The Problem with Queering Our Love Without Queering Our Lives

Being gay is not enough. We've got to be queer, too.

Photo by Rohan Odhiambo on Unsplash

Two and a half years ago, I decided to be abstinent and took a break from dating. During that time, I have gotten really clear about what I want and what I don’t want ever again. Earlier this week, at my weekly appointment with my therapist, I was sharing with her about how hard it has been dating. It revealed some truths for me that have been resting in my soul.

We talked about my last four dating experiences: one in early 2024, one in late 2024, one in late 2025, and the last one just a few weeks ago. These experiences were all with masculine presenting women and nonbinary people. I explained to her that I have been disappointed with my experiences because these women and enbies often seemed so uninterested. Or, their interest in me seemed to be primarily sexual. In these interactions, I was left feeling objectified and unseen. It concerned me because these were people who looked like me and, presumably, loved like me.

As an AuDHD person who is polyamorous and demisexual (meaning that I need to have an emotional connection with someone before I am able to develop a physical or sexual attraction), it has been difficult connecting with anyone. Not only that, the subtle expectations of a heteronormative connection, where one of us is “the man” and the other is “the woman” has often left my nonbinary, gender-agnostic-self dazed and confused. I often find myself wondering why so many of us lesbians and pansexual folks cleave to the normative standards that rarely serve us. The obsession with marriage (aka “I'm looking for a wife” culture) has left so many of us non-straights in a strange holding pattern cycling through potential partners like Pokémon cards. And, I don’t want to catch them all.

“I have to be honest,” I told my therapist. “When I dated men, I had a much better and more fulfilling dating life.”

“Why do you think that is?” she asked.

“Well, I've been thinking about this a lot. When I dated men, they saw my inherent worth. They knew I didn't really like men like that and that they were lucky to even be getting my attention. They treated me like a goddess, a queen. They always knew that they were not a necessary part of my life and that I would not be codependent with them,” I explained. “I have never had a woman or nonbinary person treat me that way.”

“Jenn, what was different about those men, in your opinion?” she asked me.

“Well, they were all a little queer. Like, they were mostly straight but they were open to a queer politic. They didn't agree with the rigid standards of gender and sexuality. And, they understood that I move in inherently queer ways, too.”

“That's an important observation, Jenn. It sounds to me like, though you are romantically and sexually attracted to women and nonbinary people, you understand that being gay is not enough. They have to be queer, too.”

Yes, my therapist has bars. And, that conversation really illuminated some things for me that have been submerged within all of my dating experiences. I have been dating people, mostly women, who have a heteronormative hangover. They, whether they mean to or not, subscribe to archaic ideals about love and connection. They believe in the “head of the household” mentality rather than in the concept of interdependent living. They see love as a hierarchy with rigid rules about who does what, who dresses what way, and who is “masc” or “fem.”

They may be gay but they aren't queer politically. And that matters.

Toxic masculinity in Black lesbian life

During my most recent relationship, I learned the subtle ways that misogyny can enter a lesbian dynamic. For example, my then-partner had a group of masculine lesbians she referred to as “the boys” or “the guys.” When we all went out together, the masculine lesbians took separate pictures from the feminine lesbians (who I got slotted in with because I was dating a masculine woman). Though I am nonbinary and use they/them pronouns, none of them ever acknowledged it. I was “she” and “her” whether I liked it or not. And, when one of “the boys” began touching me at parties and grabbed other women’s breasts, it was excused as long as it was happening to one of the “fem” women.

I learned in that relationship, more than any other relationship I have had in my life, that Black women — even those who identify as feminists and abolitionists — reproduce toxic masculinity through gender norms, patriarchy, and misogynoir, often, unknowingly.

It wasn’t only in that relationship, either. Some of the most virulent and persistent toxic masculinity I have experienced in my life has come from masculine Black lesbians. Now, to be clear, this is not to say that masculine Black lesbians are any more toxic than cisgender heterosexual men. They aren't. I just haven't dated many men. I have had more relationships with women and nonbinary people. So, my sample is compressed and can’t be fully representative.

While I have experienced toxic masculinity, sexual harassment and abuse, and violence from heterosexual men, I have never expected them to be anything other than the men they are. I have never been under the impression that men are feminists or that they have any conception of how to be in community with women and nonbinary people outside of sexual and transactional behaviors. I don't believe them when they perform solidarity. I am never convinced. I know that it is always conditional. I am careful and cautious with men because I know their capacity and propensity toward aligning with oppressive gender norms that harm women, femmes, and other non-normative folks.

