This heat makes me want to fuck. Does anyone feel that way? I wonder if I am affirming the racist stereotype of us islanders, sitting in the sun, happily eating and fucking each other into oblivion.
This heat makes me want to fuck. Does anyone feel that way? I wonder if I am affirming the racist stereotype of us islanders, sitting in the sun, happily eating and fucking each other into oblivion.
But I must pause here to confess that this wasn’t so until I migrated to America. There is something about the seasons that encourage an urgency of experiences.
The fall is all about settling into my loneliness. I write wailing, brooding, bleeding poems about the woman who just left me (because they generally leave in the fall) and revel in the angst of everything dying.
Winter makes me want to make soups and snuggle with my cat and watch movies like High Art and The Hours.
In the spring, my pheromones begin to grow tired of the inactivity. Every curved street starts looking like the perfect woman and my Hitachi usually shorts out.
By summer, I am aching for release — dying for someone to brush against me, stick a tongue between my toes, bite my nipple — anything that resembles sex. Summer makes me horny.
Maybe it’s because it reminds me of my teenage years when I was not doing a thing about my libido, but was greatly preoccupied by it. I used to sit in my religion classes wondering if those angels ever wanted to do it to each other. At gym, I was stealing glances at the young boobs that belonged to my best friends — and no, I had no idea that I was a dyke. I just knew that the soft hairs on my classmate’s arm made me want to kiss her.
When my favorite (and hottest) literature teacher left for grad school, I bawled like someone had killed my pet goat. I didn’t really know why I was so upset. In retrospect, it is clear. Miss Chaney was the kind of sexy that slunk around in loose white shirts and sheer bras. She had good curvature on her hips, and loved to hug the girls who got high grades. She always smelled like something out of a magazine. I remember going on a field trip and falling asleep with my head in her lap. It was the single most gratifying experience of my subconscious teen dyke life. When I got home, my 13-year-old panties were wet with confusion.
So when she left, I knew something significant had occurred.
And when Miss Lillian from England came to replace her, I knew there would be no more wet dreams and softly encouraging hugs. I almost had a heart attack when she walked in. She smelled like Vick’s Vapor Rub and girded her chastity with layers and layers of tight-fitting, industrial clothing. The colors she wore were sensible and she only spoke to you in her grating voice if your grades were shitty.
But all that is an aside to why this heat makes me want to be naked all the fucking time. It is July in New York, and in New York, women get naked. Showing legs that are miles long, skin that is just aching to be touched, and sashaying movement that is so easy and slow it makes my breast self-lubricate.
It may be that thin film of sweat that hangs over everybody — it makes the body smell a tad musky, a little ripe for the taking. It may be that I need to fuck more in the winter — whatever it is, I am glad it is summer. Thank God and Buddha and Nature and all that jazz for the reprieve of this lazy, sexy heat that has everybody slowing down and disrobing and smelling like they just got laid.
(Staceyann Chin is the author of The Other side of Paradise: A Memoir.)