Anna Whitelaw considers the oft-fraught relationship between lesbians and straight men.
Let me say first off, I am not a man-hater. Some of my closest friends are men, gay and straight. When I first came out, I realised I was somewhat of an anomaly among the lesbians I knew. I often wondered why lesbians and straight men are so rarely friends, while gay guys and straight women seem to get along like a house on fire. After all, I thought I could sympathise with the straight men in my life about the perks and pitfalls of dating women.
At first, I was quite tolerant of humouring straight guys when the topic of my sexuality came up in conversation. Their eyes lit up with a curiosity about lesbianism, as if I was someone from a country they’d never been to but always wanted to visit.
However, I’ve now had one too many encounters with straight men which will be familiar to many gay girls, especially those of us who don’t conform to any particular lesbian stereotype. Such encounters usually go something like this:
While dancing, or deep in conversation with your girlfriend, or female friends, a straight guy sidles over and offers to buy you a drink, or attempts to strike up a conversation. At first, such attention is harmless, even flattering; but when you politely decline, and explain that you have a girlfriend, or tell him you’re gay, straight guys invariably seem to react by being incredulous, fascinated, or insulted.
Instead of taking the hint, they continue undeterred, as if the fact that you don’t bat for their team just presents more of a challenge.
Sometimes he’ll say, “You don’t look like a lesbian,” or worse: “You’re too good looking to be a lesbian,” an insult disguised as a compliment if ever there was one. Sometimes he’ll ask intimate questions about the ins and outs of lesbian sex, and who does what to whom, perhaps going on to suggest that it isn’t really ‘sex’ if there isn’t a penis involved.
Sometimes, he’ll ask you and your girlfriend to kiss in front of him to “prove it”. Often, he’ll offer himself in case you’re interested in a threesome.
Most insulting of all is when a straight guy suggests that you just haven’t slept with “the right guy” (i.e. him), as if all lesbians secretly crave sex with men and know that subconsciously that the right guy can ‘cure’ them.
The last time I got stuck in a conversation with this kind of hetero-chauvinist pig – a guy who was wearing a moustache for Movember, even though it was almost Christmas – he implied that all lesbians needed was a good root to turn us straight, and offered to demonstrate his prowess if I gave him “half an hour in the bushes”.
In response, I asked him if he’d ever slept with a man; and if not, how could he be sure he wasn’t gay?
Flustered, he said that he just wasn’t into blokes.
“Well, I guess you and I have something in common,” I shot back.
I don’t mean to tar all straight men with the same brush. Undoubtedly, there are lots of enlightened straight men out there. But why is it that some straight men are so titillated and so threatened by lesbians? Perhaps it’s because straight women I know have been known to use lesbianism as an excuse to fob off the advances of unwanted men. Perhaps they’ve just watched too much porn, so they fetishise and fantasise about girl-on-girl action, and mistakenly and stupidly think that, as in porn, the girls are just waiting for their male co-star to join in. Perhaps they just don’t know any lesbians, so they assume we’re all either man-hating dykes, or we’re just experimenting. Or perhaps it’s just an ego thing.
Whatever the reason, when it comes to such straight guys, the only way to deal with them is to ignore them, walk away, and if they don’t take the hint, to be flat out rude.
These days I just tell them I’m dating one of the bouncers. Works like a charm.
Anna Whitelaw considers the oft-fraught relationship between lesbians and straight men.
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