Might we want to think about a top shortage as something of a crisis in normative masculinity? If we follow this line of inquiry, then it holds that the so-called top shortage is caught up in the pathos of mourning, that something-a sexual identity, a mode of being in the world-disappears as tops disappear. This bubbles up everywhere: a local drag queen recently joked that Edmonton was a city of bottoms. However tenuous its relation to statistical truth, a “top shortage” does take up queer attention. Being (or avowing oneself to be) a bottom allows one to assume an apparent passivity with respect to one’s desires, at least according to the ideologeme whereby bottoming means “taking” and topping means “giving.” I should clarify here that I’m using top and bottom in their robust sense of sexual roles, rather than the (I think equally illustrative and somewhat clearer, if also clearly curtailed) sense of who’s the insertive and who’s the receptive partner, who’s fucking whom.īILLY-RAY BELCOURT. I think on the one hand “top shortage” doesn’t actually name a numerical situation so much as a general disidentification from “top” as an avowed sexual position and that this tendency derives from a highly overdetermined disavowal of desire. Is there actually a top shortage? If there isn’t a top shortage, why do queers talk about it?
The conversation has been edited for length. In June 2017, TNI’s Lou Cornum brought together three writers to discuss what’s really going on in queer lamentations of a top shortage.