Features & Columns

Generation Q

Kids these days are constantly on their phones... and more educated
about sex, consent and gender fluidity than ever before
The internet exposed an entire generation to the perverse panoply of human sexuality—that's a good thing

When Justin Pomariga turned 18 last year, he dragged his mother to San Francisco to shop with him at Mr. S, the legendary leather and fetish store. He'd been anticipating his birthday for months, awaiting the day he could legally jump into the BDSM scene after years of Internet research.

"My mom is a very liberal person," he says. But she hadn't quite understood what her kid was into before they entered the store. "When she walked in there, she was like, 'Justin, look at this!'" he remembers. "She picked up a dildo, and I'm like, 'What are you doing with that? Put that away!'"

Pomariga went home to West San Jose with a new puppy hood, ready to show it off that same day on GROWLr, a dating app like Grindr for bears. The visit would have been unimaginable for an older generation of queer people, but Pomariga was born in the 21st century, and his mom, a certified nursing assistant, loves her kid for who he is.

Bigots used to warn about a gay agenda that would turn everyone's children into perverts. They still say that in a lot of places across America (and, sometimes, in San Jose, like last year when the San Jose Public Library's program Drag Queen Story Time faced backlash from homophobic parents). But there's no sending this generation back into the closet. LGBT young people are digital natives who learned about queer sex and gender identity on the internet and aren't afraid to talk about it.

"My sexual side has always been something that I really try to enjoy," says Pomariga. "It's something I love talking about."

This youngest generation of queer kids are also the exception to the so-called "sex recession." According to The Atlantic's Kate Julian, young Americans are screwed because they're not screwing. In a panicky cover story that spawned a rash of hand-wringing reactions, Julian asserts that young adults are having less sex than previous generations, despite easy access to potential partners through their phones and fewer cultural taboos about who to sleep with. And the numbers do indicate less sex among young people: In 2017, about 40 percent of high school students reported having sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991, and the teen pregnancy rate is 67 percent lower than it was in 1991.

Some of Julian's explanations seem plausible—sex is harder if you live with your parents, which many young people do; no one's getting enough sleep, which hurts sex drive; Julian heard stories of young straight men who seem to think non-consensual choking is a good first-date idea, which turns women off—and others, like "obesity," which Julian lists without comment, are just ignorant. (News flash: fat people enjoy sex like everyone else).

Julian observes that unlike straight people, LGBT young adults are having plenty of sex. But she doesn't investigate why, nor does she acknowledge that a huge percentage of young people identify as something other than straight. Generation Z, born after 1995, is far queerer and more gender-fluid than the now-basically-middle-age millennials: a study of Generation Z conducted by U.K. market research firm Ipsos MORI found that a third of young people are gay or bisexual, and a recent UCLA paper concluded that 27 percent of California teens are gender nonconforming, meaning they reject the label "boy" or "girl" for something in between. Any analysis of sexual behavior that skips over queer sex is fundamentally incomplete.

But queer and trans people are often well-versed in the language of sex, gender and consent, because we have to deal with our differences at a young age. That makes us more inclined to know what we like and don't like, and better at seeking it out or avoiding it. And the next generation of queer people, who grew up with great role models on TV and Twitter, gay-straight alliances in school, and the internet in their pockets, is even better at it than we were.

The National Review and other right-wing media outlets quickly blamed the "bonkruptcy" on #MeToo, then urged young people to go back to church for some in-person heterosexual flirting under His eye. But even the paranoia about "the end of sex" from nice liberals feels icky, grounded in a fear that white straight people aren't reproducing themselves. That's the same fear that drove neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to chant hateful slogans about Jews and people of color "replacing" them. It's also the fear that controls the conservative Quiverfull movement, where Christian families, like the Duggars of 19 Kids and Counting fame, have as many children as possible to fill their "quiver" of arrows for the coming war against the rest of us heathens. (Mike Pompeo, our evangelical Secretary of State, considers the rapture relevant to American foreign policy, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders thinks God wanted Donald Trump to be president, so arrows and quivers aren't as far from mainstream politics as you'd hope.)

The sex panic also ignores Pomariga's universe, perhaps because straight journalists seem mind-bendingly resistant to talking to queer people about sex. Emily Witt, a staff writer for The New Yorker, explored the world of camgirls, Burning Man orgies and orgasmic meditation in 2016's Future Sex, but she didn't ask a single gay person about their sex lives. She's not directly homophobic; in ignoring gay sex altogether, she just seems to assume, good-naturedly, that gay relationships are the same as straight ones and therefore not worth investigating.

