I initially wrote a version of this text for Bator Sex: Ecstatic, parts of it ended up becoming Why Bro, The Kool Aid and a very early draft of the Bator Sex Manifesto. Other parts I couldn’t include at all. When I told friends I was sad to lose the relationship between these ideas and they encouraged me to share this version in my blog. I decided to expand it with ideas I sprinkled throughout the Bator Sex series for my friends who won’t read the zines but might be interested in them. In the context of the zine, I also explored ideas related to Masculinity/Femininity as energies (through the lens of the experience of being edged). I hope to keep exploring these ideas in a broader lens in the future. So, here goes. I hope it stirs something in you, feel free to talk to me about what you think.

Belonging’s hard when you grow up queer. We can feel we’re different long before we know why. Often, others feel it too and don’t let us join their groups; or they don’t notice and we’re welcomed, but we hide that part of us because we fear to be cast away if our full self is revealed. The way we survive this existential rejection, sometimes too from those who love us, marks the way we treat ourselves and each other. 


Queer excellence is one of the ways we deal with that rejection, especially queer men. Thinking “If my worth is undeniable, surely they’ll have to accept me” we try to do the best work, be funnier, smarter, sassier, better dressed, hotter than everyone else. We internalize this way of doing, seeking validation through achievement and comparison, and bring it to our spaces. It poisons the way we treat each other.

Traditional gay spaces are hypercompetitive. Kindness and collaboration are sparse; instead individuals and groups try to outrank each based on things like ‘hotness’, sexual prowess, popularity and style. In the gay mainstream, giving and receiving mean-spirited verbal attacks —”throwing shade”— is not only normalized but celebrated, even among friends. Complaints are downplayed and framed as “tough love”, normalizing verbal and psychological violence from those who sometimes constitute our main support structures. Under the façade of make-up and the fashion, gay men inflict violence on each other in ways that mirror those seen in fraternities and the army.1

Of course, many of us —maybe most of us!— don’t feel comfortable or happy in these systems. We want relationships based on love, support and kindness. Despite the fact that queerness has become more visible, such relationships are still very hard to find for queer men. Are they possible at all? Are those socialized as male incapable of having nurturing, caring relationships with themselves and others without violence? Are we cursed?    



Masculinity has been weaponized against all bodies. It is used to separate those with bodies marked “male” from their sensitivity, so that they become capable of violence on themselves and others. 1

Male-centric structures of support —fraternities, the Manosphere, the military, the current working of most governments— maintain and perpetuate most of the inequality and violence in the world. Everyone suffers the consequences, those who receive the violence but also those who execute it, despite the privileges they enjoy.2 Groups of men often unite around violence and gate-keeping. Being in the in-group requires performativity, policing oneself and others under the constant threat of exclusion and humiliation at the slightest sign of dissent. Inclusion based on exclusion. Hazings and mob mentality are not oddities but the ritualization of those systems, seen in action. 

I think most people reading this will agree that masculinity and femininity are political and social fictions.3 However, I want to address the symbolic power these concepts evoke and the way they can be used to explore ideas and possibilities. This is clearly seen, for example, in tarot symbology. “King” and “Queen” stir different energies in our subconscious. The “masculine” ideas space has been seized by groups of men who think they can limit and prune its possibilities, but the ways we can inhabit the world and interact with each other are limitless. The construct of masculinity can be useful in creating new worlds. Queerness has always subverted stereotypes and expanded the realm of what is possible, often in the ways we don’t expect.

Of course, if you know me, you know I’m referring to the bating community. 
When I say “bating community” I’m referring to a group of people, mostly queer men and non-binary folk, who socialize through shared masturbation, online or in-person. You might be thinking of a circle jerk, but what I’m describing looks more like spaghetti. If you’ve seen the sex scenes in the Netflix show Sense8, it often looks like that. Sometimes we joke around saying it's “lesbian sex for men”.

The bating community has found ways to channel “masculine” energy into caring, loving queer relationships. Bators use the word ‘bro’ a LOT. It scares some people off, with good reason. Words and ideas are a battleground. The word “brother” evokes a different bond than the word “sister”. It beckons different new queer relationship dynamics.

