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Description

Good sex is accessible. Drew wasn’t sure how to respond when a sex worker on the other end of the phone said to him, “Tell me what you want.” But Drew knew he liked hearing him say it.

 

@drewgurza

www.andrewgurza.com

https://thatshandi.co/

 

As expected, Good Sex contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

 

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Drew Gurza

Drew  00:00

I realized I was queer when I was much younger than when I came out. I realized when I was like six, but I didn’t come out till I was about two weeks shy of my 16th birthday. Because I want a boyfriend by the time I turned 16 I really, really want that. I had been watching a lot of queer media and watching a lot of like queers folk was big back then. So I was watching that a lot. Everybody talks about having sex, but I really didn’t. Wow, this guy came out and then it got to go to a club and like, have great sex. And I want that. So maybe, like, come out, I’ll get that too. I didn’t say anything for a long time. I played a lot of Alanis Morissette, a lot of Jagged Little Pill because they were really morose and there was nothing. There was no pamphlets to be like, here’s how you come out when you’re disabled. There’s nothing like that at that time.

Drew

One day, I’m in the kitchen with my mom. And she’s I don’t know, forget Jesus standing on a bright red saying, and she goes, “What’s wrong? You haven’t talked to me like two weeks? What’s wrong?” Are you gay or something? And I paused and went, Well, yeah, actually, I am. And she got my comfort food, which at the time was yogurt link honey to make me feel better. And so I had a big drive and she had a cry. And then she says, “well, when you watch sexing, do you watch the boy, or the girl?” and I was like “the boy, obviously the boy”—she then rented Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for me.

Drew 

She said, “if you want to be this kind of gay person, it’s okay. “And at that point, I was like No mom. […] No, no.” And then then, weirdly enough, four years later, I was performing at the college drag show. Hi, this is Drew Gurza and you’re listening to GOOD SEX. I’m a cripple content creator and disability awareness consultant. My pronouns are he and they. And my disability identifiers are disabled. Good sex is accessible. Cerebral palsy is a center that can be like you have to use a wheelchair. Sometimes it can be spasms, it’s really an umbrella term for a lot of neuro diversity that’s happening in the brain. I had brain damage at birth, and I was born three months early, because I was like, I want to come out now.

Drew  02:22

And for me, for the way it impacts my body. I have to use an electric wheelchair to get around from a power wheelchair user. And I can’t walk at all. I was like, “okay, well, now that I’ve come out, I’m gonna have all these boyfriend’s, gonna have all the experiences that everyone else is having. Because I’ve come out now” then I very quickly realized that because I was disabled, It wasn’t working out that way. I wasn’t getting the teen boyfriend that was going to queer events. I wasn’t being treated the same way because of my disability. As I started having sex, I learned how to have sex and I learned kind of how ablest queer men were, in my experience, I learned very quickly how my body didn’t have a place here.

Drew 

I felt so excluded, excluded, excluded, I do whatever I could to downplay the disability, I would say things like, Oh, I’m disabled but my dick still works. So wheelchairs is not a big deal. And I can still do this. And I’m still sexy. It’s been a process because I’ve always thought like, I know exactly what I want, I want to go after it. But every time I go into queer spaces, or even disability places, I feel like I have to hide pieces of myself. And I just don’t want to do that anymore. The first time I hired a sex worker was back in 2015, I’m pretty sure or early 2016 I hadn’t had sex for like 12 months, almost. I was really depressed, really upset. And I had been thinking about hiring a sex worker, but I was had this shame of like, oh, if I hire a sex worker, then why can I get the quote unquote, real way? And why can I have real? Like, why can I have a real which is so silly.

Drew  04:05

Just a really bad way of thinking about it. Because the sexy over this type of rigor is still real sex. I don’t know why like so I believe that I had to have it organically or whatever it was. I got on the computer. I looked around and I was so scared. And I started looking at the prices of what these guys charge an hour and go that’s like my groceries for two weeks. So I would often look click off, go away for a day or two and then slowly find my way back to it. And one day I was just like, fuck it. I’ll figure out the money. I need this for me. He called me a day before our meeting and said, “Hey, how you doing? I’m okay. I need you to tell me what you want. What? Tell me what you want another session tomorrow. I don’t know I want to get off and have a good time. No, no outline for me what you want.”

Drew

And I had to pause because no one had ever asked me what I wanted before. I just did what I thought was expected of me. And I did all the things that I that I was supposed to do to please a partner. And I thought that that’s what it what it was. “No, my job is to please you. That’s what I’m there for. What do you want?” And I remember being like stunned by this question. It was really awkward because I had to give him what I wanted as a grocery list. I want oral, I want this, I want this. And it was really kind of strange. But it was also really cool to be asked what I liked and what I wanted. When I moved to Toronto, and I, again, was looking for just somebody to work with, I was very nervous, but I mentioned shield.

Drew 

I kept coming back to his profile, because I think he’s really cute looking really how that shirt on, doing you know, very typical gay male porn poses, which I don’t if you know what those are. But they’re basically like when the guy with the shirt off, take the shirt off and put his arm above his head. But then there was also pictures of him just smiling and being kind of a goof. And I was if I like that I like, I think I could connect with this guy. I said, “have you ever been with a disabled guy before?” And he said, No. And I remember kind of smiling, being like, Oh, that’s cool. Because that means that I can, I can be his first I get to, like, show him the ropes of disability and have great sex. Like, cool. I was so nervous, because, you know, he looks like he and I’m, I was a wheelchair user.

