It’s 2020 – by now, we’ve all pretty much agreed that homophobia is out (no pun intended) and accepting people for who they truly are is in. But no matter how much of an ally you claim to be, or how many letters of the LGBTQIA+ acronym you identify with, we all suffer from internalized homophobia. Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with you… it’s just a sad but normal part of being born and raised in a heteronormative society. But if you’re not actively working to challenge these outdated values that have been instilled in us from long before we were able to consciously participate as adults in society, it’s actively harming the movement as a whole, and it’s our job to do something about it.
Picture this: it’s a cold winter morning in 2008. ‘I Kissed A Girl’ by Katy Perry is topping the charts, and I, a closeted lil bi baby, am on the way home from a birthday party sleepover, where my openly bisexual female friend spent the entire night showing me how to properly French kiss while everyone else was sleeping. The song plays on the radio and my mom turns it up. “I love this song!” she says, and I think… this has to be some kind of sick cosmic joke. I did something bad… the Universe knows it, and soon, everyone else will, too.
I don’t know where that mindset even came from (well, actually I have an inkling, but that’s a blog post for a whole ‘nother time). My mom is a liberal, open-minded Aquarius. No one had ever told me outright that kissing girls was shameful. But that’s the thing about internalized homophobia. Its toxic tendrils grow from nowhere and everywhere in all directions, invading our subconscious and wrapping themselves around our self-worth until we’re covered green with hatred for ourselves and envy of others in our community.
It should come as no surprise that not everyone was sleeping at the sleepover, so that semester, I watched from inside the closet as every kid in the 8th grade made it their job to drag me out of it. In doing damage control for my fragile junior high reputation, I threw my friend under the bus, called her and her guy friend (the only other out gay kid in school at the time) a bunch of homophobic names, and pretty much soiled our friendship. For a long time, I amounted our falling out to, well that’s what happens when you kiss your friends, but it wasn’t until years after I publicly came out – when I started doing the shadow work on my own internalized homophobia – that I was able to finally admit that I harbored resentment toward both of them for being able to own their identities when I just wasn’t there yet (also the underdevelopment of my frontal lobe certainly didn’t help matters much).
But 12 years passed, and thankfully times have changed. At worst, gayness is tolerated, and at best, it’s openly celebrated. But in this open celebration, I see too often how our community’s internalized homophobia works in the opposite direction, almost as if we unintentionally flipped society’s “straight until proven gay” theory into “closeted until proven gay” in an effort to be more accepting. I watch as members of the LGBT community nearly force straight cis men to come out of a closet they’re not in just because they present themselves in a way that we stereotypically assume gay men to present themselves. It still tugs at my image when I’m getting dressed to go to the gay bar, and I have to decide whether I want to wear my favorite pink dress and feel like myself, or a button down and combat boots to convey to other women that I want them to approach me. And I see it in the vacant stares of those women, who are internally battling over whether my dress makes me that guy’s straight best friend, or if I’m just a bi femme queen (hint: it’s the latter).
How can we expect others to embrace and accept us for who we truly are when we can’t even accept them, or ourselves? This collective self-loathing obviously stems from a deeply systemic place of heteronormativity, but it’s looming over our entire movement and if we don’t do something about it now, it will slowly erode everything that we and those before us have worked so hard for. Every time a straight man with fashion sense, or a straight woman who has more important things to do than her makeup, gets pushed into a closet they don’t belong in, they lose faith that our LGBT community is really as accepting as we claim to be (yes, this goes even for the truest allies). Every time I choose the button down and combat boots, I wrestle with who I really am and how I want others to see me. And every time I choose the dress and am met with ‘to hit on her or not to hit on her’ glances at the gay bar, I’m reminded that my own community will not always accept me for being my most authentic self.
To my fellow LGBTQIA+ babes: it’s 2020. We can do better. When we recognize that our first thoughts are usually not reflective of our true values, but are spoiled leftovers from internalized homophobia and other societal biases, we can challenge them, discredit them, and prioritize our more refined ideas and assumptions about people inside and outside of the gay community. But until we collectively start this process, we will continue to lose credit amongst those we need the most: our allies.
For more information about internalized homophobia, click here.
The Unpolished Gemini 