on lesbianism

The Faculty is, for reasons I have myself yet to fathom, one of my favourite films. It boasts many great lines, in a teenage-blockbuster-about-alien-invasion kind of way, but they really save the best for last (and Laura Harris, right). Any character-assassination will do when the rest of your school has been body-snatched and you're not sure who's still human and who's not, so Marybeth goes for brokely with Stokely. "We don't know what she is", she snipes. "Gay? Straight? Alien?!" Well, quite.

That part always cracks me up, but not so much because it's so ridiculous, as so ridiculously true. If the Greys landed tomorrow, I genuinely belive Julie Bindel would be amongst the first to be lynched for conspiracy. Because people are weird about lesbians.

I am, for better or worse, straight. Unlike Ms. Bindel, I don't think I could change that if I wanted, and as such have no desire to. I have Katy Perry'd a girl, but only once and in the context of a drinking game - I don't regret it, but I wouldn't repeat it. Put simply, I just don't fancy girls. I don't have any close lesbian friends, and most of the time I have little reason to think about female homosexuality. So why are so many of my fellow non-lesbians so very obsessed with it?

One of the first things my friend Poppy said to me when we met four years ago was that she wasn't lesbian. She wanted to let me know because everyone always seemed to assume she was. She thought it might be because of her nose. Over the years, I have heard similar clarifications over hair colour, hair length, tattoos, clothing, dietary requirements, names, music preferences... most things that most people have, really. And I have of course been asked if I am lesbian myself, though only by the terminally moronic after either rejecting their advances or declaring myself a feminist. The utter bizarrity of these nebulous ideas about what might indicate lesbianism could write themselves a whole other article, but let us return to the moment to real live actual lesbians. What's all the fuss about?

I know no homosexual has it particularly easy, but society really does seem to reserve special bile and hysteria for lesbians. Gay men enjoy the dubious stereotype of the bitchy-but-hilarious, styled-to-the-nines, Gay Best Friend. The GBF cuts a merry caper through popular culture, casting a helpful Queer Eye For A Straight Guy here, a seductive glance there, while his doe-eyed Straight Best Friend contemplates how to "turn" him.

Enter the lesbian. Oh, to have her effortless gamine way with men and women alike, her hoiden chic, her babies if you could only convince her... Oh but hang on, that way madness lies, no more of that! Because we all know that lesbians are the worst of both worlds. Gay men love women; lesbians hate men, in fact that's why they're gay. And that's only because blokes don't want the ugly bints - rejected, they can but turn to second-rate sex with other mingers unable to land a man. Queens are style queens; lezzers accessorise their unshaven legs and armpits with dungarees and bovver boots. And they only support abortion (no, not "choice", "abortion") because they're wannabe baby-killers. No self-respecting knight in shining armour would touch a lesbian with a longsword, though he might rape one just to teach the bitch a lesson.

... Um, what? I must have missed the day at school when they teach you that lesbianism is some kind of perverted Satanic cult. Humans have never struck me as particularly rational beings, nor is most prejudice the pinnacle of logic, but let's play devil's advocate for a minute here. Immigrants? Well, they are, to quote Brad Majors, "foreigners, with ways different from our own". When my great-grandfather brought a black colleague from an archaeological dig back to Scotland, neighbours were shocked to learn that he wasn't just dirty, but his pigment simply didn't wash off - it's easy to condemn what you don't understand, and if the odd Dispatches on BNP sympathisers are anything to go by, comparable ignorance exists today. No man is an island, but ours is certainly overcrowded, and I can see (if not agree) that further influx might worry. There lurks a kernel of comprehensibility in some of the most incomprehensible attitudes.

I can also tenuously see but not agree that, as a particularly ignorant and/or paranoid heterosexual man, you might not like them gays because you're worried one might come onto you, like. As a heterosexual female, the idea of personally having sex with a woman does gross me out - because I'm straight. I imagine a lesbian would feel the same about having sex with a man; anyone would feel weird and wrong going specifically against their sexual orientation. So I can see that a heterosexual man might find the idea of gay sex similarly off-putting; I can understand, though not condone, a male heterosexual distrust of male homosexuality. Logically, female heterosexuality might similarly distrust female homosexuality. And yet the most aggressive lesbian-bashers I have encountered are not women, subjectively disgusted by the idea of engaging in lesbianism themselves, but heterosexual men. How the hell does a lesbian threaten them?

Well, I suppose every lesbian does deny poor Tarzan a potential Jane - but so (hopefully) does Tarzan's sister - it just doesn't add up. Viewed through the wider lens of feminism, of course, it makes perfect sense, but it still astounds and terrifies me how extreme and undisguised this particular brand of misogynistic homophobia remains in the 21st centry. At least patriarchy bothers to preach that lap-dancing is empowering, that Page 3 is just a bit of fun, that the gender pay gap doesn't really exist. The fact that lesbianism doesn't even register on Newspeak Radar is an even greater indictment of our society than the existence of such propaganda in the first place. And the sooner we recognise this heterohysteria for what it is, the better.