Love in the time of lesbophobia

So. About that article.

“Oh dear diary, I met a boy.

Ew.”

— an unfaithful rendition of Marina and the Diamonds’ Bubblegum Bitch

“I’ll Chew You Up And Spit You Out”

I recently attended a screening of one of my favourite movies, Deepa Mehta’s Fire. The Elements Trilogy as a whole is a stunning achievement in filmmaking and a heartrending meditation on the Indian woman’s condition, but Earth and Water don’t have lesbians.

(Incidentally, Mehta herself is a bit touchy about Fire being described as a ‘lesbian movie’. No doubt this is partly a reaction to the controversy the movie generated in India upon its release in 1996, when it ran into trouble with both the censor board and right-wing political demonstrators who slandered it as obscene and vulgar. And the film is indeed less about lesbianism per se, and more about the tragic condition of Indian wives and mothers confined to the drudgery of thankless, loveless domesticity.

But also the two female leads do very much fuck, so you can’t exactly say it’s not a lesbian movie.)

It was a small event, and the screening was followed by a discussion of the movie’s themes and symbolism and mythological allusions. To nobody’s surprise, I was enjoying myself. I love the sound of my own voice, especially when it gets to pontificate on subjects both feminist and dykey.

Inevitably, the discussion turned to the topic of the movie’s thorny reception. A choice quote from the right-wing protestors’ women’s wing was shared:

“If women’s physical needs get fulfilled through lesbian acts, the institution of marriage will collapse, reproduction of human beings will stop!”

That one always makes me chuckle. Then came a few less amusing quotes from the editor of an Indian feminist magazine, to show that the (stated) ideologies of the movie’s critics are diverse (though their outlooks are invariably conservative). Our putatively feminist editor took issue with Fire portraying “Indian middle-class families” in a negative light—how scandalous!—as well as supposedly ruining the very concept of friendship between women. Now that Indians have been introduced to the concept of the lesbian, she tearfully asserts, women will no longer be able to form close, intimate bonds without being accused of dyking out.

Snickering, I was about to opine on the historically contentious relationship between feminists and lesbians—having recently finished an essay on the topic—when the only other Indian woman present spoke first.

“You know, I quite agree with that.”

And so an important lesson was learned: to not immediately assume an event about queer media will be necessarily queer-friendly.

My jaw snapped shut and I sat there, quietly, listening to this woman—older, presumptively straight—talk about all her lesbian friends that she definitely has, who are from an older, simpler time, and would have much preferred to continue carrying out their salacious lesbian affairs in private, under the cover allegedly provided by near-total epistemicide, with their husbands none the wiser. I was increasingly baffled by her outlook. It seemed not to consider that any lesbians could want to live openly, to walk in the street arm in arm with their partners without inviting ire, not due to ignorance, but because our society is actually becoming more tolerant.

It seemed not to consider the existence of lesbians, Indian or otherwise, who don’t fucking want husbands.

That’s the essential character of heterofeminist lesbophobia. To be Woman is to suffer in a doomed, eternal dance with Man, to be resented and desired by him and to resent and desire him in equal measure. The lesbian, if she wants feminist legibility, must either be reduced to a pure symbol, a fetish for a feminist ideal untainted by desire, or excluded entirely. Sometimes there is resentment, an idea that to desire other women is to be inherently Male, Manly, Masculine, and so to suffer less under patriarchy. Sometimes there is simple disbelief. Lesbians don’t truly desire each other, do they?

They must simply have grown sick of men.

I’d love to tell you all I gave this woman a piece of my mind, but I’m not in the habit of outing myself to people who I know will be weird about it. I prefer life. So I nodded, excused myself, and slipped out the door soon after.

It wasn’t as scary as being cornered by a man in a mostly empty coffee shop, I’ll admit, but it certainly left me feeling just as bad.

“I’m Miss Sugar Pink”

Let’s talk about biphobia!

