I am in love with a womyn - that is what is important to me. Never mind if she's butch, femme or androgynous, what matters is that she is the sensitive, kind and loving womyn I have chosen to be with.
When I was in college, I used to think that I had to identify with either the butches or the femmes. Femmes weren't considered lesbian, but butches were. I know, I know...sounds really weird, but that's how things were. And even if my mother hated my baggy jeans and big t-shirts, I chose to be butch and that was a dangerous choice.
I studied in an all-girls Catholic college and as far as the student handbook was concerned, lesbianism was not permitted and was punishable by expulsion.
It was so easy for them to kick out the butches. To them, the femmes were still "normal" and it was the butches who were deviants. How sad it is that many people still believe that femmes are actually straight. This is more often based on the assumption that all femmes like lesbians who look male because in reality, they are still attracted to men. I disagree.
Of course, there are femmes who believe that their partners are actually men trapped in women's bodies, now that's a different story altogether - and I will talk about that next time.
Somehow I managed to stay and graduate from college before they thought of actually kicking me out. I was lucky.
It was not until I enrolled in graduate school that I learned much more about myself. I joined a university based lesbian organization, first one in my country in fact, and little did I know that I was to discover that there was more than one kind of lesbian.
The first and most important lesson was defining a lesbian. A lesbian is a womyn who loves other womyn. So to identify as lesbian, I had to first identify as a womyn, then as a womyn-loving-womyn. Imagine all those years in college, I was pressured to look, think and act male because I thought being lesbian meant becoming a man. Of course I was very happy to find out that I need not identify as a man at all, and that being lesbian was even acknowledging a different and special kind of femininity.
I immediately identified as butch, based on my physical appearance. The only problem there was that some other butch womyn thought of me as someone "in-the-middle." They pointed out that I was too feminine to be butch (very true). From that time on, I just stopped labeling myself and decided, that if I should be labeled, I'd be called an androgynous lesbian.
The process I went through helped me get over a lot of my hang-ups and insecurities. It helped define me not only as a lesbian but as person as well. I needed to know the truth and when I found it, I felt better about myself. The people who hear the story of my realization have a difficult time breaking their thoughts away from the stereotypical definitions they were used to believing. Those stereotypes have done nothing but make people afraid of us and call us freaks.
After educating ourselves, I think that society needs to be educated about homosexuality too. We can't deny that there are homosexuals who have given us a bad name but it's our chance to prove that a great majority of our minority is composed of good, responsible and respectful people.
Fire is a twenty-something writer-entrepreneur who's also one of the founders of INDIGO Philippines. You can reach her thru firewomyn@iname.com