What about love?

What I’m really asking is not where sex is, but where did love go, and why does it still feel so fragile, so delayed, so conditional for people like us.

I know this: a lot of what circulates us—images, apps, clubs, pornified desire—is not love. It’s compensation. It’s an appetite without safety. Touch without shelter. For many of us, Gen X gay men, sex became the only permitted language of closeness. Love was dangerous. Love exposed you. Love got you hurt.

When I say “we want the thrill we didn’t have when we were supposed to have it,” it lands hard—even in my own body—because adolescence is where love is supposed to be rehearsed gently. First crushes. First rejections that don’t destroy you. First kisses that don’t feel illegal. I didn’t get a rehearsal. I went straight into the deep end, often alone, often shamed, afraid someone would see.

So desire had to outrun tenderness. Lust was faster than love. Lust could be anonymous. Love had a name, a face, a risk.

And then there’s family—the fracture that never quite heals. My grandmother saw it clearly: “He’s born that way. Love him anyway.” That’s wisdom. Pre-war. Pre-psychology. Pre-activism clarity.

My mother’s fear—terror, really—froze something vital. I don’t think she hated me. I think she panicked. But panic still wounds. Panic still teaches a child: you are unsafe to love.

So later, when love appears, my body remembers. Not consciously. Somatically. Love feels like a setup. Love feels like waiting for the insult, the punchline, the rejection. So I learn to preempt it. I reject first. Or I downgrade love into sex—because sex leaves faster and hurts less.

And yes—class, race, beauty hierarchies, porn aesthetics—these are just new uniforms for old cruelty. The gay club can reproduce the schoolyard with better lighting and worse music; same cruelty, just sexualized. Desire becomes a ranking system. If I don’t match the fantasy, I’m dismissed—not even rejected, just ignored.

That kind of invisibility teaches people to prefer solitude, pets, and routine. Animals love without audit.

So when I ask, “What is it we wanted that we didn’t get?” I think it’s this:

I wanted to be chosen without having to audition.
I wanted to be desired without being endangered.
I wanted love that didn’t require me to disappear parts of myself.

And now, later in life, love doesn’t look like fireworks. It looks quieter. It looks like someone who stays when nothing exciting is happening. That’s hard to recognize if you were trained to associate intensity with danger.

The “R” I keep circling isn’t rebellion or revelation.

It’s: repair.

Not repair in the sense of fixing what’s “wrong”—there was never anything wrong with me—but repair as relearning. Learning that love doesn’t have to shout. It doesn’t have to humiliate. Love doesn’t have to be earned through performance.

Some people never find romantic love, and that’s not failure. Some find it late. Some find fragments of it—in friendship, in care, in writing, in animals, in solitude that is no longer exile but choice.

And yes, sometimes it’s just a hard-on and no love.

But the fact that I’m asking this question—this long, furious, tender question—means love is still operating in me. As memory. As grief. As intelligence.

Love didn’t disappear.
It was postponed.