I Promise We Don’t Care That You Have a Boyfriend
Written by Paola Songeur
Despite the diligent effort I put into curating my online world to the tune of my gayest desires, the all-knowing algorithm will sometimes still let some heterosexuality slip through the cracks. I’m not opposed, necessarily, to being tangentially involved in straight culture. After all, being pansexual positions me delicately at the center of the sexuality Venn diagram, and bestows upon me an infinite relatability - basically, I’ve seen and lived it all. It is a great burden to bear, though, knowing both the epic highs and lows of teenage love carelessly placed onto high school boys, as well as the intensity of what it is to love a woman in a way that, perhaps, no man ever could. If my words cause you to deduce that I carry a certain disdain for men, then I won’t waste my time correcting you. Misandry is not not something I’ve been accused of. Ironically though, in the swirls of boyfriend-having conversations that have breached my queer-ass Instagram feed, I find myself wanting to defend the boys. It’s not a moral positioning I am used to, much less one that I care for, but rather a corner I have found myself backed into.
If I have gleaned correctly with my own two, queer eyes, the girls are embarrassed about having boyfriends. To be clear, I don’t blame them. Much like with white privilege and golden parachutes, there is value in acknowledging that presenting and, perhaps inadvertently, celebrating straightness can uphold certain harmful cultural standards and even indirectly affect the queer community at large. If you are in a straight relationship, it’s almost always a good idea to be loud about your genuine and authentic allyship to the queer community (emphasis on genuine and authentic). Much like that of my whiteness, for example, the privilege that heterosexuality affords you is a tool. It is an ID-badge that grants you access to spaces, conversations, opportunities, and securities that are arbitrarily held at arm’s length for others. The bare-minimum, in exchange for existing with such privilege, is to name that which keeps others out. I get it; there is a kind of guilt that comes with being a straight woman in love with a straight man. A certain apprehensiveness about the optics of it, and a level of self-awareness that begets hesitance to perform such heterosexuality so visibly and publicly, especially on social media. What I take issue with, if I may be so bold as to insert myself into the decidedly heterosexual conversation, is the way in which straight women use this dynamic as a way to recuse themselves from the role they play, both currently and historically, in upholding the traditions of heteronormativity. It is akin to the way that white women will often shun our whiteness, consciously unzipping ourselves from a racist construct that our ancestors built (an act which, ironically, is a white privilege in and of itself), in order to mark ourselves as the “safe” whites.
“What I take issue with, if I may be so bold as to insert myself into the decidedly heterosexual conversation, is the way in which straight women use this dynamic as a way to recuse themselves from the role they play, both currently and historically, in upholding the traditions of heteronormativity.”
This dynamic is common – the privileged engaging in performative ways to align themselves with the masses, rather than putting their positionality, and their proximity to power, to good use. I would be remiss to neglect the comparison I see so clearly — that the performative heterofatalism we see here is the straight woman’s pink-pussy hat. It’s the same performative separation of oneself from a real, persistent threat they pose to others, while doing nothing at all to tend to the wound at the root of the inequality, which culminates in self-gratifying practices like blue bracelets, polka-dot dresses, and Instagram pictures with blurred out faces of straight women’s boyfriends.
The aestheticization of cultural competency is an empty pursuit, with no winners save for the status quo. If you aren’t intentionally using your heterosexual privilege to advocate for the queer community, then no amount of posturing will grant you an“ ally” badge. As Chanté Joseph put it in her article for Vogue Magazine, the de-facto origin story of this whole conversation,“ it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner, but also not […] come across as quite culturally loser-ish.” The only things I would add to her summation are the qualifiers of straight before“ women,” and cis-male before“ partner.”
It is, perhaps, a tendency of straight women – and in my experience, specifically white, straight women – to position themselves as victims of most systems, and thus, beneficiaries of none. It is more comfortable, after all, to jump straight to allyship before considering one’s own role in upholding white, colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal systems. It’s the same reason why straight women show up in droves to gay and lesbian bars but are defensive when told the space is not for them, or why white people want so badly to be“ invited to the cookout” but do nothing to earn the honor, and even why straight, cisgender women can’t seem to understand why the phrase“ girls, gays, and theys” is reductive, and even offensive. Performative allyship, virtue signaling, woke posturing - call it what you want - is nothing more than, well, performance.
I know and love several cis-heterosexual people in love. Some of the most beautiful relationships I have the honor of witnessing in my personal life are heterosexual ones. The fact that they are heterosexual is, honestly, mostly irrelevant to me. They love each other fully and purely, in a way that I recognize, because it’s the same kind of love I experience with my own partner. They are gentle with each other, they are loud about their love, they are uniquely in love, with no consideration of what that (cis-het) love should look like, no posturing for my queer perspective. Simultaneously, they are loud about their love for me, and our other queer friends. They are unyielding in their efforts to create a space, a friendship, in which there is no difference between their straight relationship and my queer one. They don’t separate themselves from their heteronormativity by performance, they reckon with it instead. They consider it, and they break every heteronormative mold that does not fit them, they write their own rules, and they love each other outside of every expectation. They are neither trad-wife, nor cropped-out-boyfriend. They are something all their own. They break the mold, they make some space, and they welcome us into it on even ground.
Before I carefully dismount my gay soapbox, I’d like to make one thing clear: having a boyfriend is not inherently bad, or Republican, or lame. I understand (and sympathize with) straight women’s impulse to decenter men from their lives (go off, independent queens), but doing so does not magically cancel out the privilege of moving through life heteronormatively. I, personally, cannot out-advocate my whiteness – it is something I contend with every day, continuously examining how my race cushions my passage through life. And you, straight woman, cannot out-crop your heterosexuality (or your boyfriend), and that’s okay – just use it wisely, please. Brazenly advocate for the queer community in rooms that are void of any of us, and use your proximity to gaggles of straight men to humanize and protect trans people. Don’t minimize the privilege you hold by labeling it as“ uncool”; reckon with it, wield it, and advocate for us, instead – I promise that’s way cooler.
“Don’t minimize the privilege you hold by labeling it as ‘uncool’; reckon with it, wield it, and advocate for us, instead.”
