Shifting perspectives

“He was totally flirting with you! Go get his number!” My friend squeezed my arm excitedly. It was my first year at UofT and I was nervous. I also wanted a boyfriend. Badly. I’d never had one before and everyone told me it was high time. So what happens when the guy who’s nice enough to you starts flirting with you? Well, you flirt back, of course (or at least try to), and you tell him that you’d love to go out with him (even if you’re not completely sure that you like him), and you convince yourself he’s really cute (when the lighting’s good) and that (perhaps) you could kiss him. 

So you do kiss him, but it’s not all fireworks and magic; in fact, all you can really think about is how his beard itches, and how you’d much rather be alone in bed watching Bridget Jones’s Diary for the third time than making out with him. 

My friends always told me that if the beard scratched me, it meant I wasn’t into him enough. “You just have to experiment more, babe.” Okay, fine. Go out with more boys. I nodded my head. I could do that. 

Each new experience felt like déjà vu. It didn’t matter if it was a different boy, a different setting, or a different month. After each escapade, I found myself feeling terrible about what I had done, knowing that I hadn’t really enjoyed it. But hey, at least I had a fun story to tell my friends now.

In retrospect, maybe I should have realized my sexuality before. I knew that I wasn’t straight; dates with girls and one lesbian situationship clarified that enough for me. But when it came to men, I figured I just hadn’t met the right one. So I called myself bisexual. While I know that bisexuality is a completely valid identity in and of itself, I couldn’t help but feel that I was personally using it as a placeholder. It fit me like an old pair of gloves: a little too big and rough around the edges, definitely not a perfect fit, but, well, they kept my hands warm. 

Truth be told, I found myself in a grey area that I didn’t quite know how to navigate. I didn’t like men, but I liked when they gave me attention. I liked being flirted with. I liked dressing up pretty (but the specific kind of pretty, the kind that’s expected of me). I was ashamed to admit it to myself, but I realized that my femininity was a performance for everybody but myself. 

The performance went a bit like this: welcome to the show, take a seat. I could be the perfect amount of coy and soft-spoken and flirty. This play was as much comedy as it was tragedy. The first act had me jumping, grunting, and panting as I struggled to pull the Spanx above my ass. For the second act, I pulled out my curve hugging, booty-popping, bodycon dress that my friend assured me would make me a guy magnet. With lipstick and mascara applied, with my hair long, beautiful, and straight, I was ready. Each night I went out, I followed a similar script—a script that I later realized wasn’t mine to begin with.

Compulsive heterosexuality. Equality Archive describes it as “a system of oppression that denies people’s sexual self-determination by presenting heterosexuality as the sole model of acceptable sexual and romantic relationship.” Comphet for short, it’s a system that everyone’s thrown into the second they’re born. And if you’re designated to be a pretty baby girl, you get called “princess” and told you’ll be a real boy magnet when you grow up. Assumptions are thrown around like confetti. Women are taught to perform their femininity for men. We’re told to be fun, bubbly, and smart (but not too smart). Our dresses are supposed to be just the perfect amount of revealing (but not too revealing). We’re supposed to walk behind, talk softly, and love unconditionally. Realizing the forces of comphet in one’s own life can be incredibly powerful, but also sad. You realize how much of your personality didn’t even come from you. Something as personal as desires sometimes just ends up being what we’ve been told to desire. 

One day, as I scrolled through social media, I discovered the Lesbian Masterdoc. I believe that the Lesbian Masterdoc is a gift from Sappho herself. It’s a big document explaining comphet and its effects in detail. The second I learned about this, something clicked. I realized my desire for male validation wasn’t even my own. It was something that society told me would make me worthy and more valued. 

In the middle of the crazy year we had with lockdowns and social isolation, I don’t think I would have realized the role that comphet has played in my life if not for this resource. The shift from going out multiple nights a week to being at home 24/7 was abrupt, to say the least. Day in and day out, alongside the rest of the world, I would repeat the same routine over and over again. Wake up, get changed, log on to Zoom lectures, log off. At night, motivated by the powerful forces of boredom, I’d try on my old dresses and ‘going out’ clothes. Without any other distraction, without the party and the friends and the booze and the boys, I was left gazing at myself in the mirror. The presence of just my reflection staring back at me felt overwhelming at times, partly because I knew that something had changed. I had changed. Many of the clothes that I owned didn’t even feel like me. They were what I had been told looked good on my body. And then, dressing for myself, knowing that the only person perceiving me was me, made me realize just how far I went for the validation of others. 

