At the tender age of seventeen, I went up to New England to look at colleges. I had been accepted to Mount Holyoke College and to Smith College, so I toured both. I sat down at a table with my parents and extended family at a Chili's in northern Connecticut for a brief reconnaissance. Everyone agreed that Smith was a great fit for me, but my aunt had some additional input. "Be careful," she told me, as she leaned toward me conspiratorially. "There are a lot of lesbians there."
Those words were weird to hear then, as I was just starting to come to terms with the crush I was harboring for my best friend. They're even weirder to reflect on now, as I enter my final year at Smith and have finally started to feel comfortable identifying as a lesbian. (I totally dated my best friend for three years, by the way.)
When I was little, I learned "lesbian" as a slur rather than an identity. Girls grow up knowing little about the L in LGBTQ+ other than that it is something to fear—lesbians are the "Other," to borrow from feminist theorist Simone De Beauvoir. Lesbians are oppressed in two different ways: as women, and as non-straight individuals. That means that, while straight women might share some of our struggles, they also aid in our oppression. One of my least favorite instances of this is the stereotype that women's colleges are “full of” lesbians. While I love to hear my lesbian friends joke about the staggering amounts of galpallery on our campus, I rarely hear straight people comment on it in a way that doesn't come across as homophobic.
Yes, there are more non-straight women on our campus than on others, but straight women only seem to answer this stereotype in the positive when it is with a sense of aggravation or humor. "Sure, there’s a lot of ‘that’ here, but,” they start, as if only willing to acknowledge our existence to affirm theirs. Another, more flagrantly homophobic version of this is, “Not everyone at Smith is a lesbian,” as exemplified in articles by Buzzfeed, Wiselikeus.com and Boston.com. While it may seem innocuous to point this out—given that it is, at face value, true—I seriously question why straight women are so amped to distance themselves from us, if they do not feel threatened by our presence. I’ve also seen my straight peers grossly overestimate the ratio of non-straight-to-straight women on our campus, claiming that what I would estimate to be a 30/70 breakdown is more like 50/50, which reminds me of a telling study conducted on men in regards to women.
So, if you’re a straight woman at a women’s college and you don’t want to alienate your lesbian friends, be conscious of phrases like the above. After all, these four years in a safe space like Smith (or Wellesley, or Simmons, or Agnes Scott) are the only ones we have!
