Pleasuring bodies: Performativity and sexual play

Abstract

This article explores the ways gay and queer men employ the concept of ‘play’ in relation to sex. Using Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to analyse the experiences of 16 individuals from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia who identified as a gay and/or queer man or a member of the gay community, I present how my participants used ‘play’ to refer to casual and/or kinky sexual encounters, describe certain safer sex practices, and delineate the difference between queer and straight sexual identities. ‘Playing’ also involved a range of personally cultivated rules connected to the pursuit of well-being. When these rules were broken, the activity no longer felt ‘playful’ and became risky for some. ‘Play’ was ultimately a way for my participants to discuss how risk, pleasure, desire, identity, relationships, and personal well-being related to sexual practices.

Introduction

Sex is such a playful thing. It involves exploring sensual bodies, experimenting with desire and ecstasy, indulging in erotic fantasies, and toying with the edges of pleasure. Kink practices tend to be labelled as various sorts of play: age play, impact play, piss play, needle play, wax play, the list goes on. The concept of sexual play appears to have first emerged in early 20th century marital sex manuals. Marie Carmichael Stopes (1918) and William J. Fielding (1927) both talk about ‘love-play’, and Oliver Butterfield (1937: 64) cautiously writes that ‘to speak of the intimate sexual relations of marriage as a form of play may seem highly improper to some persons’ but ‘those couples who come to regard them as a form of exalted play are the ones who find them in that mutual joy and contentment’. Sexual play carries a similar tenor today, though with a variety of new meanings and applications. Susanna Paasonen (2018b: 3) defines it as ‘the affective capacities of bodies to move and be moved from one state to another, to sense, to affect and be affected by one another. Sexual play, driven by the quest for pleasure and the intensification of sensation, steadily probes and stretches the horizons of what people may imagine doing, liking and preferring’.

This article explores how gay and queer men use ‘play’, the meanings this concept carries for them, and the different kinds of play these men engage in. Using Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and the experiences of 16 individuals from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia who identified as a gay and/or queer man or as a member of the gay community, I present how my participants used ‘play’ to refer to safer sex practices, describe different forms of kink and sexual positions, and as a way of separating queer and straight sexual identities. It should be noted that while the majority of my participants spoke about ‘play’ in their interviews, I have only included the experiences of seven individuals because these participants either used this term in very unique ways or provided quotes that were emblematic of how other participants used ‘play’.

Furthermore, while my small sample size is not statistically generalisable, my participants’ range of usages gives insight into the meanings gay and queer men find in sex and how they approach and understand various sexual practices. Exploring the lived experience of sexual play sheds light on the myriad connections between sex and the construction and embodiment of identity: what are the ways in which playing a ‘top’ or a ‘bottom’ influence someone’s life story, and how might engaging in kinky forms of play influence an individual’s understanding of themselves? Play is also inextricably connected to structures of power and risk. It brings to the surface an individual’s personal limits and exposes the social norms that govern intimate relationships and casual hook-ups.

There is a wealth of literature on play that traverses a number of different fields, including game and leisure studies (Sicart, 2022), psychology (Van Leeuwen and Westwood, 2008), education and pedagogy (James, 2013), art and art education (Regan, 2006), and of course, gender and sexuality studies (Paasonen, 2018a, 2018b). Kink as a type of play has also received extensive scholarly attention, which I explore in detail below. My study adds a valuable contribution to this substantial body of work by expanding the current literature on sexual play within the gay community (such as research on ‘party & play’ cultures and safer sex techniques as play) and kink play. I also demonstrate how other fields not currently associated with play are connected to this concept, such as research into sexual position identities and the phenomenon of straight-identifying men who have sex with other men. Furthermore, by presenting the performative nature of play, this article shows yet another aspect of life where Butler’s theory of performativity can be applied and further elucidate how sex, identity, pleasure, and desire can intersect in dynamic ways.

