By Chloe Tse
Floored — and ridiculously smitten. Swooned, awed — and completely captured.
Tumbled, toppled, caved and you’re there. Clumsily, you’ve fallen in love. But of course, she’s straight. It’s like the gay best friend syndrome. Straight girls everywhere often develop feelings for their gay male best friends. Straight girl syndrome is similar: It’s when a lesbian falls for her straight girl friend. Ultimate doom.
It happens to the best of us. Lisa Sisavath, 19, has had it happen again and again. She has been an out lesbian since she was 16 to friends and select public. Trendy sexual behaviour bugs her and she knows how easy it is to fall for a straight girl.
“I try to avoid straight girls because the only thing you can get from them is an orgasm — you don’t get the long-term relationship, which I would rather have,” Sisavath says. Girls emote and experience intense feelings towards one another. When it comes to love and friendship, the lines often blur. Sisavath tries to segregate the women in her life. When it comes to straight girls, she says, “Catch them, have fun and let go.”
With shows like The L Word and the recently retired Queer as Folk, and queer movies like Brokeback Mountain hitting mainstream theatres and even winning Golden Globes, people are offered a rose-tinted glance into the gay community.
These Hollywood versions glamorize this challenging homosexual lifestyle and inspire people to dabble in this growing “trend.” It is not a trend. Sexuality isn’t an outfit you wear to flatter yourself; it’s not something you wear to bring out the colour of your eyes. Vanessa LeBlond, 19, a second-year sociology student at the University of Western Ontario, identifies herself as a lesbian. She disagrees with the experimental trend.
“I would never get involved with a girl who was straight — having sex with me just to fulfill some sort of fantasy, or to turn on some guy,” LeBlond says. “I feel like it takes away from what lesbianism actually is.” LeBlond feels that society looks at lesbians as a method to turn the heterosexual male on.
LeBlond doesn’t think straight girls fully understand what can happen when they get involved with a lesbian. “Feelings can develop and feelings can be hurt,” she says. “For (the straight girl) it’s just a sex experience. But for a lesbian it can mean more.” The idea of my own sexuality intrigues many straight women, and never discourages men. “But, you look so straight.” I am the faux straight girl with generic feminine style; unthreatening and the perfect subject to test curiosity and sample this growing experimental trend. Being the extreme girl-lover I am, I often submit to the absurdities of these straight-girl whims.
How could you not? Women are beautiful. But straight women just want to satisfy that lingering thought: What would it be like to kiss another girl? No, kissing another girl doesn’t make you gay. And no, you can’t make someone gay. Sexuality is not contagious, nor is it a shoe. I once worked with a bonafide lesbian from whom I often sought wisdom when I was first coming to terms with being gay. She warned me to stay away from the straight girls, but that if I were to get involved with them — she told me to have sex with them, have fun with them — never fall in love with them. I fell in love with them.
Forty Kleenex boxes later, I let another straight girl lick my wounds. Then, I did it again. Women don’t turn gay — this notion of converting them is ridiculous and impossible. These women are straight — some of them are just curious. These are the same girls who plan on the white picket fence, the jeep, the two matching yellow labs and the man.
The idea of temporary lesbianism is delicious — the lifestyle package is an acquired taste.
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