Notes About Bein’ Lesbian From a Southern Black Soft Masculine Lesbian Woman

At the Marriott Marquis, on the rooftop beside the Texas-shaped lazy river, I sat in the hot tub and looked to my left and right and saw something I had never seen before: a whole hot tub full of Black queer women. Masc and Fem. Coupled and married and dating. Settled into themselves the way I am still learning to settle into myself.

I played it cool. On the inside, everything felt heightened. I was curious, aware/alive to the room in a way I hadn’t been before.

They were beautiful. They were kind. Some had known each other for years. Others had just met a few events ago and were already building something/ that quick recognition, that budding thing that happens when queer women find each other and decide to deepen. My sister-friend, the only straight woman there, sat beside me. I watched these women laugh and talk and move through the night like this was ordinary. Like this was just Monday.

I wanted to ask: how did you get here?

Not to the rooftop. To yourselves.

I had tea with a new friend recently. We talked about flirting. It was an extension of a similar conversation I’d had with another friend/ the same circling, the same questions I don’t yet have answers to. I don’t often acknowledge when someone is flirting with me. By nature I am all water and emotion, a double Cancer placement, romantic even with strangers. So maybe I don’t always know when I’m actually flirting or when I’m just being myself.

Someone once asked me if I was Asexual. I wondered what about me read as disinterested entirely. I am private, yes. But not Asexual. I love women. Especially, Black women.

At work, where I am Black and gay, my gayness is pronounced. My difference is underlined. I wear my multiple intersecting identities with honor in spaces that hardly accept and mostly tolerate. But in my everyday life, my lesbianism feels lowercase. Almost like I take on the risk of wearing myself out loud in rooms that don’t fully want me, yet I’m not taking on the fullness of what it means to wear myself for real.

I show up bold where it’s hard and quiet where it could be soft.

I came out at twenty-five in the Forward Times, a Black-owned Houston newspaper with history in its ink. My partner at the time had gone back and forth with a man on Facebook who believed women were gay because Black men had failed them. The exchange got loud enough that the paper asked her to respond. We were part of a creative collective then (htxpplproject) and I wasn’t out, but I wasn’t going to miss the chance to write out loud.

Together we published a piece called “Let the Black Gay Women Speak on Behalf of Themselves.”

And just like that, the thing I had hidden for twenty years was exposed in a single headline.

I don’t know if I was ready. But I leapt.

My family wasted no time. Disappointment came quick. They cut me off just as fast as I cut them off. And in that rupture, I think something else got cut too/ the slow becoming that might have let me grow into myself gently.

I declared before I had practiced. I announced before I had arrived.

For ten years, one woman was my whole lesbian world.

On-again, off-again. A life built and rebuilt around the same love. A dog, our son. A future I thought was fixed. In the off-seasons, I dated here and there/ nothing lasting longer than four months, nothing serious enough to shake loose what I kept returning to.

I think what happens in a long-term on-again/off-again is that the heart stays on reserve. You never go too deep with anyone else because you don’t want to cause unnecessary harm while you’re still tangled up in something complicated with someone who is less former than you let on. For a decade, I kept one foot out the door of every other possibility. Not because I didn’t want more. Because I was already holding too much.

Now I am here. Post-decade. Alone with an identity I claim in public before I ever learned to really hold it in private.

What does it mean to be a lesbian when most of your friends are straight? Does it even matter? I don’t know if it correlates to anything/ if the life I’ve built says something about me or just says something about what was available, what was familiar, what I never thought to reach for. My friends are chosen. They are family. They love me and I love them. But I wonder sometimes if there’s a room I’ve never entered. Not because the door was locked. Because I never turned the knob.

What does it mean to walk into a room full of women like you and still feel like a guest?

I am learning what I never had the chance to learn: how to flirt. How to approach. How to take lesbianism out of theory and place it into practice. I am thirty-four years old and I am new to this.

Not new to the identity. New to the living of it.

At that birthday kickback, surrounded by women who had built lives I couldn’t quite imagine for myself, I asked silently: could this be my day to day?

I still don’t know.

This isn’t the writing where I’ve arrived at sureness. This isn’t proclamation. This is still the question-asking stage.

What does it mean to be a lesbian, actually?

This piece originally appeared on Mo Nikole’s Substack.