This article is divided into six sections. Firstly, I provide a brief overview of Butler’s theory of performativity. Secondly, I present my methodology and data collection methods. Thirdly, I describe how safer sex practices were a form of play for some of my participants. Fourthly, I present the ways some these men would play with power in kinky settings. Fifthly, I discuss the relationship between play, sexual position self-labelling, and personal relationships. Finally, I describe the way one of my participants used play to separate his queer sex life from his heterosexual married life. Play in this sense became a way of enacting different sexual identities and exposing the role of the other.

Gender performativity

Butler’s ([1990] 2002, 1993a, 1993b) theory of performativity is well suited to exploring the various ways my participants enacted ‘play’ and enable a deeper understanding of sexual play. This influential theory presents gender as an intricate system of power as well as a series of enactments which are embodied and performed to create an identity. Butler suggests that biological sex and gender are a confluence of various gestures, dress styles, ways of speaking, mannerisms, et cetera that take on natural and innate qualities by being constantly reproduced across society. She also explains that gender produces the subject, that our reflexive understanding of who we are is predetermined by this system of identity in some way rather than being a passive set of identity markers we can rummage through and paste together to ‘create’ ourselves. Gender performativity is about how bodies are stylised in culturally intelligible ways, the system of norms that governs how bodies ought to be presented, and the way these stylisations are re-iterated and enacted across society.

Methodology

I conducted 16 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with individuals who identified as a gay and/or queer man or as a member of the gay community. These interviews were conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington, six; Christchurch, two; Dunedin, one; Undisclosed, one) and Australia (Sydney, four; Brisbane, two). Because I employed a constructionist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006), my recruitment process, interviews, and data analysis were carried out simultaneously. Ethical approval was granted in early 2018. Interviews and recruitment started shortly thereafter and continued until December of that year. I recruited the majority of my participants using Grindr, a geosocial networking app used predominately by gay and queer men, and selected individuals based on certain traits or perspectives that would complement my emerging data set. When searching for a new participant, I would look at different users’ profiles and search for individuals who mentioned kink practices in their bio, alluded to drug use, were a member of a particular ethnic or age demographic, or listed themselves as HIV-positive. I also invited a number of gender non-conforming individuals and political activists I already knew to participate in my project because I felt their experiences would add nuance and depth to my findings.

Once agreeing to be part of my project, I invited participants to choose if they would like to have their interview take place in their home or in a semi-private location (i.e., library or secluded park). For some, meeting at home was not an option because of work commitments, logistics, or they were not ‘out’ to the people they lived with. For others, speaking with a researcher about such sensitive topics could only be done inside the home. These interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using NVivo software. To ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of my participants (and their partners, where applicable), I assigned pseudonyms and removed any potentially-identifying information.

I carried out my data analysis process in three stages. The first stage consisted of reflective note-taking after each interview where I would write down my impressions, emotions, any new ideas that came up, and consider what elements of my data set were complicated or refined by the interview. The next stage began in March of 2018 after I had finished my first set of interviews. At this point, I collated and summarised my written notes, assembled a preliminary theoretical framework of findings, and began analysing and annotating each interview transcript with this framework in mind. I conducted another set of interviews between late July and early August 2018 after I had refined my framework and returned to the literature, and began analysing the data with NVivo. Although I had already carried out one layer of coding analysis through annotating hard copies of each interview transcript, coding with NVivo allowed me to organise my data for writing up, to refine emerging themes and theories, and separate quotes or interview sections into discrete categories in order to efficiently access relevant sections. I repeated the same process for my final interviews in December 2018. In order to present my participants’ experiences most articulately, succinctly, and honestly, I have carefully edited out some ‘filler’ words from direct quotes (e.g., ‘um’, ‘like’, ‘but’, ‘and yeah’, ‘I mean’, ‘you know’) whilst leaving some in to retain the personality and style of the participant.

Safer sex practices

For my participants, ‘play’ was more than a colloquialism. This term is particularly prevalent among gay men and often refers to casual sex encounters (frequently anonymous ones), and can describe a particular type of sex, a way of approaching sex, or a position/role someone enacts during sex. In a general context, play refers to a fun and leisurely activity, something inconsequential, joyous, and outside of work and other commitments. It can also be a creative and imaginative practice, one that artists have harnessed through the concept of ‘process as play’ to create work (Regan, 2006).