Drew  06:45

So it’s very, very nervous that like that it was too much for him to handle and he was gonna walk out. He was very willing to learn about my disability and very willing to learn about what my needs were. And we spent time talking about what it was that I would do with him and what I would need his help for. And he was very, very accommodating. And so we just became, I would say, we’ve become friends. And we’ve worked together now, the last four years. And it is, without question, the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. We giggle and laugh and play before any sex happens, just as friends. And it makes me feel comfortable to be as vulnerable as I need to be with him. And he you know; my disability is a part of our section. It doesn’t bother him like, he makes a joke because I have a lift that I used to get or a band that we sometimes use as part of play.

Drew 

And he’ll say things like, “Oh, don’t say like, I’m only in it for your hoist, we’ll joke and play like that. So he’s very playful, and very real about who he is. And that’s important for me, because with my disability, I have to be real. So to have somebody who’s on the same level, but also like, don’t worry, we can play with this. You can play with me that feels really, really inviting. Because he’s willing to understand me and work with me. John and I filmed a porn for him at rose.tv, they had asked me to find a scene partner. And without even blinking, I was like, “hey, John, what are you doing? Do you want to come over?” What was going through my mind was oh, my God, I’m shooting a porn, oh my God, like, This is so weird. Oh, my God, like, what am I doing? Oh my God.

Drew  08:27

He just put his hand on my chest and looked at me and said, you ready to do this? One of my favorite things I ever did, because it showed a disabled person getting pleasure from someone, and also giving pleasure to another person. And it’s to his credit that I felt so safe in doing that. And it’s a very different kind of relationship that I think people expect between a sex worker and a client. With him, and our sex what makes it so great is that I trust him. There have been moments where we’ve played with sex toys, we’ve tried different kinds of sex that I had never done before. And just before we do it, he’ll say, “do you trust me?” There’s something about that. That makes me just, you got me, you’re not gonna let anything happen to me here. So I feel okay. And I am such a proponent of sex work, in part because of working with him.

Drew 

I lost the ability to masturbate a couple years ago, and it couldn’t, it couldn’t physically pledge myself anymore. It wasn’t that I woke up one day, it just stopped happening. It was a gradual, I would try and my body would hurt. And the more and more I did it, my body would hurt. And I said, well, this is not fun anymore. I’m just gonna stop and I do it. Oh, it was such grief. Such loss that I haven’t really ever experienced. Because I take pride in being able to self-pleasure from the time I was young. From the time I was like, 11-12 and learning how to masturbate I was like, well, at least I know how to do that. Like, at least it’s If I need to sleep or feel better, I can do that. And losing that ability was like, it made me question my masculinity, my viability, my sex appeal, all that stuff made me feel like I didn’t have that anymore.

Drew  10:14

I was visiting my sister? She lives in Sydney, Australia. I’m very jealous. And we were sitting on the beach in Bondi, a beautiful beach. We’re talking about our lives. We’re just having brother sister time together. We were talking about kind of my hands and how they’re, they’re shaved because my disability and she says, “do these sex toys work for you?” I kind of just rolled my eyes and said no, like, there are none for me like no. Why don’t we make one? And initially, I was like, making a sex toy with my sister. That’s a really odd family thing to do together. But at the same time, when we started to ask people from the disabled community “do you want this?” this is adventure, we should even like, trail down to make any sense. And then we realized, when people came back to us with “oh, yeah, we really want this” it was bigger than just a brother and sister thing.

Drew 

It was like, we could create something that could change the world for a lot of people. And so after all of our tooling and thinking and talking about it, it became handy, you know, like handy, get it, get it. As we were doing that, people would come to us with stories about the kind of sex they were having as disabled people, we said, well, we want to take these stories and put them somewhere, this is really important. There’s not a lot of books around sex and disability that go into this realm and uncover sex and disability in this way. And so “The Handi Book of Love, Lust & Disability”—which you can get in our website, and that’s handi.co the book really goes into how sex and disability really feel? Key things about sexual disability that most people don’t consider before. I’m really proud of Handi.

Drew 

And I’m really, really proud of what it, what it will do for the next generation of disabled people to see that in bookstores. And also what it will do for non-disabled people to see that in bookstores and go, oh, I never considered it this way. And I never understood because guess what, all of us are going to become disabled at one point or another. So we need to start talking about disabled sex now. Because even when you encounter disability in your own body, you’re still gonna want to have great sex, right? So why not do it now? Even if it’s not you yourself, you might bump into the hardest disabled person in the world, which is me, so don’t worry about it.

Drew

But you might run into like someone else with a disability and realize that you want to have great sex with them but don’t know how. So we need to have these conversations down because no matter what you do, disability will become a part of your life. You can follow me on Instagram and twitter at @DrewGurza and I also have a podcast called: DISABILITY AFTER DARK—The podcast shining a bright light on disability stories. It’s available every Saturday wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening to GOOD SEX.

CREDITS

GOOD SEX is a Lemonada Media Original. Produced by Claire Jones and Matthew Simonson. Our supervising producer is Kryssy Pease, and our executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Music is by Dan Molad with additional music from APM music and sound design is by Matthew Simonson. If you like GOOD SEX, the show, not you know, why don’t you rate and review us on iTunes. And you can follow us on all social media at @LemonadaMedia. Thanks for listening!