...And Why Writers Are So Afraid of the Word 'Lesbian'.
If Munsch’s favourite emojis are owl caterpillar with glasses, then Alice Wu’s favourites are crying face, book and…sausage?
I’ll be real with you, I am so mad at Alice Wu right now. Yes, partly because I cried into my diary whilst craving sausages approximately 30 seconds after the movie finished. But also because she wrote the bloody movie I’ve been wanting to write for the past 3 years!
The Half of It is everything I needed as a teen lesbian, and based on the furious postings of every other teen lesbian who happens across my Tumblr…it’s everything they need too. For years I’ve seen posts going around searching for cute women-loving-women stories. People asking ‘where’s my sloppy sporty lesbian falls in love with the uptight office manager story?’ and ‘how about two lesbian mums raising funny, but problematic children story?’. And they’re right! To put it into the words of @lord-dyke, “We deserve some goddamn happy, corny, carefree, loving lesbian media, alright?”
I feel so lucky to be in my 20’s and about to enter the media industry right as happy lesbian media is being produced. Just this year I’ve probably watched more lesbian content than I have in my entire life. And that’s saying something because I used to get my grubby little hands all over anything that even mentioned the word ‘gay’, let alone if it was “my” kind of gay. I even watched every season of The L Word, despite it not being 2004 any more where that kind of thing could fly.
We have Vida, Feel Good, Booksmart, Atypical, I Am Not Okay With This, Alexa and Katie, so many more that I cannot even state.
So why does no one use the word lesbian?
Look, I get it. It’s a very daunting word. Gay is so much easier, so much nicer on the ears. I, for one, don’t actually know a single wlw under the age of 25 who is comfortable with the word lesbian. We all seem to flitter around it, cling to gay or queer or unlabelled. I didn’t even get comfortable with the word until I began using it jokingly to describe myself as a ‘big ol’ lesbian’. And when I began to realise I liked women, I despised the word for how ugly it was. It was my biggest obstacle to coming out, because I could never see myself as a lesbian. In time, I came around to the word gay. But calling myself a lesbian took almost 5 years, and I still wouldn’t use it around a person unless I was extremely comfortable with them.
I could go on a long rant about why the word lesbian has such ugly connotations amongst Gen Z and Millennials. Porn, for one. Only having overly sexualised media for ages, or only ever showing butches in reference to lesbians (don’t even get me started on finding yourself as a femme lesbian). I could also go on a long rant about why incorporating and normalising the word into daily life is one of the most important things you can do for a young wlw.
But I won’t get into that. I’ll have some links I can send you another time.
Just trust me. Lesbian an important word to have in the community because without it we get lost in the crowd.
Which was my biggest irk with The Half of It, and half the other contemporary lesbian media being produced.
I want more from Ellie Chu. I want to hear her use the word lesbian, because without it, it’s so much harder to find yourself.
Until we as a society accept the word lesbian as something happy, corny, carefree and loving, then young lesbians won’t either. And until that happens, young lesbians like myself only a couple of years ago, will continue to struggle to feel content in their sexualities, find spaces in pride communities and deal with internalised homophobia.
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