The growing literature on ‘party & play’ or ‘puff & play’ (also known as ‘chemsex’ or ‘sexualised drug use’) describes one of the specific ways gay men incorporate play into their sex lives. Kane Race provides us with a detailed insight into this culture and how play figures into the chemsex scene. He describes how play is a sensitising tool used by gay men to find the right kinds of sexual partners online and facilitate the interaction, and ‘characterises that encounter as casual, fun, and obligation-free’ (Race, 2015: 259). It leaves these erotic encounters open, making way for an ‘assembly of affective associations’ (Race, 2015: 260) and unexpected sexual assemblages. In the growing sympathetic literature on chemsex, many scholars have described how gay and queer men have safety at the forefront of their minds when they party & play, and draw from a range of effective and specialised harm-reduction techniques in order to protect the well-being of themselves and others in this setting (Greenspan et al., 2011).

My participant Jacob (48, AU) illustrates this connection between play, safety, and sex. For him, only safer sex featuring condoms and/or PrEP ¹ constituted as play. He described the prevailing attitudes towards HIV/AIDS in Sydney during the mid-1980s just as the crisis was unfolding in the United States:

I’d only had unprotected sex three times so… and I still remember, my friend was a journalist and we’d sometimes play, and he said to me… ‘There’s a gay disease’, and he goes, ‘It’s in America.’ He goes, ‘We gotta be really careful ‘cause it’s gonna come here and it’s gonna hurt us’, and I go ‘Oh, please…’

And he is still negative by the way, my partner. So that shows how well safe sex works, after 30 years. You can have all the sex you want, just play safe.

Generally speaking, play is typically considered to be quite a safe activity and not something overly risky or dangerous (consider playgrounds or playing a game). Jacob is drawing from this association: playful sex should be safer sex. It is not uncommon to see the term ‘play safe’ in safer sex promotional material aimed at gay men, and it appears gay men have been describing safer sex as play since at least the early-1990s (Adelman, 1992). The New Zealand AIDS Foundation (NZAF) and the AIDS Council of New South Wales (ACON) both employ the phrase frequently, alongside other vernacular like ‘cum’, ‘fuck’, and ‘cock’ in an effort to minimise the barrier between health providers and community members.

Potentially in response to concerns around ‘condom fatigue’, or the non-use of condoms due to exhaustion around public health surveillance, sexual health promotion, and the ongoing threat of HIV (Adam et al., 2005), my participant Jacob and NZAF/ACON both stress the ease and efficacy of ‘playing safe’. Safer sex practices have diversified significantly with the advent of PrEP and the development of more effective HIV treatments, and health service providers are harnessing a tailor-based approach to suit their clientele. The ACON website presents four methods of safer sex: condoms, PrEP, UVL ² , and PEP ³ . Each of these methods are framed as simple to do, easy to access, and something that anyone can integrate into their sex life. The strength of this approach is that, not only does it cater for all sexual lifestyles, it also acknowledges the dynamic relationship gay men have towards sex and how they go about protecting themselves. As Jacob says, ‘you can have all the sex you want, just play safe’.

Kink, desire and power

Play as a safer sex practice is the first conceptualisation here, and it is clear that Jacob was drawing upon play’s association with safety and safer sex promotional material when he used this term. This connection between play and safety also gives insight into how ‘risky’ sexual practices are often approached. Safety is a major topic of discussion within the kink community and goes far beyond concerns around disease. For kinksters, to be safe is to have clear and open communication, sensitivity towards each partner’s thresholds, to approach sex with a sense of care, and to always be cautious (Williams et al., 2014). Play is also a common term to describe different kinky practices, as Justin (25, NZ) demonstrates here:

Simon: What kind of kink stuff did you do before [becoming involved in] pup play?

Justin: Pretty much bondage, mess, lots of mess. I’m really into food, and my ex and my boyfriend are really into food play, so that makes life easier.

