{"id":313733,"date":"2026-07-24T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=313733"},"modified":"2026-07-13T17:07:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T21:07:06","slug":"the-best-queer-sex-scenes-are-about-more-than-just-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/the-best-queer-sex-scenes-are-about-more-than-just-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Queer Sex Scenes Are About More Than Just Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was once a different version of myself. I was a child and then a young adult in a conservative, Christian community. Existing in that environment required morphing and shrinking in ways that I find painful to think about now. But one thing I could never fully deny was my interest in sex, that thing Garth Greenwell calls a dense and complicated act of \u201cself-making.\u201d My doomed attempts not to think about sex became a way of thinking about it often, of keeping on the periphery of my awareness both my interest and the threats that lay within it\u2014namely, my kinks and my queerness. <\/p>\n\n\n

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So it is no accident that writing about sex is now one of my acutest pleasures. In my debut collection, Please Don\u2019t Touch the Body<\/a><\/em>, I focus on delights and pains implicit in the times before and after sex\u2014which in many ways are also sex. A caregiver attempts to reach out to an almost-lover while being haunted by a ghost. A young girl works up the courage to kiss her neighbor only for that neighbor to reject her. Two older women pleasure each other in order to distract from the fact that one of the women is ill. In each of these stories, I\u2019m fascinated by how desire can ripple outward and inward, altering our relationships to ourselves and others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While writing Please Don\u2019t Touch the Body<\/em>, I found myself searching for sex scenes that aren\u2019t just sexy, scenes that prioritize the discoveries and obfuscations and exchanges of power involved in sex as much as its pleasure. For this, I turned to the works of other queer writers. I bring eight of their books to you now. All of them share, I think, a consciousness that comes from being unable to take roles within sex for granted, a consciousness that is as concerned with the mind as it is the body, and which can, depending on the book, produce stories ranging from the outright erotic to the deeply unsettling. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Fantasian<\/em><\/a> by Larissa Pham<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

When the protagonist of Fantasian<\/em> happens upon a woman named Dolores at a college party, she\u2019s struck by how similar they are, their resemblance so deep as to be disorienting. What follows is a tale of carnival confusion, with scenes that are both overtly arousing and psychologically dense: \u201cI suck on her clit, flicking at it featherlike in small shallow movements, and she moans into my pussy and I think to myself now we have closed a circuit.\u201d As the protagonist and Dolores touch each other, the boundary between self and other both hardens and collapses, linking the two women in a loop of desire. Later in the novella, the protagonist assumes Dolores\u2019s identity, easily fooling even those closest to the women, raising questions about what it means to be an individual in a world that often flattens difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n