The Rules of Queer Love
Searching for something that isn’t always there
The stakes are high in the game of queer love and the rules are different from the status quo. The manual for heteronormative romantic attachment is built into everyday life whether one can successfully read it or not.
If they want to, they can find role models for loving relationships anywhere. There are cis-hetero couples holding hands on the street where they don’t have to worry about anyone’s offended gaze; they are featured in the plethora of romantic comedies that grace our screens and the many other examples that we all stumble on by happenstance.
Straight people can take their chance at love for granted.
LGBTQ+ romance must be sought out and our radars have to be refined. To find representation, if we don’t have the liberty to peruse the queer movie section, we are relegated to “queer-coded” characters in otherwise straight realities within which we must thrive on the fumes of hope, assuming that a subtle glance with brief eye contact was more than a passing thought and that the unspoken truths in our imagination are fact rather than fiction.
This necessary desire to seek out something that isn’t always there makes it more valuable when we find it.