I want to talk about the sex scenes, because they were so genuinely different than any I’ve seen. Can you tell me about writing them, where they came from?
They came from a time when I was starting to understand myself. When you transition in your 30s and for the first time start to feel the slightest hint of healing — or what cis people experience naturally, which is the feeling of being right in your body and gender — it allows you to have pretty formative experiences that I think most people have during their first puberty, when they’re actual teenagers. And some of those experiences suck. Finally, I was like, Oh, I understand why everyone was so messy in their 20s! You know?
I had learned this process with World’s Fair and TV Glow where, instead of trying to say something from the outside and explain an experience, I was trying to invite people into my own exploration of these various mysteries. This movie came from the years when I was figuring out who I was sexually and how to not be traumatized and dissociated during sex, but to actually be present. And that required really clear boundaries around consent. That required a lot of gummy candy to eat before and after. That required playfulness, starting and stopping, and being able to wind your way through the experience. And the undoing of the normative tropes of, like, Sex is this act that starts with foreplay and ends with the male climax! I had to learn it. I was having a bunch of sex with a bunch of people. And I was like, This is research. But it was! And I do feel like I reached a much more healthy and liberated place, and by extension, I’m a happier and fuller person.
I think in all of our cultural narrative, our boomer and Gen-X finger-wagging at millennials and Gen Z for being sex-negative, for having less sex — why are we having less sex? It’s so obvious. The world is so nasty, and our relationship to sex is so dysfunctional. Of course we’re having less sex. Sex is horrific. It just takes one visit to YouPorn and you’re like, Jesus Christ. The American sexual psyche — the worldwide sexual psyche — is in a really fucked-up place and needs a lot of healing and interrogation.