Dorcas: I'm interested in people's understanding of like sex. You sort of spoke briefly about how school was like - condom whatever. There was no mention - I certainly didn't get like oh, here's what queer sex can look like.

Misha: Oh never —

D: Or here's what sex can look like in general, that isn't penis and vagina? How did you —  what kind of experiences —  maybe shaped that like understanding?

M: I see okay, let me think for a sec. All right — I think I had to learn hands on, on the job [laughs]. Didn't receive much education, just showed up. Also as I mentioned before, I kept having crushes on all my friends for a long time, not realizing they were crushes. I was just like, ‘I'm just having really complicated bestie feelings.’ [Laughs] There was a point here where I was like, ‘Bestie I don't think —  [laughs] I think… we've maybe misinterpreted [laughs] what's happening here.’ So I ended up in the crescendo of me realizing that I was queer, and telling my secret circle of friends and I was like, ‘Maybe I'm not as you thought.’ [Laughs] I immediately ended up dating one of them, for a year. I think she was like —  at least from what I remember about it, and we haven't really discussed our sex life at 15 in the friendship that we have now —  but the impression that I had at the time was that she was way more eager to sleep with me, than I necessarily was with her. So what guided my way through figuring out how to have queer sex, a lot of the time was trying to figure out what to do or what's right to do, because I didn't necessarily know what I wanted to do. And I was with someone who seemed to want to do certain things with me. So I kind of just showed up and did what I thought was right. And my experience has been a lot better since leaving the complete lack of knowledge that I had [giggles]. It's so nice that now there's so many resources where people just literally speak about having queer sex, and the knowledge that sex looks different for everyone. And when you don't know anything about queer sex, what you know about sex is essentially what you have been told about heterosexual sex. So the sex that I was having a lot of the time was to please my partner, pretty much a sole focus on it, like very performative. And I'm not sure if that's like, this [was] like the first kind of sexual experiences I was having. So I don't know if that's quite common for people who are teenagers, because teenagers are anxious to please. Or if that just intersects with a teenager, who was a girl who was having sex, and then the whole expectation that it was something to do but not necessarily going to be pleasant. And so I think I carried a lot of those assumptions into my first queer experiences. And it's just been a process of building and learning and experiencing and thinking about it since, to figure out a way that it works for me. Which once again, changes a lot, but at least I know what I'm thinking as opposed to trying to figure out what someone else wants. Yeah, which is how it started.

D: That's so interesting that this heteronormative [concept] of like, ‘I must please the man!’

M: Like yeah, I think ‘cause it's the kind of blanket rule. I think you start off having it apply to even your experiences that are very different from the context that the rules are supposed to apply to.

D: This is not the same game! [laughs]

M: This is not the same game, but I'm going to play with the same ball [laughs]. Like yeah so it’s interesting.