Why are lesbian cultural contributions still invisible?
Here’s an embarrassing secret. I’ve probably watched the movie Tar (2022), starring Cate Blanchett, about 15 times. I’ll put it on in the background while I’m making dinner. It’s not that I particularly enjoy the plot, or admire the predatory titular character. No, I rewatch Tar the way other people might read Martha Stewart Living or Vogue. Every scene is graphic, bourgeois lifestyle porn: the glide of chalk across wool to cut a bespoke suit, a perfectly-lit Brutalist apartment, an assistant copying and pasting a New Yorker headline to your Wikipedia article.
Tar was the first time I remember ever seeing a lesbian on screen whose socio-cultural circumstances looked like something I might broadly aspire to. Generally speaking, media is not lacking in representation of wealthy white women; one of the critical arguments for Tar during its initial release was the supposed progressivism inherent in portraying a lesbian in the role of villainous sexual offender usually reserved for men.
This immorality does not preclude Lydia Tar from embodying an archetype that feels grounded in a shared reality of the queer experience, one which is far more rarely acknowledged, much less represented in major films. Lydia Tar is a Fashion Lesbian. She is one in a long tradition of dykes who are not outsiders but rather active participants, even producers, of contemporary culture.
The Glass Closet
Like a lot of people, I went through a kind of “awkward masc” phase when I first began queer dating. Newly liberated from the pressures of dressing for the male gaze and still unsure about my place in a new paradigm, I wore a lot of baggy jeans and oversized hoodies.
That Christmas, I pulled out a banged up pair of Ugg boots from high school and started scuffling around Buffalo. Six months before, I’d worn a pink floral dress to a wedding; I spent the last weeks of 2019 living in a Yankees hat and a sad navy wool that I affectionately dubbed “The Depression Sweater.”
I hadn’t lost my lifelong interest in dress - on the contrary, I had never been so attuned to it. But I was consciously rejecting Fashion, which felt like an old operating system to be removed, in the same way I was learning to ignore if men were watching me in the street. So I embraced comfort over aesthetics and began to favor functionality for signaling (leather jackets, boots), utility (outdoor gear), or both (carabiners).
When I started dating my ex-wife Louise, I experienced an identity revelation. Like many of us, I owe a great deal of my self-representation to the mentorship of queer friendships and dating. L and I have been trading the same bleached haircuts back and forth for the past three years, but to read either of us as ‘masculine’ or ‘butch’ is to fundamentally misread a signal; both of us are so profoundly preoccupied with aesthetics as to approach a sort of High Dandyism that borders on pure faggotry.
I’ll never forget the first time I walked into Louise’s apartment, a bright studio in a high rise on rue Marcadet that overlooked the Sacré Coeur. Everything, including the cat, was done in tasteful black, white, and beige. Bright art posters in barely-legible experimental typefaces decorated the walls.
This was a discovery of good taste - even cultural capital - expressed not despite queerness, but through it. During my marriage, I realized that I was allowed to be a lesbian and still be obsessed with Fashion. Even better, my liberation from the male gaze and participation in queer counterculture would lend me access to a distinct aesthetic vocabulary which, I would come to discover, had been informing Fashion all along.
Thus the curtain was pulled back, and I slowly began to uncover - I am still uncovering - the often invisible queerness that underpins contemporary culture.
Perhaps you, like me, had been fed a narrative of “lesbian culture” involving Subarus, softball leagues, and laboradors. Perhaps you’d pictured it as vaguely sexless, even humorless. You’d imagined “lesbian upward mobility” to be wrapped babies, Montessori, mountain cabins. You’d know urban lesbians as blue collar butches, like those that surrounded me in Buffalo but which I didn’t learn to see until many, many years later.
All of these representations are based on certain truths, and rooted in socio-economic realities. The creative industries and fashion, particularly, are perceived as the domains of gay men largely due to a system of social reproduction that dates back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, the very dawn of the modern fashion system as we know it today.
