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"You Don't LOOK Like a Lesbian!"

© Debra L. Stang

“You don’t look like a lesbian.”

If I had fifty cents for every time I’ve heard that, I could retire early. If I had a dollar, I could pay off my credit card bills. Well, most of them.

The last time it happened, I was having dinner with a friend. Another woman she knew, obviously “family,” came up to the table. My friend introduced us and remarked that she and I were planning to rent Go Fish, a delightful lesbian romance.

The other woman gave me a slow, disdainful look, up and down, as if I were a puppy who’d chewed on her carpet, torn up her flower bed, and left a nasty little present in her Doc Martens to boot. “You’re a lesbian?” she said to me, rolling her eyes at my friend as if she suspected me of perpetrating some scam. “My God, who would have guessed?”

I bit my tongue and reined in my German-Irish temper. A hundred answers raced to my mind, from the mildly obscene (“You bet I’m a lesbian, sweetheart, and I’ve got the tongue to prove it”) to the downright devastating (“Who’d have guessed? Why, anyone with a little imagination and an IQ larger than their shoe size”).

Instead, I settled for a brittle smile. “What’s missing?” I said. “The horns and cloven hooves?” My friend kicked me under the table. Hard. I felt bad about putting her in an awkward position.

But I’m fed up with people making assumptions based on appearance.

And it isn’t just lesbians who do it. I’ve gotten the same type of response from heterosexual people. “Are you sure you’re a real lesbian?” a male co-worker asked me once.

“As opposed to the cheap imitation brand you get on the Playboy channel?” I said.

And then, there are the standard getting-to-know-you questions. “Are you married?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Do you have children?” I’ve never understood why someone who isn’t a bit hesitant about asking me if I have children (which is really inquiring whether I had sex with a man without using birth control while I was ovulating) is too shy to just ask whether I’m gay or straight. Once, a woman I was dating sent flowers to my office. “Oh, how nice,” the receptionist said. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?” “Julia,” I answered. The look of shock on her face was eloquent.

I’d be the first to admit I don’t have what most people think of as the “lesbian look.” I’m too feminine-looking to be butch, and too nonchalant about my appearance to be a real femme. Most of my clothes are cheap, functional, and cover the parts of my anatomy that need to be covered in public, but they definitely do not make a fashion statement. My hair is long and unstyled. I get it cut to shoulder-length whenever I have a few extra dollars—a rare occurrence, because when I have extra cash, it usually goes right into the pocket of the nearest book dealer. Nope, if I have any kind of look, it’s the “I’d-rather-be-doing-something-more-interesting-than-worrying-about-my-look” look.

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