Last night I walked through the gay neighborhood and it was full of hordes of straight people, some snickering, a lot of them there to “slum” or because “gays are good at dancing”. I don’t go to any of those places anymore. Every lesbian bar we used to have either became a place for gay men or went out of business.
I was talking to my friend, and he pointed out that if you can’t define a thing, it has to be for everyone. So when people started to try and redefine lesbian–I’ve seen it as “any wlw”, a woman “primarily attracted to women”, and “someone attracted to feminine aligned people”–what you end up with is something so nebulous it literally includes everyone.
And here is the thing when you are a minority or disenfranchised: if the majority is included, they will rule it. They will take it over. They will gentrify it until you can’t look at it anymore. And it will never be for you again. Because all classes in power have a feeling of entitlement, especially straight and male entitlement. That’s why we have lesbians trying to use the “queer” label on themselves. They want to fit into a community that has taken our labor and our community and diluted it so we can never find each other.
All those people, trying to get a taste of the “gays”. That’s why we walk past, we go where we won’t be bothered. At the “gay” bars, there are straight men there till late who say they’ll “pick off the fag hags”. There are women who try to get me to kiss them for their fetishistic boyfriends. Men grasp my breasts without my permission, then laugh if off because they are gay. If I am recognized as a lesbian, I become part of the show for the straight people and for the “queer” people I’m like something embarrassing.
Many of the gay men I know get mocked, too, though–they don’t look “cosmopolitan” enough. They didn’t put on the proper costume. Because “queer” means strange, and if we aren’t strange we must come up with more words to make us stranger. “Lesbians are boring,” I have heard time and time again. Straight people ask if I’ve been with a man before. “Queer people” ask if I would date a trans woman. None of them can let me exist without access to my life, without knowing.
Being a lesbian becomes very lonely when everyone thinks that we should all “experiment”. And at the end of the day, it’s the same old homophobia: if our lives are nothing but sex for pleasure, why can’t anyone play? And why can’t we put our sex lives on hold like any other vice?
When they tell me that having sex has nothing to do with dating, and that I should be open to males, what I hear is “love has nothing to do with your nasty homosexual sex”.
I was walking past the gay neighborhood, and I didn’t stop. We don’t live there anymore. We live everywhere and lost our homes.
So when somebody wants to come on here and insert themselves into lesbian conversations by trying to insist that we are close minded bigots for our homosexuality, I wonder when they’ll realize they’ve taken enough.
Only when the next fad comes, I guess.