Summer of Want
“This song is about sex,” Maggie Rogers wrote of her song “Want Want” upon its release at the beginning of last summer. “No real other way to say it. It’s a song about really wanting to have sex with someone and then doing it. And enjoying it. And wanting to do it again.”
This essay is about sex.
That is, this began as an essay about sex, about desire and want, restlessness and appetite, and quickly morphed into an essay about so much more, about confusion and fear, about politics and liberation.
There is a podcast episode from 2019, the blissful before-times, that I revisit every summer, typically in late May or early June. Listening to the episode is a ritual of summer that, over the past three years, has come to be for me as synonymous with the season as bug-bites and tan lines and 8PM sunsets. It’s an episode of a now mostly-defunct podcast called The Cut and it’s a delightful, delicious, audacious meditation on desire and want, on horniness in all its irregular shapes and sizes.
“I have now worn sandals to work for three days running,” host Molly Fischer announces by way of introduction, immediately pulling the listener into the warm, pink, electric days of early summer, sizzling with the energy of newness and possibility. It is a time of year that Fischer associates with a specific feeling: “[E]veryone’s finally wearing fewer clothes,” She says. “Everyone’s remembering that they have bodies, and that their bodies want things.”
A friend of the host describes that want memorably: “I want to put my mouth on that,” and continues to say: “I don’t mean it in an oral sex way,” She explains. “I want to put it as close to my face as possible. I want to consume it in all of my senses. That’s what it is to be horny to me.”
It is in this spirit that I write this essay, and it is in this spirit that I dubbed last summer the Summer of Want.
While Maggie Rogers heralded last summer as the summer of want, it was MUNA who solidified the season as such. Their song “What I Want,” released with their self-titled album in late June, is an anthem of queer desire. There is a sense of urgency to lead singer Katie Gavin’s desire, of time wasted and time running out: “I spent way too-too many years not knowing what/ what I wanted, how to get it, how to live and now/ I’m gonna make up for it all at once/ ‘cause that, that’s just what I want.”
Gavin sings of excess, of abundance (“I want the full effects/ I wanna hit it hard”) and with piercing specificity (“I want the girl right over there to wanna date me”).
“What I Want” arrived into a world both enraged and joyful. Released on June 24, the Friday that kicked off Pride Weekend in New York City, “the new MUNA album” was the topic of much small talk at the New York City Dyke March and provided a celebratory, danceable soundtrack to my two sweltering days in the Village. June 24 also happened to be the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the subject of many a protest sign at the march. Fitting, because “What I Want” is, fundamentally, an anthem of bodily autonomy, an anthem of doing things because you want to, and that wanting to is reason enough—a reminder that bodily autonomy and queer liberation go hand in hand, and without one there is no other, and a reminder that both joy and rage are radical responses to curtailed rights.
It was in this context that I began to make my “Summer of Want” playlist, beginning with Maggie Rogers and MUNA and compiling a volume of explosive, celebratory songs to capture the feeling of pure, unbridled desire.
I am of the belief that queer people have the capacity to make the best media about desire, about sex, because we have been forced to intimately probe the furthest reaches of our desires, to interrogate what it is that we want or do not want, to define the want, sometimes to withhold or ignore or disguise the want. Queerness is by definition an identity crafted around desire. What a privilege. What a joy.
That is not to say that all queer people know exactly what they want. In fact, it can be more difficult to know what you want as a queer person because the contours of the wants that are possible for us are defined less clearly (or not at all) in mainstream culture. Rather, queer people are often more well-acquainted with their desires, with the way those desires morph with time, with the way they relate to their desires and the way that relation itself morphs with time.
Season two of the hit Netflix show Bridgerton is chaste compared to the first, with only one sex scene in the second-to-last episode. What the season lacks in quantity, however, it makes up for in quality. Part of what makes the singular sex scene so compelling is its commitment to the female gaze, to Kate’s pleasure; she is both the subject and object of desire. The camera lingers on her leg as Anthony slides her stockings beneath her knees, maintains a steady focus on his hand gripping her corset while she shudders.
“Frustration is erotic” writes Eliza Gabbert in her essay “The Shape of the Void” which appeared in the New York Times last April. Indeed, frustration is erotic. In Bridgerton, the sliver of air between Anthony’s profile and Kate’s jaw line crackles as he leans in to smell her collar, restraining himself from stealing a kiss. Queerness is frustration. “You have to stop,” Anthony sighs. “I have to stop?” Kate’s reply is watery, breathless. “There is no other course of action to be concluded. You must stop.” To stop what, exactly, is left unspoken, so obvious it needs no explanation, so veiled there are no words for it. “Everything I have ever done has been for my family,” Kate asserts. “You are the one who must stop before–” “Before what? We finally both do something for ourselves?” It is not difficult to imagine the scene playing out with queer characters, dialogue unchanged, sexual tensions high as ever, as they find themselves caught between their families’ desires and their own.
