Les petits liens de Lou
This specific photo shoot came about when Zaire messaged me on Instagram. I was pretty full, didn’t have much time in Oakland left, but something told me that I should take it. From the moment I met them, I knew they were someone I definitely wanted to know.
We don’t just need historical documentaries, coming out narratives, or survivor stories—and we certainly don’t need any more devastating endings. We need something else, something that heterosexual people take for granted: romantic vision. We need the bread-and-roses romantic comedies that make our hearts soar to the theater ceiling.
It’s a common misconception that members of gay relationships have to map onto the roles of a straight couple: woman and asshole,” said Acharya. “But neither of us is the asshole; that’s the entire point.
My most recent experiences in the classroom, coupled with my experiences while conducting research within the transgender community, however, have convinced me that our current practice of asking that everyone state their personal pronoun is not a good idea. My position is perhaps best explained by sharing two experiences.
In my gender class, as it has come to be known, I ask that students journal in response to readings, class discussions or a prompt on a controversial issue. Occasionally, those entries get personal. In a recent year, a student revealed in an entry that they thought they might be transgender. The next time I spoke with the student alone, with the best of intentions, I asked what pronoun they wanted me to use. Their eyes filled with tears as they answered, “I don’t know.” At about the same time, I asked someone at a conference what pronoun to use, and she burst into tears. She later explained that she had hoped that she “passed” and that my question made her feel like she did not.
I enjoyed talking to friends about our arrangement, but quickly found that most everyone knew someone who had left their male partner for a woman after a messy bout with polyamory.
“Be careful,” they’d say. “What if you fall in love?”
This Sunday, there’s a tall woman a few tables over with this hot outfit (almost entirely denim) and her hair gracefully swept up and back. She’s here with her parents. Do they even know she’s gay? I’m pretty confident that she is, she gave me the nod on the way in. I’m here with a sweetheart, teaching them how to control the object ball with little adjustments. I pocket a shot and catch the woman’s eye, she gives me a look: mutual recognition but definitely flirtation too. I think maybe she would come home with us. She certainly seems to be signaling, the way her eyes ask me to play just before she looks away. A fantasy starts to grow in my mind; I want to take her home with us. What does she enjoy? Would she let me lead the way I like? Am I allowed to be fantasizing about a stranger like this?
Last year I quit my well-paying city job to go back to school and work in retail and my mother still hasn’t gotten over it. To her my decisions seem like symptoms of mental illness that plagued my grandmother and great grandmother. It’s hard to explain why I needed to leave the world of business casual clothing and passive aggressive emails to feel sane again.
We’ve heard a lot about what it is to be a woman who is unsatisfied in herself and her relationships and turns to another woman for those needs; we haven’t heard the stories of the Other Women. Those stories might reframe these affairs away from the question of loneliness, unhappiness, malaise, and need, and towards a question of labor, consumption, and use. It might help us recognize how when straightness is the assumed default, gestures of queer intimacy get muddled, blurred, and erased amidst all that platonic friendships have been stretched to encompass.
There’s little conversation about the bodies of trans women who have not undergone gender confirmation surgery—online, in media, anywhere, really. Where are all the sex guides for trans women who don’t want to have surgery, who aren’t ready, or who haven’t yet had the opportunity?
To create my own, I decided to chronicle my own process, and reach out to trans women friends to ask what’s helped them most. Here's what I learned.
Les lesbiennes trans et leur·s partenaire·s peuvent baiser de plein de supers manières qui impliquent le pénis et les testicules, sans forcément engendrer de dysphorie.
Queer women probably don’t cruise because it is simply too unsafe for us to do so. It’s why Woolf is so careful to close her doors; it’s why Lorde sticks to lesbian bars, spaces created for and by queer women. Queer women’s sexuality is such a threat to patriarchal, heterosexual control that for many centuries its existence was completely denied, or deliberately hidden. The oppression levered against queer women is one of violent control: keeping us trapped, denying our existence, struggling to remake us. And even now, to be a woman in public is to be harassed—catcalled or followed home, leered at or abused. The threat of violence is inseparable from the idea of lesbian cruising.
Around three years ago, I came out by writing about biphobia for Archer, and the article was then picked up the Sydney Morning Herald. Considering the article talked about people treating bisexuality as a phase, I was wracked with guilt about how what I’m about to write might contribute to that.
Earlier this year, after a lot of introspection and a come-to-Jesus talk with a dear friend, I realised that I’m not bi, I’m a lesbian. […]
My realising this doesn’t make bisexuality as an identity invalid, or a phase. The reality is that a lot of gay people, especially lesbians, first acknowledge their same-gender attraction by coming out as bi, but eventually realise that isn’t the label for them. Ultimately, I think my original article was too naïve, and didn’t allow for the nuances of the wide variety of queer experiences.
Black women have the unique experience of being subjected to both misogynistic and anti-Black violence, but are never positioned equally amongst non-Black women or Black non-women. Black women experience all of the pain their counterparts do and yet are somehow regarded as second-class.
This history and its legacy leave me feeling that my anger about the world ascribing femininity to my body without my consent borders on betrayal to Black women. How can I claim to support Black women when there are times I resent the fact that I am perceived as one? Can I do both? The more steps I take to be comfortable in the body my spirit occupies, the more it feels like my transness and my Blackness stand in opposition to one another.
BBW is a euphemism for “fat,” but it also implies that not all “big” women may be “beautiful,” according to societal standards. In other words, the BBW category only includes women who society considers acceptably fat: That often only includes white, cis, straight or commercially plus-sized women, and leaves everyone else out.
She was in the midst of transition and unable to secure safe employment considering her yet-to-be-state-sanctioned womanness. I was still in the process of accumulating my still-accumulating student debt, just 20 years old. We had no familial support; our queerness reviled, my family had little-to-no resources to spare.