The more I become myself the more I disappear.
No one has ever guessed that I’m gay.
And sometimes, even when I tell people, when I step out of the closet, when I declare it
defiantly to old friends or new strangers, and say those three little words “I am gay”,
they don’t believe me.
In Joy Young’s spoken word poem “The Queer Hokey-Pokey” she descibes it as being “ only
contextually visible.” but I think it goes beyond that. I’ve been assumed straight
while in LGBT spaces, while wearing rainbow jewellery and pins, while kissing another
woman, while telling people to their face that I’m not what they assume me to be.
Our visibility relies on the mercy others.
That assumption that I’m straight, that refusal to acknowledge my self-proclaimed
identity, that erasure is not a privilege.
It’s being scoffed and laughed at when you step out of the closet for the hundredth time.
It’s femme women labelled as “gal pals”… not girlfriends, not lovers, but “just friends”.
I am assumed to be straight because of my hair and my clothes and my lips and my eyes
and my body and then by my voice, and then by my likes and dislikes.
The idea that someone can be “straight-passing” is tied intrinsically to the flawed idea of
a gender binary. The idea that women are feminine and men are masculine, and then the idea that
queer women and men are inherently the opposite. So queer men are assumed to be feminine and
are criticised and joked out because of it, and queer women are assumed to be masculine
and then framed as undesirable and defective in some way.
But because of these assumptions, queer people who happen to align with mainstream expectations
of straight and cis gender identities are erased. This isn’t worse than the social
punishment that comes from being “stereotypically gay”, but it isn’t better either.
Harassment is so often about an obsession with the protection of masculinity- if you
are butch your harassment will come because you are encroaching on masculinity- a presentation
that in the minds of those harassers, is a protected and coveted presentation only for
“real men”. And if you’re femme your harassment will come because those who don’t
have masculinity are less worthy of respect, “real women” are not worthy of respect.
Our identities happen to align with what is expected of us, and what is expected of them
is to objectify and see us as lesser.
This is then added to all the other ideas attached to femininity- of silliness, vapidness,
self-obsession, to justify our erasure- she’s just confused, it’s a phase, it’s for
attention, she doesn’t know what she wants. Silly silly woman.
It is not a privilege to be unwillingly and constantly closeted against our will, and
in doing so having to come out again and again and again, to everyone from your new friends
and colleagues, to people in LGBTQ safe spaces, to the guy who yells at you in the street
to get your number. The guy who, after you politely explain your lack of interest, blocks
your exit and protests “No! No way! Like, but you’re not actually gay. Not properly
gay. Whatever it doesn’t matter I’ll do your girlfriend too.”
Because when you’re a women who likes women, you’re framed as a commodity to be consumed-
living Lesbian porn for straight men to be entitled to.
According to a study performed by Keren Lehavot, Ph.D. “women who identify as “femme”
(or feminine) and have a more feminine appearance report more adult sexual assaults” than
women in the study who identified as “butch”.
If straight-passing was really straight Privilege it would protect us from the experiences that
non-passing queer people endure. But we aren’t actually straight, and it so it doesn’t.
Slurs are still about us, depression and suicide still effect us, we can’t get married, or
donate blood, or be open about our sexuality, we’re still illegal, we’re still under
the death penalty in the same places.
And this is just my story- a story of a queer identifying femme cis woman, the relationship
with femmeness, with being straight-passing, is so complex and unique for so many people
in the way that intersects with their identity. Gay men who are straight-passing, trans women
who are femme, non-binary people who are femme, bisexual people in male/female relationships.
Feeling invisible and powerless within our own community is not a privilege.
See us, acknowledge us, don’t undermine us or our identity, know our queer experience
is valid.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community