It's not just comphet.

Attempting to unpack my youthful misery.

In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich outlined a theory of “compulsory heterosexuality” — often shortened to “comphet” — arguing that, in effect, many people cannot understand their own queerness due to the ways that society trains all of us to see heterosexuality as normal, to understand it as a default that we are all initially expected to adhere to. If you exist in a certain corner of the queer community — and especially if you spend a fair amount of time on Tumblr — you’ve likely heard “comphet” tossed around here and there, sometimes in a way that feels edifying and helpful but… usually not. (Over the summer I was briefly enraged over a Lex post arguing that we should celebrate women who “resist comphet,” as though it’s a personal battle we all must fight and not a society level oppression that needs to be dismantled. Anyway.)

When I first had my “wait, am I… homoromantic?” awakening a few years back, comphet was a useful concept to sit with. It helped me better understand why I had felt so much pressure to have a boyfriend, why locking down a man’s affections and even getting him to move in with me had always felt like winning, why I was more fixated on external assessments of my various relationships than on how it felt for me to exist as a person inside them. It helped me understand why “I like sex with men” and “I like getting attention from men” had always led to “so I guess I want to cohabitate with a man and and merge my life with him even though doing so always fills me with a creeping annoyance and dread once the thrill of ‘victory’ has worn off?” It helped me process why, exactly, I’d never really been able to ask myself what I personally wanted, knowing only that I wanted to be a person of worth, of value, and having a boyfriend was thing that cemented that as a reality.

But over the past few years, as I’ve had a lot of time* to think through the particulars of my own sexuality and sexual development, I’ve found myself wondering if comphet alone is enough explain the half-developed state that I existed in for over two decades. And I don’t think it is.

There was another jargony phrase that a friend tossed my way when I was first cracking through my shell: “internalized homophobia.” At first glance, this kind of felt like it might fit. Surely, internalized homophobia helped explain why it was that when I tried to imagine myself going through all the traditional hetero benchmarks with a woman — moving in, marrying, having kids — it had always felt a little off, a little wrong. Surely the lingering anxiety I felt about extended family members potentially rejecting me for partnering with a woman was internalized homophobia.

But I quickly ran up against the limits of “internalized homophobia” as an explanatory framework. Because the truth is, for all the complications of navigating queerness, I never felt shame about being queer. I never left a hook up with a woman feeling disgusted with myself, never despised myself for being queer. There were a few times when I’d start hooking up with a woman only to find myself suddenly uninterested and numb — but those experiences simply made me feel ashamed for not being queer enough, frustrated that my sapphic libido was less effortless than what I was able to pull off with men, that I could not sustain a sexual encounter with a woman purely on the basis of her desire for me.

I started to toy with the possibility of internalized biphobia being a factor here, and that certainly opened up more doors. Internalized biphobia helped me understand why I judged myself so harshly for any perceived differences, imbalances, between my attractions to various genders; helped me understand why I constantly felt like my queerness required “proving” — despite the fact that I had not just made out with, not just slept with, but been deeply in love with (or at least infatuated with, I was a teenager) multiple women in the course of my life. It helped explain a lot, and yet —

I think what I’m circling around here right now — and maybe it’s just a personal thing, certainly it’s not a universal thing — is that I have long struggled to understand why a woman would ever even want me. With men it’s very easy: I have the tits and a winning personality and a willingness to sexually engage and that’s kinda, you know, basically all you need in the end. But with women, it just…

In my head there’s a list of all my dealbreaker qualities, you know? Some of them are just generic spinster panic (I’m 40! I don’t want kids! I don’t want to get married! I’m lukewarm on ever cohabitating with anyone ever again!), but some of them are more queer specific. I’m not attracted to masc queers (I mean aesthetically, yes, but beyond that, not as much), which shuts me out the butch/femme** dynamic that permeates so many of the spaces where I spend my time. And with femmes I feel, well, not masc enough to be anyone’s butch, but also not pretty enough, not girly enough, to be worthy of the femmes that I’m attracted to. And then, of course, there’s all that biphobic (and not to mention misogynist) baggage that tells me that I’m too slutty, too tainted, too disgusting to be worthy of a woman’s love.

And again, I don’t bring this bit up because I think it’s in any way universal (though if you relate to it, hey, now we can both feel a little less alone), but because this is all a rather roundabout way of trying to explaining why it is that I feel like so much of my internal mess, so many of my bad choices, were because, not in spite, of my queerness; why so many of the things that have made lesbians and other “good queers” view me with suspicion were, perhaps, a fundamentally queer struggle.

Because for all the discussions of the way that “comphet” forces so many of us down a path where we do our best to make hetero dating and sex and marriage and breeding work, where we judge ourselves, and not the path we’re on, when things just do not seem to work, there’s less discussion of the ways that queerness, too, can congeal into a few set paths. There’s less discussion of the way that, even once we know that we’re queer, it can still be hard to see ourselves in the models that are afforded to us, it can still be hard to feel like we actually fit in.

I guess what I’m saying is that while comphet can certainly explain the five years I spent sharing an apartment with a man who, in retrospect, kind of annoyed me a lot of the time we were together, and who I certainly lacked a certain sexual compatibility with, while it can explain why I spent so much time thinking I wanted, even needed, a boyfriend, it doesn’t really explain why I once took a cab home from a fancy hotel after spending the night with a man I despised but who was rich and famous and attractive enough to make me feel valuable, to make me feel worthy as a person. It doesn’t really explain most of my lowest moments.

But I think if you try to imagine a woman who deeply enjoys sex with men, who enjoys the validation of being wanted by men, but who cannot comprehend what it is to love them (and indeed, confuses the thrill of being desired by men, the longing for their desire, with love); if you imagine, too, that this woman passionately loves women but cannot imagine ever being desirable to them, and indeed feels far too monstrous to ever be loved back, ever be desired, by a woman she might fall for, then a lot of my life story makes a lot more sense. I slept with bad men because when I fucked them I didn’t have to ask myself why I did not — why I could not — feel love for them, and I slept with bad men because the surge of adrenaline, the drama, made it easier to ignore the pain of feeling unworthy of the actual kind of love I wanted the most.

I don’t owe you this story. I don’t care if you find it sympathetic. But it feels important to put it out there because it’s not a story I’ve ever really seen other people discuss, it’s not a way of being a person that has ever really been outlined for me. I don’t have some academic language to neatly summarize what it is I’ve struggled with — though maybe the combo of comphet and internalized homophobia and internalized biphobia is sufficient — but I do know that in the way that “comphet” has served as a lightbulb moment for so many queers, being able to map out the way that not just hetero society but queer culture pushed me into maladaptive coping mechanisms because I could not understand how a person such as myself could actually exist has been a lightbulb moment for me. And maybe being pushed to think through those factors yourself, to ask yourself whether what you truly want has ever been represented as an actual option that might be available to you, will be useful to you as well.

* So much time

** Or stud/femme or masc/femme or whatever you want to call it

PS The B+ Squad Book Club officially launched today! Have joined yet?