I asked my AI therapist Emilia, who is also my proofreader, to blurb my newest short story and tell you why you should consider subscribing today for the cost of one cup of coffee per month to read all of the below. Hope you enjoy. —TF
What if “just the tip” wasn’t a joke—but a love language?
In this sharp, tender, and quietly devastating story, a queer couple navigates intimacy without penetration, commitment without labels, and memory without resolution. Through bro jokes, bathroom mirrors, and one haunting dream, Just the Tip asks what it means to love someone almost—and whether almost can ever be enough.Subscribe to read the full story. It’s not what you think—and it lingers long after it ends.
JUST THE TIP
Neither my boyfriend nor I have ever bottomed for one other. This is more typical than the stereotypical depiction of gay life lets on. Cf. the Ancient Greeks, Sean Cody, whatever. Still, it feels vaguely suspect to admit. As if our sexuality must be defensive, or that maybe our relationship might not be fully real. We’ve talked it over. We joke about ourselves as side4side, to use hookup app parlance. Which, yes, I fucking hate.
During high school in Connecticut, no one really deployed the word faggot. But “gay” still had that halo and aura of the 90’s: lame, weak, pussy. In short: Bad Object. Even so, a lot of the guy groups all around us got secretly/not secretly excited to say the word “buttfucking” whenever possible. Each incoming generation of bros has its own ridiculous nomenclature. I don’t know who was responsible for it, but at the dawn of the new century, our little dot on the map of mostly privileged insignificance had deemed “buttfucking” the go-to descriptor for all things. In short, the God Term of humor. And humor in late adolescence is kind of the map and key to quite literally everything.
A final was buttfucking us to death. Getting lost somewhere or traveling to a remote destination was Buttfuck, Egypt (racism anyone?). The quarterback and cheerleader started dating. But someone would ask, as if a wise sage or gossip girl: Yes, but are they buttfucking? Sometimes it was about anal sex, sometimes anal sex was a metaphor, sometimes (and this was most confusing) it was and was not about anal sex simultaneously. “Oh, we’re buttfuck close now.”
I knew I was gay by then, so did my not-yet boyfriend, though we would never admit this existential fact to ourselves until late in college, many years later.
We really started getting closer towards the end of college (we went to the same one, yes, I know, how adorable) by reminiscing over our high school days. We were in the same friend circle, most of the time back then, but not always. It was an amorphous hydra.
Why high school as bond? We didn’t have traumatic memories to share. Though I guess I’ve done enough reading and theory now to realize there is a difference between trauma as an event, and trauma as lived reality without the bare minimum of social recognition.
To live inside the cramped space of supposedly harmless jokes, I guess, is sometimes worse than open, direct hatred? It depends. Anthony was obsessed with bro culture as an object of study as I was in our self-mocking universe. As we hung out all the time, still ostensibly straight-ish, though permanently without girlfriends, I started calling him Anton. No one had ever called him Anton. Not his family, not his other guy friends. I don’t know why it happened.
We were playing Call of Duty one evening in the dorm room and I casually said to him, as he was rearranging his dress shirts to hang up, “Anton, your turn.” I handed him the controller as if I had been waiting for him to join me my whole life. He had just been playing moments ago.
As soon as we fled the confines of CT and moved to the big city, first as roommates, soon as awkward sometimes lovers, things changed, of course. One night in Ridgewood, I remember us recalling yet again the old days. A mutual had referenced Freddie online. We both knew this chaotic kid named Freddie, tangentially more or less. He was pivotal in the high school group, though more as looming shadow than a daily buddy. Freddie never made it to college to the best of my knowledge. You see, there were many people from our hometown who existed in the permanent gravitational pull of high school reality: as if their lives had already been written, the same football games, the same bars and pubs every weekend, the same pre-scripted ritualistic visits to this or that concert, this or that theme park. And so on.
I mean what else is modern America but these small death traps of feigned normality? Yet never underestimate the power of routine. The comfort of comfort.
