Am I a Tig or a Sarah?

There is pressure to define yourself within a community. Even just breaking down the LGBTQ+ label you can be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning. If you go for the extended version of the acronym and add the IA to the end, you can be intersex, asexual, or aromantic. The plus sign stands for everything else that we don’t mention in casual conversation because we’d spend so much time naming labels that the actual conversation would get lost. These are the ones people know about. But within each of those, there are more subcategories. Lesbians, for example, can be butch, femme, stone butch, lipstick, chapstick, gold star, b-o-i boi, power, hasbian, until-graduation, baby dyke, etc. etc. and on forever.

I don’t fit into any of these categories. If I HAD to define myself I’d say chapstick lesbian, somewhere on a sliding scale between butch and femme depending on how I’m feeling that day. In a perfect world I’d be more femme but I feel funny wearing skirts too often, don’t wear makeup ever, and am much too outspoken to be considered demure. In a perfect world I’d be more butch but I feel more comfortable buying clothes from the women’s department and, as internally misogynistic as it is, want to feel like “the girl” when I’m dating someone. I can’t be a gold star because I’ve had boyfriends and had the nerve to experience actual feelings for them. I’m not a hasbian because I’m still gay; not a LUG (lesbian until graduation) because I’ve graduated several times. And am still gay. I may have been a baby dyke when I first came out at fifteen, but I’m too experienced to be considered one now, I guess.

One of my favorite shows when I was 19 and a sophomore in college was The Sarah Silverman Program. The show ran from 2007 to 2010, the first two seasons running on Comedy Central and the last season being picked up by Logo, the gay network. I owned the first season on DVD and watched it pretty often, because homework didn’t keep me occupied for nearly as long as it should have. In the second-to-last episode of the season, Sarah Silverman meets a lesbian police officer. Sarah experiences confusing feelings that she believes are attraction to the officer, played by comedian Tig Notaro. So, Sarah spends the whole episode transforming herself into a lesbian. Everything she does is very stereotypical. She cuts her hair into a mullet, dresses in flannel and combat boots, and sings angry songs about nonexistent ex-girlfriends open mics and accompanies herself with her well-worn acoustic guitar.

I recognize the humor and understand that it’s tongue-in-cheek comedy, just like the episode where Sarah becomes a pro-life activist after making friends with the protesters while she is waiting for her fourth abortion, not realizing that pro-life means anti-abortion. The whole show is over-the-top, definitely not to be taken seriously. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder if the flannel-wearing tough guy was the stereotype that I was expected to fulfill as a queer woman.

Before Sarah transforms herself into the perfect stereotype of a gay lady, she’s just like me: nondescript. Jeans and t-shirts, natural or no makeup, kind of funny, kind of outspoken, dates sometimes but isn’t obsessed with finding “the one,” likes to eat brunch with her friends. Then suddenly she decides to become a Lesbian with a capital L. This involves altering the way she looks, acts, and speaks because the one example she has is Officer Tig, who leans more toward the butch end of the spectrum. At nineteen, I was still heavily experimenting with my identity. I had dreadlocks, wore sunglasses inside during parties, and spent a large part of my creative writing classes sharing angst-filled journal entries about both boys and girls who I had kissed once and was now hopelessly in love with. In a way, I was delighted to see a representation of gay women on mainstream TV, but didn’t want to admit I was confused about who I should try to become in order to fit in with the community. If Sarah Silverman was like me when she was being her straight self, was being myself, but liking girls, not enough to make me gay?

I wasn’t one of those people who had never met a gay person before. I was raised liberally and spent most of my time in the dance and musical theater world, where there are a lot of LGBTQ+ folks. I spent the majority of high school as an out bisexual. I knew that gay people come in all shapes and sizes. But like experiencing diverse body shapes and sizes around you every day, only to look at a magazine and see only models who are 5’9” and 100 pounds, it occurred to me that maybe “mainstream” lesbianism meant only one thing: masculinity.

So I experimented with how masculine I could be while remaining comfortable in my own skin. Not very masculine at all, as it turns out. I’ve always liked my hair shorter, but I started buzzing it instead of going for the traditionally female styles. Looking in the mirror then made me feel "too butch" unless I accompanied the look with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick, but doing makeup on a daily basis has never been my thing. To compensate for the haircut, I put away all my flannel shirts until my hair reached my shoulders again. Instead I would wear dresses, flowy peasant-style blouses, anything to femme myself up and distract from my severe hairlessness, even though it was an active choice. When my hair grew back to a length that wasn’t as physically comfortable, but much more societally acceptable, I would allow myself to pull out my baggy jeans and converse once again.

It took me way too long to connect that when people are trying to figure out who you are, they rely heavily on the way you look. I probably get mistaken for a straight woman more often than not, because most would consider me more feminine than masculine. I don’t have a problem with being mistaken for straight, and I do realize that the mix-up is a form of privilege. But if someone asks, I’ll politely correct them, outing myself as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. I’m not undercover, I’m not hiding from anyone, but I’m also not willing to compromise what makes me comfortable in order to subscribe to how gay women “should” present themselves.

As an adult, I’ve been lucky enough to tuck myself into a secure liberal bubble. My family has always been supportive of anything I’ve wanted to do, from dying my hair blue to dating girls to impulsively taking a job several states away. I work at the library where the employees are notoriously liberal and inclusive. Like my parents, librarians are overjoyed to help you succeed in anything you’re interested in, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or anyone else. Everyone I talk to on a regular basis is supportive of me as a person. Not me as a godparent, or me as a librarian, or me as a coffee addict, or me as someone who desperately wants to dress professionally but can’t climb out of the jeans-and-graphic-tees rabbit hole. Like being a queer woman, these are all facets of my personality, not the sole thing that identifies me.