Simple Bravery
by: Chelsea Blanco
Jen’s bracelet is beautiful. It’s silver and delicate, and rests gently on her wrist — a perfect, narrow rectangle inscribed with a series of numbers. When I ask her what they mean, Jen traces them softly with one finger. She glances over at Hannah, smiling, before replying. “They’re the coordinates of the first place where we said ‘I love you.’” She describes the spot to me, and through her eyes I see past the brick and stone. “It’s our place,” she adds. It’s where they talk late into the night, where they watch Netflix or hold hands or dream about the future. It’s their place, she tells me, because little else is.
Being in a same-sex relationship, Hannah says, is like unconsciously signing a release form, letting anyone and everyone — from family to friends to random bystanders — pass judgment.
“Everyone is always putting their opinion into our relationship,” she says, shrugging. I ask what she means. Hannah sighs, glancing at Jen. They both tell me about their encounters with strange men in pickup trucks, with men who carry confederate flags in their trunks and men who are simply stopping into Wawa. They tell me about the time they sat just outside the convenience store, waiting for a friend inside. They held hands loosely, talking, and Hannah kissed Jen on the cheek. “It was intimate,” Hannah tells me, “but nowhere close to PDA.” Suddenly, a man yelled — “Oh, three-way?” as he sauntered inside.
They tell me about the time they were walking down Richmond Road, making their way to a restaurant a bit farther from campus. They held hands as they walked, thinking nothing of it, until a car rolled down its window and a man yelled — incoherently — at full volume. Jen collapsed, crying, at the intensity of the interaction, and Hannah held her. They were still for a moment, curled on the cold sidewalk. When Jen stood again, she braced herself and grabbed Hannah’s hand fiercely, defiantly, and continued walking. To Jen and Hannah, even the smallest sign of affection — holding hands — becomes a statement, a challenge, a form of bravery. “You’re definitely braver than I am,” Hannah says, turning to Jen. “Even when you’re scared, you’re always much braver.”
“No one’s physically tried to hurt us,” Jen assures me, knocking softly on the wooden table between us. But every time they interlace their fingers, every time they walk side by side, becomes a choice. “When you’re walking around,” Jen muses, “you have to choose between hiding because you’re afraid of the consequences or being yourself, even if it might get you hurt.” According to Hannah, they’ve thought constantly about the consequences. When they reach a crosswalk, an unbidden thought — What if someone crazy, someone really conservative, doesn’t stop? — finds its way into both of their minds. They contemplate stepping apart and dropping hands at every intersection. This fear has become so commonplace that they no longer discuss it — they simply continue to hold hands, if a little more tense than before. “You feel like an object,” Jen says, trying to find the words to explain the tightness in her chest. She likens it to an extreme version of catcalling. “When you walk down the street, people just feel free and allowed to just shout things at you. We’ve been screamed at, we’ve been honked at, we’ve been stared at — it’s like a gay relationship is open for scrutiny by anyone.”
But why is this still the mentality? How can people possibly react so strongly to two nineteen-year-old girls holding hands? Is homophobia still this overt? Jen confirms that these interactions are far more often in the minority. Usually, she says, it’s much more subtle. She and Hannah try to explain the complexities of everyday interactions, of soft smiles and what each connotes. Their lives are now defined by a constant, compulsory need to read between the lines, to understand the subtle interplay between physical and vocal reactions, to read cues meant to be hidden, to ignore cues meant to be seen. 10% of the time, they get a happy smile, a “good for you” or “I support you” or “I stand with you” smile. Even though they didn’t necessarily want the attention to begin with, that makes them feel stronger, encouraged.
The other 90% of the time, Hannah and Jen say, they either get a kind of double take, or someone “visibly trying not to look,” or they get a condescending, pitying smile. The pity, Jen says, is the worst part of these casual interactions. “Pitying someone is making a choice for them that they’re unhappy,” she says. Patronizing, pitying glances characterize their sexuality as a kind of disease, as something that makes them inferior. Jen looks at Hannah, her blue eyes meeting brown. “That’s no one’s choice to make.”
This pity — this sense of insufficiency and inadequacy — permeates throughout every aspect of their lives. Jen and Hannah are comfortable — now — in their own skin, yet they’re reminded, daily, of how different it is to be in a same-sex relationship. In a dorm basement, at her surprise party, Jen can toss printed-paper rainbows in the air, laughing and joking about it “raining gay,” but the outside world is less tolerant. Jen told me about how difficult it was to simply walk by a jewelry store, and see only heterosexual couples advertised. She says:
“It’s just all the time, constant reminder, with the media — people’s opinions, behavior around you — that you are other, you are different, you are excluded from the heterosexual dream of getting married, having children, having a normal life.”
This lack of representation of gay couples had a tremendous impact on Hannah and Jen’s lives. They both believe that, had they grown up with gay Disney princes and princesses, for example, or with TV shows featuring two moms, they would’ve felt infinitely more able to express their sexualities. Growing up with role models who are like you, Jen says, keeps you from feeling like “what you’re doing is unspeakably abnormal.” Watching shows like the L Word — Hannah adds — was incredibly life changing. According to Hannah, as recently as a year ago (when she and Jen started dating), she still believed there was “something missing from a homosexual relationship,” and that “the love between a woman and a woman and a man and a man was never the same as between a man and a woman”.
