men and they refuse to surrender that to homophobes. Importantly, they also have a culture of intense sexual responsibility, meaning that they embrace the risks and dangers involved in sexuality. Gay men practice harm reduction but don’t see risk and danger as reasons to avoid overt, explicit sexuality, and they don’t find 100% safety possible or desirable.