Are love and desire friends, or foes?
In this post, I discuss the roles that love and desire have played in my life, and how they have directly impacted my relationship to femininity and femmeness.
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Thanks again for your support, and let’s get on with this particularly vulnerable and identity-searching post.
My roommate said something to me last week while we were going about our evening routines. We were talking about a person who she described as “someone who lives to be in relationships.” Her words, which came across as neutral and purely observational, stuck to me for days. It made me face the fact that for most of my adolescent and young adult existence, I have been centering romantic relationships in my life. More than my dreams. More than my career. More than myself.
Despite my sapphic identity, I was a very boy-crazy little girl. I had a “boyfriend” in preschool, and we would pretend to grocery shop at the Fisher Price grocery store in our classroom together, loading a basket up with plastic apples, foam carrots, and miniature cars (nutritious!) In kindergarten, I had a debilitating crush on my now-best friend Michael, until my five-year-old gaydar kicked in. Every year until fourth grade, I had a new crush that absolutely pummeled me, rendered me speechless and sick to my stomach. In the fourth grade, I found my One True Crush, who I pined after until the last day of eighth grade, when our grade school graduation ultimately separated us.
Until high school, all of my crushes were unrequited. I was going through what I will kindly refer to as my ugly duckling stage. Early puberty. Proactiv. Adult teeth that were too big for my mouth. Flat ironed bangs. The works! I would watch as my friends— unaffected by acne, body hair, or boobs— attracted boys effortlessly. I wanted to be wanted, in the way that they were wanted. Back when wanting someone just meant holding hands, piggyback rides, and awkward hugs. Closed mouth kisses on the bus ride to Washington, D.C., even.
My first romantic relationship began when I was 15. It was an online long-distance relationship with someone I met on Tumblr. This was not only the first time my Big Feelings were requited, but also my first experience with reciprocated queer attraction. It felt exhilarating. It felt mature. It felt like love. And because we were both not out to our parents or the majority of our peers, it felt dire and secret and a tad bit rebellious. This person and I dated for over a year, until I began to grow frustrated with the limitations that distance, our parents, and our circumstances created. I also began to develop feelings for a person in real life. (I don’t like using the term IRL to describe relationships formed with people in close proximity. Online relationships and the feelings that come with them are incredibly real, even if physical contact is not possible. But sometimes, saying IRL is just easier.)
This first relationship (which I write a little bit more about here) introduced me to the wonderful, body-seizing, heart-swelling feelings that accompany romantic love, teenage desire, and future-building. Once I had my first taste, I knew I would always be chasing after it.
The brilliant and ever-inspiring
wrote in her most recent radical love note about the concept of love addiction.“My fascination with making sense of love has never been because it’s felt out of reach, but because it’s felt so simultaneously present and also inexplicable…Because it takes so many different forms, because it can be so certain even while looking a thousand different ways. Love is a thing we know, it seems, in our bodies or minds or spirits (or all of them together), but in many ways is also undefinable. The poets, the musicians, and the theorists above still haven’t quite nailed it, and that’s probably the point. Love has to be ineffable—holy and unutterable, like awe.”
I think love’s amorphous, inexplicable nature is what makes it feel so addicting for me. Like snowflakes, no two loves are alike, each arriving in unexpected packages and leaving us with unique lessons and scars. Up until last year, when my expectations of love and relationships were upended, I was secure, and even boastful, of the magnitude that romantic love has had in my life.
“I have a first house libra Venus,” I often summarized. “My life’s focus is love.”
It wasn’t until my last relationship that I learned that not everyone is like me when it comes to this. Some people truly do prioritize work, money, studies, or art over love. I can’t decide if I want to be more like those people or not.
While contemplating whether or not I live for love, and whether or not I am a love addict, I did come to the conclusion that I am addicted to feeling desired, and I have been for over a decade now. In high school, with my first partner, I was absolutely hooked on receiving reminders that they were attracted to me and that they were proud to be mine.
