Mandee Middleton’s Reviews > Not That I'd Kiss A Girl: A Kiwi girl's tale of coming out and coming of age > Status Update

The memory of a kiss is never enough, like an image you put through the photocopier twenty times until it is blurry and indistinct.

Sex for me has always been so tied up in power &control & respect & shame. It is as much emotional as it is physical. I can’t separate the two.

“You know what’s going on down there, don’t you?”
“Ah…” I paused, confused.
“It’s a gay thing.” He said in a conspiratorial whisper, raising his eyebrows in dramatic fashion. The message was clear - I didn’t belong down there.
“Gays? Oh, thank god, I thought you were going to tell there were straight people down there!”

My experiences over the previous 4 years had begun to teach me the lessons that people are either into you or they are not. There’s nothing that you can do about it and trying to force it through some kind of manipulation of yourself - your looks, your attitude, your personality - or through manipulation of them, never works out in the end.

But if drinking was a major, we were all studying for a Bachelor of Boozing with a minor in unforeseen consequences.