Toads, plants, pictures of front doors, and other hipster bullshit that follows no theme. I'm boring and too lethargic generally to interact with people. Cheers!
Too Butch to Be Bi (or You Can’t Judge a Boy by Her Lover)
by Robin Sweeney
“It wasn’t difficult for me to come out as a lesbian. In fact, most people I knew in high school assumed I was gay long before I started grappling with my own identity. I have, as one lover told me, “the face.” When I asked her what she meant, she said that I just looked like a dyke. And it’s true. Even in pictures of me at four or five, I look like a little dyke. No one has ever been surprised to find out I was queer.
I ran into pretty standard teenage homophobia - my own internalized version and from others - but I was fortunate to grow up in a Southern California town with a surprising number of openly gay and bisexual adults and teenagers. While Aaron Fricke was making headlines taking another boy to his prom, the administrator in charge of student social events at my high school made it quietly known that same-sex couples were allowed to attend the prom together.
Even though I fit the stereotypes and images of what a lesbian was supposed to be, it wasn’t always a comfortable identity for me. I was sexual with men - and liked it - and that fact was a problem for a lot of women and men I met in the lesbian and gay community. It was a problem for me, too. I didn’t know how to come to terms with being bisexual and still maintain my butch identity and connection to the gay community.
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Sexual minority communities do a lousy job of confronting our assumptions about ourselves and each other. We hold onto the same notions about difference that the dominant, heterosexist culture teaches us and apply these to our own queer communities. Most of the time this doesn’t work, and nowhere is this more true than in our assumptions about appearance, gender, and sexual identity.
I am a butch bisexual woman whose romantic and sexual partners are primarily other butch women, with some notable exceptions. Frequently, I like to appear as masculine as I can, often passing for male on the street. I like to keep my hair short. I’d rather wear jeans and boots than anything else. Sometimes I pack when I go out, putting my dildo in my pants and wearing my dick out of the house. (No, people don’t really notice that often. And the ones who do notice are the ones I’m probably trying to attract.)
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But being a butch woman who is also bisexual can be difficult. It feels sometimes that the the idea is so challenging - since the assumptions in our communities are that all butch women are lesbian women and all femme women are bisexual women - that often a butch woman trying to come to terms with being bisexual is stuck.
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But once we find a community that is accepting of our same-sex interests, we run into an entirely different series of messages. A number of these are about appearances and what they are supposed to say about who we are. The ideas about femmes (femme women aren’t really interested in other women, and femme men aren’t really interested in women at all) and butches (butches are always the aggressors in sex, whether they are men or women) permeate our queer culture. These ideas make it difficult for us to explore who we are and who we want to be. Many people feel too threatened to challenge the status quo of an already fringe community, for fear of being outcast from the one place where they have struggled to belong.”