That "we're all the same" narrative developed as a defense against bigots, who try to disgust their followers with comparisons of gay sex to bestiality, talking up the sexy parts to make us seem like freaks. So a lot of the conversation about gay rights has ignored sex altogether, afraid of giving haters more fuel for their fire. That means queer sex is usually absent from mainstream culture, or even mainstream versions of gay culture.

But queer and trans people do think about sex differently. We're far less bound by rigid gender roles during sex, which means any of us can top or bottom as we choose, regardless of our femininity or masculinity. We pioneered safer sex as a community response to AIDS, and sex-positive lesbians managing histories of rape led the way on early conversations about consent. And straight people looking for a way out of the "recession" could learn a lot from our stories.

LEARNING CURVE

Pomariga, a queer first-generation child of Filipino immigrants ("I say Filipino without the 'American,'" he says with pride), has a septum piercing through his nose and braces on his teeth. The youngest of three, he came out in sixth grade, the same year his grandmother died back in the Philippines and his family was crammed into a house with another family. It was tough; everyone in school seemed to know he was gay within days of him telling his friends, though he'd barely come to the realization himself. But the rumors brought other gay and bi kids out of the woodwork. He dated a few of them until graduating from Boynton High School last year.

Staff and program participants at the LGBTQ Youth Space in San Jose come together to help each other.

By then, he'd also built a parallel universe of friends on the internet, using forums like Disqus and through his own YouTube channel. Sometimes they'd Skype, talking face-to-face from across the country about music, video production and sex. Someone gave him a book about Japanese bondage, which opened up a whole new world for Pomariga.

He started sleeping with dominant women in addition to men, which is why he uses the word "queer" instead of "gay" to describe his sexuality. "I brought a girl home once and my mom was like, 'What's going on?'" He loved the feeling of an empowered woman topping him, though he still meets dates at the Watergarden, a gay bathhouse on The Alameda in San Jose.

Old people have always clucked about young people's weird new habits. These days, the clucking centers on Gen Z's so-called internet addiction, with headlines like "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" and "The Loneliest Generation."

Some of it is about gender: They make us use confusing pronouns! (A big chunk of Generation Z knows someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, according to a Pew Research study from last month, but it seems that old people can only observe from the op-ed pages in bewilderment.) And now, apparently, they're even doing sex wrong: They write up contracts before they make out! They'll be the end of civilization! But when Pomariga talks about sex, he brims with an enthusiasm that comes from real confidence, and that's something that both straight kids and everyone's baffled parents could learn from.

GROUP CHAT

It's a Friday night at the LGBTQ Youth Space on South First Street in downtown San Jose, and there are a handful of people watching the most recent episode of RuPaul's Drag Race on a big screen, with the lights dimmed, theater-style. In the bright front room, where the end tables are stocked with homemade glitter snow globes, six young queer people, including Pomariga—all 18-22—are opening up about sex.

Tyree Jackson, 19, is planning to go home after the conversation, but he looks ready for a night out. He's wearing knee-high white Chuck Taylors that zip up his leg over carefully ripped black jeans. He wears a white sweatshirt, a '90s choker, and tiny dangly cross earrings in each ear like George Michael. He works "only on Wednesdays" and, like everyone else in the group, lives at home with his parents. He's got a crush on a close friend who'd planned to join the conversation but didn't. "It's hard to know what's gonna happen," he says.

Jessica, 22, who asked that her last name not be used, met her girlfriend on Tumblr. She appreciates how the Internet connected her to other gay people in the small town in Massachusetts, where she grew up a South Asian kid. "I think it can help people who feel isolated," she says. Some might not have had problems meeting people before online dating, but for the rest of us, it can be a lifeline.

She and her girlfriend both live at home but find time to see each other anyway, taking advantage of their parents' denial. "Both of our parents are pretty oblivious to it, which is weird because I think we're loud sometimes," she says.

It's an oblivion rooted in homophobia, she suspects: "They think we're both girls so it's all innocent." Her mother asks about her "friend" often, though Jessica has come out to her directly before. "She's told me, 'Why don't you try dating a guy,'" though Jessica has, and would rather be with women.

