HOT QUEER SEX
a political praxis of pleasure and games on how to Do It
Hi sexy friends!
This essay positions eros (intentional attunement to sensory pleasure) and sex as mindfulness of body practices. For queer and trans folx, games can scaffold intimacy which, of course, doesn’t need to include sex.
The language, topics, and games themselves here range from a generous PG-13 rating upward. Respect your own thresholds for this material.
Here, “queer” refers to anyone beyond or outside of a strictly-heterosexual and normatively gendered (cisgendered) orientation. To locate myself: I was assigned female at birth, today identify as non-binary. I’ve played with packers and hormones, but haven’t undergone surgery nor HRT under a provider.
This essay centers queer and trans experiences. Cishet friends are welcome and invited to stay with that understanding in mind.
Light Hive offers essays on engaged mindfulness for complex times. Subscribe for applied takes on Buddhist thought, through the lens of a queer, transracial adoptee.
I support “safe spaces” for queers to practice meditation and mindfulness. My friend Julian Kehs runs the LA-based (with hybrid options) Gender Expansive Mindfulness Sangha (LA GEMS). Without hesitation: yes to more of this.
Here’s the thing: few of these groups actually engage with sexual desire.
Safe: how to notice your clothes making contact with your skin.
Unspeakable: how to notice what feels good when others touch your skin.
Safe: eating and walking meditation.
Unspeakable: eating out and fucking meditation.
Buddhism doesn’t have taxonomies of sins and commandments; it has a transgender goddess of compassion. Buddhism classifies aversion as a poison, while mindfulness of the body and sensory experience are key practices. How is avoiding pleasure in this time of historic anguish and grief the “middle way”?
2025 has brought devastating news for my queer and transgender siblings. Pride month is marked by a June 18th Supreme Court decision to strip trans people of equitable healthcare and an endorsement of conversion therapy (a “treatment” to address the “pathology” that is being who they are) that will have lasting ramifications.
In these contexts, how do people with internalized bodily shame come to love and feel loved? How do we love every aspect of our bodies, seen and unseen, excluding none?
Let’s talk about some broader thoughts on eros, and then about six games that help queers get into their bodies (and maybe other people’s).
Let’s talk about sex, baby.
QueEros as Power
The personal is political and the erotic is spiritual.
Most sexually active adults know fucking doesn’t need to be intimate. Likewise, the erotic doesn’t need to be sexual.
In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde discusses the spiritual and political aspects of embodied joy, comfort, and pleasure. While eros includes sex, it also includes painting a fence, reading a book, and hugging a lover in the sunlight. These things bring us fully into our bodies, autonomously choosing how to spend our time and direct our focus.
By nature, capitalist societies are “anti-erotic,” that is, anti-embodied pleasure. We derive pleasure from things we can attain and accrue, while systematically alienated from our capacity to derive pleasure in our own sensory experience. When most think of eros, it’s generalized as sex, not as painting a fence.
We are told our pleasure, or our means to it, only exists outside of us. For queer and trans folks, a lot of suffering often comes from shame, disconnection from our bodies, and internalized oppression.
As legendary queer designer Avery Alder states, games offer
a convenient excuse — an alibi — to become curious about how decisions about our hearts and our bodies work, and what those decisions mean to us. And since it’s all explored through the lens of a character, our defenses are a little lower, and we’re a little more free to experiment and see what happens.
The games below assert and promote embodied pleasure, consent, and presence. As dharma, these structured experiences (cough) meditations are tools for building agency within people whose bodies have been demonized and shamed.
So whether you’re sexing for the first time or wanting to expand your practice, let me point you toward some fucking instructions.
Making Love by Adira Slattery
Good for two baby queers, newer to sex/intimacy, getting back in the game. (By donation)
This game—with two heart outlines at the top as it’s only illustrative design—blew my mind with its kindness, clarity, and respect.
Making Love normalizes and praises choice, curiosity, and taking your time. Baby queers are given a sense of what to expect, what should be expected of their partner (e.g. consent), and how to check-in with oneself at various stages of physical intimacy. Two players move through first glances, to compliments, to gentle touching, kissing, to all the rest…the limits determined by the players themselves.
But nothing is guaranteed and the game starts with a stop sign. “No cishets allowed” and this banger that gives you a sense of the game’s tone:
Don’t play this game with anyone who would attempt to pressure you into playing this game, and if you are going to use this game to pressure someone? Fucking don’t, you goddamn creep. God, stop reading my game with your creep eyes you fuck.
Boundaries and consent are consistent in all the games I’m going to list here, but another of Slattery’s pieces, Robert’s Rules of Orgy 1st Edition (also by donation), deserves special mention. This is an extremely thoughtful ruleset for group sex (3+). I particularly appreciated the discussion of ribbons, so participants can know exactly what the other person is open to.
If you’re not a creep with creep eyes, let’s continue.
My Lover’s Body is a Temple (and together we make Miracles) by Logan Timmins and Nimaël
Reverential trans-centric intimacy game about worshipping each other’s bodies. ($8)
Logan Timmins demonstrates a bodhisattva level of fierce care for others through generously designed experiences.
My Lover’s Body is a Temple (and together we make Miracles) does something rare: it addresses bodily discomfort, shame, and trepidation via non-pathologizing rituals of care. This was a joint project with Nimaël about one player, the temple, being worshipped by another.
Temple comes with three safety rules: Care, Reverence, and Consent. Players are asked to read the descriptions of each before proceeding. For example,
Reverence: In this game we will revere each other. We will hold the other as sacred and wondrous and inherently worthy of respect and love.
Bodies might be physical or they might be played on the provided blueprints for temple areas like the “genital spread,” the “hand spread,” and the “facial spread.” The worshipper uses tarot cards to “kneel at the altar deep within,” interpreting and praising the various “rooms” of the temple’s body.
