#lvw

our leading ladies in a nutshell, killin the clueless lesbians trope dead 🫠

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?