Pup play has been described as a dom/sub dynamic where the ‘pup’ adopts the submissive role and the ‘handler’ takes the dominant. This practice involves role-playing and the embodiment of each persona using dog collars, butt-plug tails, harnesses, and leashes (Wignall and McCormack, 2015). Food play is just messy fun: covering each other in food and fucking. Interestingly, Justin considered pup play ‘more a way of life than a sexual thing’, but highlighted the erotic nature of food play. This differentiation Justin makes is not uncommon. For many people, kink is experienced more as a practice grounded in sensual embodiment and identity enactment rather than something focused on sexual gratification and orgasm (Turley, 2016).

In addition to describing specific practices, kink play also refers to the active engagement of sexual power dynamics. Power in this sense is about personal control, and the exchange of power describes (consensually) gaining control over someone else or allowing someone to have control over you (Simula, 2019). Jonathan (59, NZ) is an avid kinkster. He described the erotic power dynamics bound up in the different types of kink he enjoys:

I’ve done a bit of piss play. Um, I’ve done scat ⁴ once, as a giver. And I mean I’m not really into it but this particular guy was… I guess the turn-on for me with a lot of these situations is the power exchange. And I guess scat’s a bit like that as well. I’m into humiliation and that sort of thing. What can be more humiliating than scat play, in terms of smell and that sort of thing. I mean, certainly it’s a turn-off. I can’t really imagine why guys are into it, but guys obviously are.

Kink practitioners are actively playing with power, acting out different power structures, and playing with the transformative power of pleasure by pressing into new somatic intensities (Paasonen, 2018a). The consensual exchange of power has been described as a defining element of kink (Guidroz, 2008) and is used by many kink practitioners in therapeutic ways to explore and deconstruct how forms of systemic violence and power inequality are experienced (Lindemann, 2011). There has been a significant amount of work that explores the eroticisation of power in a kink setting and where the limits of these practices lie. Robin Bauer (2014) and Charlotta Carlström (2019) both describe how power and desire are experienced as a fluid force that bind participants together during a kink session, and the way this ecstatic force is channelled in emergent and unexpected ways to extend the edges of pleasure.

Jonathan’s experience articulates some of the complexity of kinky power relations: the erotic thrill of ‘holding’ power and the power of disgust. Damien (20, NZ) also spoke about how he plays with power relations and personal boundaries in a kinky setting, and desired to delicately push his personal limits:

Being a pup, it’s like, I didn’t know what to expect so I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to see what my limits are...’ I’m terrified of needles, no blood, no scat, and not a lot of pain, just yet. So, I know those four are my red flags. Fisting was there, but then I’m like, ‘You know what, I haven’t given it a try, let’s take it off that list and try it, see what… see how I feel’, and you know, I didn’t get the full fist in there yet but I did get the five fingers… Being a pup is probably the most fun I’ve ever had.

This approach of exploring the boundary between safe and risky has been described as edgework (see Lyng, 1990) and is a significant concept in the literature on kink. Staci Newmahr (2011: 181) presents how kink is more than just producing, detailing, and tracing erotic boundaries in each interaction: ‘Rather than exploring edges together, SM players are defining their edges together, creating the space in which the edges can be explored, and then responding to one another in the very ways that constitute the edges themselves’. Instead of having a set list of acceptable and desirable techniques, kink is about creating and testing unique boundaries in each interaction with an emphasis on challenging these edges in ways that privilege the safety, desire, and comfort of those involved.

This method of approaching potential danger from a paradigm of safety has been discussed in relation to gay men combining sex and drugs. Patrick O’Byrne and Dave Holmes (2011) demonstrate how chemsex practices among gay men is often about seeking the limits of what the body can handle. The authors offer ‘boundary play’ over ‘edgework’ as a more apt term because of this active ‘flirting with danger’ and the importance of successfully navigating these occasionally extreme situations. The relationship between boundary play and kink can be seen in Damien’s quote above. Damien sought to uncover and trace his boundaries around what he was comfortable doing sexually and to gently push these limits. By constructing a safe environment and finding another kinkster who was able to engage his pup-ness, he could explore his edges using boundary play.

