Guess what? We’re halfway done with the week!
I haven’t been able to catch up with the blog much lately, but these hibernation periods are good — they’re fertile (oh god, did I really just use “fertile” in a sentence about writing?), and when I get back to writing regular posts it will be with a vengeance. In the meantime, really fun stuff has been happening all over TV land. It’s a giant lesbian TV party, and you’re invited!
I can’t. I can’t even. I literally can’t even write coherently about how much I loved Mad Max: Fury Road. So for now, I will leave you with the fact that I loved it so much it has moved me to write my very first fan fiction EVER.
Cate Blanchett told Variety this week that she has had “many” relationships with women. We’ve won the internet, I’m going home.
EDIT: She was misquoted.
We didn’t have very many DVDs when I was growing up (the VHS/DVD changeover happened in my teens). The few we did have were random cast-offs from neighbors, a disparate collection of movies I watched on our brand-new laptop over and over and over again. One of our first was the movie Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett. I first watched it one day when I was home from school with a fever. Tucked up into bed, this is the girl I saw:
It’s Monday, and Betty Draper’s having a pretty bad week, but that doesn’t have to mean we just sit at our desks waiting to die (or for the weekend — whichever comes first). Let’s get happy! There’ll be only good news in these quicklinks.
Maria Bello says that we need new ways of talking about who we are and who we love. She’s not wrong.
Sexual identity is complicated. Love is simple.
When I was coming of age, my story was so much more nuanced than the narratives I read, watched on TV, connected with online, and that confused me.
For many years, it wasn’t that hard to date men. It was fine. I even fell in love with one or two, along the way. That didn’t happen to the gay girls in pop culture (well, besides Willow). It didn’t seem to happen to the people who read or wrote for my online communities, either. Everything seemed so very clear to them: they liked women. They loved women. They wanted to sleep with women. They wanted to marry women, someday, if it was ever legalized. Meanwhile, I didn’t know what I wanted. I just wanted…more than what I had with men. So what was I?
How Queer is an occasional series of vignettes and reflections on growing up in a heteronormative world. Because most of these experiences made me feel odd, or wrong, or struck a warning bell in my head when they occurred, many of them are things I have never shared or even really fully unpacked in my own mind. As such, they may be a little more fragmented or dreamlike than my regular essays. Today’s post, the first of the series, is very personal: I write about my first romantic fantasy.
What was your first fantasy?
Mine was different. I was hardly involved. Instead, I staged the set and brought in players — neighborhood kids, who were dating — the longest-running couple in our fifth grade class.
I was twelve. I wasn’t yet ready to play a leading role in my own love life.
It goes like this: I am invisible, hidden behind a wall or a chair. The boy and the girl begin to kiss. She is wearing a blouse with buttons down the front. He reaches over and begins to undo them, one by one (a gesture stolen from the movie Big, and less so, House Sitter). From under her blouse, a glimpse of bra. They lay down, on a couch. And it fades to black. (I don’t think I really knew what was supposed to happen next).
Where was I, really, in all of this? Who was I? Was I the girl? The boy?
I think that I was somehow both.
I was the girl, waiting to be unbuttoned.
I was the boy, ready to undress the girl.
It was never going to be as simple as I hope he likes me. It was never going to be as simple as me and him (or even me and her), together, in a room. It had to be the three of us. That was the only way I could connect to being the girl, and wanting the girl, all at the same time.
I sat down to write about body image and disordered eating and I ended up writing about my experience growing up female, queer, with breasts, in a patriarchal society. Typical.
You are not made up of parts. You are one whole person.
–Lena Dunham
I don’t always hate my body. There are times, mainly when my clothes are off, mainly in the afterglow of really good queer sex, when I lie in bed, exposed but not feeling so, with someone else’s head resting on my chest, and I don’t feel anything but happy and contented in my body. Grateful. It is a marvelous thing, this cohesive organism that continues to do a thousand things on my behalf each minute, this body that is working for me even as I go about my life. There are times when my body is just my body.
Orphan Black returns this Saturday, which makes the lesbian twitterverse (and this girl) very, very happy.
In case you haven’t noticed, I love Orphan Black. The show is smart and funny and fast and suspenseful and super woman-centric. Add to that the fact that Tatiana Maslany (whose name I constantly misspell) is a gorgeous, sweet, funny ACTING GENIUS, and you end up with a show that I just can’t get enough of. And Season 3 premieres this Saturday! In celebration of the impending feast, here are a few appetizers to whet your appetite:
If you’re not in Clone Club yet, here is how you can watch Season 1 for free this Friday.
Here is why Tatiana Maslany is a genius and Orphan Black is super feminist.
Or, what I need to tell myself every time I’m attempted to engage with bigots online.
They tell you you’re not as human as they are, and when you insist: I am human, I am, they say, “you’re clearly trying to convince yourself.”
That’s not how logic works. They build that hamster wheel on purpose. You could run forever in that thing and never move an inch. Don’t fall into its trap.
You can’t argue with someone who has walked off the cliff and is standing, cartoon-style, in thin air. To engage would be to join them out there.
Instead, you live your life. Be kind. Be fierce. Be helpful. Be authentic.
Queer visibility is not the work of a moment. It’s the work of a lifetime — and every single day counts. Do I have the energy for this?
Everyone’s been asked The Question at one point or another. “If you could either be invisible or be able to fly,” they say, “what would you choose?”
But in reality, it’s not really a choice. Because even though I’ve always flown in my dreams, in real life, I’ve always been invisible. Specifically, an invisible queer person.
Mostly, honestly, this is fine. Not reading as queer makes me feel safe at rest stops and when traveling to new places. And during all of those years when I was in the closet, looking like a straight girl meant one less thing I had to worry about — at least nobody was accusing me of anything as I hid, trying to untangle the threads of my sexuality, desperately clawing towards a place where being queer would feel acceptable, feel a little more normal. At least nobody was calling me out. At least nobody saw me.
But that was a double-edged sword if ever there was one. Because: nobody saw me.
queer girl blogs 