It’s a New Year, the world grows scarier for queer people by the day, and grapes are only just now coming back into stock at my local bodega.
Usually we try to enter January serene, healthy, and hopeful. But 2025 is not a year to “protect your peace” by being quiet. I’d argue that protecting our peace now actually means being quite loud about what we take issue with, especially at a global scale. And actually doing something about it. Who cares if you come across as too passionate, so long as you look back on the year and know you stood for what you believe is right?
We’re often told it’s important to wait to show your full self to a potential partner, lest you scare them away. But over the past few years, I’ve realised that litmus testing someone this way can actually be helpful. Do you really want to be with someone you give the ick by speaking your mind once in a while, or with someone who’d go down swinging right besides you? What got me thinking about this was an ~ interaction ~ I had on Fire Island over the summer.
This past Labor Day, I went to Fire Island to help produce Doll Invasion, a celebration designed to bring trans women to Fire Island. As it happens, Fire Island Pines isn’t a particularly welcoming place for anyone other than a cis gay man. **With notable exceptions, like the team behind the gorgeous Visitor’s Center store – their dairy-free soft serve is a godsend for any lactose intolerant lesbians in the vicinity. People always think I’m vegan but I’m just deeply lactose intolerant and gay.**
Anyways, a group of ~5 cis gay men were rude to my dear friend and I back my girls, so our two interactions resulted in them hurling all sorts of speedo-clad vitriol my way. As the words ‘f*cking bitch’ and ‘c*nt!’ (not in the fun way) reverberated off of the Pines’ wooden sidewalks, I shouted back; ‘Thank you, I’m a dyke so that happens to be one of my favourite things in the world!’
Verbal sparring with entitled circuit party regulars aside, the exchange got me thinking about how my (hypothetical, very much on my mind given how lonely I felt in this environment) partner might respond if she were standing there too. Ideally she’d get it when I yelled back that they weren’t being very intersectional in their queerness, and not judge me for responding, rather than disengaging, Meredith Marks-style.
So I’m wondering whether it’s worth showing your whole personality to someone you’re talking to, seeing, or matching with etc from the jump. Not everyone wants to be with someone who yells back.
As Anna Marie Tendler says, Men [may] Have Called Her Crazy but have lesbians? Because we have a pretty high threshold for the dramatic. Barring any true interpersonal harm (we are collectively looking at you, unnamed perennial student athlete), I’m going to let you in on a little secret typically reserved for sorority test banks: demure may have been Dictionary.com’s 2024 word of the year, but your true colors are going to come out sooner or later, so why not weed out the people who can’t hang from the jump?
I have this theory that a lot of people end up with Diet Coke girls. I can’t take credit for this term, my former roommate Olivia coined it. She is very happily married to a hot man now, so we can take her word as gospel even though she’s straight. The Diet Coke girl is universally beloved. Who is she? Palatable. She somehow is happy in her career. She’s just bubbly enough. She is neurotypical and good with money. She tastes special but in a way that everyone enjoys. She sometimes has bangs but always does pottery or graphic design or cooking or baking. She loves to run or maybe even did yoga teacher training. She doesn’t get her feelings hurt easily, or cry in public, or run late.
She’s probably a projection of the external qualities of everyone who’s dated an ex after me and doesn’t reflect the obstacles they’ve overcome and struggles they’ve faced. But I might also be a little right.
Let me be clear––I’m not belittling or judging the Diet Coke girl. Sometimes I envy her ability to sit comfortably in high waisted pants and tendency towards serial monogamy. Being a Diet Coke girl seems peaceful. I can so easily imagine her biting her lip and saying, ‘Welllll…sometimes I do get a little crazy…promise you won’t judge me? I fall asleep to true crime podcasts!’ And off she dozes to a blissful, dreamless sleep. She’s a morning person, of course.
Don’t get me wrong, even Diet Coke girls end up on their crush’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s LinkedIn page. That’s just womanhood.
The Diet Coke girl is not to be confused with the Diet Pepsi girl, who might have run away from college for a day or two with a girl she barely knew and made out with her in the glow of an abandoned bowling alley sign after taking her non-threesome virginity (virginity is a construct). It was all within state lines – Ohio is a hell of a place.
I’m going to be very candid with you, reader: I’m pretty sure most people I’ve really liked have ended things with me once they got to know me because of my personality. I’m a Gemini, I always have something to say, I have an extremely high tolerance for conflict (read: eerily calm in a crisis and captain of my high school Model United Nations team), and I’m probably a little too honest and direct (Virgo Mars). The funny thing is, a lot of these girls said they were intimidated before they really got to know me (Capricorn Moon/stellium).
This isn’t an experience unique to queerness by any means, but small circles have a way of highlighting every little thing that may or may not be interpreted as ‘unusual.’
Do I regret showing my cards and deep love of horses two weeks or two months in, instead of two years? No. Someone rejecting your true self after falling in love with just a piece of her becomes more painful the further along you are. Your straight, cis, male cousin who works in finance might call this by its other name, the sunk-cost fallacy. And changing yourself to be more palatable, like the most popular diet refreshment of all time, only means the person who yells back or bites who you’re hiding underneath a fuck me sweater will rear her (very pretty I’m sure) head sooner or later.
This is a call for anyone who’s (probably) been called crazy to not dilute themselves at the beginning.
Little mistakes I’ve made over years of dating in my early twenties will probably haunt me to my grave. But the hard, honest truth is: someone who really likes you will find your ‘crazy’ endearing. And your crazy is probably just you expressing your emotions or justified frustration or having some unusually specific interests (also could be that you’re an ex competitive equestrian like myself, but we’re just brave and quite intuitive).
Some real-world examples: One time I made someone a Pinterest board with clothes I thought she’d like on it and I’m pretty sure she hated it and maybe interpreted it as too much. Five years later, I did the same thing for someone else and it received rave reviews. Didn’t work out with her either but I’m pretty sure she did buy some of the things I pinned on there.
I painstakingly made a (very long) playlist for someone who never listened to it all the way through. The girl I dated after her beamed while I danced around her apartment in one of her t-shirts to pop music, Chinese carry out in hand, even though she exclusively seemed to listen to Cher and sixties bossa nova. She objectively had better taste than me, but I’m pretty sure we had just…you know, which probably made me seem more charming.
If someone likes you in a way that has staying power, they will embrace your weirdness and probably find it hot, because it’s an extension of you. A friend of mine recently made plans to attend a natural disaster preparedness expo because her girlfriend is very interested in it (this isn’t crazy, this is actually very smart). Endless queer American couples go to Renaissance fairs.
At its core, crazy is a blanket statement for words or behaviour we don’t understand or agree with. And the right person (speaking from weeks of experience here) will have the wherewithal to validate you or comfort you or try to understand you better or meet you where you’re at. This year, thanks to Tinashe, we’ve been calling this someone matching our freak.
For me, this looks like someone who understands yelling back…and someone who agrees cultural literacy is being familiar with Chris Lilley and Sarah Schulman’s work. Someone who doesn’t mind making friends wherever you go. Someone who shares a love of horses, or could learn to love them. Someone who will watch as you yell back once in a while and understand anger on behalf of the people you love is, in fact, a way to “protect peace.”
…And other things I can’t mention because my (very supportive and cool) parents read this column. But you can use your imagination there, you little freak.
P.S. Call me crazy, but I’ve never tried Diet Coke. I don’t like carbonated beverages.
Catch up on previous instalments of Dyke Drama below:
Post-election anxiety is making me want to u-haul – and I’m not the only one