Invisible

I’m constantly reminded that I’m invisible. Not because I’m 5’1”, or because I have superhuman powers, but because I’m a queer woman married to a man. I don’t have a sandwich board I can wear to correct this condition, and I don’t have a bell I can ring. I just look like a straight person in a heteronormative relationship, and it’s kind of a bummer.

Okay, my relationship doesn’t look totally heteronormative. I don’t wear an engagement ring, for one thing. I didn’t even want one. My husband probably does more housework than I do, he does almost all the cooking, and I’m a much bigger sports fan than he is, so I’m the one with my feet up on the couch, watching the game or the race at the weekend. True, friends find our many stereotype inversions surprising, but somehow that doesn’t make people wonder about me. I’ve been asked before whether he is secretly gay (apparently men aren’t supposed to like shopping for shoes), but nobody asks the same question about me.

Strangely, I never encounter this problem in the queer communities I inhabit. My non-straight friends are perfectly comfortable with thinking of me as not straight. They’re also fine with my relationship. They seem to get the point: if you’re going to tear down the walls dividing who gets to love whom, it doesn’t make sense to go back and erect new ones. I’m not saying that living the examined life is always guaranteed to produce a more enlightened human; I’ve met my share of jerks in the community. But if you’ve been forced to question the assumptions you were raised with in order to integrate your new understanding of yourself, particularly with something as central as sexuality, perhaps you’re more open to the idea that life doesn’t stick to a script.

Not everyone gets or likes that idea. The flack I get in my life is from straight women, and it’s mostly related to my deviations from script. “Why don’t you make him get you an engagement ring?” they ask. “You could still get one now. Make him get you a big diamond, at least half a carat.” Most of the time, I don’t want to hurt their feelings (they all have rings, of course), so I don’t explain to them that I dislike the idea of wearing a symbol that he doesn’t also wear, that I can’t disconnect the engagement ring from the idea of dowry, that I would feel like chattel, and that it’s ridiculous to cast me and him into such rigid gender roles. In my mind, we are two people, not a man and a woman. But that would just confuse and alienate them, I convince myself. So instead I laugh lightly about washing dishes all the time, and change the subject. I’m not doing myself or the women in my life any favours, but pretending my brand of feminism doesn’t exist is easier than launching a one-woman crusade. So I negate myself, loathe myself for it, and feel lonely.

I have even managed to feel negated at Pride, one of the most inclusive spaces imaginable. Once again, my fellow queers didn’t instigate this feeling. But at Pride in 2000, I encountered a preacher condemning the beautiful people around me for one day, one day out of the year, openly and proudly being who they were. Then he looked at me strolling hand in hand with my husband and praised us, saying our relationship was a beautiful thing.

Most people aren’t actually that homophobic. They don’t have to be. Most people, in fact, mean well. Very few people intend to marginalise me; very few realise they’re hurting me. The feeling of invisibility hurts not because such cuts are deep, but because they’re tiny and everywhere and all the time. Because they’re tiny, sometimes I’m not even sure they happened. But they add up. Every time I get a forwarded e-mail about the supposed differences between men and women, I cringe. Every time I share a dressing room with a friend who doesn’t know about me and off-handedly says it’s a good thing we’re all girls here, I wince. And every time someone makes a joke about gay people, even a joke that isn’t malicious (and most aren’t), I struggle with whether to comment and embarrass a friend or to ignore one more tiny cut.