Every so often, a spicy scene from a queer TV show or movie will get feverishly passed around on sites like X—intriguing potential audiences and letting faithful watchers revel in the sweaty, cinematic fun.
In late 2023, one such scene came from Showtime’s Fellow Travelers—a critically acclaimed miniseries featuring actors Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. While the show boasted several hot and heavy moments, the scene I’m referring to (and the one that, I’m sure, hit your queer algorithm as well) featured Bomer’s character pushing Bailey’s character to the floor with his socked foot. Wordlessly, Bailey peeled that sock off, licked the sole of Bomer’s foot before devouring each toe—taking as much of Bomer into his mouth as he could handle.
The scene was hot, went viral and spawned renewed coverage for the show. Not only was it incredibly sensual and explicitly queer, but it spotlighted foot play in a way we don’t often see. That’s why U.K.-based author and queer historian Adam Zmith included the scene in his new book, Solemates: A History of Our Fetish for Feet, to be released this week.
Zmith writes that the scene is actually part of a long history of artists and creators imbuing the foot with sensuality—from Renaissance-era paintings to today’s OnlyFans models. After all, it’s a much more common fetish than folks might think. A 2018 survey of more than 4,000 Americans found that one in seven had generally fantasized about feet. It’s also a kink that’s particularly gendered and queer, says Zmith. In the same 2018 study, five percent of straight women fantasized about feet versus 18 percent of straight men. Those figures grew to 11 and 21 for queer women and men, respectively.
At about 100 pages long, Solemates is more of a dipped-toe than a deep dive into the historical significance of (and potential reasons behind) our sexual fascination with feet—but it’s a journey that Zmith aptly makes. He’s well-practised in the casual, uncomplicated prose that feels more confessional than archival. His first book, Deep Sniff, chronicled the past of poppers, and he’s co-creator of The Log Books, a podcast about Britain’s LGBTQ+ history.
If you’re dying to know why you salivate at a Footlocker, Soulmates offers a series of theories as to why some of us find feet so appealing, yet without taking a definitive stance. From the scientific (the part of the brain that processes genital sensations is next to the part that does the same for feet) to the psychosexual (the distinct smell of dirty socks might bring you back to a locker room of awakening sexualities)—there’s a little something for everyone.
Ahead of Solemates’ release, Zmith spoke with Xtra about the book, his own inclination for feet and why the gays go so crazy for them.
Was there anything in the development of Deep Sniff that you didn’t want to repeat for this second project? Or a lesson you took from that experience?
I wrote a lot of Deep Sniff in 2020 while the U.K. was in a lockdown. Bars and clubs were closed. It became quite an interior project. It was me looking up things online, and it ended up having a lot of my thoughts around queer identity and queer history. With Solemates, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to interview people, which I hadn’t done with Deep Sniff. Solemates was going to be about shame and stigma—people like to read others’ experiences with those things because it makes them feel less alone. There ended up being four core interviews that recur in the book. I had spoken to more people than those four, but they just seemed to represent different facets of the story that I thought were really valuable to include.
As much as you feature other perspectives, you do “come out” in the book as someone who loves feet. Is there a specific moment in your childhood when you remember thinking, “Oh, this is going to be a lifelong thing for me.”
I don’t think you think like that when you’re an adolescent, never mind a kid. At first you’re in such a state of naive, ignorant bliss that you don’t even know other people are going to think that it’s weird or wrong. I just remember looking at feet a lot. The minute that I started looking at porn online, probably when I was about 15 or 16, I was definitely looking out for feet being in the shot incidentally. That’s the thing about sexuality, it can be a naturally occurring thing and then there’s a point when you start getting these signals from the universe that it’s wrong, bad or disgusting—and a foot fetish is absolutely one of those things.
In Solemates, you write about the tension between overanalyzing or pathologizing a kink versus just enjoying it. Does it take any sexiness out to understand the “why” behind foot fetishes?
