This is one of those posts that I’m likely to link back to a few times. Kind of like a write and forget thing to then link back to when people ask about my identity.
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Over the years I’ve had a lot of people put down my identity, try to rewrite it, accept it but not understand it, or just flat-out accept it. I’ve had girlfriends that call me their girlfriend, and ones that call me their boyfriend, and even one that called me partner. My mother calls me her daughter, but my aunts call me their nephew. And this is just a few of them that doesn’t count all the times I’ve had ‘Dyke or Fag’ yelled out the window at me as a car passes (or worse ‘show us your boobs’).
Over the years I’ve jumped around with how to explain my identity, from using as many identity affirming words as I can, to simply saying that’s who I am. But nothing has better been a means of expressing what I feel than my gay-girl goggles.
What I mean is not only do I consume media specifically meant for, marketed to, picked up by, or made for Lesbians and Bi women (essentially Lesbian-centric) but I also consume all media and look at it with my gay-girl goggles. I see the subtext between Chloe and Rebecca in Rooted, or freakin die of happiness when Annie and Liza finally get their reunion in Annie on My Mind, or squee with excitement at seeing the adorable moments between Tara and Willow in Buffy, and even cry horribly while smiling at love-confessing moments between Katie and Emily in Skins. (I’m tearing up just thinking about that last one)
And that’s not even touching all the moments I can think of that made me desperately want to see two of the girls in a cast get together even though it would never happen because it was a ‘bunch of straight people (or men) writing it’.
My point around all this though has to do with my consumption of media. I never was much of a reader. I slogged through the first Harry Potter book, years back when it first came out. Even TV and movies I was never big into. I just didn’t care about it all. It was boring, repetitive, or just didn’t catch my interest.
And then I found the show Skins and Buffy soon after and I started consuming TV shows with craze because there it was… something I showed emotion for, something I CARED ABOUT in media. Something that quite honestly resonated with me. Today I’d probably put it up to something everyone feels when they first meet that one character that makes them go ‘THAT’S ME!”.
Skins with Katie and Emily (specifically Emily) was the first show I was really able to connect with, and specifically those characters and their arc. I just was indifferent at the time to the majority of the other arcs. They didn’t matter cause I could connect with those two! It’s like looking at everything in a gray-scale and then suddenly there were two people with color; vibrant colors that I just had to follow.
And I followed Katie and Emily straight into Buffy, and on to Rubyfruit Jungle in books, and once I had read Rubyfruit Jungle and some of Jeanette Winterson’s work… well then I was insatiable when it came to reading. I grabbed up everything I could, then put a lot of the ‘heteronormative stuff’ down. At the time.
It was after enough of reading and watching all these characters that I started to see it everywhere and go back to those heteronormative stories and books. It wasn’t just the canon girls that were interested in girls. It was all the girls that I could find any subtext for! Probably one of the biggest ones for me was Illyana Rasputin from the Marvel Comics series. I read a lot of subtext with her and Kitty. I mean they are SOULMATES. Like literally soul mates, as in, part of Illyana’s soul would go to Kitty when shit hit the fan. No joke. And don’t get me started on how Kitty going out with Illyana’s brother only confirms this more in my mind.
The point of that though is that somewhere along the line, I totally and completely developed my gay-girl goggles. This view of the world that I read into areas way more than I probably ever should, and then squee when they actually come true. I’m not the only one that does this. There’s billions of Fan Fiction to prove that. And I even wrote some of it. And there’s also show recaps and various posts like the ones Autostraddle does that look at stuff with those gay-girl goggles.
It’s a common mentality because when you look at anything in the world you are looking at it through your specific bias. You put more weight on the way those two girls are holding hands because when you were holding hands with a girl there was more weight in it. There was a deeper meaning with all those hidden subtexts. So of course you look for it when you see it in other areas!
And to me, saying that I consume, enjoy and connect with lesbian-centric media more than any straight media (or specifically straight male centric media) I’ve touched only goes to tell me further that I connect with that identity more than anything else. I see the world through my gay-girl goggles because I’ve been through the world as a gay girl. I’m not always gendered as a girl, but then again there’s a lot of lesbians out there who aren’t gendered as a girl either all the time. Especially when you are more ‘tomboyish’ like me.
And the more I’ve gone through the world. The more I realized I’ve been on the edge of androgyny for so long that if I wear vaguely ‘girl’ like clothes or make my boobs more prominent and someone still says ‘he’, I simply say ‘I’m a girl, jerk’ and they correct themselves. Seriously. It surprised me the first few times I did it and it actually worked. But it does. Because there’s been enough girls in the world now that have had to say a similar thing.
So I’m grateful for that. And grateful for my gay-girl goggles. Because they give me something I can actually point to, I can actually say that this is my identity. And it doesn’t make me any better or worse than anyone, it’s just MY way of explaining my identity. It’s my way of saying ‘I feel this way’ because it’s how I’ve experienced my life. It’s the meaning I’ve placed in my life and quite honestly the only meaning that ever matters is the meaning YOU give things.
Even though I’ve been told by some lesbians before that I was weird for liking things like L word and Rubyfruit Jungle. Because they thought I was a guy. They kept wanting to affirm back to me that I shouldn’t like those things, that I shouldn’t connect with those things when its the only areas I’ve connected with. It’s like tasting chocolate for the first time and not knowing how you had gone your whole life without it, and then having someone come along and say you can never eat chocolate because it is only for people. And then you try to explain you ARE a people! or you slink away in sadness because they were just one of many people who told you the same thing, and clearly you aren’t a person because everyone else says so.
It’s like that.
