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.

Interview: Branded a liar by UK authorities, the Ugandan lesbian outed in a national newspaper.

Betty Tibakawa is an asylum seeker from Uganda who came to the UK fleeing homophobic persecution. Her asylum claim is currently being denied on the grounds that, whilst she has been tortured in Uganda, she is not credible. My interview with her is in Pink News: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/06/09/interview-branded-a-liar-by-uk-authorities-the-ugandan-lesbian-outed-in-a-national-newspaper/

A direct link to the petition can be found here: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-the-deportation-of-betty-tibakawa-home-office-ref.html

Just a taster from Red Pepper, the homophobic Ugandan tabloid which outed Betty Tibakawa

Who's the daddy: has Portia taken Ellen's name in vain?

This article was originally published at an awesome website called THE MOST CAKE. Click here!

The second picture of Portia and Ellen on this blog so far. Might have to start a new one dedicated solely to them.

I recently found out that our reigning celesbian married couple have now become as homo-norm as you can legally get – yes, Portia has officially taken Ellen’s name. They are now the DeGeneres’s. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, exactly. I can understand wanting to self-define in a way that reflects your married identity, but what’s wrong with Mrs. DeGeneres and Mrs. de Rossi?

According to BBC News Portia is keeping de Rossi as a professional name, to which I say – why bother changing it at all? Ellen and Portia are obviously the most famous married lesbians in the world: Portia doesn’t need to adopt ‘DeGeneres’ to define her, if you are anything like me you know and love them and the fact that they are married, presumably they know and love the fact that they are married, if she’s keeping de Rossi for half the time anyway why not just keep it full stop? Like, de Rossi is an awesome name, why get rid of it?

It’s irritating beyond belief when straight women today continue the old tradition of changing their names, blindly, as if it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Frankly, we haven’t reached the stage yet, gender equality-wise, where marriages are so equal that changing one’s name can just be a lovely custom, devoid of historical context.

Replacing your name with your partner’s implicitly supports a conception of marriage as an contract of possession – whereby the man takes the woman into his family as a nice looking bit of property. Protest as people might that they simply didn’t like their name before (my mother’s favourite justification), the fact is that assuming one’s partner’s name implies a dynamic of possessor and possessed, of one party’s control over what should be a twofold identity. The concept of the ‘head of the family’, the ‘man as provider’, and so on, really hasn’t gone away. Physical and sexual violence are still rife within marriages, and where customs uphold the sexism that feeds these inequalities, I reckon they need to go.

On the other hand, you might think that Portia and Ellen both being women alters the facts on the ground in some way. Like, if it’s lesbians it’s fine, right, because where there is no man it doesn’t matter who changes their name?

No way sailor-girl. Queer marriage is a relatively new thing, and people are still trying to shape it, and to make sense of it, and it’s not particularly clear to me that the adoption of another’s name, whatever genders you are, does anything to transgress or subvert. We’ve all experienced people insisting on viewing lesbian relationships through a straight lens: i.e. questions like ‘but, who is the man in the relationship?’ Worse, (and particularly infuriating if like me you can’t help looking femme most of the time), there’s still an assumption that the butch-er looking partner in any given lesbian couple is the dominant, manly one.

Listen, whilst my attempts at butch gender presentation can often be described as laughable, however successful they might be, I am not the man in the relationship. But neither is my (nonexistent) girlfriend the man – in my (not currently happening) relationship, there is no man: capiche? It totally doesn’t help that Portia is the ‘femme’ one and Ellen is the ‘butch’ one, and that Portia is the one changing her name, this plays right into the notion that the more masculine partner is the man.

Words are powerful, and where words characterise identities, they are doubly powerful. It’s amazing that in some countries in the world lesbian marriage is legal, and I stand up for the right of all people of all genders and sexualities to marry whomever they chose. But if we don’t keep our marriages queer, we end up assimilating into the very heterosexist dynamic that gay marriage should – if we are right to bother campaigning for it at all – transgress. And that kind of behaviour fucks me right off.