Across Butler’s (1993a, 2005, 2015) work, there is attention paid to limits and boundaries. What is the extent to which one can act? How far can the forces of language and the symbolic reach? What are the boundaries of female/male, feminine/masculine, self/other? Performativity speaks directly to the creation, maintenance, and enactment of boundaries: these identities and behaviours are ‘correct’ and ‘safe’ whereas those ones are ‘pathological’. Another example of performative limits can be seen in Jonathan, Damien, Jacob, and Justin’s experiences. Each of these men describe the production of edges in relation to sexual practices: safe/unsafe sex, pleasurable/aversive sex, softer/harder boundaries.

I argue the discursive separation of kink and ‘vanilla’ sex can also be considered performative. By designating some practices as kink and others as vanilla, one group is deemed normative and inherently sexual while the other is positioned as other and paraphilic. Smearing food all over the body or wearing a dog leash do not carry an innate erotic potential (nor does any act associated with sex); they are made erotic in a kink setting partly because of the meanings attached to these acts, like domination, subordination, and objectification. Jonathan’s description of sexual power dynamics underscores the performative nature of kink play and how these practices are not neutral but are culturally charged and bound up in regulatory norms.

Sexual positions and rules of play

The multifaceted nature of ‘play’ begins to take shape at this point. My participants have used it to refer to safer sex practices and taking measures to avoid disease transmission. They have also used play to describe the maintenance of personal boundaries, feeling safe and secure in testing these boundaries, and embodying sexual power dynamics. This focus on safety implicitly describes the neutralisation or avoidance of risk, which is to say that while risk is not spoken about directly, it is outlined by describing what safe looks like. So what about when play does focus on risk? Jonathan (59, NZ) and Trent (57, NZ) both spoke about how they played different sexual roles and the unique and complicated set of risks these roles came with:

Jonathan: I’ve found that on these sites [Recon ⁵ , Grindr, NZDating.com ⁶ ], it’s actually more difficult to find a dom than it is to find a sub... Often, I’ll [have to] play the dominant role.

Trent: I’m mostly a top guy, but I’ve been experimenting with the bottom role… I never ever play the bottom role without someone using a condom… The good intentions with my regular partner fell by the wayside after a few efforts and we kept the condom on for a while, but then we get together all night when I’m not really fully in the mood for it but I play along, and so the only way I can end up playing along is to end up with that ‘naughty boy’ thrill of risk [engaging in condomless sex].

Trent’s use of ‘play’ demonstrates the way this term can refer to the binding together of sexual positions and identities as well as the enactment and performance of these unique sexual identities. E. R. Chaline (2010) explores this dynamic in his analysis of gay kink sexualities. He suggests that top/bottom/vers positions are not simply sexual practices or roles, but are inextricably and relationally connected to the performance and reproduction of sexual identity: they are sexual practices that produce and reinforce sexual selves. He labels this performative intersection ‘sexual identity practices’. Rather than accepting these position identities as merely pragmatic (‘who penetrates who’), sexual identity practices describe how these position identities are a mesh of personal history narrative and social discourse as well as the embodiment of self-presentation, emotion, and sensation (Chaline, 2010). In other words, Trent is not simply performing and embodying these abstract sex roles; he is engaging with them in complicated ways that are bound up in his reflexive experience of sex and the broader landscape of his life.

There are a number of personal consequences for Trent when he ‘plays along’ with his partner and acquiesces into having condomless sex, which he is clearly not comfortable doing. Although this is obviously distressing for him as he is potentially putting his health at risk, there are greater risks at play here:

Trent: I find myself that, after being sexually active with someone for a long time, you have to sort of up the stakes a bit to keep arousal going, and so that can push you towards risk-taking activities... And that’s something you have to manage within yourself very carefully… and [to] manage a friendship. So yeah, the friendship’s really important to you and you’re taking a risk but it’s a risk that you manage.

Simon: Do you find it alarming when you end up in that ‘naughty boy’ situation?

Trent: Yeah. It’s something that says, you know, what the hell are you doing this for? Is it worth it? Are you better off ditching? Is it time to actually back away from sexual activities, say, ‘Ok, you’ve done it, it hasn’t achieved what you wanted it to achieve, it hasn’t achieved a relationship you wanted and I’m not really that into?’ I’m just doing it mostly to please the other person and all I really want is a bit of a hug and a bit of a sensual kind of thing. Beautiful massages are far better to me than the rest of it.

