#deshi queer

It’s Lesbian Visibility Week and I’m really glad to be studying abroad right now surrounded by lesbian/sapphic friends that I can wish well. I’m seeing more content than usual for LVW in only its sixth year and it makes my heart happy for the 2020s pop culture lesbian/sapphic/wlw renaissance. At the same time, as usual, I feel a lot of grief because there is little I wouldn’t give to be visibly lesbian/sapphic with my girlfriend of five years to friends and family from our conservative home country in the global south. We can’t even begin to plan a safe way to come out yet. While our friends make plans to get (queer or straight) married and have children, our lives have to be at a complete standstill (which feels extra terrible in your mid-twenties when you do eventually want children). It has been so hard to pull off this queer long term long-distance relationship completely under wraps after being indoctrinated with compulsory heterosexuality our whole lives, and even after painstakingly unlearning that it still hurts to pretend to be straight and chronically single, and to have to repeatedly keep lying to our nagging parents that sure, we’ll get married (to men) at some point, knowing that not doing so will establish us as irresponsible, immature adults that they failed to raise correctly. (These traditions have been especially nauseating to me as I am also on the asexual spectrum.) Both of us being bisexual only adds a layer of guilt and further conflict, because society also feeds us the narrative that we “chose” to be gay and willingly ruined our own lives, rather than that we are committed to authenticity and joy and chasing love; or they’ll say that our queerness/sapphism is just a phase anyway compared to relationships between lesbians because ultimately all bisexuals succumb to being with men out of an innate lack of integrity, right?

I told my girlfriend I was born into the wrong life because I was actually meant to be a high spirited lesbian princess, “with a lady knight in shining armor that trails after you trying to keep you out of trouble”, my girlfriend added. I would have a library full of books and flowery meadows to frolic and read and picnic in. There would be swings hanging from large trees that would provide plenty of shade, and merry, gurgling streams, with critters like bunnies and frogs abound. There would be an endless supply of delicious food and baked goods (“that the knight would prepare for you,”) so I would never have to worry about meal prepping. The palace would be overrun with foster kittens (“the ones we adore on online videos would magically appear on my doorstep,” I said) that I could pick up and cuddle whenever my heart desired. I would only wear beautiful dresses and gowns because I wouldn’t have to worry about practicality, the furniture would be vintage, and my knightess would pick flowers in the garden for my honey and milk bubble bath. She would chivalrously offer a hand on precarious stairs and uneven ground so I would feel safe in my meticulously crafted heels that would never hurt. There would be staff for everything who would be well paid and happy and I wouldn’t have to worry about productivity and spoons ever again.

It’s so ironic that years ago I was sad at how sapphic stories were sidelined, erased, underfunded, and at how hard it was to find a community that shared my sentiments and my devotion to sapphic media, and now there is a mainstream #wlw community but everytime someone says the new catchphrase “We can’t have anything,” I hear alarm bells because I’m worried they’re part of the newly minted wave of folks who think the lack of lesbian/sapphic representation is rooted within individual (usually bisexual) women who “center men”, rather than the patriarchy itself, based on the (often cissexist and eurocentric) belief that lesbians alone are the “most” oppressed LGBTQ+ group.

“People in cis M/F relationships STOP posting your wedding pictures in celebration of marriage equality being protected! Your marriage was never at risk in the first place! You people always center yourselves!”