Fridae

Many of my gay friends commented that I would make a better lesbian that I do a gay man.

I'm a fan of Ellen Degeneres and I own every k. d. lang, Indigo Girls, Sinead O'Connor and Melissa Etheridge album ever released.

Blame it on some rogue lesbian gene roaming my body, but I still regard Thelma & Louise as one of the greatest movies of all times.

Yet like many gay men, I have never given much thought as to why gay men and lesbians in general seldom do anything together.

That is, until last week.

Over the weekend, I decided to drag my lesbian friend, Daphne, to the hottest gay nightspot for a night of decadent fun. Now, Daphne, is a lipstick lesbian with a body straight out of Baywatch and I have known her to be able to slay the most persistent of dykes with a withering glance.

When we arrived, Daphne was the only lady there (in the biological sense). To say that the atmosphere was unfriendly would be an understatement. Even while we were standing in a corner trying to enjoy our watered down drinks and groove to the music, we were treated to a stream of hostile stares and sniggers all around.

Throughout our rather short stay at the club, Daphne has had the unpleasant experience of having the terms "transvestite", "drag queen" and "fag hag" thrown at her well made-up face. To make matters worse, I have had a few "friends" who came up to me to console me and ask if I had to attend a Chinese wedding dinner earlier on and brought her along as my "cover" or if I was trying to "butch it up" by bringing a "girl" (a term to be spit out much like a cobra does its venom) to a gay club.

The last straw came when a particularly high dancing queen took a break from his carefully choreographed routine on his podium and came right up to Daphne to ask if she was a "real girl". We left a short while after that.

Needless to say, the whole trip was a fiasco. Instead of making Daphne feel like a part of a larger homosexual community, I have succeeded in alienating her and killing off whatever vestiges of faith she had in the gay community. And worse, I seemed to have confirmed her suspicions that to be truly welcomed in the gay scene, you must possess the body of a Greek god, outward masculinity and a brontosaurus sized dick.

I was therefore surprised when Daphne announced one Thursday night that we were going to what was supposed to be THE event in every rug muncher's diary - Lesbian Night at a popular nightspot. I thought to myself: Payback time.

I was skeptical at first as I was painfully aware that, compared to the number of clubs and pubs available to gay men, there are very few places where women can go to be alone with other women.

When we arrived, I experienced a flutter of panic. There were hundreds of women thronging the sidewalk - with some looking like beefed-up versions of Bea Arthur with crew cuts.

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I tried to be inconspicuous but nothing can change the fact that I towered over most of them and have biceps the size of their calves. In short, I did not blend. And it did not help matters that I was convinced that every dyke there was glaring at me with grim thoughts of assassination.

In the cavernous club, I uttered a silent prayer of thanks for having had enough sense to don my Xena: The Warrior Princess T-shirt as proof of sisterhood. Daphne and I were getting our drinks at the bar when a scary butch with a lip ring stopped in front of me and looked me up and down, as though estimating how long she'd need to take me down. Just as I was mentally preparing myself for an assault, she did exactly the opposite - she smiled and said "It's nice to see a member of our male counterparts here". After throwing a playful punch at my shoulder, she disappeared into the crowd.

Now that the tension I had been feeling was broken, I started to look around me. On the dance floor and in the club were lesbians of all shapes and sizes, ranging from young giggling schoolgirls to mature women, women in revealing lycra dresses dancing alongside women in combat boots. And more surprisingly, I felt a real sense of community unlike the rather artificial scene at most gay clubs where everyone is more concerned with showing off the results of hours spent at the gym and under tanning lamps.

Throughout the night, a few lesbians came up to me to tell me that they like my T-shirt. Countless others smiled at me and one even asked me for a dance (much to the annoyance of Daphne who loves hogging the limelight). I suppose there were some lesbians at the club that night who objected to my being there. But if there were, they were kind enough not to let me know and gracious enough to let it slide.

More amazingly, it seems to me that these lesbians were all there because they wanted to celebrate together what we spend so much of our time fighting for - the ability to be homosexual without having to live up to the standards of other people (both gay and straight). And that, I felt, is something that most gay men seemed to have misplaced as they become caught up with seeking love/sex/ONS or attaining the ideal career/body/orgasm.

Having said that, in spite our biological divide, gay men and lesbians do have this in common: we both have our plates full trying to fight homophobia and other forms of discrimination. Instead of widening this divide, it's high time we work together to end the battles within our own "family" and present a collective front to society and to the world.

To do so, we must stop thinking in terms of gay men and lesbian women and start thinking in terms of gay people. Only then, can we, with "pride", proclaim that any form of progress has been made for the gay movement.

So why hasn't that happened yet?

Well, I have a theory.

It seems to me that just as girls would shoot up six inches and develop breasts before us boys need to shave or experience a deepening of voice, our lesbians counterparts are still waiting for us gay men to catch up.