When I was in middle school, I wanted to have sex with my P.E. teacher. I’ll call him Jim. He had a mullet and a year-round tan, and he listened to the same radio station I did: 99.1 WHFS, the freeform indie station few of my friends even knew about. He was nice to us non-athletes. I remember his lips, I remember the snug shorts he wore, and I remember the one time I caught the slimmest glimpse of his royal blue briefs as we all sat on the ground with our legs spread wide, stretching our hamstrings.

I was the 9 jillionth teen to have a crush on their teacher. My crush is not unusual. That I wanted to act on my crush and shower with Jim, touching each other everywhere, I had the fantasy dozens of times—probably also not unusual. But that I look back on this and think it would have been nice if that could have happened, that feels not just unusual but dangerous.

I’ve written so many wrong versions of this post. Maybe I’ll never get it right.

I was 13/14 in those years; Jim was probably in his 30s. I wasn’t gay. I’ve written about this dozens of times, but I was so fully in denial that it never occurred to me that my fantasies of getting naked with him meant something about who I was, and if it did occur to me, late at night, before falling asleep, I took it as an error in my coding. Something I’d work on correcting someday soon. But what’s important for this post are those ages. I was 13 when I was Jim’s student, and Jim was in his 30s.

Every year we had scoliosis testing, which that year entailed each of us boys sitting in the school locker room and waiting for Jim to shout our last names from his office. We all sat in our school clothes for this, hip-to-hip on the benches in front of the lockers. When my name was called I got up and walked into Jim’s office. He sat behind his desk, reclined in his chair a little, with a clipboard in his hand.

I knew already to take off my shirt.

I stood there, scrawny as a salamander, and watched Jim look me over. “Turn around and bend over,” he said, and I turned around and bent over, then slowly came back up. I knew he was eyeing my spine. I knew he wasn’t looking anywhere else, but I imagined he was. In the nighttime fantasy, this is when he tells me to close the door, and then he starts teaching me helpful things about my stupid body.

I remember just wanting to hold him, and feel him hold me. I wanted to be given access to a grown man’s body, to be encouraged to explore it, and to be told this desire that burned through me every day wasn’t going to destroy my life. That’s all I wanted. Why couldn’t I have it?

Well first there’s age of consent laws, which aim to protect young people from the desires of some adults, which is to say they aim to protect what we value as the innocence of the people we deem to be children. (The sexual desires of those children, if they exist, are mostly irrelevant in the eyes of the law.) To be fair, AoC laws have also given girls more (but not much more) personal growth and agency before another man (historically) could ruin her life with marriage and children. (I’m showing my biases here, I know.)

Like many laws, AoC laws are arbitrary; we need as a society to decide when people are able to make rational and healthy decisions. Most (but not all) states have set this moment at one’s 18th birthday. Is this when it happens, that rational understanding? Did I know I was gay and feel ready for sex at 18? No. Maybe you were?

Maybe you even reached this date much sooner. Those of us unready to make our own healthy decisions (regarding sex or drinking or voting or whatever) at age 18, or 19 or 22, understand that we need to give up continued protections from the state for those of us who are ready. Which is to say: if you think 18 is too young an age to consent to sex with another adult, you are in the minority. And if you think that we should consider raising the age of consent, I think you might be hurting queer kids.

Earlier versions of this post had a lot more to say about Age of Consent laws that I’ll drop instead in a footnote.^[1] I began those versions ready to argue, ready to put forward an unpopular opinion that I felt everyone would get on board with if they could just think rationally about sex for once, but more and more I see that I have trouble thinking rationally, and I think it’s more useful here to just say what I felt and wanted. I’m less interested in arguing than in figuring out what would have been so bad about having sex with my teacher.

Consider how we think about underage kids having sex (with each other). Talk to any teen girl and she’ll tell you that the slut/stud double-standard is still alive: when a straight boy has sex he’s scored, when a straight girl has sex she’s a little ruined. This is thankfully changing every day, as girls are taught (though not in schools) that sex is theirs to own and explore.

What about when a gay kid has sex? They’re neither studs nor sluts. They used to be perverts, but now they’re heroes.