James Murray and Barry Adam (2001) describe the complexities and various complications older gay men face when they forfeit safer sex practices to fulfil emotional needs. Their study demonstrates how some of these men tend to experience higher levels of social isolation, feel less able to assert themselves in sexual situations, and consequently seek to accommodate the desires of their partner, even if it includes sex they are personally uncomfortable with. Trent’s experience resonates with this research. He is pushed into a position that feels risky in order to maintain the intimacy he desires from this friendship; he is weighing up the costs of disease transmission with the emotional toll of social isolation.

The way Trent plays ‘the bottom role’ and experiments with this unfamiliar sexual position comes about because he feels a sense of comfort and security with his friend. He reluctantly ‘plays along’ with his partner when he is not in the mood for sex and abandons condoms to attain ‘that “naughty boy” thrill of risk’ in order to satisfy his partner’s desires. However, this is also within the wider context of an ongoing, meaningful friendship which helps to abate some of Trent’s social isolation. Paasonen (2018b) writes that sexual play is not always a light and happy affair. It can involve anxieties, fraught feelings, and a range of emotional risks: the risk of unrequited love and heartbreak, the danger of having your desires sneered at by lover. The devastation of broken trust. And while this risk might add some depth and complexity to play, it can also ruin it. Play destabilises and becomes uncertain when sex starts to feel emotionally and/or physically too risky. Trent’s sense of internal conflict around having condomless sex is evident when he says: ‘What the hell are you doing this for? Is it worth it? Are you better off ditching? Is it time to actually back away from sexual activities?’

Trent was not the only participant to critically question their sexual practices. Gregory, Jonathan (see next section), and Ali all spoke about the guilt and self-retribution they felt after breaking personal boundaries around safer sex. Gregory (38, AU) described the layers of this of guilt and worry, and spoke about the way his safer sex education contributed to these emotions:

I only really feel guilty if I’m bottoming and the guy cums in me. There’s something about having the guy cum in me that freaks me the fuck out even though I know rationally that, you know, I’m taking PrEP. So, I’m comfortable that, you know, I’m doing everything in my power [to protect myself], and usually [my sex partner] says he is either on PrEP or [has an] undetectable viral load… It was just beaten into me so much as a young kid that you have to wear condoms… [It] doesn’t bother me as much as [if] I top, although I still do feel guilty afterwards.

Ali (28, AU) spoke about how the guilt from condomless sex seems to linger, manifesting as an ongoing fear of illness and a hyper-awareness of possible HIV infection:

I do sometimes get this weakness of, you know, having unsafe sex from time to time and then all this blame… and all this guilt and panic of, you know, ‘Did I catch something?’, and if I feel a cough, if I get a cough or something, then I go and have all these tests.

Like Jacob, condomless sex is clearly not playful for Gregory or Ali: their personal rules of play have been broken. In Trevor Hoppe’s (2011) analysis of top/bottom/vers identities, he argues that the discursive scripts embedded in each of these ‘positional identities’ are guidelines that partners use for the ‘game’ of sex. They are ‘different strategies for success and rules of play’ (Hoppe, 2011: 195) which are bound up in power and pleasure. Putting aside the issue of analogising sex with competitive games, it does help to unpack Ali, Gregory, and Trent’s experiences: sex is only play if your personally cultivated rules are followed.

The connections between ‘rules of play’ and ‘playing the part’ further demonstrate the performative nature of play. Performativity is more than the literal enactment or performance of an identity. It is the creation of a subject that is continuously and insistently reproduced in relation to others and bound by a host of conditions and prevailing ideas around what it ‘means’ to be that kind of subject. As Butler highlights: ‘To say that I “play” at being [a lesbian] is not to say that I am not one “really”; rather, how and where I play at being one is the way in which that “being” gets established, instituted, circulated, and confirmed’ (Butler, 1993b: 311).

