‘At Least You’re Young Enough to Start Again’: What Not to Say to a Friend Getting Divorced at Thirty
Loving a Person Publicly: Queer Paranoia from The Middle East to the West
Moving abroad to the West, I found myself struggling with any public display of affection from hand-holding to feeding my partner a bite of my food across the table. It made me paranoid. ‘What if someone who knows my parents sees us?’ I would often think to myself obsessively, looking over my shoulder. This made it hard to fully experience my partner…
Queerly Beloved: A HER Success Story
Outwardly I am very straight passing, which though not an obstacle per se made it harder to signal my interest in spaces that weren’t queer. One time, at a friend’s house party, I got chatting to this beautiful girl. We laughed and flirted the whole night and exchanged numbers to meet up for a drink later that week. Over espresso martinis in a chic, low-light bar, she leaned toward me and said how happy she was to make a new friend. It's a queer girl rite of passage...
‘The Scarcity of Positive Representation Distorts Reality’: Recognising Abuse in Lesbian Relationships
It’s in the little things – the missed classes, the unwinding friendships, the interests that you’ve picked up because it makes sense. You can’t be alone because why would you be? You can’t make your own decisions because this is a partnership. Things that had consecrated themselves so deeply in your identity, in your very being, lose their importance and one day you look in the mirror and what you see isn’t a reflection of yourself but of your relationship…
‘Representation Hugely Informs How We Come to Love’: Navigating a Second Adolescence After Coming Out as a Lesbian
Girls were not exposed to anything other than heterosexual relationships. My school library would not stock queer love stories for fear of corrupting students, depriving young queer people of a script. This was never something I consciously realised, but when you only see women being adored by macho heroes or knights in shining armor, there is a risk of falling into binarised traps and maybe even wanting to save distressed damsels!
Playing the ‘Feeld’: Getting on the Sex-Positive App and Opening Up My Marriage Last Year
We’re ethically non-monogamous. Keen to have fun with emotionally intelligent, kind humans. This is what my profile reads. I’m the most excited I’ve been in a long while about my sexuality. Having met my husband so young, we’ve only ever been with each other. Now there was the biggest, widest door open before us. I was so fucking ready…
‘Everyone Deserves Representation’: The Dynamics of Queer Sex and Intimacy
Queer people typically define sex outside of the usual, heteronormative consensus that sex is only penis-in-vagina penetration! Rather, as Hannah (She/They), who identifies as queer, answered, ‘Intimacy is any intimate contact.’ Meaning, foreplay becomes defined as sex, as well as general touching, kissing, etc…
What I’ve Learned Dating Multiple Genders
It took me an entire lockdown to finally accept that I was not 100% straight. I put this revelation down to too much time alone with my thoughts. Lockdown crawled by. Eventually, I went back to university. In other words, to a big, anonymous city with thousands of young, cabin-fevered people within easy swiping access. I took the plunge and set my dating preferences to ‘everyone’…
‘I Don’t Care that I’ve Always Been Single’: Why I’m Twenty-Five and Have Never Been in a Relationship
I don’t really care that I’ve always been single. I’m used to it. It’s my normal. My attitude is, ‘it might be nice to find my person, but I’m an introvert who is socially awkward, not the biggest fan of people and has a chronic fear of intimacy. So, logically, it kind of makes sense’. What does make me feel abnormal is the way other people view me when they find out this information…