Sam Te Kani details the formative sexual experience of his young life.
NOTE: This contains real talk about sex and strong language.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler storytelling night or read on ...
Whenever a kindness is extended to me by a stranger, I can't help but sexualise it.
I don't mean that I fuck anyone who shows me an altruistic gesture great or small, only that in my mind that person takes on a hue indistinguishable from the violence of an adolescent crush.
This effect is greatly exacerbated if the perp is a handsome hard-bodied male between the ages of twenty five and forty, but, having said that, a random act of kindness generally makes me awash in euphoric pan sexual vibes, and preferences can be obliterated.
What does this signify other than a maximal libido?
I think there's a standard expectation of ill will from others outside filial and extended social circles. This is natural, if only in relation to the premises of society itself. In the game-changing event of an agricultural society you exclusively recognise a select few with shared rights to basic resources like food and water, as the agricultural mode of production necessitates a monopoly on these. Strangers literally threaten your survival by being potential claims to your limited food supplies.
Despite the cheap mass-production methods of a capitalist society, scarcity is an ingrained factor for those higher up the ladder who’ve made long-term benefits from the systemic elitism early agriculture-based societies fostered.
So why does it make me so horny when someone acts against this programming?
Well, my guess is it's a glimmer of sex's pre-agricultural role as social utility, whereas after agriculture the standard function of a fuck would've been firstly reproductive (to a point) in establishing an inheritor for ones resources, to extend rights by lineage over the possibility of a wider community absorbing them as surplus.
As hunter-gatherers I imagine we were all sexy layabouts, foraging by day, shared-feasting in the early evening, and retiring to a big freaky pile by night (I'm basically paraphrasing Sex At Dawn; read it, it's great).
The great north is void of any community, and at the time I was operating in the Bebo-MySpace milieu without the convenience of Grindr, so my coming out was a crash course in resilience and rebirth.
So, when someone transgresses this precedent code of self-preservation, it's like my body is recalling a time before when swapping a blowjob for a banana would've been no big thing – a time when we all shared our toys. Also, with reproductive sex economised as an insurance policy it's easy to see where we might segue into heteronormativity, and why certain phases of civilisation have given anyone not cisgender a pretty hard fucking time. Because sex for pleasure threatens the infrastructure.
I could go on and at length but I won't because I want to transition with this into my kindness story, one comprised of all the above – food sex and transgressive kindness. It's a kindness that has resonated with me in interesting ways, and even today reinforces certain actions and choices as a template for every similar encounter after it.
I'm talking about my first one-night-stand in Auckland City as a naive, destitute, nineteen year old uni student.
I grew up in a small New Zealand town, a little northern wasteland called Whangarei. I came out at the age of 14 without the practical knowledge of my orientation, only the fervent theoretical belief that I was a homosexual. The great north is void of any community, and at the time I was operating in the Bebo-MySpace milieu without the convenience of Grindr, so my coming out was a crash course in resilience and rebirth. I frequented the library a lot to contextualise my perceived alienation, and utilised the Internet much the same once broadband arrived.
To finally arrive in Auckland City for my very first semester, I felt both deathly nervous as a super-green homo, but also exhilarated, on the verge of taking the reins of my sexual destiny like never before.
To cut a long story short, I met Steven.
Steven was the ultimate first big city lay, and it's only in hindsight I've realised how that could've gone either way. To repeat, this was no forgettable one night stand, but the first resplendent foray of a repressed small town fag into sexual freedom.
The night I met Steven was the night I became an adult. It's been perhaps the formative sexual experience of my young life, and though I wasn't a literal virgin at the time, the idea of losing one’s virginity in a John Hughes coloured miasma of fireworks and French champagne and stars aligning, is a fitting image for the Steven experience. I'd gladly rewrite history with Steven claiming my cherry over the feral northern creature with that title.
So being a student, I was destitute. No semi-affluent parents drip feeding money and care packs, just a meagre government allowance and a history of poverty to help me wring nutrition from a pittance.
To finally arrive in Auckland City for my very first semester, I felt both deathly nervous as a super-green homo, but also exhilarated, on the verge of taking the reins of my sexual destiny like never before.
Steven was a suit, a major corporate despite being Samoan, but adopted by guilty white people so was ingrained with just enough residual insecurity to make him pathologically ambitious.
I guess there's nothing tangible marking Steven as monumental other than timing. Truth be told if I'd had a Steven three months later I wouldn't have batted an eyelash or raised a leg for sideways entry. All Steven did was invite me into his home, fuck me good enough, and then not kick me out the following morning. Instead, struck with what I'd later discover to be exceptional generosity, he took me to Il Forno, then a premier brunch destination in my eyes, after which he took me home for almost a full day of hungover follow-up sex, and the first season of some show he was in to. I think it was Heroes.
What Steven did was establish a precedent in my life for what artist and author John Berger calls creating a ‘locus of exemption from the liability of bodily pain’.
What we did, and what anyone tries to do when they sleep with a stranger, was to create a spatiotemporal bubble of escape from the varied problematics of our separate lives. The necessity of being strangers here is that you have no commonality other than the senses and a transgressive will to pleasure that's as much an act of resistance as picketing (albeit less focused and certainly more gratifying in the immediate sense).
In this sentiment I am not recommending a blind fuck as a substitute for orchestrated counter-cultural demonstration, because we definitely need those, I am however designating both as statements of malcontent - heroic attempts to debunk drudgery and reclaim something vital being systemically withheld from us, intuited to be our birthright as human subjects.
Psychoanalytic maestro Jacques Lacan would say such moments are “a relinquishing of the symbolic order for pure jouissance, a raised middle finger to the big Other”.
I would simply say the ultimate kindness is lending your body to a stranger for an hour or two in the name of fun.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Hadley Donaldson
This content is brought to you with funding support from New Zealand On Air.
