Lesbians! Lesbians Everywhere!

So, this week in LesboLand… K-Stew’s mom apparently outed her (in a week of oh so many highly public parental outings); Orange is the New Black basically broke the internet; and Wells Fargo is the latest massive corporation to want to use white lesbians to make a profit.

It must be Pride Month.

(Or just another week in the life of lesbian drama. I’m not picky about cause and effect.)

I came out a decade ago, and a decade ago, I didn’t know about Pride Month. (WE GET OUR OWN MONTH. Which is upsetting for all kinds of reasons related to heteronormativity and the fact that mainstream Prides are so super white-washed and corporatized…but I told myself when I sat down to write this that I wouldn’t be quite as ornery as I usually am. Let’s see how that goes.)

Today, my bedside table has not one, not two, but three stacks–borderline obnoxiously sized stacks (this is not a massive bedside table we’re talking about here)–of queer YA books on it, not to mention a couple of nifty (if not overpriced) Babeland products, and my YA fantasy novel manuscript (spoiler alert: QUEERNESS).

Over a decade ago, I skittishly went online–remember this sound??–and, sweat forming on my upper lip, copy-pasted into Word Perfect as many Star Trek: Voyager fan fiction stories under the “femslash” category as I could. I would read them nervously, quickly, always ready to click into another document with my AP U.S. outlines open, my eyes stuck on one part of the screen as I created a scroll-effect from holding down the delete key as I read.

Erasing the evidence of my queerness (because I didn’t recognize it–though everyone else did–in my flannel, keys-on-belt-loop, thumbs-hooked-into-pockets, all-I-ever-think-about-is-women…ness), even though I didn’t know that’s what it was.

Today, I make no effort to hide my queerness. It’s not something that occurs to me anymore. And there’s a lot of privilege wrapped up in that. I know. I know.

And I feel it every time the OITNB theme song whines out of my roommate’s bedroom (or my own)–we’re still so starving for “representation”–often, no matter what the racist cost of that representation.

Because if OITNB weren’t mediated by a blonde white woman; if The Fosters didn’t positively portray such a brutal and racist criminal justice system; if mainstream Prides were still protests, marches against intersectional systemic oppression rather than white-dominated, corporate parties.

I wonder what Pride Month would look like in the mainstream media.

(And there’s the orneriness.)

But we need to stay ornery. Because yep, we are everywhere. But we’re also oppressed by white-supremacist, heteropatriarcal, ableist systems.

Everywhere.

Jennifer Polish

Jennifer Polish is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, where she studies non/human animals and the racialization of dis/ability in young adult literature. When she’s not yelling at the computer because Netflix is loading too slowly, she is editing her novel, doing activist-y things, running, or giving the computer a break and yelling at books instead. Contact Jennifer at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.