The participation of lesbians in that system has been historically unacknowledged until increased media visibility in the 1980s and 1990s led to the emergence and commodification of “lesbian chic” as an aesthetic paradigm desirable, in part, to heterosexual women.
I am here to tell you that we’ve been here all along. Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, Dorothy Todd, Madge Garland. (I am personally convinced of Coco Chanel.) A great many sapphic people are designing your clothing, selling it, photographing it, modeling it, and writing about it. Your contemporary artists, publishers, restaurateurs, photographers, professors, curators, critical theorists, DJs, journalists, bartenders, designers, woodworkers, and so on, etcetera? Dykes, all of them.
I would never argue that wealthy, upwardly mobile, overwhelmingly white urban lesbians are anything but privileged outside of the very present dangers of navigating life as queer people. I don’t think we need more representation or visibility; on the contrary, many of us are protective of our community’s insularity, as if the “best kept secrecy” of itself was part of the value.
But I’m curious. If we’re the ones creating culture, why are we so invisible within it?
Bette and Tina, Jenna and Racquel
In her article “Born This Way: Lesbian Style Since the 1980s” (2013) (1)Viki Karaminas argues that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rise in representation of lesbians as fashionable consumers served both a normative and transgressive function. On one hand, lesbians were seen as “new, apolitical, post-feminist consumers” rendered palatable and even heterosexualized for mainstream tastes. Characters like Bette and Tina on The L Word represent “confident upward mobility and material success,” as expressed largely through designer dress.
Conversely, Karaminas also suggests that such representations are “daring because of their normalcy.” She cites queer scholar Eva Sedgwick: “(The L Word represents) a visible world in which lesbians exist in forms beyond the solitary and the couple, such an obvious and modest representational need that it should not be a novelty when it is met.”
Karaminas attributes such a rise in representation, however limited, to the social mobility of lesbians over the past four decades. This led to a growing interest on the part of marketers, including major fashion houses like Calvin Klein and Prada, to tap an emergent demographic. Thus lesbian chic as a stylistic phenomenon is “a category defined by class, not sexuality” and characterized by “media-hyped stylistic codes that correspond to lesbian subculture, while simultaneously reaching out to a dominant heterosexual market.”
While Karaminas focuses on an aesthetic courant specific to the 1990s, it’s interesting to revisit in the lens of Biden-era media like the short-lived Real Housewives of New York reboot, which brought on former J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons and art world mainstay Racquel Chevremont.
RHONY 2 differed from its predecessor in taking great care to portray its cast as “self-made,” distancing itself from the implicit sexual politics of the franchise’s title. Its decision to include Lyons and Chevremont is the ultimate subversion of the “housewife” trope; the primitive state of on-screen representation requires that, to be “legibile” as lesbians, they must by definition exist separately from men.
As in Sedwick’s reading of The L Word, RHONY 2 was transgressive in its normalcy. Even as their plotlines center on “coming out” stories and family rejections, Lyons and Chevremont are characterized with the same vibrant, playful intensity as the other women on the series.
They are fully included in the glamorous trips, personal dramas, and lunchtime gossip endemic to the Housewives franchise. Lyons is teased for wearing thousands of dollars of diamonds to brunch and refusing to fly coach; Chevremont is introduced as a High Femme art collector whose partner - a neuropsychology PhD - is portrayed as the “blue collar” butch. In other words, the lesbians of RHONY 2 are lauded as the same expert consumers as anyone else.
Notably absent, however, is any inkling of “lesbian culture” or queer complicity between Lyons and Chevremont. There’s a sort of “Bechdel Test” that the show doesn’t quite seem to pass, a “straightwashing” that asks us to pretend that, by privilege of their social class, Lyons and Chevremont might exclusively adopt the same tastes, behaviors, and cultural references as the rest of the cast.
