Content warning: This article briefly discusses predatory behaviour in online dating spaces.

My Queer Fairy Godmother came in the form of a short, red-headed woman with a thick Sheffield accent. She was a proud northerner: rough as guts from the outside, not because she wanted to be, but as a necessity of working in a male-dominant business.

As a lost and inexperienced queer boy in London, I hadn’t realised just how much I needed a Queer Fairy Godmother until I met her. I had no idea the power there was in having an older gay metaphorically wrap you up in a warm blanket and genuinely be interested in seeing you spread your queer little wings.

Charlie was her name. She was the general manager at the pub where I worked on Broadway Market in east London. She had been dealing with homophobia and misogyny her whole life working in pubs across England, surrounded by drunken bigots in front of the bar, and behind it, who would whisper slurs behind her back at every chance they got.

Image by: Karollyne Videira Hubert

As I was one of the only young queer people behind the bar, Charlie offered me a lot of wisdom. One of her philosophies that has stuck with me is that shame can be the most powerful emotion as a queer person.

Shame has followed me ever since I became aware that my sexuality didn’t seem to align with most of my friends at school, or with what I was taught by teachers and what I saw and heard in films and music. Shame has been there at every turn. For some people, this shame may disappear as they grow up and ‘come out’, but for others, it intensifies.

For me, shame has recently centred around my high libido.

I’ve always felt like an ultra-horny person. This is a proper rollercoaster of emotions sometimes, especially in the male-dominant queer universe I’ve found myself in, which is such a hyper-sexualised demographic already.

Sometimes, I feel like my hormones have more control than my brain, heart and soul. My ‘horny self’ feels vastly different to my day-to-day self. My high libido contributes to a dichotomy of excitement and peril.

When I ‘came out’, I was relatively late to the game, and I dove headfirst deep into the world of tops, bottoms, verses, bears, subs, doms, otters, leather daddies, twinks, twunks and jocks (I never realised just how much queer people love their labels!). This was exciting in many ways, and I met some proper gentlemen along the way to explore my sexuality with.

But to come into the gay dating scene is to realise that it’s an environment where many people simply have an itch to scratch and are looking for someone who will scratch it, and that’s it. Done. Goodbye.

While one-night stands and hookups can be fun, they can become significantly lonely and insecurity-inducing at times.

You can also meet some absolute baddies (and not the sexy kind): anything from your unsolicited nude senders, love bombers, ghosters and straight-up body shamers. Worse still, there’s the stalkers, hate criminals and sexual predators. I myself haven’t had runs-in with this cohort, thankfully.

It can be a dangerous environment, especially as an ultra-horny person seeking safe, pleasurable encounters.

I can scroll on Grindr for hours like a zombie just waiting for a boost of serotonin when some random man says hey or responds to my message. It’s like I’m in a trance, frozen and stuck in this loop of chasing attention from strangers – desperate for proof that there’s an attractive man out there who likes my body how it is, who wants me right then and there.

Sometimes, sex is all I can think about, and my hormones turn me into a version of myself I don’t want to be: “a monkey”, as one of my friends calls me when I get like this. My animal instinct takes hold, and all I want is those unknown faceless bodies on my screen to do things to me, and me to them. I’m willing to drop everything for a hookup – take a train across the city at night, or meet someone in public.

I don’t like it when this happens. I feel out of control: desperate, sick, disgusting, perverted, harmful, ugly, pitiful, pathetic, shameful. My inner thoughts play these words on loop. I feel like a bad person, and I worry that I am the only one who feels this way.

Like a drug, that boost of serotonin you get when you seek out and receive validation from a person of interest is addicting. It’s easy to be pulled into this loop and think that physical attraction is the main form of attraction, especially in the cis male queer universe that puts so much emphasis on physique.

When I’m stuck in this headspace, I must remind myself that I am in control. My body is a vessel, and I have autonomy over it. I’ve found that the more I talk about this with my nearest and dearest, the more I realise just how common it is – that most people have these feelings sometimes, where they are so horny it hurts.

There shouldn’t be shame in that.

When I left London a year ago, my Queer Fairy Godmother gave me The Wizard of Oz book. She said it’s the gay bible. Back in the day, the term “friend of Dorothy” was a code for being gay when it wasn’t so readily accepted.

She said to keep reminding myself that being queer is an adventure, and there’s a whole lot of wonderfully weird and wacky people to meet and join you on your way.

I’m still untangling my own relationship to casual sex, and my feelings of internalised shame. But to be queer is to feel proud in belonging to a community that actively resists what intimacy and romance should look like, how it should start, grow and progress.

To be queer is to deconstruct the misconceptions thrust upon us in the mainstream, which dictate that traditional monogamous dynamics are the guiding light for healthy and flourishing relationships.

Queer people move through unknown territory. This can be frightening, but it’s mainly exhilarating. After all, there’s so much joy to be found in feeling so alive in your sexuality.

If this story has brought up any issues that you want to talk about, please reach out for support:

• Say It Out Loud has a list of the LGBTIQ community-controlled services for each Australian state/territory. The organisation encourages LGBTQ+ communities to have healthy relationships, get help for unhealthy relationships, and support their friends.
• QLife is the national LGBTIQ peer-support telephone service for people wanting to talk about issues including sexuality, identity, gender, bodies, feelings or relationships.
• For Victorian residents, Rainbow Door is a specialist LGBTIQA+ helpline providing information, support and referral to those experiencing a range of issues including family and intimate partner violence, relationship issues and sexual assault.
• There is also a growing list of mainstream domestic and family violence services, like 1800 RESPECT, that are committed to LGBTIQ inclusion.

You are never alone.