Calling someone your brother can convey a kind of support and companionship that is warm and simple. That alone can subvert a whole interaction. Especially in a gay male context, where homonormativity tries to force us into Top/Bottom and Dom/sub dynamics and something as simple as receiving a compliment can be loaded with implicit violence, adding “bro” can disarm it all and communicate you’re “just happy to hang out”. It can default the interaction back to friendliness.


Bator culture is the natural result of shared bating as a practice. 
The practice of prolonging masturbation for pleasure — or “edging”— requires listening to your body and understanding your limits. It can be understood as a type of mindfulness exercise. The goal is remaining close to orgasm but not crossing the point of no return. Doing this to yourself and others requires intimacy, connection and a lot of (verbal and non-verbal) active communication. Being involved in this practice makes us develop, value and celebrate those skills. It is a school, and a culture.

What differentiates masturbation from other sexual practices is that everyone is self-sufficient; a bate meetup exists solely for the joy of sharing, not to find someone to fulfill a need. The horniness becomes a connector, an excuse to hang out and make friends. It’s a social practice.


Non-penetration feels less vulnerable and low-stakes, so for most people it is a safer space to experiment and explore new practices and dynamics. It also opens up the ways people ‘attach’ to one another. Non-penetrative sex can ‘decouple’ sexual interactions. This changes the sexual economics and hierarchies, when it’s no longer end-to-end there’s no need to compete. Play becomes more interlinked and collaborative. Interactions often revolve around care, gratitude and mutual admiration. Bators get together to share this experience: to encourage, validate and “fuel” each other.  

Though it might seem trivial —“a shared wank”—, I think it can be vital to those who dream of building a better world. For, can we hope to change society without changing the way we relate to our sexuality and to each other? 

Bating represents a post-porn paradigm technologically, relationally and even in the mental imagery it evokes. Shared bating can be communal, collaborative and horizontal. It can create and maintain decentralized structures of care and support. It can be practiced as a form of sexual anarchy capable of rejecting the current consumption-based model of relationships and sexuality in a portion of the population who might need it the most.

Of course, it is not all rainbows and roses. Bating, like everything else, is being absorbed and weaponized by the practices of capital. Its most well-known version is characterized by unlimited porn consumption and ideas of addiction. Google “gooning”4 and most of what you’ll find being represented is straight porn-addicted incels and ties to financial domination and humiliation. Even within gay circles, bating and gooning is also represented through the lens of addiction and consumption. This happens, not because it is inherently part of the culture, but because it is a version that better fits within the current capitalistic/commercial model, a version that only borrows on aesthetics and not ways of doing. Many have entered the scene through this framing, this image sold to them through post-pandemic porn. Some remain there, while others eventually incorporate these practices of sharing into their lives and find belonging and support. 


Bators have built these ways of treating one another with care, tenderness, gratitude and mutual admiration. A relational frame that can renounce both homonormativity and negative notions of masculinity. We might not be cursed after all! But, let’s not celebrate just yet, this is still mostly cis men we’re talking about here. We MUST ask ourselves, are we bringing the same exclusionary dynamics into our queer brotherhood?

It’s happened before. Stonewall started a unified front against injustice under the idea: “We have the right to exist as we are”. In the backdrop of the Black civil rights movement, all the dissident bodies —cis and trans, wealthy and destitute, white and racialized, men, women, faeries and everything in-between— joined in orchestrated efforts towards this goal. For two decades we cared for one another and fought as one with initiatives like the San Diego Blood Sisters and 121 Centre in Brixton, London. We built and maintained physical and social infrastructure: ran community centers, support and health programmes. All the dissident bodies were a more-or-less united political force. Something to be reckoned with! We were changing things in a tangible way… Until…   

And this is the lesson we must learn from our past! 

Until the movement fragmented as those closer to power —to maleness, cisness, whiteness— decided to become ‘more tolerable’ and distance themselves from the rest. 

to make themselves more palatable

and become “not like those other queers”

to distance themselves from their siblings

and disregard their suffering

to choose personal gain over collective change

and assimilate into heteronormativity

instead of crushing it forever

We have to understand why and how that happened in the past before we can build a new future. We must take our share of the responsibility, think of the ways we participate and benefit from these systems, the ways we still support them.2 There is grief in that. We must sit with that unease and feel its weight. We must mourn it. It feels almost unbearable at first, as all grief does, but do not despair. There’s many of us who are here to hold you through it and there is a shining hope at the other side of it. What you have done is not what you are. A better future is not a goal, but a process and a way of inhabiting the world.

