But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty…
—Sappho 31 [Fragment], translated by Anne Carson
The other day in the Berkeley dining hall, a new acquaintance and I—let’s call her K—were discussing the disappointing ordeals of navigating college dating pools. K complained:
Lesbians are a very underground community on campus, especially real lesbians. The amount of “bi” girls I’ve met is unreal. They’ll be like “Oh yeah I’d totally make out with a girl. I make out with my friends at parties. But I just… I don’t really see myself in a relationship with a girl.” It’s like babe, you’re simply. not. gay. That’s all.
I’d never heard anyone talk about “real” lesbians before. It felt like a bold statement. Where was the Lesbian Club of New Haven located, after all? And how many days a week could a girl stop by to pick up her membership card? I imagined they must also provide certificates of authenticity, with the words actual self-aware-bitch-boss lesbian emblazoned in golden letters at top-center and the names of all three members of Boygenius signed at the bottom. In any case, the comment stayed with me for days afterward, bugging me in the way that impending personal revelations tend to do.
What were “real” lesbians, exactly? K’s distinction implied a certain commitment to the label as opposed to the mere acknowledgment of physical attraction. To her, it was probably a working definition for gauging romantic prospects. Some girls want to get to know you. Others just want to fuck you. And still others would rather take a boy home any day of the week.
In K’s book, to be a lesbian in the true (we might say unqualified) sense required something more than the banal fact of a particular sexual inclination—something more intentional. In lieu of the hazy impulse to get one’s feet wet along the shallows of feminine affections, lesbianism entailed a readiness to plunge into the depths. And that’s why K found Yale to be such a frustrating place to date women; so few girls are ready to follow you all the way in.
I’m afraid gay kids these days demand more than many people are willing to offer. Queer gen-Z-ers are perhaps too young to remember that getting by on a few questionable hookups every month in the backrooms of local gay bars, where the yellow dew of white-tiled floors tinged knee after genuflecting knee, was once the bread and butter of their people. That is, they have savored in their lifetimes a large enough sample of dignity and freedom to ever settle for the scant life of the old days. But this is not the case for everyone; for some, the bar is still in hell.
K spoke with impatience about those other girls—the ones who dabble with girl-on-girl action but never go through with it. The girls who rizz you up then leave you hanging. The kiss-me-cuz-we’re-friends-and-I’m-drunk girls. The DTF girls. The girls who will gladly make the trek up Science Hill to get in bed with you but never stay for breakfast. They seemed to belong in a different category.
Though not a lesbian myself, I knew that breed of unsure flirt exceptionally well. The curious straight guy for whom the fumbling under the sheets says nothing about who he is. The summer camp stud who forgot to mention that girlfriend he’s got back home. The masc4masc polo player who thinks wearing a crop top is more gay than sucking dick behind daddy’s stables. The pseudo-progressive intellectual who somehow uses Judith Butler’s gender performativity to excuse himself for staying on the DL (except when he announces himself as a top).
All of these examples differ from K and I in that their relationship to same-sex desire is chiefly, if not exclusively, physical. For them, the amorous links that form between bodies on steamy nights are to remain tenuous; they always end at daybreak and must never be allowed to turn into a different kind of rapport. On their watch, passion stays behind closed bedroom doors, in the basements of frats, or in the rouge of that one drunken night.
Not unlike us, they never learned another love but the usual one. The one with a boy and a girl and a wedding cake and a lush backyard and beautiful children. But unlike us, they never felt compelled to teach themselves a different thing. So now they are that and we are this for the same reason that loving and fucking have separate dictionary entries. It is one thing to have sex, another to acknowledge the feelings, to risk their swelling into a full-bodied love.
It may be love, then, that separates “real” lesbians from the rest. And what a sentimental, slippery thought that is. Yet here it seems to clarify, not obscure. It refines our definitions: real lesbians are the ones who are willing to love. And let me do justice to the mawkishness of my claims:
Love is the sustained meeting of eyes the morning after. Love is the few words exchanged before clothes get hung back on bodies. Love is the pancake shared with you, love. Love is the thirst for you that mounts until, at lunch, I suck the wet out of a clementine less juicy. Love is holding a girl’s hand in public a few hours after you let her slip it in your pussy. Love is something not too far from these.
