January is Makeout Month at Autostraddle.com
Some of the best nights of my life have started with a make out, the culmination of hours (or days) of wondering if the recipient of my affection would want to kiss me back, a rush of sheer joy at the confirmation of our shared desire. Formative teen movies like Grease and Mean Girls framed making out as the pinnacle of public displays of affection. Makeouts showed you were confident in who you were and who you wanted, and that someone wanted you, too. As I approach my 25th birthday and the alleged solidification of my prefrontal cortex, I’ve been reflecting on my experience making out: how I fit into the dynamics of desire and performance and what I’ve learned through all my experiences. After all, making out has more definitions: to “make something out” is to discern it, and asking how someone “made out” inquires how they fared. These definitions feel intertwined in my life: I have learned a lot about myself from the people I’ve kissed, and I haven’t come out of every kiss as well as I went into it. Through five core makeouts, I’ve gone from the teen I was to the adult I am still becoming.
1.
On New Year’s Day of our freshman year of high school, my middle school best friend asked me if I wanted to kiss him.
I was sitting on his knee in his bedroom closet after a game of truth or dare, and another friend of his was a few feet away. I nodded anyway, half-hoping the friend would know and tell other people, since desirability in high school was collectively decided, and according to the boys in my school, I was undesirable.
My first three relationships (two girlfriends and one long distance boyfriend) had been age appropriately chaste, but I wanted more. People in our grade were starting to date upperclassmen, which meant they were making out in Central Park, in school stairwells, in Instagram photos. Beyond actual touch, I craved the normalcy, the optimism that those images provided. Making out was normal, so if I was making out, I was normal. I was okay. I made out with my best friend.
We were alone later, his family and their friends a few rooms away. Like almost anywhere in New York, the potential for interruption was ever present. We retreated into his closet. (Perhaps a little on the nose for a then-bisexual-now-lesbian, but the universe can be funny that way.) I told him to use less tongue and clicked the light off, and we both thought about girls who didn’t want us.
I walked to the bus stop later in a limbo: the kind where it becomes obvious that everything is going to change, but the change hasn’t happened yet. I had made out with my best friend, and I didn’t want it to mean anything. I wanted to go to school Monday and have everything be normal, the exact reason I’d wanted to kiss him. I was his first kiss, which had felt almost sexy in the moment and would feel destructive after, as the days we didn’t speak added up to more than the times we had. The meaning of us had shifted imperceptibly, in a way we couldn’t make out, all because we had.
2.
My first ex-girlfriend and I stayed late at school to make out on the floor of classrooms our sophomore year. We both had younger brothers and no privacy at home, so we loitered after school to figure out when classrooms emptied for good. Maybe it was normal, then, to be having my most sexual experience so far in the building where I spent most of my time. A friend of mine used a free period and a gym supply closet to stake her claim to the hottest boy in our grade. Still, having my ex run her hands over my new breasts and whisper how long she’d wanted this in the same room where my classmates learned Spanish conjugations and trigonometry felt as risky as it did sexy.
She wanted me, despite my nagging insecurities. I wanted makeouts that meant nothing, that was just the two of us passing time in whatever private space we could find. It was a far cry from the teenage romance I saw on TV, littered with personal cars and entire wings of houses and secluded suburban streets, but it was ours.
3.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I enrolled in a pre-college theatre intensive. Despite knowing I wanted to study playwriting or lighting design in college, I was there as an actor mostly because I didn’t see the design/tech application until it was too late and partially because the design/tech program was far more competitive. Each design/tech participant was assigned one of the shows to stage manage. Not being a stage manager myself meant spending a lot of time with the cute stage manager of my show.
From the first day of the program, we were drawn to each other. With other people in the show, we formed a friend group of queer kids from around the country. We stayed up late talking about classes and rehearsal and debating which institute rule was the stupidest. Much was made of the fact that we couldn’t jaywalk across one intersection, but the program admitted they couldn’t stop us from having sex. I tried not to look at the stage manager when we talked about this.
I had a boyfriend back home. We were directing a show together in the fall, connected by our time in high school theatre. He did not want to make out very often or ever have sex, which was hard to square with the value I placed on my desirability, so he, unprompted, gave me permission to hook up with other people while I was away. My voice was scratchy from overuse, my clothes were butch, and I’d just started introducing myself with they/them pronouns. I was ready to be something new, even if I didn’t quite know what that was yet.
