Although America doesn’t have the ‘class system’ like Britain does, I was born into what could be said was a ‘middle-class family’. My Dad was a commercial airline pilot; my Mother was a stay-at-home Mum.
My dad physically abused my mother, throwing her down the stairs when she was 8 months pregnant with me. (I told that to a schoolfriend once, and it got all over primary school: “so THAT’s why you’re mental!”) 🙄
By the time I was 11 years old, I’d been through 5 marriages and 5 divorces just with my birth parents. Suffice to stay, I didn’t grow up with any idea of what a long-term, loving relationship was like. I had to go to therapy at 11yrs old from the toxic fallout of my mother and stepfather’s divorce. “Here’s a dollhouse. How would you populate it?”
I was too smart for the therapist. I knew what she wanted: make all the dolls hit each other.
I instead, with all the strength of an 11yo, made Happy Families with the dolls and with 11yo ‘logic’ thought: “I got one over on that therapist”. 😒
Now I’m 15yo, and a school friend told me she’d found a comedy club “up there in West Hollywood” and she had a driving license, so I went along.
I spent the next 15 years of my life there (behind the scenes; I was the one moving the furniture/placing the props in the 15-second blackout between pre-written comedy sketches and improv games).
Two of the first people I met at The Groundlings were two gay men who’d been together for 20 years at that point. I thought “I don’t know ANY adult who’s been with the same partner for 20 years”. They were so natural with each other, so loving, and this was completely alien to my upbringing. I thought “gay men do better long-term relationships than men+women”.
I also worked the Concession Stand, where it was advertised that we offered Vintage Coffee and Fresh Wine (😃 thank you Rebecca Bonar) for a donation [no liquor licence]. We often ran out of change.
So me, a 15-16yo suburban girl, had to go across the street to The Big Red One (red neon sign: a Roman Numeral 1), a very gay bar.
All the times I went over there, the men (doing whatever they were doing, I averted my eyes) respectfully parted like The Red Sea to allow me access to the bartender, who always gave me $1s for my $20. This is the early 80s.
Gay men – in my young mind: both the longest-term partnerships, and the most repectful to wee girls when they weren’t doing long-term partnerships.
Then AIDS happened. I’ve written about my Meals on Wheels deliveries on Twixter.
https://twitter.com/ShazzBakes/status/1521163922237267976
My gay male friends were dying all around me. It was uniquely horrible cos no-one showed any interest in determining WHAT WAS HAPPENING and how to fix it. I went to rallies, on marches, for gay rights, right in the midst of AIDS and everyone saying “they’re despicable, they deserve to die”.
NO! They’re f&cking people! Who really gives a shiny sh!t who they love? ðŸ˜
Then the 90s. Two of our girl-posse in high school in the late 70s/early 80s (some of us friends since kindergarten; some of us since junior high school) came out as lesbians. Really, Anna [name changed]? You were a freshman ie 14yo, dating a senior ie 17yo? The first of our lot to get a boyfriend? We were so jealous! And now you’re gay? 😕
I house-sat ‘Anna’s’ house when she and her girlfriend went on holiday together, looking mostly after their cat. The night before they left, she, girlfriend, and all their lesbian friends invited me to a raucous night out. I have never felt so relaxed on a drunken dancing night out EVER. They all knew I was straight, and accepted that. But to this day, decades later, I remember how FREE I felt in a lesbian nightclub. No men hitting on me, no-one crowding me in with their be-penised trousers; just all women, having a glorious time in an utterly safe space for women.
I was there when we left that nightclub, and drunken men were shouting “Have a suck on THIS! You won’t be a lezzer no more!” I was soon to hear far too much of this 😔
Lesbians: in my mind, provided the safest space for women to be free of male harrassment. And to all the nasties: No you weirdos. None of them hit on me. The “predatory lesbian” of your fevered dreams is just that: a feverish dream. Women are different from men, deal with it.
Then the internet happened. Everyone knows, and it’s been written about countless times, that any new technology is colonised by porn producers first. Do you know why VHS reigned over Betamax, an unequivocally better technology? Cos all the porn producers went to VHS. Betamax died.
And porn was produced by men, for men, especially the “lesbian porn”.
I watched a bit – I had to, I was adamantly against porn for many reasons, but I hadn’t seen any, so how could I object? So I watched some.
None of the “lesbian porn” videos were anything like what I knew from my lesbian friends. I can’t say much about gay male porn; I still don’t know enough, but none of it showed the long-term partnerships, the respect for young girls, that I’d known growing up. There were too many “twinks” which made me boak cos that was obvious paedophilia to me. And all those rallies, marches in the 80s, had as one primary goal: to remove same-sex attraction from paedophilia. That was an obvious homophobic move. “I don’t like the idea of two men together [but I beat off on the idea of two women together] so they must be into children too.” 🤮
I don’t want to go into this in public, but I had an “experience” on my 16th birthday that left me, for decades, unable to celebrate my birthday cos I relived the trauma every year. It took until my late 40s to say “that happened to me. I didn’t allow it. It wasn’t my fault. It was those men”. And it distilled my understanding that sexual attraction is innate. We don’t choose it, we just are. Gay, lesbian, straight: nothing can change that. Not electrodes on genitals, not “pray away the gay”, not even what happened to me at the hands of men could shift that I was innately opposite-sex attracted.
Since I became aware of “trans” issues 5 years ago, I’ve seen them calling gay men/lesbians “genital fetishists” (while at the same time railing about “cis” people being “focussed on genitals”).
It’s porn. What little I saw all those years ago, everyone gets it on with everyone else, no fear or favour, just bump your uglies against everyone, job done. I’ve seen the screeching about “cis gay men” and “cis lesbians” not wanting porn-addled “trans” people in their dating pool.
I’ve seen the homophobia inherent in “trans ideology” and I think about all the lovely gay men I’ve known (yes, I know there is a problem with misogyny in some of the gay male community; I’ve been lucky to avoid that), and all the wonderful lesbian women who’ve made me feel safe in their spaces.
Straight woman, signing off, with deep respect for what gay men and lesbians have had to put up with for hundreds of years; and what they have to put up with again, today. Homophobia greater than Section 28.
As someone much smarter and a much better writer than me put it:
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But sex is real, cos without that, there’s no same-sex* attraction.
*or opposite-sex attraction, I’ll add.
SHAZZ BAKES 