The only upside to how my family treated me was that it spurred me on a path of independence. It is not easy hearing these things on a daily basis from those you have grown up playing and laughing with. So, what explained that first magical encounter with a woman? I tried drilling sense into my family but they insisted that once I get married to a cishet man, things will fall back on track. There was no exposure to porn or Hollywood films that are supposed to contaminate you. I was just an impressionable nobody from a small town in Andhra Pradesh.
It was so pure, so organic despite no one having taught me how to go about it. Then, when I was 18, I had sex with a woman. I was struggling with my identity for the longest time. I am a trans lesbian and my conservative family simply couldn’t comprehend my life. It is not easy hearing these things on a daily basis from those you have grown up playing and laughing with.” “My family insists that once I get married to a cishet man, I will fall back on track. I will always regret losing him, and will always blame him for tainting all the beautiful memories we had together in the most disgusting way there is. That’s when I knew it was my time to quit whatever we had for good. All the while, as he cried, he kept feeling me up like a creep. But one day, he simply pinned me to the wall and wept on my shoulders, begging me to go back to being straight. He kept saying the same thing – “We had sex, how can you be a lesbian?” I tried reasoning with him because I didn’t want to disappear after my coming out and leave him in the lurch. He didn’t take it well: endless texts, rambling voice notes, abusing me on calls, breaking down when we met. In my case, I realised I was only into women after my first and only relationship with a man. Some people even end up marrying cishet people and come out to themselves in their 40s. It must take a really mature individual to understand that we all have our journeys and might not be born with the realisation that we’re queer. “My ex-boyfriend pinned me to the wall and wept on my shoulders, begging me to go back to being straight.”įor many, the realisation that you are gay can only come after you have been in an unsuccessful relationship with a cishet person. So, all I do is pretend he doesn't exist. My homophobic parents didn’t let me file a police report and, to this day, they believe he is just a lonely widower. Whenever I’d step out for a date, I could see him standing in a corner somewhere, seething with rage. He added that true feminine beauty can only be appreciated by men. But on my birthday, he crossed that boundary and gifted me a card that had his thesis on lesbian women – how they must be “fixed,” the ways in which they can destabilise the human population, how being a lesbian was a disrespect to the nature of a womb. As long as he remained at a distance, it was okay. But after that encounter, I’d find him outside my building, brooding on his scooter, always with an old novel in hand. For the longest time, I wanted to empathise with him. From what I’d heard, he was widowed and lived a rather dreary life. But one of my former school teachers was certainly taken aback by it when he ran into me after nine years. I don’t know if it was my butch appearance that made me seem exotic. VICE spoke to lesbian women to understand just how dangerously obsessed some straight men might get with them, and the many misconceptions they harbour. In her statement to the media, she said that though she’d accepted homophobia and violence as a part of her life, it continued to give her panic attacks and triggered her anxiety. In 2020, a lesbian woman was punched in the face in the city of Sunderland in England. When the couple refused, they were viciously beaten up. In 2019, four male teenagers forced a lesbian couple to kiss on a London bus after figuring out they were queer. In the real world, the price that lesbian women often end up paying when faced by men who solely view them in a fantastical, voyeuristic light can be near-fatal. “So it has this voyeuristic, naughty, fantastical element.” “They (straight men) are desiring a view of a sexual experience in which they cannot, by definition, take part,” Timaree Schmit, a sexuality researcher, told NBC News. According to data released by PornHub and YouPorn, lesbian porn remains the most searched category globally. The sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Colour, which won best picture at Cannes in 2013, were criticised by the film’s own lead actors who “ felt like prostitutes” shooting sex scenes directed from a male gaze. For lesbian women, fetishisation takes on a different, darker hue altogether.