#internalized queerphobia

ઇ moth to a flame

synopsis: you desperately look for something that no men can give you.

contents: not proofread, angst with barely any comfort, internalized homophobia, reader is in a relationship with a man, reader is mentioned to have had a lot of previous relationships with men, reader is a lesbian but is too scared to admit.

You look to your side to see the man breathing heavily in his sleep. He's chest moves up and down, shining with droplets of sweat.

You get up to run a shower, the feeling of his skin on yours still lingers on your cells. He didn't exactly touch you — you try to avoid it —, you only gave him a blowjob. But the idea of him still on you makes you nauseous.

When the hot water reaches your closed eyes, all you can think about is her. The auburn haired woman that haunts your dreams, your steps, your life.

Always staring from afar; at the frat parties, she watches as you walk in your boyfriend's arms; at the games, she watches how you cheer for him and when he wins, she watches how he holds you up and kisses you.

She's always observing you, like fire observes a moth circling it. And you're the moth. You're the moth that yearns for a fire to call yours, for a fire to get you entertained, a fire that won't become ashes once you're close enough. You want a fire that burns you, that makes you its ashes.

You desperately look for something that can catch your attention more than your men do.

Your reputation isn't the best: always in the arms of a man for no longer tha six months before going to the next one. You're looking for something, something you're not sure of yet.

Ellie is a hint of what you're looking for, but you're not ready to accept that all you've been seeking all this time — male attention — isn't what you actually wanted or needed.

When you leave the bathroom, towel around your body, the first thing you do is dial her number — because you would never save her contact — and call her.

You call her like you always do when he sleeps, because you can't bear her absence.

It rings one time before she picks up and you can hear her hoarse sleepy voice. You close his door and sit on the living room's floor, towel falling from your body and covering the floor you're on.

"Why are you up this late, love?" she asks, her voice small through the phone speaker. You can picture her hands brushing the sleep out of her pretty eyes.

"I miss you" your voice is sweet, thick like honey.

She sighs and you bite your inner lip, anxious about her next words.

"Where are you at?"

"Steve's"

You can feel how her breath changes, how she holds back to not spit off everything she wants to say to you.

"I'm on my way"

You don't even put on a pair of clothes, you just tie the towel around your body and leave his place once she texts you saying she arrived.

The hot tears already threaten to fall, but you can't let that happen, not now.

From the driver's seat she opens the door for you, frowning when looking at your body.

"What the hell...?"

You close the door and the pout that forms on your mouth is involuntarily. Your hands goes to your face to hide the tears that began to fall.

"Hey, hey. What happened baby? Come here" she holds your hands and takes them away from your face, holding you between her hands like you're the most precious thing in the world.

You shake your head no. Not wanting to talk about it, because you know it will only make you cry more.

"Talk to be baby"

You sniff before trying to form coherent words.

"He disgusts me. Every time he touches me I want to take off my skin. I can't do this anymore" you keep on shaking your head, tears running down your face

Ellie bites her inner lip and you can see the moment it all click inside her head. She swallows hard.

"Leave him" she says without hesitation, for the hundredth time.

You shake your head again, eyes closing and cheek pressing against her hand.

"I can't"

She huffs and takes her hands out of your face, holding the steering wheel hard enough to make her fingers go white.

"The hell you can't"

Your sobs grow louder. "I can't Ellie, I can't do this"

She punches the steering wheel. "Why do you keep doing this to yourself? You hate him! Why do you keep doing this to me?"

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Ellie."

You hug your legs and let your tears wet them.

"Does he know about me?" she presses the back of her head against the seat and closes her eyes.

You move your head no.

"Didn't you say he went through your phone last time you stood him up? What about the pictures that you keep?"

"I keep them in a locked folder"

She sighs.

"Baby it's not safe for you to stay with him. Leave him, even if it's not to come to me, leave him."

"I can't. He's already suspicious of something. What if he tells people I like girls?"

"What about it? Is there something wrong about liking girls?"

"I don't know, Ellie. I really don't. I was told all my life that it is wrong, that it is a sin."

She reaches for your hand and pulls you on her lap, sitting on your side on her lap.

"But you like me, don't you?" she asks, brushing her lips sweetly against your cheek.

"I more than like you, Ellie. I adore you." She smiles against your skin, eyes closed.

"And do you feel wrong about it?" Ellie kisses your temple, lips wandering on your face.

"Sometimes yes. But only if I think too much about it."

"So don't think too much baby, just be with me. Let 'em talk. Who gives a shit?"

"I do"

She stops for a second, then kisses the side of your mouth.

"I can not give a shit about it for us both."

Disclaimer that I enjoy different headcanons of both characters, their minds and their identities! This is just my musings as a queer autistic guy who relates to Ed a lot. And I use queerphobia as a slightly broader umbrella term.

I'm also not going into the Riddler persona here, because the question of his being an alter or an extreme personification of Ed's own impulses is down to your personal interpretation. I lean more towards the latter.

1. Firstly, I can and do make jokes that both of these men are dumb in different scenarios - because they are. Gotham is a wild, inconsistent ride of a show, and Ed and Oswald's relationship itself is wholesome and toxic and gorgeous and ridiculous.