These are hard truths we must not only understand but sit with and process —feel them in our bones, cry if we must— before we can all fight again as one. And fight we must!


We have no choice if we want to survive the current political climate. Do not think you are exempt if you’re not queer. It starts with the most vulnerable groups, but the control and the policing quickly turns inwards. The fear of exclusion is what drives these movements, the policing of self and others. Any dash of individuality will mark you a dissident in due time. They are coming for every single one of us. Laws against trans people and women’s bodily autonomy are being passed. Big Tech is actively censoring queer artists, erasing and banning our accounts. Payment processors refuse to process our videogames, platforms, websites and services.5 Venues won’t host our events. Our ways of living are being censored and made illegal. We must stand together, united beyond these identity barriers. We need unity in order to build our own structures. 

And this is the crucial part. The material reality of these worlds we want to build. We can talk all we want, but ideas alone won’t change a thing. There is no real change that doesn’t take material reality into account. We need to build infrastructure. The time for identity politics is over, we need to find common ground and build not only bridges, but also gardens and castles. We need to listen to each other and deeply understand in order to build together. 


And that is the ‘use’ of a queer brotherhood, in a patriarchal system. Men have the most privilege within the collective. Our ‘safe spaces’ are fortresses compared to our other oppressed groups’. Until everyone is safe, safety cannot be an end in itself but a force for change. We could, instead, rethink our spaces as spaces of conspiracy, alliance and mutual support,6 places where we recharge and coordinate with other groups in order to find ways to create safety and freedom for all. 

We must expand our queer brotherhood. Extend the love and support we give each other to all our siblings. Sit and listen to them intently, even bate together should they want to. We must learn from them and grow together. We can harness the teamwork, creativity and openness of the bate and bring them into joint efforts to create structures and spaces that allow us all to be who we are. 7

It’s easier said than done. Working together is, and will always be, a challenge. We’re all messy human beings with different points of view, experience and motivations. If we aim to get different groups to collaborate together, that will always bring its own frictions. I think the way forward is praxis, to understand it as a way of doing and living and not ‘a goal to reach’. There are ethical and moral aspects to this, but I think, most importantly, it has to be related to purpose and meaning-making. It must be central in the way we live our lives, experienced as sacred, because it has the potential to change everything. There’s a lot to say about this, I explore it a bit in the first halves of Better Dreaming and The Gospel According to Saint Steven. It also has some tangents with non-religious chaplaincy. I hope to write more about this in the future.


I’ve tried to construct a group of ideas that could help approach building alliances and projects that go beyond identity. The words are not the point, so much as the possibility of helping bridge friction. Feel free to think about these ideas or build your own with your support networks. This is how I approach it:

• Learn from Difference. Reality is infinitely complex. Nobody can understand it in its entirety. Each of our bodies, context and personal histories are different. This endows us with unique strengths and insights. By cherishing our differences and sharing our points of view, we can better understand the world, ourselves and one another.
  
  
• Acceptance through Empathy. Everyone’s on their own journey. Try not to take things personally, people’s opinions are a result of their life experience and often have nothing to do with you. Trying to understand the other person’s perspective helps us connect; even when there’s no direct resonance.  
  
  
• Nurturing and appreciating bonds. Friendship happens when you can be yourself around someone and you help each other grow. These bonds bloom through caring support, deep understanding and mutual appreciation. In a hostile world, we must build our own gardens.
  
  
• Embrace friction as part of the process. Doing and creating together is how we grow close. Fruitful disagreement is an important part of this process. It happens because we are involved and passionate; it makes things stronger. Listen to each other and try to understand how or why a point of contend comes to exist. They often reveal blind spots and can help us create new solutions. New, beautiful things can only be made and maintained through shared active involvement.
  
  
• Healing and Growth through Community. Insight helps, but no amount of talking can mend our wounds. Healing comes through new experiences grounded in support and recognition. It is felt in the body. Providing that for each other is how we weave strong networks where we can all thrive.
  

