Staring at dykes on trains

Article originally submitted to Gender Agenda Zine, edited by Elly Robson and Clementine Beauvais, whose wonderful cartoons you can find here: Doodles from the Bubble

Like this (left), but with less touching and more staring

Saturday afternoon. I’m wearing a yellow vest top and long adidas shorts, listening to Sleater-Kinney at their angry best, reflecting portentously upon an event of singular importance: my next haircut. Should I go for the quiff and shaved side bits again, or is it time to change to the andro-summer crop? Every recent hairdressing experience of mine features this exchange - ‘I won’t cut it that short, you don’t want to look like a boy’... ‘No, I do! Make me a boy! I like masculine! Actually, maybe that’s too short. Oh God, what have I done?! Maybe it will be ok with lipstick.’

Its a truism that every lesbian looks like a lesbian in some sense. But if every lesbian really looked that different we wouldn’t be recognisable at all, and we are. Much of my commuting time over the years I’ve been living in London has been dedicated to figuring out what gives the game away, what distinguishes a straight-looking woman from an obviously, irreversibly flaming dyke.

From humble beginnings trying unsuccessfully to catch the eye of an attractive, shaven headed, twenty stone, dungaree-wearing bull-dagger holding a copy of the (sadly defunct) Pink Paper - she stared me down mockingly as she left the train - I have come to know something of what the signs are.

There are the socially visible markers of a woman with a butch identity. Docs, crop, shirts, jeans, ties, the ‘I can take you, your best friend, and your mother. As long as you all consent.’ attitude. There are the East Londoner signs: slightly more androgynous than your average hipster, likely to be found wearing an aggressive jacket. There are the femme indicators, sometimes nothing more than a look in the eye, a slightly geometrical haircut, short nails, and the all-over back-at-you appraisal which is definitely (in my imagination) more I’d-like-to-fuck-you than I-like-what-you’re-wearing-oriented.

There are lesbian-feminists from the hallowed field of Greenham Common. I often see them holding ‘zines, wearing badges and studiously defying fashion fascism all at once. There are queers who defy fashion fascism by denying that fashion could exist as a meaningful class. There are the bisexual women who might fall into any of these camps.

And of course there are the lesbians that don’t look back at me, who I don’t recognise and can’t put into a lesbian-concepts box based on outmoded ideas about what we look like. There are the straight women who I prejudicially stereotype as lesbians because they’re wearing plaid shirts. There are women of all orientations who probably want to know why I’m looking at them when they’re trying to get to work.

The train is one thing. The scene is another. In a lesbian club, or, more likely, a ‘mixed’ night (i.e. 94% cock, 5% cunt, 1% other) you’d be forgiven for the default assumption that whatever the woman in front of you looks like, she’s on the team. But given the straight female penchant for turning up with gay men at gay nights, it is not just interesting but also quite useful to keep an eye out for lesbians.

Please bear in mind, when I say that, that I once spent a significant proportion of a night chatting up the only straight girl at Brighton Pride. (She didn’t tell me until I tried to kiss her. She was at PRIDE, LESBIAN PRIDE, and I could not have made it more obvious that I was flirting.)

Anyway, in amongst this resuscitation of ideas so hackneyed they lived in squats in Dalston before it was hip, there is a point, I promise. Here it comes.

Why have I spent years, mostly on the tube, trying to distinguish dykes from heteros based mostly on cliche-driven assumptions? It’s not just because trains are long and boring, its because, in this big bad heterosexist world, seeing another queer woman is a little bit of reassurance. When I catch a lesbian’s eye and she catches mine back before I look away in terror, it’s a small affirmation of a shared identity. That’s what it is to me, anyway. And by the way, speaking as someone who has been scared of ‘looking like a lesbian’ for my whole life, I don’t think we should be scared of admitting that there is something true enough to stereotype that the many cultural signifiers of queer-woman-hood are visible to those who look.

By the way, for those of you that find this article pointless, superficial, objectifying, banal and generally offensive, feel free to leave a comment.