Also interested in relationships is Anthony Francis, 20 and mixed Caribbean-American, who came out as bisexual to his family four years ago. Like Pomariga, he knows his mother wants to meet his dates. "She's like, 'You best take that person home. You better introduce me so I can get to know him or her better,'" he says. Almost all his friends are straight men, but he's found "a welcome family" at the Youth Space. In a sweatshirt and athletic pants, he's cheery and soft-voiced. "I've never really been in a relationship before, so I kind of wanted to experiment with my sexual orientation a bit more to see what it's like." He's not interested in casual sex, preferring instead to "get used to that person and be in a healthy relationship."

Joshua Danner, a black 18-year-old who is also bisexual, is open to casual sex like Pomariga, but he stays away from apps like Grindr. ("All of Grindr is scammers," Pomariga quips, and Danner agrees. Turns out they might have the digital intelligence to know who's real online, unlike baby boomers, who share "fake news" more than everyone else, according to a study published in Science last month.)

In contrast to Alex, a mixed-race 20-year-old who wouldn't mind if a partner asked for a nonsexual but romantic relationship—limited to hugging and cuddling—sex is fundamental for Danner. "I wouldn't be dating them otherwise," he says. Raised a Southern Christian, Danner says he has found no shortage of dates in San Jose, but there's a familiar, youthful grandiosity to his claims. Like anyone in their late teens and early 20s, he and his peers are still figuring things out.

"I get at least two people hitting on me a day," he brags.

"I wish I had that," says Pomariga.

"I have like zero people hitting on me," says Jackson.

Alex, in a Steven Universe T-shirt, seems skeptical of Josh's claim. A student at De Anza college, he asked to use a pseudonym for this article. "Are these in queer spaces?" he asks.

"Really anywhere," Danner says. "It gets annoying."

LEARNING TO LOVE

Jessica's challenges with queer dating are more than annoying. "My girlfriend really likes to hold my hand and sometimes I feel, like, uncomfortable with that," she says. "You never know if there's a random homophobic person walking down the street who's gonna see it and say something or do something."

Her fear isn't unjustified; actor Jussie Smollett was attacked days after our conversation in Chicago, targeted explicitly as a black queer man. Visibility, even in big American cities, can still be dangerous, and violence against LGBT people is up, according to a 2018 report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.

Alex has not yet had sex or been in a relationship. He thinks part of that has to do with social anxiety; he's known about the Youth Space since April, but had only been once before, because it's tough to go alone to a new place. (Is he especially unique? Every story from my early 20s involves bottom-shelf vodka and whole jugs of Carlo Rossi. If we'd had words like "social anxiety" back then, we would have used them. We would have hung out at the Youth Space, too.)

Alex does think his phone makes it easier to turn away from social interaction. "Obviously, I do crave face-to-face conversation, and with my really close friends, I obviously want to call or Facetime or see them in person. But when it's new people, it's scarier," he says. His phone offers so much distraction and he knows he can fall back on it instead of pushing himself to talk to strangers. "It might be a little dangerous to label a whole generation as [too phone-addicted to talk to people], but it does ring true," he says.

Still, Alex is optimistic, and his friends don't shame him. They're all queer, some are poly, some are monogamous, some are asexual, and they all learned about sex on the Internet. A quick Google search will get you pages of articles on all those identities, and at least in Alex's social circle, they're okay to talk about.

"My friends who have slept with lots people before are just like, 'I'm excited for you to have sex for the first time.' It's not like, 'You have to right now,'" he says. "We know the acronyms. We know the words."

A friend who loves sex recently told him, "If my partner were to tell me they were asexual, I probably wouldn't mind, as long as we cuddled and the romantic relationship was great and there was some sort of physical connection." A few years ago, might that asexual partner have endured unwanted sex to maintain their relationship? Maybe.

That happened to Pia Cruz, 21, also from San Jose. She's a bubbly Puerto Rican transgender woman who's used the label "gray ace," or gray asexual, for the last several months. Just like the Kinsey scale describes a spectrum of sexuality from heterosexual to homosexual and various shades of bisexual in between, someone who's gray asexual falls somewhere between sexual and asexual. "I feel sexual attraction on rare occasions, but I don't have enough desire to act on it," Cruz says.

For Cruz, specific language helps her navigate a sometimes hostile dating world. The pool of people interested in her, she's found, is "very tiny," because anti-trans bigotry is so common and because asexuality is relatively uncommon. "Putting a label on it helps me communicate it to the world," she says.

But she hasn't always had those labels. In the past, her body dysphoria made sex uncomfortable. "But I would do it anyway, because no one told me otherwise, and I thought I had to do it," she says. "My first two boyfriends, I kinda just had to, because it was just what was expected, and I didn't know any better, that what I was feeling was valid."

