Ha Ha. Sob Sob.

Hannah Tennant-Moore explores Jesse James Rose’s debut memoir.

By Hannah Tennant-MooreDecember 8, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Gender & Sexuality

IN THERAPY WITH a straight white male therapist, I once joked, “At least I didn’t get gang-raped. Small victories.” The straight white male therapist stared back at me, stone-faced, reprimanding, as if to say, “That is not an appropriate thing to joke about, and I refuse to participate in your trivialization of sexual trauma.” Later, when I spoke about my real sexual trauma in terms that were not at all funny, the straight white male therapist shamed me for not seeking treatment sooner and suggested I was exaggerating the abuse in retrospect.

A categorical refusal to laugh at a rape joke may make someone seem like a feminist, but it can also signify disengagement. For many of us who have actually been violated, a joke does not trivialize the trauma but rather acknowledges a sense of shared hopelessness over the fact that rape culture continues to affect nearly every aspect of our lives. Sometimes the best way to explain something that horrific and that absurd is with a joke.

Trans actor and activist Jesse James Rose’s debut memoir, sorry i keep crying during sex (2025), is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the deepest: having a command over humor means having a command over the complexity of what you’re joking about. The laughter Rose evokes throughout the memoir disarms the reader, drawing them close to the disturbing subject matter: sexual assault and molestation, 9/11, traumatic breakups, and dementia.

Rose encourages us to take the emotional risk of staying present with the most unsettling parts of ourselves and our culture in part by taking risks with form. She writes sometimes in polished prose and other times in stream-of-consciousness monologues, inventing her own grammar. She jumps between pages and repeats scenes to mimic the traumatized brain. She uses Grindr and text message conversations to expose the drive-by communication that passes for connection among millennials—while also showing us that all of these forms can be pathways to genuine feeling when used with heart and purpose. Rose, like other genre-bending trans writers such as Cecilia Gentili, Hazel Jane Plante, and Hannah Baer, offers not just a new kind of storytelling but also a new way of being with ourselves and others.

Consider the beginning of her three-page-long “List of Reasons My Rape Doesn’t Count”:

1. He wasn’t a stranger and everyone is raped by strangers in alleyways
2. I met him on Grindr, which is supposed to be a fun place
3. The blood vessels under my eyes didn’t burst from choking
4. My hymen wasn’t broken
5. I wasn’t drunk
6. I’m not in a sorority
7. I wasn’t beaten
8. He wasn’t taller than me
9. He wasn’t a psychopathic predator who stalked me beforehand for months
10. He didn’t break into my house
11. He didn’t wear a ski mask
12. He didn’t have a knife
13. I’m not a troubled girl who lost her parents in a tragic accident at age fourteen and got in with the wrong crowd and became addicted to opiates

As this list of tropes goes on and on, we feel—through our laughter—the pain of living in a culture that only acknowledges the mistreatment of women if it’s so egregious that it’s practically caricature. Rose never describes her rape in graphic detail but focuses instead on how her mind, heart, and body feel in the aftermath—and how difficult it is to recover when the outside world consistently downplays the extremity of her pain, even in queer, liberal spaces.

While Rose is still bedridden due to the physical trauma of the assault, her boyfriend Finnegan breaks up with her, saying, “[Y]ou’re not the confident person I fell in love with anymore.” In the aftermath of this abandonment, Rose sleeps with “at least 36 percent of the men in Manhattan,” men she calls solely by number (“#32 has me pushed against a wall,” “#76 buzzes me in,” “I can’t go back and face #84”). These encounters—although sexy—are often distressing:

I find doggy a notoriously difficult position. This is probably because of what Finnegan once said about how he puts guys in doggy when he “doesn’t want to look at them anymore” and that imprinted on the side of my brain that houses “Insecurities” and “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

Ha ha. Sob sob.

Rose is not the survivor people typically like to see in the limelight. We want our survivors to be either innocently ruined or triumphantly resilient. We do not want a survivor to scroll Instagram obsessively to find out what made her “more assaultable” than people her rapist had consensual sex with. We do not want a survivor to write about “how hot” her rapist is. We do not want a survivor to ask herself, “Is it bad that I almost hoped that my rapist had assaulted someone else?” Or: “If I was more desperate […] would I have not asked my rapist to stop[?]” Being inside someone’s mind as they spiral out like this brings us so much closer to the inner chaos than we might want to be. It’s hard to accept that there is no linear path to healing.

Unlike a “good” rape victim, Rose is also unapologetically and joyfully slutty, even as she acknowledges how painful sluttiness can be. She never questions her pursuit of sex, which offers a particular way of being alive: “Sex is funny. It’s silly. We are aimless animals mashing our genitals together to feel something: connection, pleasure, worthiness.” She does, however, question the men who refuse to treat her like a human being. Despite what slut-shamers would have us believe, the problem is not sex; the problem is people who are selfish and disconnected lovers.

The orgasm gap in heterosexual encounters has been documented, but few people have pointed out that the inequality of pleasure often applies to tops and bottoms of any gender. Rose can’t believe how few men take the time to make her body feel good: “I know, you’d think the subset of gay men who repeatedly goon off to ass pics would be more inclined to eat a girl out, but alas we are sixty-something men into this adventure and how many of them gave me the rimjob I deserved? Maybe four?”

Rose subtly points out how women habitually do all the caretaking during sex with men, both for their partners and for themselves: “‘How does that feel?’ I said the line I wanted to hear.” Women are also often forced to find some sense of satisfaction and control from giving others pleasure, because having our own needs met feels so inaccessible: “I want to kiss him but I’m afraid of the advance being rejected especially after a mouthful of semen. I settle for burning the memory of his orgasm in my mind, something I caused, something I achieved.”