About halfway through the institute, the stage manager and I found ourselves alone for the first time. We were immediately on my crappy bunk bed, hands in each other’s hair, lips pressed together. I had never kissed someone else non-binary, and it felt ecstatic. We held and touched and kissed each other with a mutual understanding. They wanted me as I was, not as some ideal image of girlhood that I would never be. They made me feel desirable in a way no boy ever had, a way that was true to myself. We didn’t get a lot more alone time together, and we haven’t seen each other in seven years, but that summer showed me my longing to be seen completely as I was. I went back to she/her pronouns, not rocking the boat in my last year of high school. But not all my yearning stayed hidden. I broke up with my boyfriend that October.
4.
Partying as a teenager is hard in New York City, where very few people have houses and almost everyone has nosy neighbors. I went to venue parties, which meant buying a ticket to an event that would inevitably be shut down by police sirens, and maybe two or three apartment parties, but nothing like the ragers I’d seen on TV or in movies. I’d never kissed anyone at a party, confirming my suspicion that being into me was something embarrassing or secretive. I thought the kissing at parties period of my life would never exist, something mythological for suburban kids or the extremely wealthy. Then, I went off to college, changing my name and pronouns for good this time.
Just before Halloween, my university’s Rainbow Alliance had a meeting to watch Twitches and eat snacks. I dressed as queer as I could, still-long hair split into two french braids, plaid shirt unbuttoned over a gray tank top, and barn coat braced against the Illinois chill. I enjoyed the movie but was worried I hadn’t made any fast friends that night. I opened Facebook the next day to friend requests from some of the older students. A few days later, an invite to a queer house party arrived.
My roommate and I gussied ourselves up the day of the party and made the trek from our dorm to the off campus address we’d been sent. We knocked hesitantly, showed that we’d Venmo’d five dollars each, and got our hands stamped — we were in.
I got one drink and took to the dance floor, trying to shake off a hookup that had ended a friendship. Before long, there was a beautiful blonde woman dancing in front of me, with me, on me. She turned around slowly and started kissing me. In an apartment full of queer people, she had wanted me. I was becoming a new person, one who could make out in public, who knew what they were and what they wanted, and who was wanted by others. Later, I had a serious boyfriend, and then a lot of fun hookups, and then a serious girlfriend. I was settling into young adulthood with a confidence in myself that had been crystallized on that dance floor.
5.
Six weeks out of a yearlong relationship, I went out for dinner and dancing with a new friend of mine, completely oblivious of her interest in me. We laughed through dinner, sparks flying, and made our way to the sapphic event we’d bought tickets to. We met up with a friend of hers and had our tarot read at the event.
The reader told me: “You don’t have to be fully healed to move on.”
A cute redhead flirted with me, and I kissed her. We exchanged Instagrams, and my friend suggested we go to Henrietta Hudson’s. The redhead and her roommate were going home, but she promised to message me soon.
After an awkward E ride and chilly walk to Henrietta’s, my friend stashed our coats and dragged me to the dance floor. We were dancing near each other, then we were dancing together, then we were kissing, then we were making out, pressed up against the wall. My breakup had led me to spiraling about the idea that I would never make out with someone again, and here I was, making out with a gorgeous friend, in a queer club. Joy and kissing had a habit of returning.
I had never been infatuated with a man the way I was with this friend. We were texting constantly, and I always wanted her lips on mine, her arms around me, her voice in my ears. For 12 years, I had thought I was bisexual because I could find boys and men cute and had liked kissing or sleeping with them enough. But as I remembered that first kiss in Henrietta’s, the dance floor makeout in college, the way my stomach had clenched uncomfortably when I kissed my middle school best friend, a realization that I was not as bisexual as I had thought started to crest.
A few weeks later, my friend and I were officially dating. A few weeks after that, we were girlfriends. Six days into the new year, I was pretty sure that I was a lesbian. All because of one amazing makeout at a queer bar.
Overall, I would say I’ve made out okay after all this making out. I’ve learned that the voices telling me that I’m undesirable are not my own, nor are they worth my attention. I’ve learned I feel better in the arms of someone who shares identities with me. I learned that I liked girls and, very recently, that I only like girls. The path to my young adulthood has been paved in makeouts, from classrooms at my high school to famous queer bars in New York. I hope to keep making out: to keep kissing someone passionately, and to keep discerning myself.