Cruz doesn't think her experience is new. "Just because we have a word for something now doesn't mean it never existed," she says.

SEX RE-EDUCATION

If the "sex recession" means more virgins like Alex or asexual people like Cruz, that's not a bad thing. Neither of them are having sex right now, but they're also not having bad sex. Cruz has crushes on many of her friends, and she knows her sexual interest could change. "I may be totally into it, potentially in the future," she says.

For his part, Alex is so excited by the prospect of eventual good sex that he wants to be a sex therapist. That's not because of Netflix's Sex Education—about a high school junior, also a virgin, who counsels his peers on their sexual problems—though Alex has seen a few episodes.

He had "terrible" sex education at his Catholic high school (condom, banana) so he took a sex ed class at De Anza College and watched a lot of instructional YouTube videos from people like [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bwI8tdAFdU ]TheNotAdam and [ https://t.co/FVCAfhXCDE ]Stevie Boebi to figure out what he needed to know. He's not repressed; he came to the Youth Space on a Friday night and talked about his desires and interests, even as he struggles to communicate with his family about his identity. He's lucky that San Jose has a place for that, that there's no pressure to have sex there, and that he is part of a generation that can find straightforward, non-judgmental sex information online.

Unlike the gay bars of yesteryear, the Youth Space's goal is to build sober, consensual community. On a recent weekday afternoon, four young people at a wooden table playing an extremely wholesome game of Jenga exclaimed when their tower collapsed. The space also offers workshops about healthy relationships and safer sex, raising awareness through the Santa Clara County Public Health Department's Getting to Zero program, which works toward zero new HIV diagnoses.

"We allow a space for folks to talk about sex, but we also allow a space for folks who don't want to, who may be more reserved," says Stanley Gaeta, drop-in center coordinator at the Youth Space. "First and foremost, the Space provides a sense of community for folks to build friendships."

It may have been edgy for a network sitcom when it debuted in 1998, but for for queer kids born in 1998, 'Will & Grace' is as about as boundary-pushing as 'I Love Lucy' is for older generations.

Alex and Pomariga's young lives represent two prongs of a new kind of American sexual freedom. For most of the LGBT rights movement's history, we fought for the freedom to do things we hadn't been allowed to do before: freedom to gather in gay bars, freedom to marry someone of the same sex, freedom to live as the gender we are without discrimination. But there's an equally important thread running below those campaigns, which is freedom from doing things we don't want to do.

When we sought to gather in gay bars without cops attacking us, we wanted freedom from police oppression. Part of why many of us cared about gay marriage is because we didn't want to have to marry a person of the opposite sex; we wanted freedom from forced closeting, just as trans folks seek freedom from compulsory gender identities that don't fit.

The same idea applies to the sex we're having: Some of us, like Pomariga, want the freedom to explore unique desires that were taboo in the past. San Francisco's history of sexual liberation fit into this first framework: Come here to figure out what it is that turns you on—whether it's bondage or other men or, these days, cosplay—and you'll discover a community living out that dream freely.

But a lot of the new conversations around sex are the "freedom from" kind: asexuals want freedom from the obligation to have sex, and aromantics want the freedom from the romantic relationships that are assumed to accompany sex. The #MeToo movement might be giving more of us the chance to say no to sex we don't want. That's freedom from assault, and it's the sort of thing that young people like Alex are thinking about before they plunge into sexual activity. What do I want, who do I want to do it with, when is the right time, how do I feel about it, and am I ready?

As author Lux Alptraum wrote in response to Julian's article in the Atlantic, "The only reliable source of answers we have for what our sex life 'should' look like is our own libido, desire and fantasies." Alex is trying to discover those answers for himself, so far with different results than Pomariga.

Of course, we always technically had the freedom to reject sex we didn't want, but it's a lot harder to explain a long-term disinterest in sex without a commonly recognized term like "asexual." That label also makes it easier for someone like Alex, who's not asexual but isn't having sex, to defend that choice socially.

In Sex Education, almost no one has sex while drunk or high; instead, they awkwardly fumble around with their dates and ask for help from the (teenage) school sex therapist when they need it. The sober, funny, all-gender sex in the show feels modern and never coerced; sometimes characters even stop in the middle when it goes wrong, instead of pushing through something awful. Affirmative consent means you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, and if that means this generation of young people are having less sex or later sex with better boundaries, less shame, and more consent, that's worth celebrating.

"We're all just bouncing around in this crazy world trying to find someone," says Cruz.