It’s long been
argued that lesbians are invisible.
 When your hear this
argument, you’ll generally hear these words thrown into the conversation as
well: ‘patriarchal society’, ‘hegemony’, and ‘dominant culture’, blah blah
blah.
But if you walk
the streets of this town you’ll see that lesbians are anything but invisible;
the ones that look like lesbians, that is. The lesbian who looks like a lesbian
can seem ubiquitous even when there are only a handful of them within a five block
radius, because the lesbian look stands out like the facade of RMIT’s city
campus.
Even if you apply
horse blinkers, there’s just no avoiding it.
The lesbian look
is what causes people who don’t have the lesbian look to remark, ‘Why do they
have to look like that?’.
It’s an in-ya-face display of brazen sexuality that
shows no signs of phasing itself out. We’ve looked liked this for decades with
only slight variations; in fact for some, who are like characters straight out
of Stone Butch Blues, no change
whatsoever has been required for their wardrobe since the 1950s.
So, why do we
cling to the short back and sides, the boyish clothing, the boots made for
kicking in some serious head? It’s an austere look to say the least; it’s
certainly not soft; and the only comparative style would be that of the
flamboyant gay male, but I’m afraid he’s thin on the ground these days. It’s only
the ghost of the dandy we’re left with now, and it’s a fact that Oscar Wilde has
been turning in his grave since the early 90s because of modern gay males’
aspirations.
But the hardcore
lesbian remains.
It is true there’s
been some resistance to the lesbian look in recent years, with cries of ‘I want
to be with a woman who looks like a woman’; and there are plenty of people who have
a strong investment in blending in. One needs look no further than the Los Angeles Girl Bar
photo gallery to see an example of women who have no time for the traditional
lesbian look at all. While they may think long hair and excessive make-up is an
act of revolution, I, on first look, thought it was a strippers’ convention. A
heterosexual strippers’ convention that is.
Now, I am as
guilty of liking women who look like women as anyone else; everyone likes women
who look like women, except for that one select group of women whose eyes are
only for the boyish girl. And thank god for that special interest group,
because the rest of the world deplores them.
Why, just today,
sauntering down the street with a Miller shirt undone and softly blown open by
the wind to reveal a freshly ‘napisanned’ wifebeater, I walked past a group of
workman, a precarious situation for both women who look like women and the lesbian look aficionado; and
before they could offer the obligatory ‘DYKE!’, I simply smiled.
They never smiled
back, just shifted uneasily in their boots.
I rounded the
corner into the city alleyway filled with the usual lunchtime crowd of women
who the women from LA Girl Bar would love and the men who love them too; and came
across a girl who looked like she would have a collection of wifebeaters to
match my own.
There we stood like
the RMIT façade, both at the mercy of our appearance, for better or worse.
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