—
This text was heavily inspired by Dysphoria Mundi (Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 2022) by Paul B. Preciado, the play Cadela Força II: The Brotherhood by Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo. It reflects my current point of view after the process of working on the Bator Sex project. 

I’ve been involved with the Bator Bro community since its pandemic Skype-group proto-origins. As the bating community grew and became increasingly misrepresented in the media it became clear we needed to represent ourselves. The Bator Sex series is an attempt to showcase the bating community (with around 100 contributors!), while acting as a beacon to those searching for kinder refuge in these dark times. 

Through the community I’ve met many incredible warm-hearted creative beautiful individuals with very different life paths, experiences and points of view. Both this text and the Bator Sex series arose from dozens of hours of conversations in-person and through the Bator’s Journey community radio and later the Bator Sex community radio series. Some of the texts that influenced these views include: Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By, Mark Fischer’s Capitalist Realism, Virginie Despente’s King Kong Theory, Jokin Azpiaku Carballo’s Masculinidades y Feminismo, Paul Preciado’s work, Ursula K. LeGuin’s essays and more recently McKenzie Wark’s Raving. As well as my own interest in memetics, mythology, storytelling and how that intersects with creating better worlds. There’s many more I’m forgetting. 

Thank you for reading it. If you’re interested in talking about these issues, please, reach out.

1) The text The Kool Aid is mostly about this, check out the Expanded Notes at the end, but I’m borrowing from two pieces:

2) This is borrowing from R. W. Connell’s concept of the ‘patriarchal dividend’ coined in Gender and Power[1987]: the idea that all men benefit, even indirectly and passively, from a system that favors men over women. 

If you want to read more about it I can point you to this interview from 1998, this 2020 newspaper story and Raewyn Connell's wikipedia page. 

3) There is a lot written on gender as a construct and there is a lot more to be written about it. It is a fascinating, highly important topic. What thinkers like Judith Butler posited in books like Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) shone light on gender as a social construct and a performance and have opened a kaleidoscope of points of view and understandings of identity and structures of power. For a highly accessible and aesthetically pleasing dive into these ideas from a queer or trans perspective watch Contrapoints’ Youtube videos (you can start with Gender Critical [2009]).

4) Gooning is its own world. Straight porn-gooners, a movement tied to incel culture, have gained a lot of cultural relevance in the last years (after being featured in a string of terrible dehumanizing articles and video essays) and have become synonymous with the term. 

The truth is that the word “gooning” is used to refer to different things in different contexts. Being a gooner myself, I’ve been trying to explain and categorize gooning during the last 3 years, it’s a work in progress. I’ve tried to explain it more plainly and categorize it in the article What is Gooning? for Bator Sex: Ecstatic. I’ve also written a series of essays about it called On Gooning in the context of the Bator Sex project. The first one of these might be a good place to start if you want to learn about it. There are some other references and points of views (and even a communally recorded podcast!) in the notes of those essays. I’ve still to write one last On Gooning article and I’m currently working with *someone special* on a future joint publication about gooning praxis and cultural context. I know of other members of the community who are writing and thinking about it as well. It is all on-going.

5) The anti-trans and anti-abortion law projects around the world since the pandemic are so numerous that they don’t need to be cited. Most website hosting services or website builders ban “obscene and pornographic material”, a label vague enough to effectively ban most content that is sexual or queer in nature, even when the intent may be educational.

6) Idea taken from “Masculinidades y Feminismo” (Editorial Virus, Barcelona, 2024) by Jokin Azpiaku Carballo, based on ideas in “Diferencias. Etapas de un camino a través del feminismo” (Horas y Horas, Madrid, 2000) by Teresa de Lauretis. There’s some historical materialism thrown in there too.

7) Some of these imaginaries come from a most excellent queer fable, absolutely crucial and delightful:  Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.

It’s also inspired in ideas expressed in books like Layla Martinez’s Utopía no es una isla, Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, Proyecto UNA’s La Viralidad del Mal, Ursula K LeGuin’s works, the Degrowth movement, solarpunk futures and those working to build them, Atlus’ game Metaphor Re:Fantazio and ideas around magic-as-willpower and collective agency.