Stop Gatekeeping Chappell Roan from the Straights
Queer Liberation is Collective Liberation
No proper in-text citations for this one. For further explanation, kindly, go contemplate a poem by Audre Lorde, cry while listening to Chappell Roan*, and fan-girl over the first chapter of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward.
*Easily achievable if it is raining and you happen to be running laps around a cemetery after dark.
Learning that most humans (and countless members of the animal kingdom; see Queer Ducks by Eliot Schrefer) fall somewhere on the bisexual spectrum has been one of the most liberating experiences of my adult life. Most of us can choose our sexual orientation - whether we are able to embrace this fact or not. Although this knowledge did little to change my external behavior, it allowed me to overcome my struggle to identify with a label. I stopped trying to make sense of my own sexuality. If humans were never meant to have rigid notions of sexuality, gender, and attraction, I finally felt free to just let myself be. (Refer to the history of Victorian gender ideals and how colonialism/racism has pathologized and obscured the sexual and gender diversity that has always existed among humans).
After a decade of contemplating my sexuality, I do not think it is unreasonable to claim I have watched hundreds of TikToks addressing every bisexual girl’s greatest conundrum: “How do I tell the difference between compulsive heterosexuality and a genuine desire for men?” Am I attracted to men because I have been taught to be so — or because of some authentic internal force?
Certain tips and insights I have found helpful. For example, one twenty-four-year-old lesbian made the point that trauma may produce a distaste for men, but it does not produce an attraction for women; lesbianism and sapphic relationships are rooted not in a hatred of men but in a love of women. I do hate men (i.e. the social group socialized from birth into a state that makes them emotionally and physically dangerous to people like myself; i.e. the social group most likely to kill me), but that is not the reason I have the capacity to be in love with a woman.
However, I find the original question futile. I will never know how I would feel if I had grown up in a society in which men did not terrify me and traumatize every person I care about. Likewise, I will also never know how my queerness would have developed if I grew up in a society that did not shove heterosexuality down my throat. There is no wiping the slate clean and discovering my “true” self. Identity is always fashioned in conversation with one’s historical and cultural context.
I have little interest left in determining what my “authentic” and “true” sexual orientation would be in a parallel universe (If most humans are bisexual, I predict I would still be some variation of bi!). And, I do not feel the need to find the perfect label, date the “right” person, or experience attraction in a particular way to feel like a valid member of the LGBTQ+ community. To cite another TikTok that helped me: I am attracted to a very select few people I think are hot – period.
Engaging with my queerness means so much more to me than discourses about identity. It means allowing myself to feel and act on my (mutual) attraction to another human regardless of their/her/his gender. It means grappling with what it means to be attracted to women outside of the male gaze and the hypersexualization of sapphic relationships. It means having sex in a way that does not conform to a heterosexual, male-centered script. It means reimagining what romantic relationships – even monogamous and heterosexual ones – can look like. It means knowing that the kind of love I want is not transactional nor emblematic of a business contract. It means interrogating my gender identity and the gender roles I am often pushed into. It means being loved outside of my designated role as either caretaker OR sex object (look up the Madonna-Whore complex for further explanation). Most importantly, it means pursuing freedom – giving up the (conditional/restrictive) power that comes with performing heteronormativity – and thereby making this freedom more available to others.
To me, Queerness is a project, a verb. Queerness is (collectively) creating the conditions in which all humans, particularly women, girls, and other feminine-presenting people, are free and safe to develop and experience the gender identity(s), sexual orientation(s), attraction(s), and relationship(s) that make them happiest.
I often think of the little girl in Maine who sometimes likes to pretend she is a boy and is utterly terrified that someday she will be a man’s wife (que Chappell Roan’s bridge to “Good Luck, Babe!”). I want her to see and know there are so many different possible futures to dream about. I also think of the alarmingly angry (cis het) man who is adamant that sexuality is a choice (little does he know I see him as a fellow bisexual). If only he grew up without homophobia and the demonization of all things “feminine” - what if he grew up knowing that he was allowed to choose differently?
Remember the scene in “Sex Education” when a very emotionally-repressed gay boy gets his makeup done by his (secret) partner? He looks at himself in the mirror with such joy and awe, softly declaring, “I look pretty.” How much joy have we all been robbed of?
Too often I think mainstream LGBTQ+ discourses (often dominated by white and bourgeois voices) have lost the plot (especially in online spaces): another debate about who does and does not belong in gay bars; another spiteful joke about bisexual women only dating men; another instance of speculating about a celebrity’s sexual orientation and whether or not they are “queer-bating”; another attempt to gatekeep Chappell Roan’s music as if an outspoken, beautiful, curly-haired lesbian from a small-town in the Midwest could not be highly relatable and inspiring to queer and straight women alike. While I am always here for the drama, I have a problem with discourses that are devoid of intersectional analysis as well as strip Queerness of its political/radical roots/potential.
I remember two articles assigned as my first semester of college came to a close. They each explained that Queerness is about making a MESS. The goal is to make things messy - to disrupt, to question, to break down, to inspire, to create, to connect, to embrace the contradictions. The messier, the Queer-er. The professor put those readings at the end of the course for a reason: she left her pupils with an invaluable analytical framework that we could apply inside and outside of the classroom. Queerness is not an endpoint. It is a mode of being – a mode of approaching (and creating) our ever-changing world(s). Strict rules and boxes, although politically and individually helpful at times, are often antithetical to the Queer project of collective liberation.
In conclusion, stop gatekeeping Chappell Roan from the heterosexuals. Queer liberation translates into the liberation of everyone.
Maybe I have over-intellectualized my sexual orientation to a new extreme (am I yet another bisexual girl desperately trying to prove her Queerness?), but I do not really care (at least, for today). I vaguely remember a story from the “Vagina Monologues” in which the protagonist is free enough to let herself have pleasure and joy amidst contradiction…
Unexpectedly, I am posting this on the eve of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Yet, in the wake of the climate crisis, genocide, the impending threat of World War III, and capitalism’s “slow death” march (See Lauren Berlant’s work), Queer Theory is still relevant. All the things that make us human – all the things that bring us pleasure and joy – have long been under threat (again, PLEASE see Lauren Berlant’s work). Refusing to repress our most human parts – our propensity to love and be close to one another for reasons that extend far beyond reproduction – may be our biggest safeguard against hopelessness and dissociation(?). In the words of our Lord and Saving Grace (i.e. Audre Lorde):
“This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”