But with other women and nonbinary people, I have often encountered their assumption and expectation that we hold the same political, sexual, and normative values. And, I often fail to confirm that we are aligned beyond mere attraction. I have dated more “touch me not” women whose ideas of pleasure were rooted in a masc/fem binary than I would like to admit. One woman specifically told me, “I would never open my legs during sex. That shit is gay af.” I have never had a man tell me that I “emasculate” them. However, I have had several women say this to me. I have never had a man call me aggressive but women, whether I am dating them or not, have used this language about me frequently.

What I have come to realize is that the straight men I have dated have all been queerer than the gay women and nonbinary folks I have dated.

Let me explain: these heterosexual men were comfortable with me being taller than them, with my masculinity and androgyny, with my smooth bald head and my critique of gender norms. These men never asked me to “be the woman” in the relationship even though I was, in fact, the woman in the relationship. They saw themselves as equal partners with me, never expecting me to carry a heavier load because I was perceived as feminine.

I have to take some responsibility for this. I clearly have been drawn to women and nonbinary folks who are not truly queer. Now, we are all caught up to the conversation with my therapist.

What is a politics of queerness?

This is where my revelation and reflection enter the chat.

Whenever I’m exploring the intersections of my ideas (theory) and how I live out those ideas (practice), I turn to Black Feminist thinkers. As such, my ideas about queerness stem from the work of lesbian feminist, movement builder, and political science scholar Cathy J. Cohen who trained me.

In her canonical work on queer politics titled “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” she writes, “the label ‘queer’ symbolizes an acknowledgement that through our existence and everyday survival we embody sustained and multisited resistance to systems (based on dominant constructions of race and gender) that seek to normalize our sexuality, exploit our labor, and constrain our visibility. At the intersection of oppression and resistance lies the radical potential of queerness to challenge and bring together all those deemed marginal and all those committed to liberatory politics” (1997, 440).

In summary, queerness is bigger than who we sleep with. It is about who we are when we get up. Queerness is inherently about reconfiguring gender and how we experience it. It is about non-normative family building that doesn’t require marriage or sex. Queerness is about finding safety and security in working together to tear down systems of oppression because we have the courage to challenge our own ways of knowing and being.

I return to this explication of the power of queerness regularly as, when I read it for the first time, it unlocked a deep-seated discomfort I always held as a Black queer person. There were always intersections of politics and sexuality that felt rigid and unaccepting of my queer body, queer love, and queer ways. I grew up confused when people would say “do you like boys or girls?” without asking me first what my gender was and if I believed in any of it to begin with. Navigating the world as an agender/genderflux person (someone who feels no gender at all or sometimes feels surges of gender identification triggered by external or internal stimuli), I never felt comfortable moving in queer spaces without knowing who my queer people really were.

I sometimes feel lucky that I never watched my parents in a normative marriage, one marked by rules and roles that bind us to one another like puzzle pieces. They divorced when I was four years old and, for better or worse, my mother focused on making me a hyper-independent, adultified, parentified Black girl child. Instead of active dads and men in my life, I saw Black women working together in queer ways: caretaking for one another, helping each other during times of sickness, sending over a plate when someone was low on cash for the month. I grew up watching Black women taking care of one another because they understood that men would never “complete them.” Perhaps that’s why I never desired to get married (even though I eventually would get married).

This upbringing forms the backdrop of my queer platonic marriage. A marriage that has lasted for twenty years and endured sickness and health. That’s why I still struggle when I meet Black queer people seeking to build the same kind of marriages their heteronormative parents had 40 years ago. This conception overlooks all the ways that women were expected to “find a husband” 40 years ago just for mere survival. Women couldn’t even have their own credit cards or purchase a home on their own until 1974. The socio-historical contexts that necessitated heteronormative marriage no longer exist.

Queer folks in this social moment actively trying to make straight normative households that replicate gender and power differentials seems so counterintuitive to me. In a moment when we can build families and relationships that serve our queer ways of being, why conform to a norm that left generations of Black women isolated, divorced, and unloved?

What’s the point of being queer if your dream is to reproduce institutions and models that harm us?

I don’t know. There is a part of me that wants to marry a woman or non-binary person one day. Not formally through the processes of the state, but in a commitment ceremony of some sort. I want to build a life with someone who loves and looks like me. I want that life to be fundamentally queer, un-reliant on the expectations of anyone but us. I know that it’s possible and I’ve made the mistake of trying to force fit every woman I have ever loved into that dream, that vision for myself.

My therapist is right. Whoever that person is, she/they will have to be queer and gay. For me, the two are mutually inclusive. And, now, I know better than to take queerness for granted.