The Lesbian Thing

I’m writing a book at the moment. It's a fairly extreme horror novel inspired primarily by horror flicks of my youth (so, the mid-80s) but wilder and, hopefully, populated with more interesting characters. Anyway, the two main characters are women and they end up falling in love with each other. A friend of mine read the manuscript for the book and liked it a lot but said, “You know, you’ve really played out that lesbian thing.”
You see, he’s read various other things that I’ve written and, since I tend to write about lesbians often, he’s become familiar with (and, apparently, tired of) the lesbian relationships that I write about. He’s one of my very best friends and I’m glad that we’re close enough that he could tell me how he really felt but his statement left me troubled. You see, I don’t see my lesbian characters as simply pornographic toys to play with (although they serve that purpose as well, I suppose.) I see them as fully-fledged characters with actions, motivations and desires not *too* much outside the realms of possibility.
Let me tell you a little about what I think about your average perception of lesbians (from a male point-of-view.) The male idea of “lesbian” falls into three major categories:
1) Hatred. These are your men who resent the fact that women can survive and have a fulfilling sex life. This challenges their worth (in their opinion) and it scares them.
2) Denial. These are your men who don’t believe that lesbians really exist at all. We’ll call this the “Bankie” syndrome (in honor of Jason Lee’s character in “Chasing Amy.”) They can’t accept that women would be able to “resist the power of the cock” so they must be simply pretending whenever they fool around with another woman. Many of these men do not mind enjoying watching two women have sex but this kind of foolish activity is, to them, “foreplay for the REAL THING.” To be sure, there are many women who have sex or play around with another woman just for laughs and to turn on their boyfriends, but the men afflicted with Bankie Syndrome somehow seem to think that an actual lesbian is a kind of myth, like unicorns or Bigfoot. The interesting thing about most of these guys is that they totally accept the concept of homosexual men (again, the power of the cock) even though they, of course, aren’t one themselves. I can picture them now… “What? You kidding me? Course not! I NEVER think about other guys in that way, I’m just saying that, you know, there are guys out there like that!”
3) Possibility. These are your men who really enjoy watching women have sex together, primarily in pornography and the like. It turns them on.
Now, many of the men from the third category like to imagine themselves joining the two women during sex. This is a common male fantasy and has been documented to death.
Let me tell you how I differ from this. I do not imagine myself joining in with the two hypothetical loving making women in any fantasy that I have. To me, this would completely ruin the fantasy. What gets me excited about lesbianism is the idea that two women would be so turned-on by each other, so passionate about each other, that they simply MUST make love (and, hopefully, pursue a relationship.) If I, or any other man, would join them during sex, this idea would be completely destroyed. Now, it becomes about cock (see categories 1 or 2) and not about lesbian love.
This feeling of mine extends to such an extreme that I don’t think I would even enjoy watching two women actually make love in front of me. I imagine that I would keep thinking, “Why are they letting me watch?” I would soon, no doubt, come to believe that they were *trying* to turn me on and, if that were the case, the once beautiful sex act that they were engaged in would become a fairly standard heterosexual act, because they would be doing it to turn me, a man, on. Even if this wasn’t the case, even if the women simply DIDN’T CARE who was watching them, I would still probably think that this was the case. I’m not saying that I’m unique in thinking this. I’m sure that there are other men who feel the same way. I just think that guys like us are few and far between.
Therefore, I write about women who have no need for men, who enjoy the sexual and intimate company of other women. I’ve already said that the book I’m writing is a horror novel. This is significant since lesbians do not fair well in horror stories. If they appear at all, they are usually secondary characters and almost always die (think Hitchcock’s otherwise wonderful “The Birds.”) I wanted to create, with this novel, an extreme horror story with strong women characters who were the main characters and who didn’t feel the need to define themselves solely through their involvement with men.
Of course, I suppose the way to create a truly strong female character in a horror story is to write a character who is not in a relationship at all during the course of the story and (here’s the important part) not reveal anything about her sexuality. Think about it. There are numerous horror stories that have a male main character who doesn’t have a girlfriend and not much is made about his personal life AT ALL. This is downright common.
I’m sure, in the future, I’ll write that book as well but right now, I like the idea of giving a couple of lesbians good parts in a grisly horror story and seeing what they’ll do. This is why I won’t change the novel that I’m writing, even though I greatly appreciate my friend’s advice and counsel. Let me know what you all think…

Brian Flynn, 10/20/06