The Queer Signal
I’m still confused about how to communicate my own queerness within the LGBTQ+ community.
Illustration by Ally Hart
I doubt there’s ever been a society where people didn’t desire to communicate their identities. 25,000 years ago, humans expressed their individuality by decorating themselves with jewelry and today we form communities around common interests like sports and video games — we all ache to show the world who we are and the things that make us special. But what happens when you identify (proudly) as something but don’t know how to tell people? That’s what being a “femme” queer woman feels like.
How do queer women communicate about the existence of their queerness to other women in their community? More importantly, how does one meet other queer women? One obvious way to do this is to go to a queer event, where you are comfortable in the knowledge that anyone else you meet is also “like you” or at the very least, supportive of you being queer.
Before it was safe to publicly host queer-geared events, liberal and radical political parties (including communist, socialist, and anarchists) have often been a safe haven for queer women to identify themselves. According to Elisabeth Jay Friedman of the University of San Francisco, many early lesbian activists of Latin America began in anti-authoritarian groups in the 1980s, such as activist Alejandra Sardá who is part of the activist group Akahatá – Equipo de Sexualidades y Género based in Latin America and the Caribbean. The connection between queer identity and radical politics is still alive today, which is hardly surprising since when one has to fight for their basic human rights, they tend to get political.
How do queer women communicate about the existence of their queerness to other women in their community?
Things are even more difficult for queer women living in countries where it’s not safe, or sometimes even legal, to be queer in the first place. In many places, the existence of the internet has been pivotal in providing channels of communication for those constantly hiding their identity. In the 1990s, cyberspace became the main tool for queer women in Latin American countries like Mexico, Argentina, and Chile to connect. Through specifically-created websites (with names like VOICE, Sappho Link, and Breaking the Silence), these women were able to find others that identified as they did and build a network for communication. Here, they could talk to others about their true selves and safely form a sense of community.
Some places, especially those where the culture is slowly moving in a more LGBTQ+ friendly direction such as Hong Kong, have safe queer spaces like bars but keep their exact locations hidden. In other places, like Burundi in East Africa, where being gay is illegal, women must identify their queerness to one another in public spaces without alerting the general public. They do this by wearing a discreet symbol on their clothing. The documentary Whistle, by StormMiguel Florez about the queer community of Albuquerque, New Mexico in the 1970s and 80’s, explains that young people made a specific sound to identify themselves to other queer women when out on the town.
As a femme lesbian, how I communicate my queerness has always been a confusing activity. Though femme can mean a lot of different things, I am the term here to denote a woman who appears to the average passerby as non-queer, or heteronormative, when she is, in fact, queer. This is how I define myself. By “passing” in society I have the privilege of not being targeted frequently for hate crimes. But it can also be frustrating to have to constantly reaffirm my identity both for myself, and to those I consider as part of my community.
I find it difficult to communicate my queerness with others. I constantly feel as if I’m straddling a line between being too loud and too quiet, trying to navigate between the privilege and isolation that comes with “passing” for straight. Sometimes I want to shout “Hello lesbians, I am one of you! Be my friend!” I don’t feel the need to change my appearance to match the stereotypical lesbian look (although I do own a flannel or two), both because it’s not my personal style and because I think we need to help remind society that we come in all shapes, colors, and haircuts.
The problem with femme invisibility comes from both inside and outside the community. Within the community, women who are perceived as ultra-feminine, or fitting into the heteronormative female style, are often questioned as to the extent of their sexuality. These women are also often invisible within the cis-gender world since their sexuality is mostly assumed incorrectly and they find themselves having to reaffirm their identity time and again. Sometimes their sexuality is then questioned or mocked and this could potentially lead to dangerous situations for them.
Sometimes I want to shout “Hello lesbians, I am one of you! Be my friend!”
Because of my identity, Girl on Girl: An Original Documentary is an important film for me. I empathize with the women in the film who felt stigmatized or invisible because of their gender expression and sexuality. This documentary showed how these women in the queer community desire more representation and recognition. As Director Jodi Savitz so wonderfully put it during the Q&A of the film’s New York screening in December 2016, “Everyone’s story deserves to be told.” This documentary is desperately needed in today’s environment because there are many other feminine LGBTQ+ women out there who can identify with the feelings of these women.
We’re not all Alice Pieszecki (the personable and witty writer from the much-adored lesbian televiaion show The L Word); we’re not all able to express ourselves and our identity easily to others, or even ourselves. I have been open about my identify for half a decade now and even I still have difficulty having to explain myself to others. It’s a personal part of our identity and it’s awkward to correct people’s assumptions of you, especially when you know some of those people may have a negative reaction to the news.
Maybe ten years from now the human population will be considered so sexually fluid that no one makes assumptions and most people are more open-minded about who they’re talking to and what they may identify as. Even still, I can’t see there not being that excitement when you find another queer person in public. It’s like being in a foreign city and seeing someone wearing a sports jersey of your favorite team; you’ve found another member of the minority with a shared interest. While many queer women are familiar with the famous “head nod” that is often used to acknowledge each other in public, this is not always the case for someone like myself who isn’t obviously not heteronormative-looking.
We all need to have a community where we feel represented, respected, and included. For some of us, this means finding people similar to us, and I want to surround myself with other queer women. Communicating with others who have a sense of understanding of you and what you go through is important. As the writer Shannon L. Alder says, “One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.”
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