I’ve been queer for as long as I can remember, but my earliest crushes were definitely on boys. Of my first crush in the fifth grade, I wrote in my diary, “When he smiles at me I feel like he is lighting up the dark side of the moon.” That feeling of attraction was real (and foreshadowed a lifelong practice of loving and writing from it!). I am not opposed to the bisexual label or here to negate its validity. I dream of a world without labels at all. But some time ago, I chose to start identifying and living as a lesbian. I was empowered by a rising tide of lesbian visibility to take the plunge into an identity I had previously believed was lonely, restrictive, or puritanical. (I fell for some propaganda, I fear.) Becoming a lesbian opened new portals in my heart and life. I knew what I was rejecting — men — but I couldn’t have imagined what I am accepting instead. I am still untangling its beauty.

It sounds silly to say, but my last straw was a pregnancy scare. I’d had numerous negative experiences with men in college, some even traumatic, but I managed to recover from them, to keep an open heart. Although I primarily dated women, I had, in some way, accepted occasional violence as an occupational hazard of dating men, of the sexual liberation I was lucky to have. I thought I could roll with the punches, stay in the ring. But I had to take a Plan B because of a dumb man who had bell hooks on his bookshelf. My stomach was cramping like an omen from God, and I thought, never again. This was shortly after the fall of Roe v Wade, putting everyone with a uterus at the mercy of men and the state, and I felt, with sudden certainty, that men were no longer worth it. I did not want to play this incredibly rigged game. (I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed by women calling for a 4B movement after Trump’s re-election.) That’s why I stepped away.

When I moved to New York, I was determined to be gay, as a lifestyle. To join a long lineage of women and queers who make tender love and mischief, build worlds against violence, towards equality, until even the slurs hurled against us lose wind, can be recast, joyously, like confetti. I enjoy the gender buffet in a way that feels similar to my enlightened bisexual sisters. I have dated the whole range — the ones with long hair and shimmery lips that proudly claim the word “dyke.” The loping, boyish ones, the ones who’ve shorn their hair or breasts, wearing their difference like courage. The ones who move with a touch of the otherworldly, their gender alien — they make you look twice. I love when people don’t fit in and have probably never tried. I love the push-and-pull of courting and being courted. The mercy of the first kiss. I discovered lesbian culture online, through screens, but it is different when you can touch, feel, thumb through lovers like the pages of books. Indeed, this world I previously only read about, it has scooped me in its jaw, stuns me with its vibrancy. I love women and queer people, but the things I love about them could feasibly belong to any gender. There is little these people have in common — not their bodies, energies, or personalities — except the condition, in some way, of refusal.

It is a condition of existing in opposition to patriarchy — as its victim, or mortal foe, depending on who you ask, rather than its perpetrator, or beneficiary — that I find incredibly hot. This is why (I’m happy to report) I have never crushed on a straight woman in my life. Not all women are enemies of patriarchy. There are many women, sometimes due to race or class identities, whose interests feel unsexily oriented towards the patriarchy. There are, similarly, men who have a stake in dismantling it, or at least can recognize its effects, and with these men, I can usually catch a vibe.

To be clear: I don’t hate men. Decentering is not demonizing. Although you will not catch me spilling ink over men — at least not since my pre-pubescent diary — I see their humanity. The dignity of fathers in Palestine, protecting and grieving their children amid unfathomable violence. The sort of grown men who give their seats, speak up, help carry heavy things. My sweet, ridiculously handsome gay male friends. This morning, I saw a group of long-legged teenage boys at the subway station. Gracefully, one of them stepped over the turnstile and then opened the door for the rest of us. I had never seen such a casual display of chivalry. There are moments I am taken by the grace of men, even as I choose not to center them.

