Last weekend, SnowWhite's Stepmother and I found ourselves in Bandra picking out t shirts with clever gay-centric slogans. This was the launch of JAILBIRD, supposedly India's first branded gay tshirt, and we were surrounded by cute fags everywhere. :) So yes, while the two of us hemmed and hawed about t shirt sizes, we also sneaked a peek at some of the cute men around. And of course, the lesbians. Aa, the lesbians.
We'd known that the tshirt thing was the brainwave of a couple of lesbians (maybe more) even as we headed out to Bandra, so it really wasn't a surprise to see a whole pack of them there. (Or maybe I'm just being silly and some of them weren't lesbian after all, but straight women.) But they were there, and they were actually utterly sweet. So sweet, that later in the car, SS and I looked at each other and exclaimed about it. Now, why on earth should that be a surprise? Lesbians aren't really monsters now, are they? Are they?
Hmmmm... :)
O gosh, this makes me sound terribly prejudiced, doesn't it? The truth is, I probably don't know enough lesbians in the world. I'm still stuck with the silly stereotypes in my head. And when you come to think about it, lesbians have hardly anything in common with gay men. They're not as drama-queeny as us (are they?), they're not as flamboyant as us (are they?), they're not as sexually active as us (are they?), they're more relationship-oriented than us (are they?) and they're definitely not as pretty as us (full stop!). It's pretty much the Mars vs Venus thing all over again. Limp-wristed Mars and highly athletic Venus. :)
My first brush with a lesbian was through this blog. Well, Mizfit keeps on oscillating between calling herself Bisexual and Lesbian, but for all practical purposes, I always saw her as lesbian. And it's not as if she's one of those stereotypical big women with gruff voices and killer handshakes. She's actually quite shrill, quite pretty, and quite obsessed about her weight - thanks to a certain lovable fag called FreeSpirit. And... she sleeps around, she tells me. Of course, this conversation I had with her was many months ago and now that she's in lurrrv, the sex-phase is probably toned down, but it was quite a thrill for me at that time - seated opposite this smart, witty woman who professed that she hated emotional lesbians and loved hanging out with the boys at gay parties, and I loved her dramatic eye-shadow. She was so... feminine, and while I was tempted to ask her what the gruff-tomboy vs fairy-girly ratio among lesbians was like, I didn't do so. Certainly, Mademoiselle Mizfit was quite apart from any lesbian stereotype.
Then, there was this guy I was seeing for a coupla weeks, with a bunch of art-house lesbian friends. In fact, the first time I saw him, he was dancing at the GB party, surrounded by loads of lesbians. The first thing I noticed was breasts (yech!) and then the cute smile on his face. And as I had just started watching episodes of The L-Word on DVD then, the boy and I bonded... sort of. Again, I had all these questions to ask about lesbians - but again, I didn't, and we just ended up discussing the characters of The L-Word, and comparing them with the QAF boys.
And that was another thing: The L-Word. I didn't quite like the first few episodes: I mean, I probably couldn't identify with them. I hated the hairstyles. I thought women should have bigger breasts than the actors in the serial did - yes, even though I find them yechy, I have silly classical notions about what they should look like! And I was unclear whether lesbians really do sleep around that much - or was it just something they wanted to copy from QAF, the rampant drama about slutting around. But as I watched some more, I found other stuff that I liked: the level of Family Bonding in L-Word is so much more than in QAF, and I could identify with that; the issue of staying in the closet or coming out; even the infamous sex-map on the white board was so hilarious and familiar; and of course the characters, despite some of the awful hairstyles and minuscule breasts, were endearing after a while. On the whole, I thought that the girlie gang of The L-Word was much more fun and coherent than the QAF boys - with the exception of Emmett Honeycutt of course.
But despite this, the inherent vagueness about lesbians remains. Most gay men treat them as behenji comrades, something which seems to me so completely formal and put-on. Somehow, it's easier to behave with straight women - or is it again because of my silly classical notions about what women should be like...? Aaa, but the straight women I'm closest to are hardly stereotypes themselves: Chimneypot and the Wicked Witch of the West would blanch in horror if either of them were described as 'classical'. But then, there was this lesbian friend of Natureboy whom I met briefly the other day, did a quick (and silent) yikes when she shook my hand very tightly, and promptly hightailed it out of there. Something about the leather wristbands and the chains and the nose rings and the tattoo on her unnerved me - though I would probably find them all highly erotic on a six-foot tall man.
And that's something I can't really understand about myself: why I have this strange wariness about lesbians. I mean, SS and I crack jokes about butch gals and pansy us, and the fact is, there's something reassuring in laughing about lesbians and gay men. A way, perhaps of assuring ourselves, that there are other freaks in the world, albeit at the other end of the sexual diameter? Or maybe it's just your classic case of (gasp, shudder, shake) Shyness?
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