I am a femme who also typically passes as straight, though not always because it often seems like being fat and having tattoos throws you into dyke territory on occasion. My partner is a butch female who reads as a butch female, and we rarely pass as anything in public as anything other than a lesbian couple.

The majority of my internal processing right now has a lot to do with the conversation surrounding femme invisibility and the dismissal I hear/see of the butch/andro/not-passing-femme-queer experience. I’m struggling because I deal with invisibility in the queer community due to my presentation often, but I generally don’t have to deal with the safety issues that my friends/partner do/does.

I think it’s so important to keep this conversation going, and for everyone to remember that while we dialogue about our invisibilty and passing as straight in our queer worlds, we should try really hard not to dismiss non-femmes as “having it easy” just because they are more visible in the queer community. Many of us who pass as femme don’t have the same sort of safety issues that those of us who don’t have. That’s not to trivialize our experiences, it’s just to validate all experiences, which is something I see glossed over a lot lately, especially here in Portland.

Thanks for having an awesome blog!

But that’s slightly disappointing too, because it makes me feel like the only ‘acceptable’ lesbian to the world is a straight-looking femme one. And since I’m in a classic butch/femme relationship, that’s obviously not an opinion I share! Femme visibility is a huge issue, and one that I hope we can work on. I think we need a vocabulary, a set of signals by which we can make sure our community recognizes us. Maybe we should hang blue scarves off of our bags?

I spent the last 10 years completely isolated from the lesbian community because I didn’t feel like I needed it, and I was partnered already, and we just never had any gay friends and didn’t really know how to make any. This was actually really hard on me. Straight people however nice do not know what it’s like to have a visceral feeling of danger when a group of straight guys walks up behind me late at night when me and my girlfriend have been holding hands. They don’t know what it’s like to guiltily jump apart from the woman I’ve been sleeping with for 13 years when a person walks by our park bench. If I have to go through that just like every other lesbian, do I really have to take crap from said lesbians because I don’t look right???

Also like you, the pressure to visually “prove” my lesbian identity resulted in cutting my hair short. Now I get smiles and winks from dykes on the street, and other visible lesbians are more likely to treat me as one of their own. BUT at the same time, there is a metallic taste of guilt in my mouth for conforming to the “radical” look that most associate with queer women.

By “passing” but being out as queer, we DO add to the diversity of the lesbian community, though few identify our value as such.

I am in the process of writing an article about the complexity of femme invisibility within the lesbian community, through the lens of my very recent haircut and the different responses it has evoked. If you are interested in reading it, please let me know!

(it’s probably easiest to message me through myspace, as weird as that may be.)

Some people will say that being gay is no sweat because you can always “pass”, thus avoiding discrimination. They mistakenly assume not only that everyone CAN pass (when this true neither for those who conform to the stereotypical media-representations of gay women/men, nor for many transgendered people), but also that “discrimination” is limited to differential treatment and homophobic slurs. They certainly don’t take into account how being perceived as someone/something you are not (and conversely, not being perceived as that someone/something you are)can be every bit as damaging psychologically. Much of what one might, with some reservations, call “the gay experience” is shared by so-called passers and non-passers. For instance, most of us have at some point or another had to deal with coming out to ourselves, our families, and our friends. That experience is part of what connects us even as a community of strangers. And the connection is, like you said, very validating because it reinforces a sense of “yes, THIS is who I am”. The more volatile/vulnerable our identity as a gay person, the more important those small, defining interactions become. As a stereotypically “pretty” femme, I never discovered the thrill of those moments until spending time in public with “obviously” butch/genderqueer people. The identification was twofold, there were aspects of belonging and non-belonging. Gay people treat you as one of them, straight people don’t. Both things are potentially liberating.

“Looking straight” has added an extra burden of proof, a need for justification, to my identity as a gay woman. I was told I was “beautiful”, “cute”, “elegant” growing up, and praised for conforming to the heterosexual ideal of womanhood. I assumed that since I looked this way naturally, I had to fulfill the remaining expectations in terms of behavior: smile a lot, act insecure about your opinions/capacities, laugh at sexist jokes, date men, and dote over babies. Even when I acknowledged my attraction to women, I translated the experience into vocabulary that matched my prescribed, straight identity. “every straight girl has crushes on girls”, “I just haven’t been around enough men lately”, now let me exaggerate my femininity, my “attraction” to macho men to prove myself – to myself. Similarly, my otherwise liberal-minded parents had similar reactions: But I didn’t LOOK gay, I was confused, I was such a perfect heterosexual female specimen, I just had to wait for the right man to come along. Straight men treated me as a potential sex partner and I got of fending off unwanted advances-bordering-on-sexual-harassment. Straight women treated me (and still do) as a homophobic confidante, as in “I get so uncomfortable being around lesbians, don’t you too?”

To top it all off, a lot of gay women make equally ridiculous assumptions based on appearance. At a mixed straight-gay gathering once I was informed by a lesbian that “gay parties” are “parties where gay people get together” and that I need not fear for my heterosexual purity, “we won’t hit on you, we both have girlfriends”. Less dramatically, I would notice that if I was with a very out gay woman, and then introduced to other gay women, there would be an awkward tension in the group until my ‘gayness’ was established. It’s like they were thinking, “what is SHE doing here,” “why is X hanging out with a STRAIGHT girl?” After I cut my hair short, people who’d previously refused to greet or talk to me were open and friendly, and finally I would have those eye-contact/smile-moments with strangers without the presence of a butch/genderqueer friend. In some sense, then, cutting my hair was selling out. I gave up trying to stand out as a gay woman with an alternative look - precisely because it was perceived as just “straight”. I wasn’t treated like a traitor, the way I suspect many bisexual people are, but just overlooked, ignored, talked down to by other gay women. I tend to think this condescending attitude is more common among lesbians than gay men, in part because gay men often are less political and couldn’t care less about “betrayal”, even if this betrayal just consists of being born heterosexual. At any rate, (and I’m sure you’ve posted entries on this before) what people, straight and gay, fail to see is the HUGE difference between “femme” and “heterosexual feminine”, and the ways in which the former’s stance towards socially prescribed roles for women is ironic/playful, whereas the latter in most cases uncritically swallows them whole. A femme generally sees the role as a role and dislikes being grouped with women who may look and dress the same, but who nonetheless differ drastically in terms of political/feminst consciousness.

The bottom line is that passing is enabled by stereotypes. Straight people think they have a gaydar because they can identify people who look gay according to standards set by books, movies, TV shows, and every time they are able to pick out a gay person in a crowd, they blame their success on this “extraordinary” capacity (“see, you can always tell”). They’ll never know how limited this “gaydar” actually is until unorthodox-looking gay people come out to them (which is a whole new topic in and of itself, I’m sick of having ‘coming out’ be this crawling on my knees-type experience, like going to confession, begging for “God “to accept me “despite”.) The femme identity needs more publicity – but without reconfirming the Alter ego of the ‘manly dyke’, namely the super-feminine, long-nailed blondes of straight porn. The L-word is a balancing act in this respect and I’m not sure quite how successful it is (I know a number of straight men who watch it, often on “mute”, and who implicitly or explicitly imply that the show was made for THEM). People, straight and gay, have to understand that a woman can look, but at the same time not actually be, available to men.