And a willingness to love someone, if at all earnest, is also a willingness to bear the cost of that love. It is to welcome the loss of other affections that love implies, to renounce the attention, to sit out of the game. In the case of gay love, it is also to eat the blow of that timeless cobblestone where my brothers fell dead in some back-alley that my cheekbones still remember. It is such a troublesome thing to do—and yet our people have been doing it for centuries. It is our pride even today. It is what allows K to spot the “real” girls. Their neon glow beaming through the crowd, they gamble everything on their love.
To the others, love is still something to shy away from, a daunting thing. Some of them may be confused, and I celebrate them in the way that Whitman celebrated himself. After all, confusion is their right, and it is productive. It kindles curiosity, and, if coupled with courage, matures into conviction. Some of them may still refuse to see themselves truly, and I embrace them, for the world is forbidding and the road is long. Others have seen, though, and even having seen yet they deny themselves, as Peter denied Jesus in the house of the high priest. Those people I see, through and through. And I beckon them to listen.
They who scorn to attach themselves to what they see as the sticky labels of 21st-century faggotry—the troublesome L, G, B, T, Q…—usually ascribe to the phenomenon of sexuality a certain trivial character. Sexuality to them is but one more thing about a person—a matter of likes and dislikes. It is akin to liking chocolate cake over vanilla. It is the casually libidinal result of having a body and it should not be treated as the center of one’s universe. They like to conceive of sexual orientation as more of a preference than an identity.
But this banishing of sexuality from people’s sense of personhood is a luxury that only finds utterance in the mouths of those who are able to pass for straight cisgender men or women. Some of us can’t flick our queerness away like a gadfly any time it becomes a nuisance. Some of us can but don’t, because the bite of self-denial is too insulting to our soul.
At any rate, some of the promoters of sexual preference over identity do use the occasional label. Often, they confine it to very specific and contained spheres of their lives. Others rebuke labels altogether for fear that they might scare away more traditional prospects. It is not uncommon, after all, for queer people to end up in straight relationships. And who could blame them for wanting to reap the benefits of such a life? The world accommodates straight love better than its alternatives, not to mention the emotional rewards of satisfying our hetero-normed, Disney-movie-coded, grandma-endorsed expectations about romance. Getting yourself a pretty wife and kids is easier, I guess, than learning how to douche.
Elspeth Catton—played by Rosamund Pike in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn—put it best when she said: “I was a lesbian for a while you know… but it was all just too wet for me in the end. Men are so lovely and dry.” Her man was dry and rich.
The sign that betrays the levity of Elspeth’s gayness is her ability to live without it. The ease with which I imagine her giving herself up in exchange for the comforting embrace of safer affections and the monumental charm of a British medieval mansion is but an expression of her lack of self-commitment (Pike’s loveliness notwithstanding).
Of course, I also sympathize. If Elspeth were here, she would tell me that it’s not as simple as I make it sound, that it’s easier to come for individual people making choices about their lives than it is to confront the underlying social structures forcing them to make those choices in the first place. And she would be right. Except she’s not a real person and shaming her is not my point. My point, rather, is that her backstory illustrates how tempting the traditional avenues can be for gay people, how quick we want to be in accepting the varying levels of self-denial that they require—and to caution against doing just that. After all, I do not believe that our inability to change oppressive cultural systems overnight releases any of us from the obligation to authenticity that imposes itself upon every person of conscience.
I disagree, then, with people who would justify Elspeth, those who insist on trivializing sexuality. But I will grant them this: their casual attitude gestures towards the normalcy with which we may one day come to treat sexual diversity. One day—once all the conversion camps have been leveled to the ground and all our martyrs resurrected from their graves—on that day, they can have their way.
Still, the trivializers of sexuality will not be judged for their shrewd theoretical musings about some ideal world where our sexual lives determine nothing about us beyond who we share a bed with. Down here on Earth, sex and love change nothing short of everything about a person’s experience of the world, and they, like me, are free to choose only how they respond to this crude fact. For this they will be judged. They may face up to it with candor. They may flinch away from it in shame. But they may not avoid the reckoning. They may not avoid themselves when the door is shut and the dust of history settles between the body and the mirror.
To return to my conversation with K, I would not for all this conclude that some queer people are more “real” than others; hence why I have kept the quotations. But there is a line in the sand. A rooster’s song can now be heard outside the house of the high priest. K and I know where we stand, and we know why. This is the reason: What separates sexual preference from sexual identity is the same enormous rift that spreads between the silent honesty of noticing oneself and the behemoth courage of living in accordance with oneself. And in our days, honesty will not suffice.