A common point of discussion online, repeated ad nauseam—because queer history is always in the process of being erased and re-discovered—is why bi men and women experience subtly different forms of biphobia. The bi woman is usually imagined to be insufficiently gay, insufficiently queer, a pretender or a user or something in that vein. She is merely a tourist, serving her Queer Time until her inevitable return to the heterosexual fold, a temporary phase to bring up as a passing point of interest at cocktail parties. The bi man, by contrast, is imagined to inhabit a temporary stop on the way to Gaysville, utilising bisexuality as a closet with glass doors, so to speak. He is simply tempering his deeply repressed desire to suck and fuck as much mancock as he can get his hands on by assuring us all that no, no, he does find himself attracted to women once in a blue moon, a tragic victim of society’s heterosexual expectations who just needs a bit of time before he can truly get his Flame On.

Many theorise that this is due to society’s androcentrism—all roads lead inevitably to the veneration of Man, in a sense. The bi women must really want to fuck men and the bi men must really want to fuck men, which contributes to their respective mythologies of deception. It’s a compelling theory, though it does run up against the inconvenient fact that men are not encouraged to eroticise men in an authentically sexual and romantic way—only in the way that other men are the only people men value. Why are bi men not as frequently libelled as “fake queers” who will eventually turn their backs on queer communities? (It is not totally absent from queer men’s biphobia, but the other narrative about bi men is both more popular and more widely parroted outside of queer spaces.)

A part of this is due to the dichotomy between homophobia against men, and homophobia against women. Feminisation and “faggot” stick to you the way blood-caked hair sticks to a cracked scalp. Meanwhile, “dyke” is something people are always trying to tear out of your hands, no matter how tightly you grasp it. No matter how long you live and love as one, no matter how much you assert your non-interest in men, you are always at risk of being a Fake Dyke, a Temporarily Embarrassed Tradwife who will eventually give in to the siren call of unwashed mandong.

I am, of course, speaking in generalities here. There are gay men who are disbelieved—usually but not always due to gender-conformity—and lesbians who are not, usually but not always due to gender non-conformity. Such is the problem when speaking of patriarchal attitudes and mechanisms: there will be corner cases, which unfortunately do not undermine the core logic at play.

(And any longtime readers who have spotted the symmetry here, between this phenomenon and the fundamental difference between degendering and regendering, congratulations on paying attention.)

It is harder to “reclaim” a “fallen” man than a “fallen” woman because shirking the signifiers of manhood leaves you Marked, tainted. (Read “fallen” as “queer”; a heterosexual society considers them synonymous.) Meanwhile, those designated as reproductive assets usually have a great degree of pressure exerted on them to turn back, to be reclaimed and serve their True Purpose before it’s too late and they hit the point of no return. What that point of no return is, is flexible; sometimes even marrying a woman or being a chronically genderfucky dyke aren’t enough, sometimes they are. It usually depends on what is most convenient for the one passing judgment upon you.

All forms of bigotry are flexible like that, you see. They’re mechanisms of punishment, not hard and fast rules.

It’s the underlying existential horror of queer womanhood. There are always voices whispering to us in the dark, telling us that nothing we do will ever prove we’re dyke enough, that we’re just kidding ourselves until the Sufficiently Revered Manshaft happens along and claims us. We are constantly subject to messaging that is invalidating at its core, which at once excludes us from the category ‘woman’ due to our queerness while also reminding us that womanhood—true, heterosexual womanhood—is inescapable. We can get as many side shaves and girlfriends and big stompy boots as we like, but glitter hearts and pink dresses and tradwifery will come for us all, says everyone and everything around us.

It’s enough to drive a dyke mad.

And you know, it frequently does.

“Steal Me With a Kiss”

So let’s discuss the pink elephant in the room, or Low-key, I chose to be a lesbian, the Autostraddle article that has taken the dyke internet by storm.

It’s fine.

But many lesbians think otherwise.

