No more straight girls: a manifesto

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By: Sophie Geffros

My first girlfriend broke up with me for being too gay.

I understood her concerns. We were both deeply closeted teens in a small rural Ontario town where homophobic slurs were so rampant that they were less hate speech and more punctuation.  Despite my best efforts, I’ve never really been someone who could “pass”, and so all of my close relationships were tarred with the same ambiguously gay feather. Even before I was publicly declaring myself a member of the tribe, my friendships with women were treated with added scrutiny by our peers and parents alike.

It was lonely, and so the last years of my high school experience were capped with me aspiring to a kind of hyper-femininity in the vain hope that, if I could just prove I wasn’t one of “those” lesbians, I would be able to kiss girls in peace. Instead, that first doomed relationship was my last intimate encounter with either gender until university.

It was then that I discovered that the same qualities which had always marked me as undesirable and othered in high school could be used to pursue relationships. I was still far too shy to ever do anything so extreme as pursue a girl romantically, but my hair, my clothes, the way I carried myself – all of these built up to a flashing sign pinned to my chest declaring myself strongly uninterested in sex with men. Self-proclaimed “straight” girls would make out with me at parties for titillation and/or a strange kind of liberal street cred, and for a while, that was enough.

Of course there will always be straight men who take the signalling of sexual unavailability as a sort of challenge. The same straight boys who thought it was hot when their girlfriends made out with me had no problem loudly wondering whether I was “only a d*ke because men wouldn’t f*ck [me]”, as one charming specimen asked drunkenly at a party. After sobbing myself to sleep in my dorm room after one such encounter, I pledged to myself that I wouldn’t let myself be used for straight people’s titillation any more. This lasted approximately two and a half weeks, until the straight object of my affections and I engaged in some tequila-fueled fondling at an after-exam party.

In the LGBTQ+ community, there’s a phenomenon known as “second puberty”. Every September fresh-faced youth arrive on campuses across North America, thrilled that they will at last be able to date people of the same gender, or present as the gender they identify as, or even just meet other people who share even an iota of the same experiences as them.

My first girlfriend broke up with me for being too gay.  

What follows can be a rude awakening. Social skills that our straight, cis peers learned in middle school may be completely beyond us. How to flirt, how to ask someone out on a date, how to have your heart broken–these are lessons most of us don’t learn until we are in our late teens and early twenties. It’s one of the things that allows lesbians and bi women to open ourselves up to experimenting with self-identified straight girls who will never leave their boyfriends for us, no matter how many flowery messages we compose in the back of our Math 1A03 notebooks.

To any first year LGBT women reading this let me assure you: she isn’t going to leave him, and you deserve better than being someone’s dirty little secret or youthful experiment. It took me until the age of 20 to realise that sex and relationships shouldn’t leave you with a bitter kernel of shame in your chest.

Part of growing up has been realising that I am one of “those” lesbians, and that it’s okay. Trying to change your gender presentation in the pursuit of an unfulfilling one night stand is a recipe that can only end in tears. The kind of girls who will only have sex with you if you don’t seem too gay are the same girls who will do a number on your self esteem and self respect.

In 2016, let’s pledge to only date people who will make us feel good, and never ashamed.

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