Top and bottom sexual position identities can be considered performative not only because they (re)produce culturally specific subjects through the repetition and imitation of behaviours, but the enactment of a top necessitates the production of a bottom too. Both Chaline (2010) and Hoppe (2011) argue that sex is an enactment produced in relation to others which draws upon an intricate array of power dynamics; it is shaped by embodiment, sensation, and emotion, and is reliant upon pre-existing scripts that are either resisted (e.g. a power bottom ⁷ ) or embraced. These positional identities are also discursively loaded, as Hoppe (2011) points out. This demonstrates that there is a historical genealogy of discourses guiding how these identities ‘should’ be carried out (Butler, [1990] 2002).

Trent, Ali, and Gregory are also asking ethical questions: how do my actions affect others and myself? What are the implications of having this type of sex? Butler’s (2005, 2012, 2015) more recent work examines the intersection of performativity, ethics, the relational nature of subjects and selves, and precarity. Just as individual identities are performative, so too are assemblages of bodies and the various ways we are connected to each other. Although Butler uses political protests and mass demonstrations to exemplify her point, the issues she explores are relevant to my participants’ experiences, like the need to investigate and address how vulnerability uniquely affects marginalised groups (Butler, 2012, 2015) or how to care for others in relation to the social conditions that produce us (Butler, 2005, 2012). Ali, Gregory, and Trent are actively engaging in these issues that Butler raises by critically examining how they interact with other members of their community; they are developing ways to support the well-being of themselves and others based on the points of vulnerability they see around them.

Playing with identity

The selection of participant experiences I have presented so far demonstrates how multilayered ‘play’ is. These men have used it to describe safer sex practices, the expression and maintenance of personal boundaries, a way of engaging in sexual power dynamics, and the enactment of sexual position identities. There is one final, and rather unique, application of play that only one of my participants used: play as a technique of delineating between straight and queer identities. Paasonen describes how sexual play ‘ripples across identities’ (2018b: 131) and can be an exercise in fantasy and enchantment that ‘pushes the boundaries of previously defined sexual identities’ (2018a: 545). Play not only invites us to experiment with new forms of desires, pleasures, and ecstasies, it also demonstrates the fluidity of sexuality and the way our erotic preferences shift as we grow. In this way, play queers sexuality: notions of stable, discrete categories of identity are thrown out in exchange for ‘spectrums of experimental play geared towards pleasure’ (Paasonen, 2018a: 546).

My participant Jonathan (59, NZ) has been in a heterosexual marriage for several decades and is not ‘out’ to any of his family, friends, or work colleagues. For Jonathan, play was a way of separating the sex he has with his wife from the casual, anonymous sex he has with men. It was the crucial line of order that enabled him to maintain these two facets of his life without too much cross-contamination:

Simon: Has it ever been difficult to juggle being married as well as playing with guys?

Jonathan: Um, from the point of view that… you know, I guess I’m cheating. But I sort of rationalise it in my own mind that this is something that my wife can’t give me. And I mean, it is part of me but it is also something that she doesn’t know about… I feel at times, and in some respects, that I’ve cheated my wife out of… you know, she could have had a husband that was really sexually into her. I’ve enjoyed sex with her but, as I say, in my mind I’ve always fantasised about males when we’ve been having sex.

Jonathan does not actively identify as gay and situates his erotic encounters with men as both a legitimate and illegitimate form of sex. By ‘playing’ with men and ‘having sex’ with his wife, Jonathan de-legitimises his erotic encounters with men. However, his acknowledgement that he is ‘cheating’ on his wife also demonstrates he does see these same-sex encounters as legitimate sex. The importance of this linguistic boundary can be seen in the way Jonathan consistently used ‘play’ (25 times) to talk about same-sex relations and ‘sex’ (9 times) when referring to marital sex.

