Hi friends,
We loooove an advice column (from E. Jean Carroll’s decades-long column for Elle to Roxane Gay’s Work Friend), so we tapped poet and professor Ali Shapiro to answer a question about the perplexing feeling one reader experienced after an unexpected lesbian romance.
Occasionally whipsawed by confusion,
The Prism Team
Dear Prism,
I thought I was straight, but I fell in love with a girl I met at my pottery class last summer. Our affair has since ended, and I've been really confused about what it means for my sexuality. I'd never been attracted to a woman before her, and I haven't been attracted to one since. I feel like a fraud if I call myself queer, but also a fraud if I don't? Having some identity confusion. (I'm a cis woman).
Glazed and Confused
Ah, pottery class, that hotbed — kiln? — of lesbian longing! Remember that famous pot-throwing scene from The L Word? Wait, was that Ghost? Ah well. Anyway, Glazed, I’m sorry to hear your affair ended with your heart breaking like a piece of, well, pottery.
Much like the boundaries in a lesbian affair, my advice to you is unlikely to be simple or clear. I’d actually like to start by asking you a question: To whom are you “calling yourself” queer? And why is that audience, real or imagined, making you feel like a fraud?
Perhaps your imposter syndrome is informed by the online discourse around bisexuality, which I know can include some condescension or gatekeeping. If so, ignore the algorithm. In real life, I think you’ll find queer women, a group whose most enduring stereotype might just be vegetarianism, somewhat more relaxed.
Appropriating queer identity can be problematic, of course, but mostly if you’re selling something. If you’re a straight person plotting to make your millions off Live Laugh Lesbian mugs, I guess that’s…kind of annoying. And if you’re a straight person in charge of both designing Target’s Pride Month merch and axing the company’s DEI policies, that’s pretty reprehensible. But the real stakes of calling yourself queer, Glazed, are less that anyone will think you’re a fraud and more that “someone” will ban your books, cancel your drag shows, and/or surveil you based only on your sexuality, to name just a few community benefits. So, from one queer woman to another (oops! I answered your question!): Come on in! The water’s boiling!
Less apocalyptically, I also wonder if it’s possible that you’re thinking about “attraction” in ways that need some updating. Maybe that clay you thought you’d use to make a mug turned into more of a vase. Maybe that vase is actually an abstract sculpture. Maybe the ways the cishetpatriarcho-industrial complex conceptualizes “attraction” just aren’t big enough to hold your desire right now. The woman I’m currently seeing, who used to be married to a man, calls me her boyfriend. When I dated a cis guy in grad school, I still identified as a lesbian. A caterpillar doesn’t just grow wings inside its chrysalis; it melts down into a soup of imaginal cells from which it builds its new butterfly body. Imaginal cells!!! And didn’t Demi Moore kind of look like a lesbian in Ghost, with that adorable haircut??
What I’m getting at, Glazed, is maybe you’re just discovering that the old categories don’t fit you as well as they once did. And that can be confusing, but also freeing. So mend your heart. Throw your pots. Be honest with yourself and others, and the pieces will fall into place.
- Ali “Knows from experience” Shapiro, Relationship Chaos Expert and Prism contributor
Got a question for Ali? Hit us up at [email protected]
Our team’s Monday standup this week was derailed by our version of water cooler gossip: Debate over a comprehensive NYT Sunday Magazine article about ADHD. The TLDR (it’s long, and actually might make you question whether you have ADHD trying to get through it…) is essentially: We’ve maybe been diagnosing and treating ADHD wrong, as evidenced by multiple studies that show that students are more obedient when on medications like Adderall or Ritalin, but not actually learning better (i.e. retaining lessons, thinking critically, etc.), and that ADHD symptoms often disappear when those same students end up in jobs that they actually find interesting (i.e. the call is coming from inside the…classroom).
We have thoughts (as always), but we’re curious about your take, so we made a two minute ADHD(ebate) poll for you. If you have ADHD, are close with someone who does, or are just an ADHD(abbler), now’s your time to add(erall) your perspective, and we’ll include results in a future Postcard.
Playful 🧩
Hope the rest of your Sunday is more springtime flowers than springtime showers.