The Gray Area Of Being Gay
It’s all a balancing act.
I came out at the tender age of twenty-one which, by my calculation, is twenty-eight years ago and, therefore, I have almost three decades of being a lesbian under my gay belt.
I have always connected emotionally to women, realizing in my late teens that this included romantic connections. Contrary to popular myth, I have no issues with men and have some wonderful ones in my life who I enjoy spending time with, I just don’t want to date them.
However, as we mosey along under this sexual persuasion there are some pitfalls worth mentioning in being attracted to women, not only with respect to the queer among us, but with our straight sisters as well.
Allow me to elaborate.
I’ll start off by saying that I don’t fall in love with straight women, and any battle-scarred lesbian will feel the same way. I know better than this, mainly because the first woman that I fell in love with was straight. She was more than twenty years my senior and I was freshly out, too young to control my feelings towards her as they proceeded to torment me for the better part of two years.
She was a colleague and a friend, and I allowed my imagination to run wild of how she would suddenly realize that I was the one, that gender didn’t matter when you were in love, and how she would confess her love for me one quiet evening surrounded by candlelight — don’t you love an eager young mind with no grip on reality? Nothing came of it, of course, as nothing was ever going to come of it, but oh Lord did my young heart hold out hope for far too long.
It was a hard lesson to learn, but thankfully I learned it early on in my dating life and have never allowed myself to feel romantically attracted to another straight woman since.
Some straight women, however, enjoy flirting with me; possibly looking for the validation that they rarely find with men, some try to see whether their feminine wiles work on women as well as they work on men, and some, I truly believe, would like a life experience. Regardless of the motivation, I don’t cross that line. Yes, on occasion I have flirted back, but only when we both knew nothing would come of it.
Let’s call a spade a spade — flirting is fun!
I’m not saying that there aren’t straight women that I couldn’t fall for. On the contrary, I admit that I’ve had a few friendships that, had they been gay, I would have investigated them romantically. I am, however, not in the business of making anyone feel uncomfortable and am very adept at separating the love of friendship and the love of a partner.
Unfortunately, the saddest pitfall I have encountered in some friendships is how wary they become when they find themselves getting closer to me emotionally. I see the change in their eyes as caution creeps in, secretly questioning my intentions with the assumption that every gay woman will eventually want to progress a friendship with another woman sexually, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, if I was ever to tell them that I wasn’t interested, they would be deeply offended by my lack of romantic interest. A conundrum that has amused me endlessly— wanting me to fancy them but not act on it! Go figure!
I do need to reiterate that this doesn’t apply to all my straight friendships — I have many that honestly don’t care and treat me as they would any good friend.
Now, regarding my sisters of the inclination, I do love my community but Oh Lord we can be quite the mess. Within lesbian friendships, more often than not, one person becomes attracted to the other and when the feelings aren’t reciprocated, the friendship goes downhill pretty quickly. As women, we are sensitive to rejection. It always astounds me how men can be shot down again and again and simply move on to the next target without breaking stride.
Oh the resilience of the male species!
We, however, are terrified of rejection and circle each other in some imaginary animal kingdom documentary, waiting to pounce on our prey, all the while waiting for the other to make the first move. When one summons enough courage to take that leap and the feelings aren’t reciprocated, it can be hard to take and they often withdraw completely to lick their wounds.
From personal experience it can be devastating and heartbreaking when you have to lose a friendship that you’ve come to cherish due to circumstances completely out of your control. If I could choose who I was attracted to, my life would have been so much easier, but that chemical reaction is a level of science that I am not qualified to modify!
There’s a gray area in being a gay woman when walking that fine line between attraction and friendship. Sometimes it works in your favour, and sometimes it just breaks your heart.
