In almost a quarter of the world’s countries, it is illegal to be a lesbian.
The fact that it’s 2024 yet people are still being discriminated against for something that they cannot change is shrouded with injustice.
When the choice to be gay is as much of a choice as the choice to have naturally straight hair over naturally curly hair (that is to say, it’s not a choice at all), why can’t people see the injustice?
Of the Jackrollers who, between 1940 and 1960, would go club to club searching for masculine presenting women (any woman wearing less than three pieces of traditional women’s clothing) and, upon finding them, would subject them to public shaming. They would be arrested, stripped, and subjected to what they dubbed ‘corrective’ rape (what was essentially a type of conversion therapy; ‘How to turn a lesbian straight, 101’).
Of the lesbians in Germany during the Second World War who were forced to wear inverted black triangle badges.
The thing about triangles is that there are always three sides- your lover, yourself, and whoever is watching.
A trespasser in their own bodies, the landowners are the men who pass them in the street. They are the resistance groups who force them [lesbians] to go undercover, marry men, wear dresses, and give birth.
Turning their lives political, they try to erase their whole existence.
In Nazi Germany, lesbians were sent to concentration camps, but not because of their sexuality in the way that gay men were. They were subjected to such horrors for the sole reason that they refused to conform to the prescribed gender norms.
A woman’s job is to give birth to children, to have sex only to procreate.
Laughing in the face of such a backward ideology, lesbians posed a threat to the patriarchy in their refusal to conform, hence why they would be sent to concentration camps.
It’s all about control.
It’s the same reason that female police officers were not allowed to marry or have children until 1946.
When the patriarchy dictates that men must remain superior at all costs, women can have power, but not too much power…
Open your eyes to the injustice.
- Of the 72 countries that still criminalise same-sex relationships (44 of which explicitly criminalise female homosexuality).
- Of the 11 countries that still support the death penalty for lesbians and gays.
There is so much division, and it’s all about men controlling women, to some of whom ‘no’ is an act of aggression, something innately personal because, ‘How could anyone turn down this?!’ (God’s gift).
Seeing red, they’ll take what they’re (not) given.
Men are broken things breaking things. They are monsters dressed as people.
And it’s not just external either. Sometimes it comes from within.
Inhabiting separate rooms in the same club, we spend more time policing each other than protecting each other, handing out intimidating stares over nods of solidarity.
Alas, we must build the road we walk on together, acknowledging that two truths can exist in the same space.
Butch/femme, we all speak the same language.
We are stronger together, and we must come together to join in the fight for equality.
Portfolio of Hope 