This is the obligatory lesbian-blog post on silly questions that straight people ask lesbians.
Most posts in this genre are annoyed or censorious. (On the other hand, Loserville has a bemused and amusing list.)
Those questions don’t annoy my Love or me.
We actually like them. (OK, I don’t want to be asked about my sex life. Thank goodness, nobody has asked me anything like, “How do you do it?” I would pity any straight woman who would need to ask that. Or is sleeping with a guy who would need to ask that.)
Perhaps it’s because we’re unusually tolerant of our fellow sinners.
Perhaps it’s because we haven’t gotten a lot of those questions. I’ve only been out of the closet for about six months. My Love has only been out for about a year. We live in New York. We’re both private people. We don’t hide that we’re gay, but we don’t make a point of it, either.
Still, we come from a place where lesbians don’t exist. We’re probably the first out lesbians most people back home have ever met. We have gotten some of those questions from family and friends.
But they’ve never been hostile. Every time either of us has been asked, it’s been in honest good will, honest ignorance and honest curiosity. They may be questions that nobody would ask a straight person, but they know the answer for a straight person.
If they’re not hostile, we’ve already won the most important battle. If they’re tolerant and interested enough to be curious, we’ve won the second most important battle. We’d rather build on that (and have a tolerant little laugh later).
I do not mind ignorance. Maybe there is no cure for stupid, but there is for ignorance.
It’s just people trying to understand something new to them. Do unto them as you would have them do onto you. Tolerate as you would be tolerated.
We need all the friends we can get.
Family Values Lesbian 