The year was 2012, and I was newly graduated from college with my notebook open at a coffeeshop. Minutes earlier, I’d watched a cis man approach a woman to ask for her number. Once he’d left, I found myself wishing that was a thing women did with each other more often.
I wanted to live in a world where heterosexuality wasn’t assumed.
So I got out my computer and began to write one.
Queertopia begins with a woman striking up conversation with the female protagonist at the newly opened queer coffee-shop in town. Readers soon learn she is traveling back in time, from a future (2200) where children are raised to believe in homo and heterosexuality as equally viable lifestyles.
This isn’t to say queerness was necessarily the majority. What changed, though, was the lack of assuming. Two men could hold hands in public without drawing stares. Two girls could kiss without guys treating them like their latest streaming selection on pornhub.com, reads an excerpt.
Within the world of my story, by 2200 the term “coming out” had become obsolete. Absent of the prevailing assumption of heterosexuality across society, there was no longer any need for it. Unless people were educated about gay history, this phrase would draw blank stares when used in conversation. “Coming out of what?” tended to be the common response.
Several presidents had taken office. Egg-mixing facilities allowed two women to birth babies who shared both of their genes. Still more women in this era were realizing they didn’t even want to have children — opting, instead, for full-hearted pursuit of meaningful careers and “leaving offspring in the form of books, passion projects, and lifelong friendships.”
“Several paths, all equally viable, have supplanted the constricting, uni-dimensional one. If your life doesn’t look like the lives of others, then you’re in the norm.”
It was a passion project for me at the time — one that, though I never managed to finish, served as an imaginative exercise and cathartic outlet, helping me to work through my frustrations with both heteronormativity and the modern dating climate (the protagonist finds in this time-traveling woman her first real relationship, after a slew of disappointing experiences).
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Like most people in the early 2000s, as a young person I’d seen scant depiction of people like me in the movies I watched or books I read. Back then the only film my then closeted self knew of with a lesbian character was The Truth About Jane (which happened to be on when, channel flipping through my family’s boxy 90s TV set at the age of 12, I first realized I was gay).
In much of the media I consumed thereafter, almost all the lesbian relationships seemed fraught or tragic in some way or another. Lesbians and bisexual women seemed to be killed off at disproportionately high rates, which an article in DIVA described as “a parlous hit rate given that lesbian and bi characters were as rare as ostrich burgers at a lesbian potluck until recently.”
Around 2014 or 2015, I noticed this trend begin to change. First came Orange is the New Black. Then, shows with queer women characters were exploding. Casey on Atypical. Michelle on Dead to Me. Netflix programs from the Haunting of Bly Manor to Mind Hunters added to the mix. Suddenly there were so many I ran out of hands to count them on (where before, they could fit on two). The queer women also weren’t just token characters anymore, but richly drawn and well fleshed-out.
Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash
According to weforum.org, last year “For the first time in the history of the study, lesbian characters represented the majority of LGBTQ characters on the five US broadcast networks at 40%. Lesbian characters also lead on cable for the first time in over 15 years, since the 2006–07 season. Representation of transgender characters increased, with the most on streaming platforms, but 42 characters counted in total across broadcast, cable, and streaming shows, up from 29 last year.”
Here in 2022, I noticed how a scene from the recent Hulu teen rom-com Crush almost seemed to bring to life the pages from my earlier novel attempt. Rather than a depiction of an imagined utopia, though, it was somewhat a reflection of our current reality.
The movie’s lack of an anguished coming out trope is refreshing. So is the fact that no lengthy discussion about sexuality takes place. The closest a character gets to this is a simple comment alluding to how her mom was “totally fine with it.”
The high school in Crush was different than the one I went to in the early to mid 2000s. At mine, guys used “f**” to insult each other regularly. Girls referred to the massive amounts of homework their teachers had assigned them as “so gay.” Boys and girls made out against beige lockers. There wasn’t a queer couple in sight (or at least none daring any public displays of affection).
In Crush, the main character talks about her crushes — which happen to be on girls — in a matter-of-fact way. Several characters are openly gay, bi, or queer without it being a thing.
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A new UW study estimated that in the U.S., approximately 2.7 million adults age 50 and older self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. They predicted that this number would increase to more than five million by 2060.
Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash
Still, we’ve by no means completely arrived at a post heteronormative world.
As Erin Tatum put it in an article for Everyday Feminism: “Diversity might be increasing, but even as queer characters start to get bona fide love stories, there are still subtle codes that reinforce the implication that we’re always a little bit less than worthy of true fulfillment.”
Personally, I still encounter heteronormativity across numerous situations. Over the years, older Latina ladies at work have joked about bringing me back a husband from El Salvador. Kids I babysat have asked, “What kind of boys do you like?” Various Lyft passengers (back when I drove for ride-share) have repeatedly launched the “do you have a boyfriend?” question as conversational ice breakers.
Once at the doctor’s, after I answered in the negative to the “are you on birth control?” question, the doctor immediately assumed it was because my partner was using condoms.
Perhaps my favorite: “Are you selling these for a friend?” a man once queried, gesturing to the lesbian romance novels on my blanket at a flea market in Uruguay.
Though all mostly innocent comments, in accumulation they still subtly reinforce LGBTQ people’s “other” status. Heteronormativity turns coming out into a lifelong process.
Additionally, being raised in a time of greater scarcity, even if the current reality is one of prosperity, means that those earlier imprints stay mapped in our brains at least to some extent.
Residual trauma might linger from the days when homosexuality was classified as an illness — particularly for many members of older generations.
“Especially in Uruguay, those who lived through the dictatorship era are still carrying the mark of what it was to survive that,” said author Carolina de Robertis in an interview with OFM.
“But younger generations who were born after the dictatorship (which ended in 1985) are often much more open and ready to kind of help themselves to a public queer truth.”
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Other ways in which we have not yet arrived: familial rejection hasn’t gone away. Depending on what part of the country you live in, waiters might still refuse to serve you. Drunk men continue to shout sexual comments at two women out on dates together, amplifying the risk of walking around at night that a woman on her own already faces.
And society still invalidates trans and gender nonbinary folks in ways both subtle and more overt. As Isabel Wilkerson wrote in Caste, “In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitos in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated.”
“What’s hard now is I think we’ve had a little taste of getting our rights, and now we’re on the verge of having so many of them stripped away,” was how Curve Magazine founder Franco Stevens put it in an interview for Them. “Rights we didn’t even know we had are now under threat. Laws are being enacted to limit what can be taught in schools for instance, and people who break them can be imprisoned. I just know we have a long way to go and a lot to fight for.”
With all this said, this year at Thanksgiving, we might choose to express gratitude for our hard-won victories — while also recognizing that we’re not completely there yet.
A post heteronormative world might have a ways to go before becoming a reality. Still, we can keep it in the backs of our minds as an enticing possibility — perhaps drawing it forth at the Thanksgiving table when your grandma misgenders you, or your uncle asks for the 20th time whether you have a boyfriend.
It can shine like a beacon back there as you smile and hand them the mashed potatoes.
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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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Photo credit: Christian Lue on Unsplash