What’s more - and perhaps most egregiously - where RHONY 2 succeeds in acknowledging the marketable power of lesbians as cultural consumers, it fails miserably to acknowledge their impact as cultural producers. The show may not hide its gay characters, but its normalization contributes to a sidestepping of their queerness entirely. Thus, we’re not meant to fully connect the dots that a lesbian is responsible for defining the fundamental silhouette of the Obama years (Lyons). Lyons’ partner, renowned fashion photographer Cass Bird, is reduced to “Jenna’s girlfriend.” Chevremont’s contributions as a curator and a collector are overshadowed by her previous relationship with artist Mickalene Thomas.
What do we lose when we ignore the contributions of lesbians to the shaping of contemporary culture itself? Not only visibility, but power. We uphold a decades-old stereotype that characterizes women and femmes as passive consumers; we discount the legitimacy of lesbian voices in participating in cultural discourse. We render ourselves more susceptible to accusations of “identity politics” by creating a context of silence that makes any work by lesbians a “lesbian work” - rather than work emerging from a person who happens to be engaged in a very real socio-cultural ecosystem.
Perhaps Tar was, after all, deeply progressive in portraying a flawed lesbian whose weakness was not only her sexual transgressions, but ultimately, her destruction by the very blind egotism that led her to success in her profession. At the very least, we got to read her Wikipedia.
Hedi Twinks Forever
The other day, I posted the roots of this piece as a story on Instagram. This all began because I started rewatching The L Word for the first time since I came out, back in 2019 - 2020. Back then, I’d found the costuming unbearably early 2000s, but fashion’s come full circle enough that Shane’s wardrobe has me coveting ripped skinny jeans and tight leather jackets. A little research led me to discover that Shane wears mostly Hedi Slimane-era Dior Homme, the silhouette that shifted fashion away from the baggy minimalism of the 1990s and, famously, forced Karl Lagerfeld to crash diet.
Much has been made recently about the return of the “Hedi Boy” as a trendy silhouette - or even subculture - in menswear. Skintight flairs, pointed boots, and shaggy hair belong to Mick Jagger, to Hedi’s Dior, Saint Laurent, and Celine, but they also belong to Shane McCutcheon. Shane’s a Hedi Girl in and of herself: a sexually promiscuous bad boy with a heart of gold, and an evil twink if there ever was one.
I’m finding myself asking, yet again, why Shane’s look is treated as a derivation, not an archetype; why the discourse around lesbian fashion remains limited to a handful of broad, mostly outdated typologies (‘power,’ ‘lipstick,’ etc.); why the contributions of dykes themselves in creating the silhouettes, images, and language that compose the fashion system are still so hidden.
“It’s never been so cool to dress like a lesbian,” we love to complain amongst ourselves; we rely more and more on sharing The Look to know whether the girl with boots and a strong gaze and a powerful walk is part of the family or not. It would be easy to attribute this coolness to a sort of reemergence of “lesbian chic” or an intentional marketing strategy to target us. I’m not sure, particularly in this political landscape, that that’s the case.
Maybe that’s the real risk of invisibility. The lesbian gaze - that female homoeroticism - is hiding in plain sight behind so much of the cultural output that characterizes contemporary fashion today. Our presence is such an open secret, our credit is so limited, that the contributions of lesbians as producers isn’t recognized as anything but Fashion, itself. We stand behind a curtain of insularity that we hope will protect us from the outside world; ultimately, we hide ourselves.
(1) Expert from A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk (2013), edited by Valerie Steele
Why are lesbian cultural contributions still invisible?
Here’s an embarrassing secret. I’ve probably watched the movie Tar (2022), starring Cate Blanchett, about 15 times. I’ll put it on in the background while I’m making dinner. It’s not that I particularly enjoy the plot, or admire the predatory titular character. No, I rewatch Tar the way other people might read Martha Stewart Living or Vogue. Every scene is graphic, bourgeois lifestyle porn: the glide of chalk across wool to cut a bespoke suit, a perfectly-lit Brutalist apartment, an assistant copying and pasting a New Yorker headline to your Wikipedia article.
