GenQ - For the not so straight individual

Truly, I am a romantic at heart. I get gushy about people being happy in love. I watch movies that have happy endings where the right people end up together, and I hope that love is all you need. Now logically, I know that there is no happy ever after. That life is a little more complicated than our story books tell us. Still I hope behind everything that they are wrong.

I know that life isn’t easy and that you have to work at it to be happy, that ultimately happiness is a journey not a destination. All this I know intellectually, but it doesn’t stop me going weak at the knees when my girlfriend buys me a surprise present or makes something specially for me, or when I am watching telly and the people I want to get together do.

But love for me is not universal. I find that as the culture is saturated with heterosexual love that I crave something else. I crave representation of the love I have for my girlfriend and find that mostly I like to watch anything that depicts love between people of the same sex. My happily ever after is with two girls. I find that love depicted in a heterosexual relationship feels different, like it somehow invalidates the love I have, so our movie collection has as many films that are about homosexual/queer issues as possible. I guess, I am interested in why this is for me, why love can’t just be all I need?

As I glance at my bookshelf I see the books I have had since I was a kid and not one of them depicts a love between people of the same sex, even if I did have a very liberal upbringing. Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie are the only exceptions that I can think of and even that is a little ambiguous. I had a class the other day and we talked about the problems of representation of the monstrous feminine within children’s literature yet this phenomenon exists with anything that is outside the hetero norm. I mean, even the pets are gendered correctly in children’s books. No wonder love is continually shown as being heterosexual.

So, if I am a romantic, where does that leave me? In a quandary. I want people to be happy and yet I want that happiness to be universal, to represent some of the difference in the world. I want to be able to buy my girlfriend a card that represents our love; I want to be able to declare it from the roof tops. I want to live happily ever after and to have that shown somewhere other than the fringes of the hetero norm. I want to be able to buy my future children a book that shows two women in a relationship. I want to see happiness in the heterosexual relationships and not feel threatened by its representations that overtly and covertly constrict the life I lead. I want happily ever after to become something that is represented as something to work for, that it’s a journey that can lead you anywhere and that might just take you somewhere you don’t expect to go.