With a new season of Sex Life of College Girls upon us, I’m anxious to see what will happen in Leighton and Alicia’s storyline. Now that Leighton finally came out to her roommate in the final episode and seems to be on the track towards self-acceptance and healing is there hope for the two girls?
Their closeted relationship featured as one of season one’s several compelling plot-lines. The two girls met through the women’s center on campus, with Alicia initially writing Leighton off as a cookie cutter hetero sorority girl — an assumption that Leighton corrects by kissing her at a party.
They begin dating, and though their chemistry is undeniable, Leighton begins acting weird about introducing Alicia to her friends. Initially Alicia shrugs it off, thinking perhaps Leighton just needs a bit more time to get comfortable.
One night though, Alicia takes a selfie that she posts to Instagram. When Leighton notices her bag visible in the shot, her light-hearted energy instantly dissolves. She demands that Alicia delete it, and Alicia quietly does. An hour later though, she tells Leighton she thinks they should break up.
“I can’t go back into the closet with you,” she says, teary-eyed but resolute.
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As a gay woman who’s been dating for over fourteen years, I understood how Alicia felt. People of all sexual orientations can relate to the scenario of commitment wariness from the person they’re dating, or one person not being ready. But there’s a particular brand of hurtfulness that comes when it’s mixed in with possible questions of internalized homophobia, shame, and internal struggles on that person’s part.
Years ago, nearly every queer relationship took the form of a closeted or “short” one — not culturally sanctioned, and unrecognized by society. Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, for example, exchanged love letters that were twenty pages long. Publicly though, Eleanor remained married to FDR.
The harm this type of relationship can inflict was on display in last year’s film Happiest Season, a movie that Keegan Williams described in Out Front as “essentially Kristen Stewart’s character being emotionally abused, gaslit, and pushed back into the closet for 90 minutes because her partner’s parents are right-of-center.”
Though I tried to give the benefit of the doubt in the past, I’ve found there are consequences when one woman is out while the other is still closeted or completely new to the queer dating world.
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One of the first times I experienced something like that took place almost a decade ago. I met a girl for a date at the start of the summer who said queer dating was very new to her. She was still in the process of coming out.
I was slightly wary of this at first. She seems interested in me though, another part of me thought. And everyone has to get their start somewhere.
Our two months of dating were marked by sharing plates at a food truck festival, where fallen leaves the color of honey beautified streets lined with Victorian houses; holding hands in the “party Lyft” driven by a fun older butch lesbian; kissing in hot tubs, under the bright strobe lights of gay clubs, beneath a starry night sky at the entrance to her parents’ castle-like home.
Gifts and poems were exchanged. While laying next to me she’d even begin to say things like, “just thought you should know that I’m really starting to like you.”
In the days after she left the area to return to school, she and I kept in frequent, flirty text contact. After about a week though, her tone changed. Texts got shorter. Stark and robotic responses replaced the “I miss you’s” and “Wish I could wake up at your side”s.
I tried to deny the abrupt shift meant anything. I told myself maybe I was just imagining it.
But I wasn’t. Days later an “MCM” post of her ex-boyfriend showed up on my Instagram feed. When she and I talked months later, she said that what we’d had was fun — but that she identified as straight.
Hearing that came down over my heart like a bucket of bricks.
She wasn’t the only woman this happened with. Other times, the girl would introduce me as a friend to her family or friends from back home, even after we’d been dating for several months (and all our friends at school knew of us as a couple).
What hurt about these situations was not being able to tell if it was me they were rejecting, or my gender. I had a hard time ignoring the fact that even for those of us who came to terms with our orientations early in life, society has taught us that our attractions toward the same sex aren’t as natural. It’s not who we’re supposed to be attracted to. We’ve been taught shame rather than to act on these attractions.
In contrast, hetero relationships are modeled everywhere — on TV, in the couples we know, in the people we see walking down the streets. They wait at literally every corner, their representation ubiquitous and effortlessly reinforced.
I wondered if, even though queer relationships are technically legal now, scars inflicted by a legacy of homophobia lead many to unconsciously relegate theirs to a finite time period. One with a clear-cut beginning and end. One that’s small, contained, and closet-like.
My questions were always: Did they just need more time? Or were they never planning to commit, and deep down they knew it, but still wanted to have an experience with a woman — so they led me to believe they might in order to have it?
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Ultimately I think qualities like honesty, self-awareness, and emotional availability are what matter more than anything else.
And yet many of us queer women who came out long ago have been down that painful road — of hoping someone will change, of thinking maybe they just need more time to grow comfortable, of waiting, and waiting, and waiting — only to end up hurt regardless. And we don’t want to walk it again, when it was hard enough the first time. We want more than for our love to be relegated to a closet. We want it to see the light of day.
No one deserves to be judged for wherever they are in their journey. Still, sometimes where two people are at just doesn’t align, and trying to force their paths together results in too much hurt. This doesn’t mean either is wrong.
A friend of mine once told me about her friend who was curious about women, but wasn’t sure she wanted a relationship with one — and had also never dated one. She met a woman on an app who’d just gotten out of a LTR with a man, and had also never dated a woman. Neither were entirely sure they wanted to be with a woman long-term. They ended up dating for a few months, and it sounded like a peaceful and mutually beneficial situation for both of them.
In short, they were compatible in what they were looking for. Ideally there’d be a specific app for people who are on equal footing in this regard. A safe space for women both looking for the same thing, to find one another.
That dating always involves some risk is true for all sexual orientations, not just lesbians. Countless variables make both finding and sustaining a relationship more difficult (among them communication styles, past traumas, the “types” we each have, and the fact that people don’t always present as the most honest version of themselves initially). Dating women who may still be working through internalized homophobia only adds another.
Has Leighton fully worked through hers? Is it possible to in only a few months? I’m not so sure. Either way, whatever ends up panning out, I wish both girls happiness — and that, when the time is right, they find a person who aligns with where each of them is at right now.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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