The grayscale layout is haunting and gorgeous, with the text caressing the outlines of ancient ruins. The game includes a gentle post-play debrief between the two players.
The next game maintains this level of thoughtful care, but does gain a bit of edge.
I'M A TRANS MAN AND I'M HERE TO FUCK (TRANS BODIES ARE SEXY) by Logan Timmins, Nimaël, Rook, and Uncle Vlad
🛑👉 Send all your transmasc friends this empowering embodiment practice. ($10)
Logan and Nimaël teamed up with Rook and Uncle Vlad (transmasc author of this beautiful zine on Gender Euphoria) for this one. The creative spirit is visualized by a clear energetic shift toward the repetitive, messy, and carnal.
This game was designed as a solo experience, but can be played with 2+ people. Here’s the metta meditation as game description:
I'M A TRANS MAN AND I'M HERE TO FUCK (TRANS BODIES ARE SEXY) is a (NSFW) game for trans men and trans masc folks to feel very trans and very sexy. It's a game to celebrate trans bodies. It's a game that says, “yes, I can have an explicitly trans body, and love myself, and be incredibly attractive to others and have really, really good sex.”
The game involves a tumbling tower (read: Jenga) and a standard deck of cards. The cards are divided into suits, each representing a stage of the sexcapade. Blocks are pulled and when the tower falls…it’s orgasmic.
As with Temple, this game concludes with a debrief. This one relies on the last suit, spades, for deck pulls. For example:
Four of Spades:
Your bodies lie together, flush and flushed. Skin against skin, bare and bared. Take this moment to breathe, just breathe. Where do you feel the strongest connection to your partner?
As such, mechanically, this game is 1/4 aftercare. Even with its all-caps title, I’M HERE TO FUCK creates a queer alterity inextricable from tenderness.
I particularly respect the discussion about bracketed terms in the text, like genitalia. Players may sub in whatever words for their body parts feel most right.
Quick mentions worth sexploring:
A few more fitting for this piece.
The Moth Loves the Flame by Natalie Pudim
In this two-player game about fleeting connections, any gender can play a hot femme that picks another hot femme up at a bar. ($10)
Ah, the femme lesbian/bisexual. How objectified yet unseen, how envied and powerful you are.
Characters are shared, creating a deep sense of interdependence. The roles of “moth” and “flame” will switch. How? Well, it involves a book of twenty matches. For each stage, players strike a match. When each naturally extinguishes (or is put out), roles switch. Two roles, two players, one game exploring not-self in relationship.
Noteworthy:
I recently backed Natalie’s game Can You Host? about “messy queers who want to f
uck, but don’t want to host.” Check it out; it looks massively fun.
Sweet Creams are Made of These by Mids Meinberg
A solo game about fantasy, kink, and self-love by an asexual designer. ($5)
Asexuals and demis: I’ve not forgotten you, and neither has Mids Meinberg. Sweet Creams assigns settings, kinks, archetypes, and events to a standard deck of cards (leaving ample opportunity for players to fill in their own sets—there’s some empowering guidance for folks who might not be certain). Players, who themselves are referred to using the gender-neutral ey pronoun set, draw cards to imagine the sexiest scene possible.
A quote from the game:
Ultimately, it is crucial to see masturbation as a thing in and of itself, rather than a replacement for another act. It is a way to explore your desires and your body’s physiological responses in an environment where you can control for most every variable, and discover so much about yourself in the process.
A Place to Fuck Each Other by An Sheep and Avery Alder
A game about the spaces built by and for queer women, and the distance between expectation and reality. (free)
As with The Moth Loves the Flame, roles rotate, so no player “owns” any one character. Everything is a negotiation. As with many of Adler’s games, there are extensive “extended examples,” showing what gameplay might look like.
A quote from the game:
The best we can do is to carve out little spaces for resistance: to hold time, to really listen, to pay attention to the ways we rub up against each other. It adds up. - An Sheep
These games teach how to build a world where queer pleasure isn’t shameful. They offer structured reminders that our bodies are sites of knowledge, pleasure, and communion, as well as aging, vulnerable vessels, not just pawns in a political culture war. We both are and are not our bodies.
These bodies are, after all, temples. For all our impermanence and imperfection, we are at least one more thing: divine.
I’m not going to tell you the who, what, when, where, or how to fuck. That is always going to be situational and dependent upon enthusiastic, ongoing consent from people positioned to freely offer it.
But I’ll suggest some whys of eros, with or without sex:
I’m again finishing an essay on a historic day. I wish “Midnight Hammer” was a gay pulp novel. In addition to the decisions to deny trans healthcare, there’s a lot to not be “pleased” about.
We are only in these bodies for a limited, unknown, period of time.
Pleasure can be found right here, right now, in your own skin.
Being here for it all is the point.
Takeaway Practice
From A Place to Fuck Each Other.
An Sheep and Avery Alder’s game includes character-building prompts like “I tend to…” and “I’m coping with…” in addition to needs “that will help [lovers] feel like they belong.”
They give some sample needs:
Privacy
Warm light, soft textures
Reasonable quiet
A reassuring cleanliness
Trusted folks nearby
What might be some of yours? What makes you feel safe to explore Eros (this doesn’t need to be sexual) with yourself or others?
If you liked this, consider checking out:
Bio
Logan Juliano (they/them) holds a PhD in Performance Studies and is a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Through Light Hive and as co-editor of Notes from the Inflection Point, they write to share reflections and practices amid ecological and sociopolitical uncertainty. As someone who studied games, and were academically mentored by the queer of color who wrote Cruising Utopia and a butch lesbian who frequently wrote about BDSM, they are embarrassed to say sex games never crossed their mind until Maria Mison introduced them to Making Love.