On the “Girl Crush”
A few weeks ago I met with a member of my undergraduate alumni association. She was doing outreach for the university and as a dyed-in-the-wool Wolverine, I was more than happy to have a coffee with her and sing the praises of the tiny arts & social justice-oriented Residential College I enrolled in during my four years there.
As we were leaving she said something that struck me, and it began with, “I don’t mean to girl crush on you, but…”
I didn’t really even hear the rest of what she said, I was so taken aback by the term “girl crush.” It was something I hadn’t really thought about or said in years… but suddenly memories started rushing back to me.
Memories of the tall woman (whose name I still remember) with wild, dark curly hair who used to walk her Great Dane across campus and who was in my peer-tutoring seminar. I always used to try to sit next to her in class. I wanted to dress just like her, look just like her, I even bought a kind of lip balm because she looked so cool when she put it on! I always told myself this was a “girl crush.” I just wanted to “be like her.”
I had a friend in college who was magnetic—people just loved her and when she spoke to you it was like you were the only person in the world. I loved the way she moved about in the world— with such intensity and truth and vulnerability. Total girl crush.
There was a young woman I met in my master’s program at NYU. She too was someone I wanted to be. I wanted to live like she did, write like she did, sing and dance and move just like her. Total girl crush.
I was born in 1983. I didn’t know what “gay” much less “queer” was until middle school. I remember holding hands with female friends in the hallway, until Ellen DeGeneres came out on the cover of TIME Magazine in 1997. The next week I was holding hands with a friend and someone called us “Ellens” and I never did it again.
We didn’t talk about gayness or queerness in school or at home, either positive or negative, I just knew the basics: gay was “a boy who loves boys” or lesbian, “a girl who loves girls” and that was that.
It wasn’t until high school when I learned anything about bi-sexuality. To be honest, no one I knew took it at all seriously. It was more like, “Pick a side! Be gay! That’s great! Be straight! That’s great too! But bi-sexuality isn’t real…”
In college I totally fell for bi-erasure. In the early 2000’s people I knew (gay and straight) just simply didn’t believe bi-sexuality existed. The idea was that girls “experiment” in college, or would make out with other girls because “guys think it’s hot.”
And that “bi-sexual” men, were really just gay guys who weren’t ready to embrace their sexuality. That “bi” for men, was just a step on the way to gay.
So I had my “girl crushes” and still identified as straight.
It wasn’t until I read a lot of queer theory, read a lot of queer books, saw a lot of queer films and television shows and plays that I began to realize how much of a spectrum sexuality really was…
Which brings me back to the “girl crush.”
What if all those “girl crushes” we all had throughout our lives weren’t just platonic crushes in which we wanted her hair, her top, her jeans, her vibe, her style, her confidence… What if what we wanted was… her???
We need to normalize same sex desire outside of the gay/ straight binary and in so many ways we finally are. We can be romantically attracted to one sex, but physically attracted to another. We can be heteroflexible (mostly straight but sometimes attracted to the same sex). We can be pansexual (attracted to people and not “parts”). We can be equally attracted to both genders, but only romantically attracted to one. We. Have. Options.
What makes me sad is all the people, like myself, who pigeonholed themselves into straightness… because we knew we weren’t gay, but never let ourselves explore our “girl crushes” for what they might have been… queer desire. Simple as that.
We can be LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay bi-sexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual), the plus covering all of the many sexual identities there are out there. It’s important to remember that there is a difference between physical/ sexual attraction and romantic attraction and that, like gender, sexuality is a spectrum.
So yeah. Next time I think I have a “girl crush” I’m going to call it what it is. Same-sex attraction. Because here’s the thing I didn’t have the words for when I was called an “Ellen” in the 7th grade. I’m heteroflexible.
To put it in terms that “Schitt’s Creek” fans will certainly understand: I pretty much only drink red wine… but every once in a while, there’s a bottle of white that seems just too good to pass up.