The article is written by a bi lesbian who is attracted to men but has no interest in dating them, and I understand why it’s been received in the way it has. It more or less jabs a hot poker in a nerve that has been raw since the Ancient Times, dating back to the halcyon days of the second wave that birthed lesbian feminism in the crucible of the original posting wars between hetfeminists and lesfeminists, when lesbianism was a Political Statement and a Feminist Duty because liberation could only be brought about by those who don’t “sleep with the enemy”.

A couple of dykes (or political lesbians—the difference will be important!) said that once, and the rest of us have to suffer the consequences in perpetuity now.

Essentially, it highlights the tension between lesbianism as a feminist fetish and a way of life. Many of us are guilty of the sin of wanting our marginalised identities to be statements in and of themselves, to represent our radicalism and progressivism instead of just being aspects of our lives that incur hegemonic wrath. That central tension is exposed, over and over again, in arguments about authentic and performative queers, assimilationist and radical queers—real and fake queers, as always. Where “real” can mean “a part of my life and embodiment that I had no choice about or say in”, or “a deliberate statement I make about my politics as an aspect of my identity”, depending on who’s speaking.

Don’t you just love the inherent imprecision of mere words?

Therefore, we must once more put the dreaded Political Lesbians—the polilezzes, if you will—on trial, condemning them for their nefarious misdeeds and longstanding conspiracy to dilute the meaning of the word ‘lesbian’. Political Lesbians are not lesbians—lesbianism is not chosen, after all—and it is offensive to say that lesbian identity is something you can simply put on, like a costume, or that lesbianism is something you do instead of something you are. Real lesbians all agree.

But of course, I must do the one thing I never expected I would do, and actually hand it to the fucking queer theorists. Because online discourses have regressed past mere Feminism and Queer 101, all the way back to the desperate pleading with our oppressors to pwease not oppress us, we can’t help it, our queerness is an Essential Characteristic we have no choice in. Queer theorists are wrong about a lot, but they were fucking right to push against this assumption of essentialism!

So, answer me this, sweeties: queerness being an essential characteristic is good and all for us True Homosexuals, but aren’t we leaving our bi siblings out in the cold a little? Bisexual people are essentially bisexual, perhaps, and can’t not be bisexual, but they can date people of ‘either’ (socially sanctioned patriarchal) sex.

Are they wrong for choosing to date people of their own gender?

Are they wrong to ‘choose’ being gay?

And fuck it—are we wrong to choose it? If it was a choice, if you could actually choose not to be gay, are you telling me you’d actually fucking take it?

You don’t have to tell me. This one can be between you and your pastor, which I am not, but really think about it long and hard.

I can understand why people rankle at this, but that doesn’t mean the impulse is good. It can be a little lonely, sometimes, to be chatting with your lesbian bestie and have yet another dyke in your life drop the reveal that she’s probably bi but knows for a fact that she never wants to date men. That queer wariness comes from somewhere, is the thing—enough of us have been told by our exes that they simply can’t be with us because they’ve chosen their families’ expectations over our happiness. And enough of us have actually used bisexuality as that stepping stone, in that way that bi men are so often accused of doing because promising our parents that hey, don’t worry, I know I’m a fucking freak but maybe I’ll still end up with a guy, chill out—it can be a necessary evil. Or even something we tell ourselves and truly believe, in the complex process of queer self-discovery in a world that avowedly wants us to not be queer.

That’s the part that people consistently overlook in these discussions: we’re all trying to navigate a patriarchal society that doesn’t care what we want, only that we obey its directives. And very often, the people telling us they can’t be with us because they’d rather give in aren’t even bisexual. I have a friend whose ex has a labrys womb tattoo and never identified as anything but a dyke. She still went “My family wants me to marry a man” and fucked off to do just that. We’re all haunted by the Lesbian Canon Event, and terrified of being subject to it again.

More of us are haunted by the idea of being someone’s Lesbian Canon Event than we’re willing to admit.