I understand why people are often outraged at the idea of “choosing” your sexuality. For a long time, gay people were criminalized and ostracized (we still are), and the way you’d insist you were still worthy of care and protection was by claiming you couldn’t help who you were. “Born this way” discourse had its moment, but I think it frames queerness as an unhelpable accident of your birth and not a wonderful, principled choice you could make for yourself. I choose to loudly and decisively align myself with other women, because I think it helps all of us, especially straight women. Far from gatekeeping, I want to open the wide house of queerness to them.

The truth is, my straight friends are struggling. There’s been a “crisis of heterosexuality” among my generation, a widening gap between young men and women in metrics like political views, education, and achievement. Gen Z women are uniquely screwed, because we’ve experienced enough material advancement that we don’t need men and can in fact demand better of them. But Gen Z men haven’t caught up and shifted their behaviors accordingly. What’s more, movements like #MeToo, rather than nudging men towards the decent people we need them to be, have provoked profound backlash. I’ve seen the smartest minds of my generation, as the saying goes, taken down by the impossibility of reconciling their feminist principles with the reality of losers in their DMs. For many of my dearest friends, the solution, more or less, is decentering men. Close female friendships and rose toys must do the job, at least for now. Many generations of women prior, we suspect, would have chosen celibacy and a career over being bound to wifehood. For their sake — and ours — some straight women are trying to hold the line. Can we have a little honorary lesbian commotion for them?

It’s easy for me, at 24, to hold out in my principles. I wonder what will happen when I get older. Our society has made it very structurally difficult for me to envision a life outside of partnership with a man. Unless a squillion of you buy my books or I get hit by an MTA bus and sue, I don’t think I can ever raise a family by myself in New York, my chosen home. I don’t blame those who can’t hold out: Being a lesbian is not for the weak. Most often, we speak of the financial disadvantage when you refuse male money: My friends joke that you need an actual line-item in your budget for lesbian dating. But also, there’s an erasure of your humanity when you step out of patriarchy’s blinding searchlights. Recently, a masc friend of mine described a humbling interaction where a man totally looked over her, only addressing her more femme friend. Since she clearly wasn’t for him, it was like she didn’t exist at all. (I’ve heard women describe a similar devaluing when they start to visibly age.) I’ve felt it too, even as a young feminine woman, the door that shuts in a man’s face when I reveal, mid-conversation, that I’m gay. My opinion matters less to him now. That shit hurts.

I wish there were more spaces to name and strategize the realities of lesbian existence. To truly, joyously, commit to the bit. We are under attack. An Indigenous man was murdered this very Pride Month, and authorities won’t categorize it as a hate crime. The endless discourse each year about bisexual erasure, splitting hairs between bisexual and lesbian identity, strikes me as selfishly concerned with cosmetic questions of “inclusion” and “validity,” the politics of who can post up online, enjoy our parties, or profit from the culture versus who is boots-on-the-ground, taking risks, advancing, and protecting us. (Previous generations  didn’t care very much about the distinction between sapphic labels, but I suspect that as queerness has become a less political, more palatable identity, an insistence on individual queer identities, personal comfort, and self-labels arises to water us down). Either way: the queers I align with don’t have time to bully your boyfriend if he comes to Pride, because we have bigger fish to fry. Babes, we’re building a better world.

My mid-twenties have been characterized by continuous moments of refusal to systems and mindsets I cannot abide. My proudest quitting moment, more than quitting men, was swearing off Amazon because of how it mangles our relationship to consumption at the cost of the environment. Movements like BDS have taught us the power of refusal and redirection, collective pressure to make change. I have the privilege to ponder and mold a life in accordance with my values. Against all odds, I am 24, hot, financially independent, living in the Global North, beholden to no authority but my mom. I want to use the tools at my disposal to put up a fight. What we tend to grows, and I choose to pour my immense creativity, love, and care into uplifting women, especially the ones I love platonically — not people I deem my oppressor. As my dear friend recently told me, in a gay appropriation of George Bush: “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” Patriarchy is the terror. I want to terrorize it back.

Autostraddle’s Pride 2025 theme is DEVIANT BEHAVIOR. Read more, and be deviant!

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