Due to these dynamics of representation — especially early on in life — Jen and Hannah came to recognize societal expectations for a romantic relationship. Throughout high school, Jen realized that dating a man — while difficult in its own right — was infinitely easier than dating a woman, simply in terms of positive reinforcement. Getting a boyfriend, to Jen, was like stepping onto a new social platform. When she was in a relationship with a boy, her parents thought she was more “well-adjusted” and “well-balanced” after having attracted him. Everyone at school thought she was “prettier” because “a boy wanted me,” and she was more “popular,” more “likeable and social,” because she was going out with a guy. She then found herself stuck in relationships that went sour, leaving her unhappy and unfulfilled. Jen finds comfort, now, in gay and lesbian organizations and activities — such as themed TV shows and movies and events like D.C. Pride. Although she finds the separation of these events from mainstream celebrations problematic, she loves that they exist, because — in her own words — if you identify as gay in this society, “you have to isolate yourself in order to feel like a person, like you’re normal.” The gay community has made her feel infinitely more accepted and loved.
Hannah, like Jen, finds that dating girls is almost twice as difficult as dating boys. For a while, she thought, “why date a girl if I can be attracted to guys? Why even go there?” Her parents, for example, were wary about allowing her to make plans for her future with Jen, and her friends — even her closest, most liberal friends — continued to ask her if this was what she wanted, and if this was relationship she should be labeling. Jen chimes in that, often, their friends react to their homophobic stories dismissively, in an attempt to make them feel better, but instead, say something that is simply invalidating. “It’s like a woman trying to get a powerful position at work,” Jen says. “She’ll have to pass double the tests that a man would to be considered legitimate or qualified.” Jen and Hannah, too, need to pass twice the tests in order to feel like a valid couple.
Hannah and Jen find that this trend to invalidate their relationship is much more deep-seated and ingrained than most might imagine. This problem lies in the sexualized culture of female/female relationships. Hannah and Jen have found that at parties, many girls hook up — not for their own enjoyment or experimentation, but simply to be objectified by the men who surround them. Many men don’t even consider these interactions cheating — something Jen found blatantly problematic. “Stop,” Jen says. “That hurts almost worse than people honking at us.”
Why? I asked. Why does this feel so invalidating? Hannah responded almost immediately. “It’s invalidating because that’s how people view our relationship.” Suddenly, their displays of affection become less meaningful or significant. When people use words like ‘love of my life,’ or ‘girlfriend’ or ‘wife’ in a platonic context, it devalues the terms. Jen frowns at this, leaning forward slightly in her chair. “I have a woman who is the love of my life,” she declares candidly. The more that people “make a joke” out of the expression, “the harder it is for people to take us seriously.” Even when compared to other homosexual relationships, they tell me, female relationships are significantly less respected. Women are objectified and trivialized, and their sensual interactions with other women are treated as meaningless — simply to provide entertainment to men. Their relationships are placed within a college context, as both Jen and Hannah have been called “BUGs,” or “Bisexual Until Graduation,” as if the two would “outgrow” or “resolve” their sexuality after receiving their diplomas.
“Yes, a lot of ground has been covered,” Jen says, calling to mind how violently and brutally gay people were treated in decades past, and how ignorant the common population was about sexuality — even just recently, in the 1980s, with the wildly misinterpreted AIDS epidemic. “But there’s a long way to go.”
A few weeks after this interview, my friend and I drove Jen and Hannah to the hospital. Hannah tickled Jen and she had accidentally hit her head on the cinderblock wall of Hannah’s dorm room. She laughed when she told us the story, but Hannah’s face looked pinched.
As the tiny red line above the steering wheel inched to ten — fifteen miles above the speed limit, I continued to glance in the rearview mirror. Hannah laced her fingers through Jen’s, holding her girlfriend’s face steady with her other hand to see if the two could make eye contact. Their hair was mingling together — Hannah’s straight, brown locks with Jen’s soft, wavy ones, glimmering gold in the passing streetlights — and I could barely make out their faces. My heart felt heavy in my chest even while Jen continued to talk to me, as I felt her fumble with her words and trip over parts of her memory. How bad could her concussion be?
When we pulled up to the ER, Hannah kept hold of Jen’s hand, and did so all the way until we reached to the doors of the building. She let go, and turned to sit in one of the stiff, blue waiting room chairs after making sure Jen would be taken care of. For fifteen minutes she sat rigidly, silent and tense. Suddenly, as though she’d heard her name, she jumped to her feet and hurried to the front desk. Hannah said something, softly, and they let her into the room with Jen.
About an hour later, Jen and Hannah walked out of the room, Jen looking as though she were almost sleepwalking. They didn’t touch.
“I told them I was your roommate,” Hannah whispered to Jen as we walked down the hallway. “I was worried about how they would react. I thought it’d be safer — I didn’t want to cause any trouble.” Jen nodded.
But as they walked past the sliding doors, Hannah leaned down to plant a gentle kiss on her head, her left arm keeping Jen pressed, safe, to her side. “Let’s go home, love,” she said, taking her hand. Jen glanced at their entwined fingers, dazedly, and smiled.
