the awesome/terrifying freedom

yes timmy, lesbians do exist!

Hi there,

I read your weblog and I wanted to respond to Wednesday's entry. I pretty much agree with everything you wrote, but I wanted to comment on "The L-Word." I don't know how successful it will be. Lesbians will tune in, if they have Showtime, but I don't know how many straight people want to watch a (somewhat) realistic show about lesbians. We're pretty much invisible across the board.

I think the reason lesbians get so little screen time on Queer as Folk and Will & Grace is that straight women make up a large part of the audience for these shows. They want to see hot guys doin' it, or they want the harmless gay best friend. It's about *their* fantasies. They want men who act gay, as long as those men are straight in real life.

It's the same thing with Clay Aiken. Again, the straight girls need to keep their fantasy alive, so Clay is being marketed as the ultimate non-threatening ladies' man. The rest of us know that a man who has that many female friends is probably not straight. To quote Karen Walker, "Honey, your gayness can be seen from space!" (I love Clay to pieces, so this is not an insult. It's stating a fact, like saying that Ruben is black.)

Okay, this e-mail has gone on long enough. Thought you'd interested in one lesbian's perspective. Keep writing; I enjoy it.

Cheers,
Kelley

kelley, i'm so excited to get your email!

showtime is definitely taking a risk by producing 'the l word,' but it's a pretty calculated one. they have obviously had great success with 'queer as folk' (as dreadful as it is), and have legitimate reason to think that there is a substantial lesbian market for the show: lesbians have money too! i hope it works and i hope showtime's new head of entertainment can muster up some actual talent for the risk-taking, but thus far intellectually challenged network.

it's true.. straight women and gay men are a similar audience - it should logically follow then that straight men and lesbians would have similar tastes too.. do they? is there a secret lesbian following of 'the man show?' or is there some weird discomfort that straight men have with women no longer concerened with attracting a penis? is this why straight men didn't tune in, and only lesbians watched the wnba?

so kelley, tell me, what are lesbian fantasies? are lesbians attracted to the 'traditional' model of femininity? do lesbians face the same media-image-induced self hatred that many gay men face? how does the absence of penis into the equation change your lives? i want to know! and i want the lesbian voice to be heard! grrrrr!! there was a show on pbs when i was in high school - it used to be on tv after 'in the life,' called 'dyke tv.' now that was an honest look into the lives of lesbians. there were mullets and crop tops and motorcycles and tennis and golf and some lipstick lesbians talking about fucking. now that's what a lesbian 'queer as folk' should be.

there's a strange gray area of sexuality that intrigues me so much.. that place where effeminate men and butch lesbians sort of meet in the middle and become indistinguishable from each other. i see it a lot every pride day, which is really the only time that i ever see large numbers of lesbians. so many times i would see someone from behind and think 'oh that guy in the jeans and button up shirt is pretty cute.' and then he'd turn around and have a set of perfect jugular mammary glands on his/her chest.

there is an urban legend.. perhaps you've heard it.. about the ultra butch dyke who looks like a hot guy (think hillary swank) who picks up the passing-for-a-real-woman drag queen at a bar. only after they get each other's clothes off do they realize that their sexual extremes have tricked each other into a weird twilight zone reverse-hetero coupling! i don't tknow if it's ever really happened - i think it was a setup on the maury povich show once, but i love the idea that the spectrum of gender can be stretched so far that sexual identity and gender identity become independent of each other.

check out straightacting.com for the complete spectrum, and find out where you fit in. i like the site because it's honest, bit it kind of disgusts me too - it serves to solidify the gay male aesthetic that being 'straight acting' is more attractive. gay men are always touting their straight-rating as if it's some kind of sexiness indicator.

ah, and check out this article from the village voice about 'd-l homies:' semi-closeted black men 'living on the down-low,' who defy all sexual labelling. these guys just like sex. with anyone. and crib from ultra-masculine thug culture the way white gay boys crib from ultra-masculine frat culture. this is fantastic - a part of gay life i've had almost absolutely no contact with - i only had a small taste of this facet of gayness the one time i went to 'krash,' an 'urban' gay bar in astoria. it was a culture shock. i couldn't adjust. i wasn't fascinated at the time.. i couldn't look at the experience as an anthropological excursion, i just wanted to get laid - and dressed like the frat boy i wanted to pick up, i was clearly in a very wrong place.

but now it's cool to look at it, and to look at the gay pride parade on sunday and realize that the best thing about gay culture is that it really is a subset of all cultures, and that being gay brings many groups together that would never socalize otherwise.