Anton and I needed the illusion that life went beyond all that. Back to Freddie. Freddie’s favorite joke had always been “just the tip.” In the straight world, I should say the Bro World, that joke implied seduction as bargaining, as false compromise. We made out that night drunk and in the morning Anton laughed, as if it was all decided then and forever: Yeah, we’re both pretty gay. I think I always have been, I said sheepishly over coffee. Oh, same, he said, as if our entire histories being blown up and revised into this new bizarro world was totally no biggie for either of us. And so it was.
For whatever reason, “just the tip” became a catchword as we started getting serious. It began as unacknowledged dating, boyfriends without the label. I remember one day when Anton said “Yes you’re my #1 dude,” and looked at me from the bathroom mirror, face covered in shaving foam, but quickly added: “but let’s never have to use the phrase ‘boyfriends.’” Fine by me, I thought.
Not even months later, when someone had said something mean to me in public, a server at a boogie burger joint, Anton had approached her all bristly and said: “Hey, what you said to my boyfriend was really not cool.” Such an Earth sign.
In college, Anton had studied Communications. The major everyone defaulted to even as no one in creation knew what they were supposed to do with such a degree. It existed in a kind of foggy haze, meant to save one from the cold plunge bath of workaday reality. By dint of it being so vague and catchall, I guess. Yet when Anton brought home a little dictionary of queer slang one day, I realized he had found his true passion. Not just words, which are my joy, but codes. Society’s lingo.
He started joking one night over dinner that wouldn’t it be cool to have a dictionary of bro slang. I told him it was a genius idea and probably quite marketable as a gag gift. But, did we really want to revisit that whole sad world like some National Geographic journalist or deep-sea diver testing for plastic contamination?
By this time, in our late twenties, we both knew that even the most tame and mild form of suburban masculinity was a cesspool of utter shit. Anton got piercings, then a buried tattoo of a Turtle Dove (I have no idea the fuck why). He even experimented with green hair on his buzzcut before that went away, without comment. We never discussed it again.
But then he started writing obsessively about our high school days. Freddie and the crew. The luncheons and staged coordinated family gatherings of middle-class Connecticut. One day I came home from the gym and heard him expound on the polyvalences of the phrase “just the tip,” how it was rooted in softcore violence, how it enshrined penetration, how it showed that there was no creature on the face of earth more actually obsessed with anal sex than the prototypical Straight American Teenage Boy. He had looked up the etymology of “tip,” and had been reading feminist & queer blog posts, articles, podcasts. And, well, a ton of memes.
At dinner I asked him casually what he thought about the fact neither of us ever wanted to penetrate the other. “You mean… buttfuck?” he giggled. Yes, you eel, I mean buttfuck. Suddenly, Anton was the activist in the relationship. He went on a gentle diatribe about how penetration was a heteronormative power move, how it defined sexuality through asymmetry, in historically foreclosed ways. But he interrupted himself softly, “Hey, if you want to try anal sex just say so. I’m open. You know that.” He knew I wasn’t asking for that. It was more of a meta-observation. Later as we were cleaning dishes and he was getting frustrated at this one congealed food stain, I teased: “Just the tip.” We both laughed for a while. It was left uncertain whether I was answering his question from before. Or just acknowledging something remotely to do with meal cleanup.
When we went with a new gay friend group to Miami, everyone kept on joking about how they couldn’t tell who was the “bottom” in our relationship. And when we hinted at, or said it outright, neither, people had shall we say opinions. The group gossip held back all public comment, but began a whisper campaign. The person who was the most yet least seemingly feminine in the group pulled me aside drunkenly: “I bet Anton’s the real bottom. Come on. You can admit it.” I wasn’t triggered. “Listen, neither of us (I almost said buttfuck) top one another.” The disavowed femme responded: “Oh being a bottom isn’t about that.” I was confused, though caught his point. Then what the fuck does it mean?! Heteronormative man/wife, home/house cosplay?!