Sex: First time for everything

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WORDS Matthew Mulligan

I don’t know when I “lost” my virginity. I don’t know whether it was during my first kiss in the rain, my first blowjob in a park or my first frantic fuck that definitely didn’t feel like sex. If I’d had sex with girls before having sex with guys, would my virginity have gone before I got close to a dick? Perhaps, as a gay man, that would have been the perfect definition of losing my virginity; brought to orgasm for the first time by a person I’m never going to be sexually attracted to. So many peoples’ first experiences are met with a jarring realisation that the only thing they’ve lost is a romanticised fiction.

In ye olde Ireland, a fair maiden was only considered as such if she had stayed away from the ballroom of romance and the wiles of men. Thus if her hymen wasn’t broken, she’d be considered untainted and “virginal”. As a man I have to ask myself whether I ever had those virginal qualities about me in the first place.

Men were never dressed up in white and presented as debutantes. The hysteria surrounding keeping women virgins until their wedding night was never something that applied to men, and as an extension of that, never applied to gay men either. Up until the late 20th century, gay men were used to living a secret life, engaging in what society considered to be sordid acts of sodomy. In today’s world, freed by the constraints of up-tight sexual expectations, straight couples are free to engage in anal sex, oral sex and any freaky shit they want to do. Gay men and women however are being brought more into a heteronormative fold, with the rise of marriage equality and the ability to live mostly open lives. With that comes a search for equivalence to heterosexual life, and indeed, notions of “virginity”.

I don’t think virginity has ever been a real concept in homosexual sex, because the notion is wholly centred on that age-old fascination with dicks in holes. In a typical lesbian relationship, neither woman has a dick. Their sex isn’t based around penetration. In a typical gay male relationship, fucking isn’t the centrepiece of every sexual interaction. The majority of gay men engage only in oral sex or masturbation. Even if penetration happens occasionally, if someone is able to bring another person to orgasm or be brought to orgasm by oral sex or masturbation, is that not sex? If the first time you engaged in sexual activity you just got a very good handjob and it made you orgasm, are you outside your rights to think of that as the moment you lost your “virginity”? Men, it may shock you to know, don’t have hymens. So if a woman is a virgin till her’s is broken, when does a gay man stop being one?

In the UK, an art student is planning to let art school “steal his virginity,” by engaging in sex in public for a performance art project. He hasn’t said whether he will or not, but because he’s openly gay, most people automatically assume that means he’ll be having anal sex in public. If he really wants to make a statement on virginity I’m hoping he gets a limp handjob, cums in two minutes and declares himself gloriously deflowered. If that’s not a beautifully human coming of age moment, I don’t know what is.

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