"I don't know where you find the time": On Chasers

is there an enviable clarity of appellation to "👀4trans"? Or is query naive?

Last year I started sleeping with men for the first time in quite a few years, and I did so in a way that was new to me. The locations, the contexts, the parties involved, the rules of comportment were new not only to me but to most of my closest companions, and I found myself with the desire to lift my eyes from my own paper and compare my work against someone else’s: Is it like this for everybody?

A better question might be, And what is this?

One is forever learning new ways to act, which is both pleasurable and destabilizing; one both fears and enjoys the sense of behaving like an ingenue at a decidedly non-ingenue age. Once a man told me while we were having sex that he hadn’t gotten off all day, because he wanted to save it for me. My first thought in reaction to this was And he works from home, so that really counts for something. I found it an astonishingly hot and tender thing for him to say. I found my own reaction a little funny. I still do, on both counts.

I’ve very much enjoyed Davey Davis’ writing about sex with strange men as I’ve looked for fellow travelers:

“Before Dallas, it had been almost a year since I’d fucked an anonymous man. I felt out of practice, for one thing. Then there was…my reluctance to really lean into what I’ve been calling “twink MILF,” a brand increasingly foisted on me by a certain kind of bro who doesn’t know what to do with an older fem other than be mothered. (“Wow, 37! I love cougars 😏,” a guy one presidential term my junior recently told me…)

While he was decisive in his movements, moving my body with the ease that I do my phone, he was gentle; he choked me only briefly, as if to demonstrate that he could, like a flight attendant holding the oxygen mask to her face before takeoff.”

“I think you and I might sleep with some of the same sort of men,” I wrote to Davey afterwards. I was thinking then of chasers in particular, as distinct from men who might only incidentally be interested in sleeping with trans men¹, those whose interest is moderate, modest, restrained, manageable, “I could eat” rather than “That’s exactly what I want; I don’t need to see the rest of the menu.”

One thinks of a chaser as having the placid, unconcerned certainty of Pepe Le Pew, bounding ceaselessly and unidirectionally after someone else’s transsexuality. I’ll be the psychologically complex one, sweetheart, you just be your straightforward self, okay?