Being desired spoke directly to the little girl who still resides in me, the one with acne at age nine and sweaty palms, walking the mile while her friends, still operating in children’s bodies, finished it in under seven minutes. It spoke to the girl who watched as these same fast-running girls dated the popular boys, and worst of all, the boys I really liked. Being undesirable has more significant and active consequences than just solitude. In our culture, being undesirable (as a woman, mainly, but for so many other identities as well) can put someone at great risk of ridicule, shame, and even violence. Being desired became safety, to me. Being desired became a refuge.
Even when being desired showed its negative sides, I reasoned with myself. As boys made sexual jokes at me at school, or when grown men would pester me online with full knowledge that I was a minor, I knew that it was a better place to be than being excluded or ridiculed. I ignored the sour to bathe in the sweet. When feeling desired became necessary to my feeling safe, however, it put me at a precarious spot, confidence-wise. Who was I if I was undesirable? What worth did I have?
Now, as an adult living and dating in a predominantly lesbian community, my ideas of desirability have shifted. As the things that I find desirable in a partner stray from the status quo, so do the desires of my fellow queers. I’ve always been an incredibly femme person, to the point where my femmeness did serve as a point of ridicule from my straight peers and from the adults that loomed over us. I wore makeup too early and too obviously. I wore heels with my Halloween costume, making it too provocative. I did book reports and science projects on Marilyn Monroe and bacteria growth in makeup products. I was not taken seriously on account of my femmeness, but I refused to give it up.
The desire and love I receive when expressing femmeness and heteronormative femininity are obviously incredibly different. My definition of femme is unique to my own experience and what makes me feel beautiful. My definition of heteronormative femininity is one that is quite broad and general, and obviously could be another woman’s expression of her femme identity. To generalize, femmeness is how I express myself in line with my queerness. It is innate. Heteronormative femininity is a performance, a shield, that I put on to garner positive response from the world around me. It is learned. It is taught. Both involve makeup. Both involve lace, pink silk, black lace, and heels. Both can be wielded and used as a sharp-edged weapon. But the final effect is drastically different. Funny enough, I think I’ve mastered my het-fem costume more than I’ve mastered my femme expression. Gee, I wonder why…
Turning to femmeness in my queer relationships, and its relation to desire, I think of a quote from the author of Dykette, Jenny Fran Davis, in a scrutinized 2020 essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“High Femme Camp Antics (HFCA) of the 20th and 21st centuries include: Jennifer Tilly in Bound slipping out of her negligée while hoarsely informing butch Gina Gershon, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m trying to seduce you.” Cleo’s sexy, mute girlfriend, Ursula, in the 1996 bank-robber movie Set It Off, who performs a lap dance to thank Cleo (Queen Latifah) for buying her lingerie with stolen cash. Lorna Morello in Orange Is the New Black wearing makeup in prison and making up a fake husband to toy with Nikki’s butch emotions. Alice B. Toklas replacing the word “may” with “can” every time it appeared while copyediting Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation because Stein’s ex-lover was named May. The top-bitch attitude of Glee’s Santana, played by the late Naya Rivera, along with her smirky catchphrase, “wanky.” And pretty little Ann Walker, in HBO’s Gentleman Jack, suffering a nervous breakdown …when choosing between going off with butch Anne Lister, her true love, or marrying a man.” (Paraphrased for brevity)
As a high femme myself, I’m guilty of this behavior. I’ve displayed HFCA when purchasing an item off of my ex’s ex’s depop account, so I could figure out where she lived. I’ve also tried to exit a moving car because I was receiving the silent treatment. Don’t do that.
Davis explains how HFCA can also meld into something a little darker, a little more self-sacrificing. For a large chunk of my late adolescent/early adult dating, I held tight to the belief that if I perform femininity as hard as possible, I will be rewarded in the form of loyalty, or stability, or intimacy, or, at the most basic level, praise. A gold star from a gold star, if you will. Once I understand which aspects of myself that my masculine partners find desirable, I will lean into it as far as possible, until it becomes a staple of my personality or my appearance.
I wasn’t connecting the dots that femininity, and especially femmeness, is seldom rewarded in our culture, even in the assumed sanctity of sapphic relationships. Of course, it should be, but… it is what it is. Femmeness can be quite unnerving. In Leslie Feinberg’s depiction of femmeness in contrast with butchness in Stone Butch Blues, the butch protagonist cannot comprehend the femme spirit or femme priorities. Like love, it is holy and unutterable.
