GOLDEN HOUR

Rewriting history by Billie Gold

I’m not usually one for an internet row, especially during a time where everyone is wound so tight the term ‘triggered’ is being thrown around like hand sanitiser, but the other day I found myself deep into a two-hour long row over something I found personally abhorrent.

Since the beginning of time people have speculated over other people’s sexuality, and described them to fit their narrative. It wasn’t so long ago that women who were quite obviously homosexual and happily partnered were being referred to as “Gal Pals”. How many times have you read something like: “Mildred’s family grew increasingly disappointed with her inability to choose a suitor, and eventually died an old maid by her best friend Gwen’s side with whom she lived for many years before her spinsterly demise.” Woe betide them to see poor Mildred as happily partnered with a woman. They even found statues in Pompeii with the words “master and his slave died next to each other in an embrace”, when it was quite obvious the two men had been lovers.

It wasn’t so long ago that women who were quite obviously homosexual and happily partnered were being referred to as “Gal Pals”.

The blind refusal to witness a homosexual relationship has plagued history for many years, and has thankfully reached an era where we can call a spade a spade, and no one really cares who you’re with, until I came across a seemingly innocuous Instagram page.

Interrupting my mindless scrolling was a post that read in bright red letters “Marilyn Monroe was a LESBIAN”. I looked at the source, which is one that I have followed for quite some time, and saw that this was a guest post from a page called Turn Lesbian Now!. I obviously thought that this was a clear attempt at satire, but upon reading the page, half shocked and half amused, I saw that it was run by two recently ‘out’ lesbian women in a relationship, and their mission was to gather pictures of celebrities who had had the faintest sniff of Sapphic behaviour and out them.

Now, ordinarily this wouldn’t be much of a problem for me and I would laugh it off, but upon pointing out that Marilyn Monroe was not in fact a lesbian, and had many lovers which included both genders, and that this in the very least is bisexual erasure, I was met with an incredibly defensive woman who claimed that men are useless and that women do it better anyway so what does it matter.

I am not sure whether this woman knew she was, in fact writing back to a gay woman, but bisexual erasure seems to be the only acceptable thing left to be homophobic about in the LGBTQ+ community

Actually, I continued, it matters a lot. I am not sure whether this woman knew she was in fact writing back to a gay woman, but bisexual erasure seems to be the only acceptable thing left to be homophobic about in the LGBTQ+ community.

Here was a woman effectively rewriting people’s history to fit her own cause and her own experience, and isn’t that what homophobia is in the first place?

I wonder if when people are choosing how to rewrite their own history, does being authentic to oneself include trashing other sexualities? I sincerely hope not.