The phenomenon of straight-identifying men who have sex with other men has piqued the curiosity of sexuality researchers since Laud Humphrey published his infamous study on ‘tearoom’ sex. Recent work into the ways heterosexual men navigate same-sex eroticism describes how these men often see gay sex as purely pragmatic and a way to relieve sexual needs (Silva, 2018). Many straight men will depersonalise and hide their queer encounters through anonymous-only hook-ups or by visiting darkened sex clubs as a way of maintaining their heterosexual identity (Reynolds, 2015; Silva, 2018). Blaming external factors like substance use or conflicts with wives/girlfriends to counterbalance their sexual activities is also common (Reback and Larkins, 2010), as is seeking out other straight-identifying male sex partners to separate themselves from ‘real’ gay men (Reynolds, 2015). Studies into same-sex attracted men in heterosexual marriages yield similar findings, but with a greater emphasis on the way these men work to cognitively and pragmatically separate their gay sexual encounters from their heterosexual life (Hudson, 2013). Jonathan’s experiences resonate well with this research. He spoke about how he would cruise the public toilets near his work most days because anonymous sex was simple, emotionally clean, and easy to separate from his marriage. However, it was not without its own emotional complexities:

I would like to find somebody that I can continue to meet. And you know, whether it is meeting once a month or once every couple of months or something like that, but to actually have a relationship with somebody. But that is sort of difficult too. I mean, if you get into the emotional connection, [that] is where it can sort of impact my other life. Casual sex is good from that point of view, because it is somebody different all the time. And I mean, there is no emotional connection; it purely is just a sexual thing.

In addition to the pragmatic and emotional rules of play Jonathan made for himself, he also created self-imposed boundaries to try and protect his wife from the disease-related risks of his casual encounters:

I’m sort of aware that there are risks with oral [sex], but I mean, I’ve never taken precautions or anything… I have picked up herpes somewhere. And yeah, I don’t know where or how. And that’s sort of been difficult to manage. I’ve never seen… I’ve never seen a doctor about it. You know, whenever it crops up, and it still does… Last time it might have been eighteen months ago or something like that, and it doesn’t last as long now. But, you know, it’s always been a matter of avoiding sex with my wife.

Jonathan has strict rules of play for himself, partly to prevent his hidden sex life from intruding into his marriage and partly to protect the well-being of his wife. He also feels a pronounced sense of guilt when he transgresses these rules, just like Gregory and Ali whose experiences I described earlier. Although Jonathan used ‘play’ to refer only to hidden extra-marital sexual encounters with anonymous men, this term was ultimately about psychic identification and misidentification. Butler ([1990] 2002) describes how performativity enables and facilitates alterity through presenting one set of identities or practices as intelligible and valid while othering the rest. Identification in this instance is more than naming something or someone; it is the ‘machinery’ of subjection and ideology (Butler, 2015). Jonathan’s playing with men enabled him to refuse a gay identity and disavow the symbolic associations of gay sex, but the deliberate misidentification and othering of these encounters also brought with it a host of complicated issues.

Conclusion

Based on my participants’ experiences, ‘play’ is more than casual sexual encounters and forms of kink. It is about having boundaries and limits: what constitutes as safer sex and risky sex? What are the boundaries of identity and sexual practices? How do these two aspects of social life interact and what limits emerge across settings? Where do gay and queer men situate personal boundaries and what are the ways these boundaries impact their intimate relationships? What are the limits of gay and queer men’s relationships and how do they influence their sexual practices?

‘Play’ is also about enacting identities and uncovering power relations. This concept helps to demonstrate how sexual positions become identities loaded with meanings, associations, and contribute to the power dynamics of an erotic encounter. This might be through playing a sexual role, practicing a type of kink play, separating one type of sex life from another, or actively playing with sexual power relations. To play with someone involves enacting a certain identity and engaging the discursive weight of various sexual practices in nuanced and complicated ways.

The connection ‘play’ has to identity enactment and the production of boundaries also demonstrates its performative nature. As Butler ([1990] 2002, 1993a) describes, performativity is about how language, symbols, expressions of embodiment, structural power relations, and normative ideals all coalesce to produce identities and ways of existing. ‘Play’ is primarily a linguistic tool, a way of speaking identities and practices into being, but it is also a culture within the gay community. It is a way for gay men to relate to one another, speak about their relationships, describe personal boundaries, and articulate the importance of feeling connected.