The pursuit for the Pure Lesbian Who Will Never Leave Me is as understandable as it is futile, and it has led to more intracommunity nonsense than I have the time to write essays about. I’ve seen “femme for femme” lesbians say that dating butches isn’t lesbian—butches are basically men, don’t you know? I’ve seen butches say that femmes who don’t date butches aren’t really gay because they’re not attracted to the inherently gender-defying lesbian—they’re just attracted to a version of themselves. (Finally, cis lesbians can be autogynephiles too.) I’ve seen ancient arguments about how femme lesbians who don’t adopt more androgynous presentation are simply waiting to return to straightness—hm! Or that lesbians who go back to presenting more femininely are “turning straight”. And of course, there’s the ever-present re-digestion of everyone’s favourite topic: does butch-femme “recreate heterosexuality”?

(Queer men have similar gendered anxieties about femininity as costume versus femininity as identity, which I’ll mention but won’t discuss in-depth because it’s not really the topic of this essay, or my scene.)

As it turns out, we all exist in a patriarchal world that says that there is no such thing as a real lesbian, and so we are all cracking under the strain of having to prove our Real Lesbianism to everyone including ourselves. But it’s a fiction. A mirage. Not in the sense that women who are only attracted to women don’t exist—we very much do. But what’s the prize for a lesbian who feels no attraction to men?

There isn’t one.

(Which sucks because I’d win.)

There is also literally nothing wrong about bisexual women who profess their lesbianism and choose not to date men. It’s not something that they’re incentivised to do in any way, and their attraction to men doesn’t mean they have to or will date any. If you live a lesbian life, does it matter what you feel in your heart of hearts—or clit of clits?

Because I’ll tell y’all for free that if I had a choice in the matter, I’d look every one of you in the eye and choose to be a dyke. Always. In every life, in every timeline, in every eventuality. And I have no issue with those who’d do the same.

Let bi women date women.

“I’m Gonna Pop Your Bubble Gum Heart”

Pink elephant number two: “born this way”.

While the Gaga song is a bop, the argument has outlived its usefulness. Arguably, it was never productive to engage with zealots and homophobes on their terms, to assure them that we wouldn’t be queer if we had any other choice. Frankly, I would. Frankly, you couldn’t entice me to heterosexuality if you tried.

Frankly, I endured a system that did try to entice me to be heterosexual. It’s called ‘patriarchy’.

That’s the uncomfortable bit we’re not saying out loud, isn’t it? You can choose not to be homosexual—not openly. Many of us do make and have made that choice, sometimes because we didn’t know any better, of course. But sometimes we knew exactly who we were and chose to keep quiet about it anyway because the consequences of not keeping your mouth shut can be very, very bad.

Let’s face it, gang: existing as queer is something we have to choose to do. We have to work towards it, bide our time sometimes, and we have to fight like hell to get to be who we are on our own times. That’s why we guard it so jealously.

But we all had the option to not do that. Which doesn’t make it a good option, mind. I very clearly and emphatically believe just the opposite. That doesn’t mean that the choice isn’t there, or that many of us—too many of us, frankly—haven’t been coerced and pressured and browbeaten into making that choice, at the cost of our own happiness.

Patriarchy doesn’t care what you want, remember? All that matters is that you obey. That you conform. You can apologise for your existence to your heart’s content and reassure everyone that you’ll suppress your freak urges, so long as you pop out babies for the hegemonic machinery all the same.

In the grand scheme of things, taking that into account, I find I have no fucks to give about women who say they choose to be dykes. To say we all are attracted to men and are choosing dykehood out of disappointment or spite—that’s a different statement, and not one the writer of the Autostraddle article made. The reality of lesbian identity is always under threat because lesbians are always under threat in a reproductive, heterosexualist hegemony. But the problem is not people who eschew their attraction to men.

The problem is very much those who wish to compel us to be with men, attracted or no.