Years ago, I watched a crappy version of Saving Face (2004) on a shady website because it wasn’t available on any streaming service or physical medium. Today I sobbed on a Tuesday evening as I watched it in the theater. I never thought I would get to experience this. As a fellow Asian woman with a mom that royally fucked up in her own love life, making her all the more desperate to seek redemption by raising me to be the perfect daughter (while I go behind her back to be with my girlfriend)—there is perhaps no other movie that encapsulates my life more. A tall masc Asian girl glanced at me and held the theater door open on the way in (lesbian chivalry is never dead) and on the way out a breathless desi mom said her fourteen year old daughter was the one who had wanted to come watch this, she hadn’t expected the intimate scenes! It’s the small things in life. I only wish my girlfriend could come with me, but I’ll hope for a next time. Can’t wait to buy it in DVD. Thank the stars for Alice Wu.

I broke up with my abusive high school boyfriend, drained and exhausted from giving that relationship everything, when I was twenty. I eventually started falling for my current girlfriend and finally decided I was done being in denial about being bisexual. In true serial monogamist fashion I plunged into a queer relationship. (I also fully waterboarded my girlfriend, who is also bisexual with a preference for women but had succumbed to believing she would never be able to date a woman seriously.) Neither of our families will ever understand and it is also physically dangerous in our hometown to be queer; there are no properly “out” queer people in our country at all, with zero legal protections or recognition. The long-term plan for us is to migrate to an LGBTQ+ friendly country as skilled labour, which is a time-consuming work-in-progress.

And so it was hard. It was hard for us to make it long-term with no representation of proper vision of what a future can look like, but even still we just … were not built to be casual with each other. In five years of dating, we’ve been mostly long distance and we’ve never seen a reason to break up.

My partner agrees that I was the foundation and optimistic backbone of this relationship, and I still am, despite her being the one with a lean towards loving women. We initially struggled a lot with internalised homophobia, lesbophobia and biphobia, as well as unlearning comphet. There would be days where we felt like imposter straight women fully making up our very legitimate and mutual attraction and romantic love. (Those days have since passed—if you’re a baby gay reading this, they do pass!) My girlfriend was the one who grew up secretly consuming these things, but I threw myself into sapphic media—books, film, articles, essays, vlogs. When it hurt, when I felt like I was losing hope, I doubled down. I didn’t have access to therapy, and I often had to be the therapist in our relationship. But even that couldn’t stop me from embracing what I desperately needed to do to embrace who I truly am, and the authentic life and queer joy I deserve to experience.

Sometimes I worry that I’ve ruined her life, that I’ve been a bad influence on a woman who had made her peace with playing it safe rather than risking her relationships, her culture, and her safety. My girlfriend has informed me that is a valid but incredibly silly concern, as she has consciously chosen to do this with me just as much as I have chosen her. (If you can’t tell, we have an assertive femme x babygirl masc relationship.)

Sometimes I think of what it will mean for me if we end up breaking up. (Not that I feel that scenario looming in any way, it’s just one morbid hypothetical I entertain among with many others.) I kind of … don’t know who I’ll be anymore? I am still bisexual and I feel strongly in that identity. But it hasn’t stopped me from making WLW (specifically, a shared love with my girlfriend) “a foundation for what I want in my life and the decisions that I make inside of it”. But if I happen to date a man somewhere along the line, all the extreme mental preparation I’ve done in regards to someday coming out will have been … unnecessary. Discardable. I expressed this fear to my girlfriend, and she said, very simply, “You wouldn’t feel lost. You’d be with someone you love. And you would still love your sapphic book collection. It will always feel natural and right, and you.”

Actually, Google will probably not have a terrible answer!

Thank you! No, that has never been part of the plan for us as it would require some semblance of coming out/explaining, and we want to put that off for as long as we possibly can. Our priorities are to establish financial (and emotional!) independence first, so when the time comes, we are strong enough to withstand and manage the reaction. We genuinely love our families and we expect our siblings to understand, but not older figures such as parents, aunts, uncles. It’s also difficult to gauge how word would spread or how the rest of our tightly-knit community/society will see us (…probably not favourably). We really love our country and culture and want to maximise our access to it for now, and the cost of that is to remain closeted!

We’re choosing to take it a day at a time, which can feel very unfair because if homophobia didn’t exist we would be able to make long-term plans like our other friends in their mid-twenties. Even though we’ve been together for a while and can see ourselves together indefinitely, we acknowledge that not all relationships in your twenties will be built to last and we’re trying to make responsible decisions rather than risk it all right away! (This is also perhaps a uniquely bisexual self-imposition. If I were dating cis man instead, or on the highly off-chance I date one in the future, I would obviously be out to my partner but I would never bother to come out to my family at all.) As we both agree that children is something we might want but not having them wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, we have been willing to make the difficult sacrifice of not racing against time. This is purely hypothetical but I often think that if I were a lesbian, I would have felt more inclined and empowered to establish, commit and fight for my identity and chosen partner/future—because there wouldn’t be a possible hetero-presenting alternative that I feel pressured to maintain space for.

Regardless, we like to count our blessings! Our positive outlook is literally our survival. We have a lot of love in our lives and our plans revolve around sustainably preserving that for as long as possible. I imagine coming out in our thirties or forties (as opposed to when we are in our “prime” as young women, which the patriarchy unfortunately feels entitled to) will be a softer blow for our families and community, and we will have way more control and agency. My parents may not ever be proud of my sexuality or queer relationship(s), but I like to believe they would be “proud” (read: tolerant) of how I’m going about it by ultimately prioritizing my career rather than eloping. Yes, even if that is requiring me to make the difficult decision to unfairly sacrifice some of my dreams. I hope that it can all be worth it for us some day, and we will get to have most of what we want in life, even if it’s nowhere close to everything. :(