I was scrutinized for my femininity in a heterosexual relationship, my interests in makeup and nails and astrology picked apart. I thought, perhaps, that I would be rewarded for my femmeness in my queer relationships. The only time I did feel as though it was truly celebrated was in my first relationship, actually. I found home in my femmeness, but was praised only for my heteronormative femininity; my lovers idolizing heterosexual women and praising me most when I cosplayed straight. My companionship was only worthy if it gave the illusion of being reserved for men, my masculine lover a special exception, the winner of an exotic, forbidden prize. But, like my facade of blonde money-piece highlights and push-up bras stuffed under high-street corset tops, we were loving under an illusion. And while illusion has so many fun roles in my queer relationships that I would absolutely love to explore at a later date, this kind of illusion was limiting and suffocating.
Now, traversing life as a single girl for the first time in years, and this time with a nearly developed brain(!) I am understanding that while desirability feels nice, it is just ego fodder. It confirms something I already know. It’s made even more clear to me that although being desired is fun and momentarily fulfilling, it cannot beat the pure security and calming weight that being loved provides. In fact, detaching desirability from my femme identity makes me feel even more at home in myself. My friendships have become oases of unconditional love, and sources of this desire-free affirmation. Without the race towards no end of trying to hold the attention of a partner, I’m arriving at the conclusion that my femme self has existed much longer than my addicted-to-desire self has.
I’ve also come to see how my femmeness is detached from my addiction to desirability in moments of true humility. Femmeness (not yet separate from melodrama, the other pinnacle of my being) exists in moments of great happiness, as it does in my sorrow. To skew into spirituality, when I think of femme sorrow, I think of Mother Mary. When I think of femme joy, I think of Aphrodite. Poetically, and perhaps in a display of High Femme Camp Antics, I threw myself against my bedroom altar back in August, when I could feel deep in my gut that It Was Ending, and begged these two fiercely femme deities for their guidance and protection.
The medicine they delivered me was bitter, but it was necessary.
Dating update! Lol!!!!
I went on a first date last Sunday with someone who is in her late twenties, and in the process of becoming a firefighter. This is the oldest I’ve dated thus far, and truthfully, I really enjoy the age difference. I’d been seeing someone younger than me in what I can only describe as an aimless situationship on and off for a few months, and although they were only two years my junior, the maturity difference was blatant. This last date felt so much more… relaxed. Not in a way where it was void of formality or respect, but just a lack of nerves and uncertainty.
Future Firefighter and I met at a lesbian game night at the Music Box. I came away from our first date quite giddy, despite us not having that much in common. There is strong physical chemistry, and our personalities bounce off one another well. Astrologically, she is a Scorpio sun and a Scorpio rising, and that inherent intensity and mystery is front and center. I’m not afraid of Scorpio placements (we should all be much more terrified of Virgo placements, but I digress) and am eager to learn more about her on our second date, this Saturday.
February was the Lesbian Event Gauntlet, and I would say that I’ve emerged quite victorious. The event cycle will repeat all over again, in March, with Strapped on the first. Despite the immense loss our community has faced with the closure of Berlin, Empty Bottle is a venue that suits Strapped quirky sensibilities well, and even though it’s a hike for me to get out there, I am always excited to venture to new neighborhoods.
Last Friday’s Super Sapphic II, an event that crammed hundreds of queers onto the dance floors of Smartbar and the Metro, was like a Real Housewives reunion, but for random gays that I’ve met in the last year. And the Thursday before, I attended a Strapped-hosted topless paint and sip in Logan Square, which made me really feel like I was living in a page of Dykes to Watch Out For.
I need a few days to rest before it’s back out into the froth! And, I should also take some time to work on my novel some more, but ugh, $15 ticketed lesbian events are just so much more instantly gratifying.
Thank you all for reading this behemoth post. Happy Lunar New Year, and as always, FREE PALESTINE.
Oh my gosh I am honored to be quoted in this wonderful and EXTREMELY RELATABLE essay!!! Thanks for the shoutout and thanks for this reflection. Also, I’m obsessed with the Marilyn and makeup bacteria school papers 🙏🏻