PortlyDyke wrote a beautiful post about reflexive, safety-making cloaking:
I doubt that most straight, cisgendered people think about, or notice, how frequently they touch their partner in public in ways that are not necessarily “sexual” (in addition to kissing, cuddling, and the odd bum-squeeze) — ie. holding hands, walking with an arm around the waist, smoothing the other’s hair back out of their eyes — nor do I think that most straight, cisgendered people are probably aware of the fact that when I touch my partner in public, it’s nearly always a considered act. […]
So, I issued her and her husband a challenge (and I’ll issue the same challenge to any straight coupled allies here who want to raise their awareness of LBGTQ issues):
Spend an entire week pretending that you’re not a couple. Don’t write a check from a joint bank account. Hide all the photographs in your home and office which would identify you as a couple. Take off your wedding rings. Touch each other, and talk to each other, in public, in ways that could only be interpreted as you being “friends”. Refer to yourself only in the singular “I”, never in the “we”. When you go to work on Monday, if you spent time together on the weekend, include only information which would indicate that you went somewhere with a friend, rather than your life-mate. If someone comes to stay with you, sleep in separate beds. Go intentionally into the closet as a couple. For a week.
They took my challenge.
They lasted exactly three days.
There’s lots more, and I recommend reading the whole thing. Curtsy: TeaOtter.
I live the non-coupled straight ally challenge (“Spend one week in which you make no mention and give no hint of your sexual orientation at all.”). I have no personal pictures up at work and don’t talk about dates or boyfriends even when I’m crazy in love with someone unless it actually pertains to the current conversation. I don’t do it to bend people’s perceptions about sexuality (although I do consider that an added benefit), but because I’m an extremely private person.
I know that my being “in the closet” about my sexuality is completely by choice and not out of neccesity and I could stop at any time and no one would look twice at me, but it has really opened my eyes to the assumptions people make about me because I don’t fit into their idea of what a straight woman should be. Added in the fun is that I have no intention of getting married or having (biological) children. I’ve been accused of leading men on because I didn’t mention my boyfriend every 5 minutes (they ignored the part about me not flirting with them) and mistaken for gay because I dare to go to bars without a male chaperone on a regular basis, and everything in between.
I wish the best of luck to PortlyDyke and all my gay and lesbian friends who have to hide their affection in public and hope that soon enough they won’t have to cloak or hide anymore.
I think that for some crazies it’s the nonsexual references and touching that freak them out the most. They already go crazy about sexual touching of any kind, so it’s the random squeeze of a hand, touch of a cheek or shared smile that so threatens them, because those acts are more difficult for them to segregate from their own behavior.
I’m several years younger than PortlyDyke and also from the San Francisco area, so I’ve always been somewhat demonstrative, but also, like her, aware of it. When I was first dating in the mid-90’s, people reacted with absurd hostility. I remember being all of 16 and holding hands with a girl, walking through a public park. And alarmed mothers packed up their kids and left!
Compared to that, I thought things had become neutral. I could walk around my home area holding hands with my girlfriend and nobody cared. This was Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco, after all, and not the bible belt!
And then I started to transition and started to pass. Suddenly, I’m not a butch woman holding hands with a girl, I’m a young straight guy. In the San Francisco Airport. Preparing to be separated from my beloved for several months. Anybody who looked at us could see this. Just like they could when I’d left from previous visits. But it was completely different. Straight women smiled wistfully at us. I couldn’t believe how much hostility must have been hiding under that ‘tolerance’ that I had taken for granted.
It’s like when you’re in a female/female couple and you see another such couple and give each other the -oh-cool-you’re-queer-too look. I was getting something like that from the straights. Like they have all this approval and happiness for couples. Which obviously they do, but it’s not something I had EVER experienced before.
Fucking weird. Passing for the first time at an airport is also a fucking strange place for it.
When I started going out with my now-ex-girlfriend, we were teenagers and beautifully oblivious. We used to walk down the street holding hands. I remember kissing her on Waterloo bridge and looking out over the river together.
As we got older, things started to change; we became aware of the people around us. We started noticing the looks. Some girls who’d seen us kissing once saw us again on a bus and spent the whole journey giving us shit about it. It wasn’t easy any more. I’ve always been the ‘fuck you’ kind of person who’s able to deliberately switch my awareness of that kind of thing off to a certain extent, but my ex wasn’t; it made her more and more miserable as time went on.
She started flinching when I tried to take her hand or touch her. The straight couples who try this experiment might be able to understand the difficulty of not acting like a couple when people are watching you, but they probably won’t be able to recreate the experience of forgetting the rules for a second and having your partner stiffen in fear. Even when I think about it now it’s like a punch in the stomach.
On Dan Savage’s podcast last Wednesday, he said – and I’ve heard him say this before – that his advice to young homosexuals is to assume that the people they date are going to be emotionally screwed up unless proven otherwise, because of sucky society and the time it takes some people to move past it. I don’t like to think about how small the proportion was of lesbians I’ve known who didn’t have visible scars – and I mean that in the most literal sense you can think of. These were mostly middle-class, white urbanites, who probably had a comparatively privileged experience of growing up gay.
And a friend of mine asked me quite seriously why we still had Gay Pride marches, since homophobia was basically over and we had civil partnerships now.