Moreover, the little isolation bubble I found myself in gave me the space to re-examine many of the things about myself I’d just assumed to be true. As I dared to open up my Pandora’s box of sexuality and gender, I realized that the only reason why I felt like a woman was because I didn’t feel like a man. As shattering as this revelation was, it gave me the space to examine my gender identity on my own terms. It’s powerful when you realize that gender expression truly doesn’t have any essence or rulebook; it can be whatever you want it to be. And thus the experimentation began: I started small by chopping off my chest-long hair (much to my parents’ chagrin). Over time, I added borrowed (read: stolen) shirts from my dad’s closet to my wardrobe. Humans are multidimensional—as I gazed at myself, with my shirt neatly ironed and my short hair slicked back, I uncovered a new version of me. A version that didn’t replace the old me, but existed peacefully alongside it. I still felt like a woman, but more so on my own terms. Aretha Franklin once sang, “You make me feel like a natural woman,” and while I love Aretha and mean no disrespect, I realized there’s nobody on planet Earth that has the capacity to make me feel more like a woman than I do. My relationship to my gender and my sexuality is uniquely my own, even if others don’t understand it, and even when I can’t find a way to make people understand it. I don’t have the right terminology or statistics to express how masculine or feminine I am, or how gay or straight I am. I don’t need it, anyway. 

Having uncovered new aspects of myself, devoid of the male gaze and societal expectations, I was high on the excitement of my newfound identity when my old friend, loneliness, showed up. Now, loneliness and I have a long history together—but with the grace of technology, quick fixes have always been easily available. Not so much during quarantine, though. Once again, I found myself grappling in the dark for something to make me feel better, only to find myself at the other end. To know myself, to befriend and be there for myself. 

Cravings and desires are scary, especially when they’re not socially acceptable. Almost every queer person who’s ever gone through a denial phase knows this. I know this, and I thought that with the power of accepting my bisexual identity, the sexuality struggle was behind me. Boy, was I mistaken. What then ensued was not so much a crisis, but rather an awakening. I realized that I really didn’t miss men at all. Maybe I missed the attention, the flirting and the free drinks, but none of what really mattered. Not the intimacy, not the emotional connections. And definitely not the scratchy beards. 

Sometimes I wish I could have it all written down for me. A big guidebook explaining the complexities of gender, sexuality, attachment, and desire. The truth is, though, you can have all the guidebooks to your life and it still won’t make the process any easier. The endeavor to know oneself is a lifelong journey. It takes work, it takes honesty, and it takes courage—but man, is it worth it. 

As we prepare to head into campus and begin life again, I have my reservations and anxieties about coming to an old place as the new me. While my straight friends may not completely understand my experiences, I realize that it is not their total understanding I need, but rather their support and love for me as I continue to evolve as a person. Furthermore, while I’m not that afraid of looking typically queer and people making assumptions of my sexuality based on my appearence, I do fear the much-dreaded question: “What are you?” 

Truthfully, I still don’t know. I spent a long time trying to fit myself into a label. I tried to be more feminine, I tried to repress my sexuality for the first 18 years of my life, I gave up and tried putting on a label I knew kind of fit me—but mostly didn’t. I might be completely gay, or I might not. However, my sexuality and gender identity don’t need to be palatable for others. It’s okay for me to not know, and it’s definitely okay for me to not have the words to explain them to others. Language is limited and feelings and desires are so complex. How can we ever hope to fit something so vast into a box so small? 

All I know is that I am a queer person, who’s now gayer than ever, and I’m not ashamed of it. 

1 thought on “Shifting perspectives”

  1. I love this article to pieces. It reads like a love song to yourself. In my own personal philosophical dictionary, identity isn’t a thing, it’s an experience. And I’m just, so excited to see someone who has the same experience as me, to have struggled through comphet especially. I cannot express the feeling quite right, but thank you.

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