Well I’ve written a whole book about foot fetishes, spent a lot of time thinking about them—and then two days ago I was having sex with someone and he was making me worship his feet. I was not thinking about the book I had just written or about Sigmund Freud—I was just obsessed with his feet. And with dominance and submission, the great thing for the submissive is that they give control to the other person and can switch off their brain. I’m someone who is thinking, calculating and reflecting all the time so it’s nice to sometimes be able to let that go. That’s true for much of BDSM, but foot worship is quite common in that. So, in this case, sex is the answer to overanalyzing, not the other way around.
While the book talks about foot fetishes in straight contexts, it does acknowledge how much more prominent the fetish is in the queer community. Why do queer women, and especially men, seem to like feet more than their straight peers?
Some of the answers to that might be looking into the methodology of those stats I reference. For instance, are queer men just more forthcoming about their sexual fetishes than other identities? But, since you’re asking me to do some science fiction and think about why that might be—it’s true that it’s common for people socialized as male to have more risky or dangerous sexual practices, and that danger can include social risk and stigma, like with foot fetishes. When you have two men, that tolerance for social risk is compounded, so that’s one potential factor.
Another thing is that queer people, in general, are more sexually adventurous anyway. Society is still very heterocentric, so if you’re growing up in that society, you’re pressured to conform or automatically do something different, even if you’re having the most vanilla sex. If you’ve opened the door already, what’s a little foot worship or pissing on someone? It doesn’t really change your status that much. That’s one of the great inverse advantages of being raised in a cishet society.
Another topic that gets raised in the book is commercialization, with people—and especially straight men—selling their used socks and shoes to queer men. With so much discourse around “queerbaiting” and “gay4pay,” do you see any problems with that?
Obviously if someone is extorting money or taking advantage of someone else, that’s bad, but politically I don’t see what would be gained if we stop these kinds of consensual sales. It’s definitely produced by capitalism, and I’m not defending capitalism, but I think there’s still something sexual in the trade, even for that straight guy selling his footwear. The fact that he’s willing to and wants to do that, to me, is him engaging in sex in a way. And there are other versions of this in the world: what about straight actors who do very sexualized underwear adverts? They know that a portion of the market that buys those sexy undies are gay men.
Also there’s an argument, and this comes from U.K. writer Mark Simpson, but I agree, that the more sexualization of straight men we can have, the better for everyone. Don’t desexualize queer people or gay men, but put straight men in the position that women and gay men have been placed in where the culture sees them as sexualized.
A much lighter question: the book is lime green and you make a “girl, so confusing” reference in the text. How much did Charli XCX influence Solemates?
It was mostly written before Brat, but I love the album and Charli. The “girl, so confusing” line was added quite late in editing because it worked with the preceding sentences. I know you’re joking, but to talk about Charli XCX’s ideology—the term “brat” has been around for years in sex and kink culture, and I know trans women who have used it for years. Charli is like Madonna in the ’90s: there’s this amazing punk, fuck-you attitude while at the same time being sexy, gorgeous and clever and making absolute banging pop music. It’s really quite extraordinary. When thinking about cover colours, I asked to see lime green and my instinct there was because it’s kind of gross and we had the image of someone licking a foot, so I did send the brat cover in the email as the reference.
You’ve written books on poppers and on foot fetishes. What’s next?
I’m currently working on a very different kind of book with my co-producer from The Log Books, but there is an idea for a third book in this “sex trilogy.” I’d love to write, think and research a lot about monogamy. It wouldn’t be a book about polyamory, it would be an outsider’s look at monogamy. Basically “Monogamy: What the fuck is that? Where did that come from? Who is that serving?” More of an inquiry of the social power of monogamy. Because I’m totally on the outside of monogamy and always have been. It kind of baffles and intrigues me that monogamy is a thing, in the way that poppers intrigued me and feet intrigued me.
Final question: toes, heel or sole?
Toes. Getting in between.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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