Queerness is more of an identity, or a set of commitments and allegiances, than it is a history of lived behavior (behold Jameela Jamil), but gayness, i.e. homosexuality, is nothing separate from the sex it wants. So when a gay kid has consensual same-sex sex, it’s always a triumph—even if the sex is rotten, and even if the gay kid regrets it afterward. The triumph lies in their courage to say yes to and go after everything (a) their body is telling them to get but (b) their society tells them it’s wrong to even want. More than coming out of any closet, that first-sex moment where (a) triumphs over (b) is like a queer’s bat mitzvah.

I bat mitzvah’d at 26. I would have loved to find my triumph earlier, but I didn’t have anyone to help me, and I didn’t have the courage to act on my own. I didn’t know a single gay person who saw me. If Jim showed interest, it’s hard for me to accept that showing me how and why to have gay sex would have somehow hurt me in my becoming.

A lot of things have changed for gay people in 30 years, online porn being one of them. Used to be gay boys had to be “brought out”—almost always by older people. Read the early novels of gay U.S. fiction and much is made of this feeling of getting initiated into a secret club. I know how this sounds. I don’t have the personal stories to illustrate how it wasn’t necessarily abusive, but trust me that I’ve heard from enough gay friends about the underage sex they had with older men to know it doesn’t innately hurt a person.

Today, what a gay person is, what gay sex can entail, and why gayness isn’t a flaw are all common knowledge among U.S. teens. Gay kids are coming out before I even knew what I wanted to be growing up. When they can find depictions of gay sex online, and when they can come together in queer student organizations to see and affirm each other, what use do they have of queers of an older generation? The idea of having your first sexual experience with such a man must seem at best useless, and at worst predatory.

Or maybe it’s hot, still, for some of them? I’m myself a teacher (of adults), so I’m very wary of how to write about this. I know I have zero interest in sex with younger men (behold my browser history’s glut of daddy & bear links as evidence), but I also know I was once a younger man, I was even once a boy, who really wanted sex with an older man. I know I keep asking the same question again and again, but what to do about such real desires?

One path is to look at this from a consent framework, which would argue I at 13 could not consent to sex with my teacher. I’m talking about consent as it’s been delineated in university Title IX offices—which offices are tasked with fixing the longstanding inequities between men and women on college campuses, and specifically the discrimination against women or exclusion practiced toward them.

What makes consent so attractive (and as I hope to show ultimately limiting) is how it seems (via the law, or alongside the law) to seek out the one true way, or some catch-all concept of what sex is and what consent entails, that will, once we all get on board, stop rape and abuse, and even stop regretted sex.

In other words: once we fix sex and get it right (via the consent paradigm), then people will be sexually safe, healthy, and free.

College consent paradigms are important steps that (most) schools have taken to try to stop college men from sexually assaulting women. Consent paradigms—i.e., any two (or more) bodies engaging each other for pleasure must both agree to do so before any one body can get pleasure^[2]—commit us all to using consent to correct or combat gender inequality and unfair power dynamics within a patriarchy. They are, then, useful when heterosexuals negotiate sex.

When gays have sex, that gender imbalance is gone, and with it go all the ideas about vulnerability and care that we bring to what the “two genders” signify in opposition. What remains, however, are the concerns about professional power imbalances and quid-pro-quo. Because Jim was my teacher, the paradigm goes, any sex between us would ruin or at least taint my learning, or the ongoing teacher-student relationship. At worst, it would force me to provide sex if I wanted a certain grade.

In this and other ways, the consent paradigm sees sex as unruly and contaminating. But is this true of sex, by its nature, or is it true of our relationships to sex?^[3] Regardless, the consent paradigm would carefully explain how the sexual desires I had weren’t wrong, but that acting on them would be, because of how they would damage my non-sexual relationship with my teacher.

Personally, I don’t buy it, for all the reasons about gay sex and triumph I get at above. Who better to show me how to listen to my desires and use them to open my body up to my self than my physical education teacher? Um, maybe an experienced gay boy your own age? you might be thinking, and fine. Okay. But what I want to point out here is that the consent paradigm doesn’t give me the tools to (a) accept the sexual desire I had, and then (b) look into myself to know whether to act on it. Consent just says it’s wrong, or that I don’t yet have such capabilities. It has its reasons and its reasoning, but all of that is formed by the law and dictated to me. I am told to just accept it, for the safety of others.

