lesbian

I am gay.
Call me a lesbian and feel me cringe at the word, the way it sounds, the way it goes from occupying your mouth to eating the space between our faces when it's said to me. I hate the word.
I am g a y.

The way it sounds is horrible, phonetically speaking, I find it disgusting; the juxtaposition of the 'les' sound, one letter away from spelling 'less', which is how I feel when stood next to pretty straight girls, with the sound of 'bi', like 'be', like I must "be less" because I am gay, finished with 'bian', as if my sexual identity is in fact some kind of exotic tribal cultural identity.
I am not exotic, I'm a permanently ill white noodle girl who screams at the sight of Cara Delevingne and reads gay smut.

Porn. I like it. Porn is great. Porn is my friend. Free porn, however... well, what's better than that?!
I don't like lesbian porn.
Lesbian porn is performed by mostly straight or "curious" female actresses and produced almost solely for consumption by straight male audiences. Too much straight clutters my gay girl-on-girl porn for me to be able to enjoy it. It's unrealistic and leaves me, even in my sniffling noodle-like and socially anxious form, sexualised.

Lesbians are so hot!
Yeah, a lot of them are, and I'm fucking thankful for that, for the Ingird Nilsen's and Gigi Gorgeous' of the world. But people aren't hot because they are lesbians. Just like people don't deserve sexualisation for how much skin they show, they don't deserve - I don't deserve - sexualisation for their sexual identity.

Sexy lesbian teens experiment at sleepover
No, I won't click on that video, I don't want to see that.
I don't want to see my gender objectified.
I don't want to see my sexuality degraded and exploited and sexualised for an audience that consists of straight men, some (most) of whom would crinkle their noses at marriage equality or be scarily angered if he got turned down by a lesbian because god, he just automatically is entitled to every woman's attention, and, "for fuck's sake, why is everyone gay these days?! The world is going to shit!"
And I don't want to see my age sexualised. I was born in 1999, so at the time of writing this, I'm a teenager, and although I support cg/l and don't have a necessarily negative view towards ageplay, I don't like the way age is sexualised in porn. In bdsm dynamics such as ageplay and cg/l, the childlike setting and the sometimes sexual connotations of childlike actions are consensual. In porn, teenagers as a whole aren't globally consenting to you fetishising their age. Fetishising our age. My age.
I'm not "fresh meat", I'm not a "unclaimed pussy", I'm not a fucking fantasy, okay. I'm a gay. I'm a fucking teenager and you're some gross guy fetishising my existence. Like, no, fuck you.
Fuck you.

I'm the "angry liberal feminist lesbian".
That's the title bestowed upon me by the friends that hate when I open my mouth and my opinions fly out like stirred bats from a damp cave.
I'm pissed off because I have rights but I don't have as many as you, in half of the world's countries.
I'm angry because I don't deserve to be your fucking fetish.
I'm angry because I don't need to "meet the right guy" - people reidentify, yeah, but stop telling me that it will happen to me because nobody can know that. Not even me, but I identify as gay because I want to kiss and cuddle and care for and fuck girls and I want to kiss and cuddle and care for girls exclusively.

I don't need a man, I need you to stop having opinions about me.

I hate the word lesbian because it sounds horrible.
Lesbian has seven letters in it
l e s b i a n
Gay has three letters in it
g a y

Calling myself gay...I'm four letters less of an "other", of a "different".

Because I hate the word lesbian, and I am a lesbian, does that mean I hate myself?
It took me so much to be able to love myself and my gayness.
I love my gay.
My gay is great.
But deep down, do I hate my gay for making me different, for making me feel inferior, for making me feel "less than"?

Difference is good, but it can be scary.

I hate the word lesbian, and I think I always will. I hate lesbian porn, and the only thing that would make me like it is if I was one of the actresses and got to get it on with a pretty professional, but that's not going to happen. I hate sexualisation. Sometimes I wish people saw me more as sexy or at least someone with the potential to be a girlfriend or a hookup or one drunken make-out session, but that's my choice in those moments; you sexualising me is not my choice, selected straight creeps of the world.

I hate the word. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
But I don't hate myself.
Because I love my gay, even if you don't, even if nobody else does.

I'm gay.

I'm fact, I am a lesbian.
...

and that's a title I will always have to bear, so maybe I should start to learn to hate it less and accept it more. Maybe it's four letters more "different" than gay, but even if difference is scary, it can be good.