I Love Lesbians – They’re Great!

Oliver Chapman

6 years ago

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In my quest to love and understand women, one of my most powerful allies has been the lesbian. While many articles have spoken about the “straight woman with the gay best friend” phenomenon, dramatically less has been written of the opposite yet no less satisfactory feature of the “straight man with the lesbian best friend”.

Not every lesbian enjoys hanging out with straight guys, nor do all of them like being treated as an expert on all things related to the female orgasm or cunnilingus; nor are they interested in your silly threesome fantasy. However, if you can avoid such crass over-generalizations, you will find yourself alongside one of the greatest and most spectacular alliances ever, one filled with new perspectives on what makes women tick, someone you can share with, someone whose brain you can pick on puzzling female behavior and one of the best friendships you will ever experience in your life.

Indeed, without being a player, a gay guy or someone who works with women in a “clothes optional” job (i.e. massage therapist, mammography technician, male skincare specialist, etc.), there are precious few avenues straight men can follow to understand women besides having a lesbian friend. If your lifestyle does not allow you to fall within those three categories above and you don’t know any lesbians, then the glittering world of women, the sisterhood, will be a closed-off citadel, a walled garden with no key, a forbidden and locked fortress to you forever. Whether you like it or know it or not, you will be ranked among that vast, numberless, faceless brood of Average Frustrated Chumps, the wilderness of clueless dweebs who “just don’t get it”, aimlessly wandering the face of the earth in utter incomprehension of how the other half lives.

Furthermore, having a lesbian friend is by far the easiest, most low-maintenance way to receive that insight. Whereas a job takes years of skill-building and training, being a “player” means months on end of hanging out in dead-end bars practising pick-up and suffering hundreds of rejections to learn things the hard way, and being gay is more or less impossible (unless you discover some hitherto-unknown aspect of your sexuality you didn’t know you had), having a lesbian friend creates a great window of opportunity to improve both your understanding of women and your relationships with them. Before I became a male feminist or practiced massage therapy, I had a lesbian friend – and, to tell you the truth, it was awesome.

I was only 19 and had made some tentative attempts at talking to women at social events. No success had occurred and I was feeling down about it. Then suddenly, this woman showed up, sat down at my table and started talking. At first, I was delighted, thinking that either my “skills” had suddenly garnered results or that this was some amazing fluke. As it turned out, it was neither.

She was 24, fat, with short, black, greasy hair, thick, rimmed glasses and fluffy, black hairs above her top lip. Not really “my type”, but she was FEMALE, so still miles better to look at than any man. We talked some social niceties at first, just basic stuff. What struck me is that she didn’t just make polite conversation, then walk off, like the other women I had been speaking to. At least she stuck around, which was a huge plus for me. I could actually hold down a conversation long enough to calm my nerves, feel normal and say stuff I liked, chat, shoot the breeze, make comments about things going on around us and things like that. My faith restored, I felt emboldened to talk more animatedly about a range of topics. She was interested, friendly and engaged me, offering her opinions and corroborating mine.

Wow, this girl is awesome, I thought, feeling attracted to her despite her appearance being substantially different from that of Cindy Crawford, my idol at the time. I was somewhat surprised, this being the first time I had felt an attraction towards a woman without it being based on physical appearance, so proving that it wasn’t based on looks alone.

At subsequent social events, our friendship deepened and I felt that I could talk to her about anything. What I loved was how she normalized my feelings, which was important to me, since I often felt a freak for not being able to get on well with guys and for believing that women were more important for me than they appeared to be for most guys.

I found we had similar backgrounds – disappointing relationships with abusive, unpredictable fathers, little common ground with men and a strong desire for connection with women, as though our lives depended on it.

This led me to feel confident in then asking her about women, expressing my desires about them – physical, mental and emotional connection. I asked her what she thought were the best ways to achieve this and received a wealth of knowledge. My mind considerably broadened and I felt more able to relate to women.

Despite all this, I never realized she was a lesbian until someone else told me. When I finally asked her about it, she said, “I just haven’t found the right man yet.” No matter – I didn’t press further. I was chill with it, anyway. We remained friends, which she seemed to like.

We were work colleagues and in the end, she moved to a different job. I missed her a great deal and, despite the intervening years, in some ways I still do. She was the first woman outside my family that I had any success with, the first woman to think I was someone worth spending time with, someone who made me feel like I was “OK” and that my desires for women were the same as everyone else’s.

After that, I met other lesbians. I remember one couple I met on a cruise. One of them talked to me and told me a lot about how lesbians think and a lot of it is the same as how men think, in fact. She gave me a lot of X-rated languages and even more X-rated knowledge of female sexuality, lady bits, and other stuff, which enlightened my understanding further.

However, being friends with lesbians is not all about facts and information. Most of all, it’s the nearest we can get to the friendships women have with each other. I felt accepted without question, something that’s hard to come by in the world of men. I didn’t have to compete. I could just be.

I consider making friends with lesbians an important step for any man wanting to learn about women and wanting to have the greatest best friend ever. She also needs it, despite what she may say to the contrary – it’s an opportunity for her and her girlfriend to be protected by your “straight privilege”, which all LGBT people are in dire need of. It also leads directly to becoming aware of LGBT issues such as discrimination, where other people’s closed-mindedness begins to directly affect the people you care about.

I very much hope you too can experience the joy of lesbian friends and discover what I have – that lesbians are just female straight guys who like the same people we do – namely women – and that they will be your ally with women if you become their ally in the world.

Oliver Chapman, DipCPC, PT

Certified Life Coach

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This post is published here with permission from the author.

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