What if we reversed the fixing-sex paradigm framed above: once we finally start talking as a society about what sex is (and is not, and what bodies are for and not for, and why every person deserves and should insist on their own sexual autonomy), then people will be better defended against rape, abuse, ruin, etc.

But what’s sexual autonomy exactly? Well, we can start with its dictionary definition of “freedom from external control or influence”—it’s about people acting as self-governing agents. Here’s theorist Joseph Fischel on the concept, from his very useful Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent:

[S]exual autonomy need not assume that we all come to the table—or bed—as unencumbered free agents. Instead, it can attempt to recognize differentiated relations of dependence, and to theorize acceptable and unacceptable forms of interference in the realm of sexual decision making, without prescribing what good sex should look like. The autonomy here is not an ontological truth of the human, but a guiding, revisable principle that recognizes available choices and checks certain constrictions on those choices. To that end, “sexual autonomy” is understood to be an aspiration, not an a priori. It is not a synonym for freedom, let alone justice, but a guiding principle for theorizing and regulating young sex and the young sexual subject.

Autonomy wants to preserve individual choice and agency as much as consent does, but it wants to begin from the sexual agent’s sense of knowing who they are and what they want (and don’t want). It wants them to feel informed about, and able to weigh the benefits of, the consequences of saying yes to any sex act. And in cultivating one’s aspirational autonomy, the autonomy paradigm distrusts the long-term effectiveness of one’s agency being regulated by outside authorities.

Which brings us back to my P.E. teacher, because what about his autonomy? Jim wasn’t gay,^[4] and he never showed any interest. He may have once seen me looking up his shorts when we stretched, but then he looked away. And even though I didn’t feel it then, he may have felt (as I do now) that having sex with a student would get in the way of that student’s care and education. All that is ultimately why our having sex would be a bad idea: it would make any sex we had one-directional. Even if he consented to the sex I wanted (as a favor, say, in this impossible scenario), it would deny him sexual autonomy.

It wouldn’t be coercion, but it would impinge upon our both having equal agency and equal opportunity to choose only the sex we’re interested in having, and to come away from that sex feeling at peace with those choices. And my first time—as important or as unimportant as I considered it—would be with a man who didn’t want it. And what would sex mean to me after that?

I need to get at a more pressing problem to this whole thought experiment: how could I possibly have had enough of an understanding of my own sexual autonomy at age 13 to gauge the suitability of showering and more with my P.E. teacher? What I’m doing here is imagining actions and choices a deeply closeted kid would be making with the wisdom and understanding re sex I’ve only recently come to.

The real answer to why Jim and I couldn’t have had sex is that I didn’t know how or why to have it (and how and why not to).

You might believe that knowing all this takes time and the onset of adulthood, but I think more importantly it takes education and commitments, which the U.S. still has little of.^[5] As kind as Jim was, the thing I learned most from Physical Education, in all the years I took it, was to be ashamed of my body, poorly performing at all the sports they just kept shuffling us through. Not a word about nutrition, or why exercise is important for everyone. Anything regarding sex was kept to the biological reproductive functions, plus your standard STIs, their symptoms, and their means of transmission.

And that was good sex ed. I got lucky, comparatively. But I’m keenly aware that it took my committing to write a book about sex and shame for me to finally learn—in my forties, for crying out loud—what sex is, and what my body is.

My claim here isn’t that sex is unruly, and thus can’t (our shouldn’t) be tamed by law. Nor is it that sex is always liberating, and needs to be kept free from limitations. Sex is a handshake. It’s Settlers of Catan. It’s a glass of wine with your friend. It’s table tennis, squash. It’s never anything outside of the other person(s) you’re having it with, never something abstract or pure that can exclude the fact of those people.

Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s lousy. Nobody should ever be forced to play, or feel coerced into being a good sport. But nor should your sexuality be presented to you as something you need to protect from harm or theft. Sex is yours to give and accept from others, whenever you know it’s best for you to do so.