There is no flag for us. Not really.
Lesbians have always lived in codes, in glances, in the art of recognition. Our history was never written in the open, and so we stitched it into fabric, into poetry, into the way we carried ourselves. We pressed our love into the margins of literature, tucked it between the bars of Sappho’s verse, carved it into initials on tree trunks where no one would think to look.
We learned to find each other through signs—through violets exchanged in secret, through rings on middle fingers, through a well-placed handkerchief peeking out of a pocket. In Paris salons and speakeasies, in the smoky corners of bars where women danced together for the first time, we spoke in the language of the unspoken. A glance held a second too long. The slow drag of a cigarette. A name carefully chosen, deliberately shared.
But for femme lesbians, this language was never made for us.
There is no universal emblem, no single symbol that marks us as both femme and unquestionably, undeniably queer. No effortless recognition in a sea of strangers. No shorthand that grants us entry into spaces that should already feel like home.
We walk the world with a strange kind of duality, slipping between the safety of assumed heterosexuality and the grief of being erased by it. The world sees softness and assumes it belongs to a man. It sees lipstick and assumes it is worn for the male gaze. It sees a dress and does not consider, for even a second, that it might have been chosen with a woman in mind.
We are here, and yet unseen. Too queer for the world at large, not queer enough for the spaces meant to embrace us. We are the unspoken question, the uncertain glance, the double-take that never quite resolves.
To be femme and lesbian is to exist in a state of misrecognition. It is to know that your love will always be misunderstood. It is the dull, constant ache of being assumed straight in every room you enter. It is the hesitation before a first date—does she know? Does she believe you? It is the quiet, persistent exhaustion of having to explain. To justify. To answer the ever-present, subtly demanding question: Are you sure?
History tells us stories of butch and androgynous lesbians who carved out space through visibility, who embraced defiance in a world that sought to erase them. And for that, they deserve reverence. Along with their defining strides, there remains another kind of survival, a quieter one, a history written in the margins and footnotes. There have always been femmes among us—women who loved women and looked like someone’s sister, someone’s mother, someone’s wife. Women who walked into rooms where their queerness was invisible, and carried that weight alone.
The bars where our ancestors found refuge in the 1950s—where butches and femmes created something sacred—do not remember us now. We are a lost dialect of an old language. There was a time when being a femme meant something inextricable from queerness, when it was a choice made boldly and without apology. And yet, over time, our culture has thinned. The world does not know how to recognise us anymore. Sometimes, neither does our own community.
Queerness, as a whole, is a visual language. A culture of signs and signifiers, of understanding before words. But when your queerness is not immediately legible, when it is stitched into the softness of your voice or the deliberate application of lipstick rather than a convenient outward marker, you become a question mark even among your own. There is a particular ache in knowing that, even in the spaces built for us, we must still ask to be seen.
So we try to flag in whispers. A small rainbow pendant, resting just below the collarbone. A carefully chosen book carried into a café. A quote from The Price of Salt hidden in a dating profile. A song lyric from Chappell Roan, from Hayley Kiyoko, from someone who sings in the language of us. We send signals like pressed violets in the pages of old letters, hoping someone will recognise what they mean.
And yet, it never quite works the way we want it to. Because even when we try to make ourselves known, the world does not always want to see us.
To be femme is to move through life in disguise, whether we choose it or not. It is to be wrapped in a protection that is not always kind. It is to exist in a world that, perhaps thankfully, spares us from its cruelties by pretending we do not exist at all. But we are here.
And so we search for each other in the places only we know to look. In the way another femme lesbian meets your eyes across the room, and in that moment, knows. In the relief of an unexpected conversation where someone does not ask, does not second-guess, does not require proof. In the places where we do not have to explain, where we are understood before we have even spoken a word.
Perhaps flagging, for us, is not something we wear, but something we find.
Perhaps our survival was never meant to be written in symbols.
Perhaps it is time to stop waiting to be seen. To stop shrinking ourselves into something palatable, something recognizable, something easily understood.
Perhaps it is time to exist, unapologetically, in the fullness of who we are.