What is also especially intriguing to me about this heterosexual sex scene is not simply that it is well-crafted, but that so many queer people were involved in the making of it. Cheryl Dunye, lesbian filmmaker known for her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, directed the episode, and Jonathan Bailey, who plays capital-R-rake Anthony Bridgerton, is openly gay. Historically, Dunye-directed sex scenes come critically acclaimed. In a review of The Watermelon Woman that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jeannie DeLombard described the lesbian sex scene in the film as “the hottest dyke scene ever recorded on celluloid.”
The tension. The push-and-pull of unfulfilled desire. The queer gaze can make old tropes feel brand-new.
It is a favorite pastime of mine (and of many other queer people) to take the lyrics of canonically straight songs and to turn them queer. Take, for example, “People Will Say We’re In Love,” from the classic musical Oklahoma! Take, specifically, the version from the 2019 soundtrack starring Damon Duamno and Rebecca Naomi Jones, which transforms the chaste Broadway standard into a twangy, sultry, sexy ballad, starting out understated and reaching an passionate end, Duamno’s scatting falsetto bursting free from of the contrived, stately melody. The song finds its power in negative space, the frustration of disguising desires as prohibitions:
Don’t throw bouquets at me
Don’t please my folks too much
Don’t laugh at my jokes too much
People will say we're in love.
It is once again all too easy to imagine the duet with queer characters, lyrics unchanged, as the characters sing in doublespeak, articulating simultaneously what they want and cannot have.
This July, I found myself on a fourth date at a small concert in Harlem. The closing performer, Bronx-born singer-songwriter Durieux, ended his set with a question. “Who here is on a date?” he asked the crowd. My date and I shyly raised our hands. “If this is, like, date three, this next song might cause some problems,” he said jokingly. I laughed, and my stomach churned.
The song he played is called “Are We?” and the hook asks: “Are we making love, or are we having fun? There should be no confusion.” At the bridge, Durieux asked the crowd to sing along. “It goes like this,” he said. “I wanna be makin’ love/ I wanna be makin’ love/ I wanna be makin’ love...”
And so I found myself, seated in a tight room of about forty people, singing lightly, self-consciously in the way of kids around a campfire: “I wanna be makin’ love/ I wanna be makin’ love/ I wanna be makin’ love...”
My stomach churned again, and I felt my shoulders fold in on themselves. How was it that I had so proudly, just a few weeks ago, pronounced this the “Summer of Want” and yet recoiled so easily at an opportunity to sing my desire out loud: “I wanna be makin’ love/ I wanna be makin’ love/ I wanna be makin’ love...”
It was in this context that I began to expand my “Summer of Want” playlist to include not only the overwhelming, declarative wants, but also the little wants, the burgeoning wants, the self-conscious wants, the veiled wants. While I had begun with the all-caps surety of Lil Nas X’s “THATS WHAT I WANT” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s unambiguous “I Want You In My Room” (“I wanna do bad things to you,” she sings), I ventured deeper into the musical world of want, down more complicated roads.
Lizzo is bouncy as ever, but unsure in the beginnings of a not-yet fully-formed want on “2 Be Loved”:
Am I ready? (Girl, there ain’t a doubt)
Am I ready? (What you talkin’ ‘bout?)
Am I ready? (You gon’ figure it out)
To be loved, to be loved
Am I ready? (You deserve it now)
‘Cause I want it (That’s what I’m talkin’ about) Am I ready? (You gon’ figure it out)
To be loved, to be loved.
Lizzo only sings the word “want” a couple of times throughout the song, each time sandwiched between repeated questions and uncertainties, but she captures the preamble to a want, the questions and false starts that come before naming a desire.
Joni Mitchell’s wants are both quotidian and profound, both wandering and directed, inflected with both love and frustration on “All I Want”:
I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling,
Looking for something, what can it be?
Oh I hate you some, I hate you some,
I love you some,
Oh I love you when I forget about me.
Mitchell evokes a kind of aimlessness in the opening lines, looking for something but unsure of what. Later, however, her wants are pointred and specific: “I wanna talk to ya/ I wanna shampoo you/ I wanna renew you again and again.” And later: “I wanna knit you a sweater/ I wanna write you a love letter/ I wanna make you feel better/I wanna make you feel free.” She knows what she wants, and yet is still searching for something, what can it be?
On “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” Ezra Furman knows what she wants, but cuts herself short of declaring her desires, posing them as questions, considerations, wishes. “I was considering ditching Ezra/ and going by Esme/ Baby, would you find that so odd?... I sit around all day wishin’/ That the real me might be the one you want.”
“Much More” from the classic 1960 Off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks is fundamentally a song about desire, but Luisa, the show’s ingenue, sings the phrase “I want” only once in the entire piece, right at the end, veiling the intensity of the desire boiling inside her behind polite, subjunctive, hypothetical “I’d likes.”
And returning to MUNA, the patron-saints of want, on “Good News” Gavin sings: “I saw a psychic healer/She’d just turned seventeen/All she said was to do what I want/Like I’m supposed to know what that means.”
Click here to listen to more songs of/about wanting that the author recommends.