To be a Queer Girl among Straight Girls 24/7
I spent my senior year of college in bed with my girlfriend watching “Grey’s Anatomy” and looking at apartments in faraway cities. I got a lot of backlash for this. People didn’t understand why I’d become so withdrawn. I didn’t want to hang out with my friends anymore, and I was never in the living room with everyone else. I stayed down the hallway and only really hung out with my girlfriend. It was weird. I was clingy. Eventually I stopped being invited to do anything at all.
It’s a common thing for us to make fun of couples that seem obsessive and like they think they’re too good for anyone else. Friends get offended. The general public mocks them. We worry, too, because sometimes this a sign of an unhealthy relationship. But other times, especially in queer relationships, this can be the result of something else: Sometimes it’s just too fucking hard to be a queer girl hanging out with straight girls all the time.
I spent four years at an overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly wealthy, overwhelmingly straight university. When I got there, I was smacked in the face with culture shock. Somehow I’d been completely isolated in the diverse part of Maryland where I grew up. Nothing was normal to me about being surrounded by girls who wore brightly patterned dresses that cost hundreds of dollars, who were somehow nearly all white, and who still said things were “so gay.” My white best friend from home said she wasn’t sure how I ended up surrounded by such white white people.
By the end of my first year, I’d realized I was queer. By the end of my second, I realized I wanted to do something about it. I spent my third year hooking up with girls and my fourth year dating a girl seriously.
By the middle of my fourth year, I’d had it. I couldn’t stand the microaggressions anymore, the people who acted like I’d never kissed a boy because queer didn’t register in their either-gay-or-straight world, and the people who only wanted to hang out with me when they wanted to find out how I had sex and how they, too, could hook up with girls. I couldn’t deal with watching the people who were supposed to have my back say absolutely nothing when friends of their used slurs in my own apartment. I couldn’t deal with the fact that I’d spent so much time just sort of hoping these people who were supposed to care about me would come around.
It hurt tremendously to always feel like the outsider. No matter what happened, they would never understand how I felt.
I sought community in queer spaces but found drama instead. Everyone had hooked up with everyone, gossip was the major form of communication, and despite their marginalized identities, many of these people still were basically racist and classist and mocked people with mental illnesses.
I became someone who desperately craved connection but who couldn’t find it beyond my best friends from home and my girlfriend. My friends would visit, and we would party and explore and hang out. I’d feel like a normal college student again. But then they’d leave, and I’d feel so ridiculously alone.
I’ve since graduated, but it’s still been hard to find people I can trust. My best friends and I live in different states — we still haven’t realized that our best bet at friendship is just forming a commune — and I still feel like I’m recovering from four years as an educator/social justice advocate who never really got to make that decision. As a marginalized person, it felt like a role I had to fill. If I didn’t, who would?
It isn’t as if I don’t have friends. I go out. I do things. But my best experiences are those I have with other queer girls and non-binary people who are committed to things like anti-racist feminism and creating safe spaces within our hangouts. It’s hard to bond with your besties over Beyoncé or plucking each other’s eyebrows or sharing poetry when you’re just waiting for the second that they say something to offend you and promptly call you oversensitive when you’re upset.
