Many heterosexual Irish teens gradually work their way up the ladder of sexual experience to the long awaited S-E-X before secondary school comes to a close. This can take place over the space of years, maybe with an array of “lovers” to experiment with. The same space is not always afforded to those in the LGBTQ+ community. As it stands now, the average age to come out in Ireland is 21. Meanwhile, perhaps they’ve had the odd, awkward, fumbling encounter with the opposite sex, just to try it. Maybe peer pressure got the better of them. Or perhaps they reluctantly sat by the wayside, biding their time, always a spectator and never the main event.
A gay friend of mine told me how it felt to watch his friends from the sidelines: “I remember in second year when I was boarding, a couple of my classmates started to – y’know [snog] up in the classroom. That was when I kind of started thinking: I’m starting to miss out. [And in] the junior disco, anybody and everybody, except us for the most part, at least could get with people. It was just a matter of your friends asking others [if they’d shift you]. That was hard.”
Those who come out late are plunged into a world where sex is not just on the menu, it’s the main event. My friend feels that having sex for the first time now would be much easier if he’d gone at the same pace as his straight peers, “because, back then no-one is really thinking about going the full nine yards or whatever. It was just kind of about shifting. There was not too high of an expectation. You didn’t have to worry about how far you were going to take it or how far they wanted to take it.” Another gay friend of mine lost her virginity about a year ago, when she was seventeen. When I asked her whether she felt ready, she said “When I did it for the first time, I genuinely didn’t even register what I was doing properly, if I’m honest… It wasn’t until after that I was just kind of like, ‘oh shit, right. I just did that.’ So yeah, I was ready, thankfully.”
As someone who thought she was bi for years, I’ve had experiences with both men and women, but due to the lack of openly gay lassies in small town areas (and internal confusion) I usually settled for a guy. My first time with a guy was awkward, unsatisfying (sorry if you’re reading this), and short lived. At least it wasn’t absolutely terrifying. By that time, we had gotten kissing down (well, I had), and the other bases had been covered in the run up, meaning it felt more like the next step forward, and less like an olympic pole-vault to the finish. Now fast forward a few years, and here I am, aware that guys are not my cup of tea, and never were, and faced with the big bad college world of sex, with very little experience with women at all.
Many will argue that I’ve already lost my virginity – well, it sure doesn’t feel like it. In college, it seems like everyone has been having sex for years, judging by the number of free condoms they are stuffing in their pockets, courtesy of the student union. Meanwhile, it seems like my guy friend and I are far behind, in the group named stragglers. Even apart from inexperience, it’s more daunting to get with a woman, than it ever was to get with a man, because this is what I really want; for me, this is what it’s all about.
Illustration by Leonard Buckley.
