Confessions of a Power Bottom
Accepting my identity as a power bottom, rather than a submissive one, has meant recalibrating how I think about sex, gender, and pleasure.
A couple of months ago, I published an essay here on Medium about what I’d learned about teaching my naïve straight friends about gay sex, about how that conversation forced me to confront my own unconscious ambivalence about my masculinity and my preference for being a bottom. I was truly blown away by the positive reception that the piece received. So many people were brave enough to share their own stories about how they related to their sexualities and their bodies. I was and am humbled by the welcome embrace of such frank discussion of gay sex, and it was a powerful reminder of the positive things that can come from publishing one’s thoughts on the internet. Sometimes, it seems, online discourse can actually be a social good rather than a fast-moving disaster.
In the time since I published that essay, I’ve had more time to think about how my behavior in the bedroom shapes the way that I relate to the world, in particular how an embrace of being the penetrated partner in sex requires a certain vulnerability, a yielding up of control to another man. Today, I want to, ahem, drill down, if you will, and talk a little more about another…