Some of the men Rose sleeps with call her “man” or “dude” after having sex with her, as if to make it crystal clear how little they care about her sense of self. This is a trap: Rose is a victim of the systemic oppression of women while also being told she’s not a real woman. She does not give us arguments about why misgendering is wrong and hurtful. Instead, she explains—through a specific moment felt in the body—the immense relief of having the truth of herself acknowledged by a lover for the first time:

“I like going for the boob.” His scruff tickled my neck. I giggled. “It gives me something to hold.”

My chest, at the time, was flat, nothing material to hold, yet something stirred in the fibers beneath his hand. […] It was as if his hand on my body and that word in my ear tied two loose strings together that I’d been tripping over. […]

Girlhood was something more than the need to be fucked or the itch to grow my hair out or $80 at the nail salon “because I like how it looks,” it was something that could be held.

Rose forces us to engage with topics that have become overburdened by theoretical arguments—gender, trauma, terrorism—as if they are visceral realities we are encountering for the first time. She considers the War on Terror not as an abstract conflict targeting the “worst of the worst” but as a series of actual events in actual people’s lives. Rose was molested as a child around the same time that the Twin Towers were hit in 2001. The collective trauma of 9/11 is a running theme throughout the book, considered with the same intimacy and physicality as Rose’s own life. She shares, for instance, the surreal fact that, after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, they wanted to make sure they’d gotten the right guy by verifying his height, but they didn’t have a tape measure. So they made one of the SEALs lie down beside bin Laden’s dead body, while his wives and children were zip-tied nearby. Rose imagines her way into this moment:

Like, how close did he lie? Was he inches away from Osama’s arm? […] Was Osama’s body still leaking fluids at the time from the whole murder part? Was he in a body bag, or did he have to be taken out for accuracy of the measurement? Did the SEAL close his eyes? What did he smell like? How long did he lie there?? Did anyone take a picture for their records, or just look at it and go, “Yeah, guess he’s about six feet four, must be Osama!”

If it seems jarring to insert a well-researched essay on the “Kill Osama mission” into a book about sexual abuse, that is largely the point: to derail the reader’s habitual categorizations, to draw us into the mess of life and then hold us there, looking around in astonishment, feeling it all. Between transcripts of explicit Grindr messages are scenes of Rose caring for her grandfather as he dies of Alzheimer’s—cooking his favorite meals, checking his diaper, judging how to respond to his illogical questions in a way that protects her “grandfather’s feelings and maintain[s] [her] own sanity.” In one particularly poignant scene, Rose’s grandmother believes her husband is dying because it sounds like the death rattle is beginning. When they realize he’s just snoring, Rose and her grandmother shut themselves in the bathroom, giggling “into delirium. He wasn’t dying, he was just snoring. And we were laughing. What a relief. […] I willed the notes escaping my lips to burrow into the fissures in the tile, where the cement might hold the joy tight in its bubbles, releasing it when we would again need it most.”

The implicit message of this chaotic yet controlled overlap of different types of grief is that there is no hierarchy of trauma. “Some people are going to criticize me for ‘humanizing a terrorist,’” Rose writes; “let me remind you that while y’all were busy with terrorism and being racist about it, I was getting molested, so thanks a lot.” Like most of Rose’s jokes, this one gets unpacked throughout the course of the book in the most complex and thoughtful ways. Rose frequently visits the National September 11 Memorial, both to honor the individual losses that occurred on that day and to grieve, something this place offers an essential way to do: the memorial’s “vacuous pit with water hemorrhaging from all sides plummeting into a gaping, bottomless hole,” she writes, is the “only thing I’ve ever found that encapsulates how it feels to be sexually assaulted.”

Which is to say: It encapsulates the pain of being treated like you’re disposable, like your body is just there to be used as a tool of someone else’s sick agenda. Pitting one type of suffering against another is what causes people to become extremists, to justify hurting other human beings. Cruelty is cruelty. Pain is pain:

Sometimes the same PTSD that plagues military veterans and sexual assault survivors alike with the same shredded clumps of neural pathways fails me. I cannot contain it. Liquids, shudders, heaves, they burst from me with reckless abandon. I am back to square one, hand over my mouth, wishing I could evaporate.

The only way out of the pain is just to feel it. The more Rose allows herself to open to her own brokenness, the more space she makes inside for pleasure and joy. Ultimately, healing comes not from meeting the “right man” but from being present and loving and attentive with whomever she’s with and expecting the same treatment: “Every time I find myself in this position—literally, figuratively—I watch myself fall in what I believe is love, though realistically it is a cocktail of lust, poppers, and grief. Here with #114, I only want to like him. I focus on tying my emotions to reality, engaging with the present.” And when she does have a PTSD attack despite having connected, pleasurable sex, she allows herself just to cry and be held: “The pressure of his body is a cement dam against my ballooning cries, a container to feel pain without the fear I’d disappear altogether.”

There is so much unexpected hope in sorry i keep crying during sex that, as the news has gotten darker and darker, I have returned to this book 10, 20, 50 times a day. Rose writes that a lover’s murmurs of tenderness when she is lost in despair are “alcohol on my wounds. They sting, they cleanse, they hurt until they don’t.” There is no better description of Rose’s own words. This is a book that tears down the veils around the heart—veils of political correctness, of social conditioning, of labels. It hurts to be vulnerable, to bring your innermost darkness into the light. But that’s the only way transformation happens. Anyone who can be with themselves in all their complexity—the brokenness and the resilience, the desire and the rage—can also face the world as it is, without giving up on it.