But his various moments of social awkwardness or denial doesn't strictly equate to Ed being emotionally unintelligent, and jokes about Ed being dumb in general can sometimes risk toeing the line into territory of mocking an autistic character for not handing emotions the way allistic characters do.

When Ed is seen as oblivious or cold by other characters or viewers, that doesn't mean he is those things. His brain processes emotions more internally compared to Oswald's external style - hence why Ed is quiet and controlled in many instances, and Oswald is dramatically expressive.

2. Secondly, with Ed, I think he's competent at handling his own feelings to an extent, but denial pops up to complicate things when those feelings are stigmatized (like his violent impulses, or his growing attraction to Oswald). Ed manages to accept the violent tendencies early on, but the denial around his own queerness was more persistent.

I agree that Ed's emotions are a strong driving factor for him throughout the show, however misdirected they were. Oswald tells him in 3.22 that instead of emotion he's driven by "a desperate, compulsive need to complete what you've started in exacting fashion," but that need is an emotional one for Ed, something Oswald can't automatically relate to because of their differing processing styles.

I do think he began to comprehend Ed more accurately as the show progressed from this scene, however. I've said before that Oswald understood Ed better than he understood himself, and knew more about how his brain worked than anyone else in Gotham. I still think that's true. But that was just because Oswald loved him, and therefore spent a lot of time puzzling out the difference between Ed's 'cold' or 'oblivious' exterior and his emotionally-driven actions - I wouldn't say he knew Ed perfectly from the start. It was a journey.

3. Thirdly, I feel that the biggest factor in Ed's denial about Oswald (and therefore his reaction to the Isabella debacle, and his subsequent clumsy relationship with Lee) is internalized queerphobia rather than his being emotionally inept.

In early S3 Ed's internalized queerphobic framework wouldn't permit him to accept a man falling in love with him (or a man he was already in love with returning those feelings, forcing him to confront his own desires). Once he found out Oswald loved him, Oswald had already killed Isabella and that provided Ed an easy excuse to paint over his own love for Oswald with hatred and revenge - enough for him to shoot Oswald, though he was visibly emotionally conflicted throughout his 'revenge'.

His obsessive spiralling, vivid hallucinations and drug abuse following Oswald's supposed death speaks for itself about the level of denial he was under. Ed loved him as more than just a friend and mentor, but he still couldn't admit that, so he left it at "we were best friends, I cared for him and I miss him," and leaned into his new life as the Riddler.

When Oswald showed back up, Ed defaulted to the enemies mindset again - but I would love to know if he would've actually gone through with shooting Oswald for a second time (had Oswald not outfoxed him first).

Because Ed's characterization is all over the place in S4 (like many other characters in the later seasons), I think it's fair to interpret that his continued internalized denial about Oswald is responsible for most of his emotional actions in that season.

He pivoted from half-heartedly intending to kill Oswald for freezing him to instead languishing in the Narrows, after Oswald showed him total rejection: that he wasn't even worth the label of rival anymore. Ed then latched onto Lee (a woman incredibly similar to Oswald in almost every way) in another attempt to prove to himself and others that he was straight, and not emotionally linked to Oswald except as an enemy.

Later in S4, Ed/Riddler persisted in nonsensical attempts to convince Lee to drop one of the few things that set her apart from Oswald - her compassion for the poor of the Narrows and towards others in general. If she'd gone along with that, Ed felt like he could finally possess a female version of the man he'd spent years trying not to love, something that he hoped would be 'close enough' to pacify his own queerness.

And that ended the way it was always going to - Ed and Lee stabbing each other. Oswald then proved again that he was the one person who genuinely loved Ed by saving him, and that he accepted that it might never be returned by deciding to have Strange save Lee too.

Looking at S5, it comes to my mind that Ed has a track record for making foolish decisions when he feels he loves someone. He showed Kristen proof of his killing her former boyfriend, he nearly dropped his entire life to pursue Isabella despite her being suspicious af, and he did multiple stupid things to try and convince himself that he and Lee were anything other than convenient tools for each other to use.

It was only in S5 after becoming allies again with Oswald that Ed finally started to break down his longstanding denial, accept his own sexuality and follow his emotions to make the ultimate foolish decision out of genuine love: staying in Gotham just because he loved Oswald and could not accept leaving him to die, and Oswald wasn't willing to sail away with him.

TL;DR:

1) my take on Ed being in denial about Oswald for so long is that it was more down to internalized queerphobia, rather than him just having poor overall emotional intelligence.

2) Ed being viewed as emotionally unintelligent in all situations, and/or his reduced affect being taken as a lack of emotional intelligence can be problematic, because he's autistic and his processing of emotions may not always fit conventional expectations.

3) I adore both of these fools-for-love, their dumbness and their messy relationship.

They're all ga...

They call me a weirdo lesbian freak for liking byler...

they scream across the class that I'm gay...

I don't like them anymore

hehehe I don't like ME anymore

Also had to deal with cognitive dissonance part 2 years after realizing I was a bisexual ace and going on hour long rants about wanting to be a shapeshifter and wishing I could be androgynous af to anyone that would hear plus my own ears, then ending with "No way I'm trans though. I'm just daydreaming."

from MY point of view, i'm completely fine with that. but whenever i think of the potential (imaginary) partner, i feel bad for them.

i feel like i'd be cheating them out of getting the "full experience."

i'm not a REAL man... is what my head is telling me.