These are the words I utter to my housemates while lying on our dusty kitchen floor, not feeling completely out of place amongst small pieces of red onion peel and rogue buckwheat pasta spirals. They recognise me, and I imagine them giving me a small wave — solidarity in our domestic discardment. I’ve been here before.
I’ve known I am queer for a long time, though I have struggled with understanding which label I felt most comfortable with. I have felt most secure with the ambiguous label ‘queer’. It’s accompanied me as I’ve grown older, throughout the shifts in my gender and sexual identity. My relationships with men have been tumultuous and disappointing for just as long, often ending with a kitchen floor and an unsettling feeling in my stomach: why does this not work for me?
I’ve known I am queer for a long time, though
The kitchen floor offers me a sense of comfort, one which I can’t ignore the irony of. It’s almost purgatorial in nature: I don’t belong in traditional, cis-het domestic spaces, but I don’t know how to get out of them.
So, if I have been in this linoleum limbo before, why did I go back? Why did I need to prove I was worthy of a man’s attention? Nothing more than desperation to prove that I could be their perfect girl.
But, as far as queer discourse goes, compulsory heterosexuality has been examined time and time again. I won’t bore you with an explanation of it, though if your only exposure has been the Lesbian Masterdoc (which any queer person who was online in 2020 will be familiar with), I highly recommend reading Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, which posited the queer/feminist theory and wasn’t written by a 19-year-old on tumblr.
So, if we can acknowledge compulsory heterosexuality as the problem, what’s the solution? For some feminist and queer theorists, it’s political lesbianism.
Political lesbianism grew as a political ideology and queer/feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s, with one 1981 publication entitled Love Your Enemy? written by radical feminists asserting that giving up sex with men is “taking your politics seriously”. Political lesbianism began as a subversion of the homophobic idea that ‘sexuality is a choice’, encouraging queer and heterosexual women alike to reject men as a direct opposition to the patriarchal state. However, early political lesbianism presents a cis-gendered perception of lesbian relationship, asserting that penetrative sex is inherently heterosexual and therefore inherently patriarchal. This transphobic discourse cannot be ignored, and neither can the bi-phobic and pan-phobic binary that political lesbianism emerged under, not to mention a disregard for any AFAB non-binary people like myself.
In her Honi Soit article ““No men, no meat, no machines”: The Forgotten History of Australian Radical Lesbian Separatism”, Mariika Mehigan speaks to the “unsympathetic” treatment of queer wom*n in relationships with men by political lesbians.
While I have dated men in the past, I’ve realised that my relationships with them stemmed from a need for validation — a need to feel like I belonged to the cis-heteronormative society in which we live. But once this validation faded so did any ‘attraction’. I was not attracted to the men, I was attracted to the idea of being wanted by one. So, in my first act of political lesbianism I committed myself to unlearning these tendencies. This is not to say that queer wom*n are just lesbians suffering from compulsory heterosexuality. In fact, that notion is incredibly damaging for fostering a sense of community amongst queer AFABs of all labels. For me, despite its original binary treatment of lesbian sexuality, political lesbianism has helped me realise that what I first thought was a political choice — to be “done” with men — was actually a manifestation of the person I have always been and the experiences I’ve had.
Unlike the political lesbians of the 70s and 80s, I don’t think that all queer and heterosexual AFAB people need to become lesbians in order to move away from the patriarchy, as the rise of so-called ‘celibacy eras’ among wom*n who are attracted to men proves. My sexual and gender identity journey has been turbulent, but I’m open to that turbulence continuing. For now though, I feel a sense of peace for the first time in my life.
And so, I will sweep the food scraps off my kitchen floor and properly discard them. They will tumble down the cheap bin liner and land on top of my old sense of self, one that reeks of Lynx Africa and a misplaced desperation to belong.
