The Body I Goon: Notes From a Biracial Nonbinary Bator

I am a biracial, nonbinary Bator with a penis that is not huge, a body that is chubby, and a practice that has taught me more about belonging than most rooms ever did. I say that without apology. For years my shame was organized, almost professional in its efficiency. It lived in my dick. It lived in my gender. It lived in the public meaning of being a person of color. Society has always had work for a body like mine: be useful, be readable, be the correct kind of sexual or the correct kind of safe. Softness was a problem. Averageness was a problem. Ambiguity was a problem. A person of color, in that logic, is not simply a person. A person of color is a function.

Queer space did not dissolve that function. Often it refined it. I learned the quiet arithmetic of usefulness: Am I present as myself, or as evidence that the room is diverse? Do I remain desirable if I am not masculine enough, not hung enough, not “ethnic” in the way a stereotype promised? When I refuse the racialized script—hypermasculine, hypersexual, oversized, always ready—I do not always meet hostility. I meet irrelevance. That is its own exile. I do not fit the white muscle-jock poster. I also do not fit the hung-man-of-color poster. Between those two images there is a great deal of actual flesh, and very little invitation.

Gooning changed that for me.

I did not take up my penis to become more of a man. I took it up to stay with myself long enough for the verdict to loosen. No performance of gender. No correction of size. No apology for the belly, the softness, the flushed and unselfconscious animal I become when I finally stop managing the room. Shame does not vanish because a body becomes impressive. Shame thins because a body becomes inhabited. My dick stopped being a comparison and became a site of contact. That is not a small revision. For someone who has been taught that their body is only as valuable as its usefulness, it is a kind of homecoming.

I like the filthy version of that homecoming. I like poppering up until my thoughts thin out and my mouth forgets its manners. I like drooling down my chin, onto my chest, onto my fist, making a slick mess of the same body I used to inventory for defects. I like going slack and wet and stupid with pleasure, eyes empty, cock throbbing in a rhythm that has nothing to prove. I like being porn for people. I like being watched while I ruin myself on purpose. There is a generosity in that, and a hunger. I can offer the heat of this body without first translating it into someone else’s fantasy of a bro or someone else’s fantasy of a person of color. I can be seen as I actually come apart.

The exhaustion arrives when the same body tries to enter community.

Bating culture still runs on a narrow operating system: always on, always masc, always bro-talk, always the hung muscle register. Race does not complicate that system so much as intensify it. The stereotypes that follow people of color through the world are not left at the door; they are stroked like doctrine. Size becomes destiny. Masculinity becomes racial proof. A body becomes a type. If you are chubby, not hung, unwilling to perform bro, and uninterested in serving as a racial kink object, you can feel the room reclassify you in real time.

I am not always on. I do not experience bating as masculinity. I have arrived at in-person events and been read as too feminine to join. I have stood in the hallway of MEN ONLY, listening to the phrase land like a lock. That harshness is not incidental. It is the culture announcing its borders. It is also uniquely disorienting when you love being porn for people; when you are willing to be seen at your wettest and most unguarded but yet are still told that the body doing the offering is the wrong gender of body to admit.

If the culture remains reserved for muscle jocks, masc bros, and the racial scripts it cannot stop rehearsing, it will keep mistaking a poster for a community. It will keep calling exclusion a standard. It will keep leaving out a vast population of people who already know what it is to goon a body the world has under-described and over-interpreted.

For me, this was never about becoming a man. It was about the serious, filthy joy of giving myself pleasure until the old verdicts lost their authority. I goon to come back to my own flesh. I make space so other people like me do not have to abandon theirs at the door. The pleasure was never only for the people who already looked like the poster. It was always available to the rest of us.