Tar was the first time I remember ever seeing a lesbian on screen whose socio-cultural circumstances looked like something I might broadly aspire to. Generally speaking, media is not lacking in representation of wealthy white women; one of the critical arguments for Tar during its initial release was the supposed progressivism inherent in portraying a lesbian in the role of villainous sexual offender usually reserved for men.
This immorality does not preclude Lydia Tar from embodying an archetype that feels grounded in a shared reality of the queer experience, one which is far more rarely acknowledged, much less represented in major films. Lydia Tar is a Fashion Lesbian. She is one in a long tradition of dykes who are not outsiders but rather active participants, even producers, of contemporary culture.
The Glass Closet
Like a lot of people, I went through a kind of “awkward masc” phase when I first began queer dating. Newly liberated from the pressures of dressing for the male gaze and still unsure about my place in a new paradigm, I wore a lot of baggy jeans and oversized hoodies.
That Christmas, I pulled out a banged up pair of Ugg boots from high school and started scuffling around Buffalo. Six months before, I’d worn a pink floral dress to a wedding; I spent the last weeks of 2019 living in a Yankees hat and a sad navy wool that I affectionately dubbed “The Depression Sweater.”
I hadn’t lost my lifelong interest in dress - on the contrary, I had never been so attuned to it. But I was consciously rejecting Fashion, which felt like an old operating system to be removed, in the same way I was learning to ignore if men were watching me in the street. So I embraced comfort over aesthetics and began to favor functionality for signaling (leather jackets, boots), utility (outdoor gear), or both (carabiners).
When I started dating my ex-wife Louise, I experienced an identity revelation. Like many of us, I owe a great deal of my self-representation to the mentorship of queer friendships and dating. L and I have been trading the same bleached haircuts back and forth for the past three years, but to read either of us as ‘masculine’ or ‘butch’ is to fundamentally misread a signal; both of us are so profoundly preoccupied with aesthetics as to approach a sort of High Dandyism that borders on pure faggotry.
I’ll never forget the first time I walked into Louise’s apartment, a bright studio in a high rise on rue Marcadet that overlooked the Sacré Coeur. Everything, including the cat, was done in tasteful black, white, and beige. Bright art posters in barely-legible experimental typefaces decorated the walls.
This was a discovery of good taste - even cultural capital - expressed not despite queerness, but through it. During my marriage, I realized that I was allowed to be a lesbian and still be obsessed with Fashion. Even better, my liberation from the male gaze and participation in queer counterculture would lend me access to a distinct aesthetic vocabulary which, I would come to discover, had been informing Fashion all along.
Thus the curtain was pulled back, and I slowly began to uncover - I am still uncovering - the often invisible queerness that underpins contemporary culture.
Perhaps you, like me, had been fed a narrative of “lesbian culture” involving Subarus, softball leagues, and laboradors. Perhaps you’d pictured it as vaguely sexless, even humorless. You’d imagined “lesbian upward mobility” to be wrapped babies, Montessori, mountain cabins. You’d know urban lesbians as blue collar butches, like those that surrounded me in Buffalo but which I didn’t learn to see until many, many years later.
All of these representations are based on certain truths, and rooted in socio-economic realities. The creative industries and fashion, particularly, are perceived as the domains of gay men largely due to a system of social reproduction that dates back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, the very dawn of the modern fashion system as we know it today.
The participation of lesbians in that system has been historically unacknowledged until increased media visibility in the 1980s and 1990s led to the emergence and commodification of “lesbian chic” as an aesthetic paradigm desirable, in part, to heterosexual women.
I am here to tell you that we’ve been here all along. Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, Dorothy Todd, Madge Garland. (I am personally convinced of Coco Chanel.) A great many sapphic people are designing your clothing, selling it, photographing it, modeling it, and writing about it. Your contemporary artists, publishers, restaurateurs, photographers, professors, curators, critical theorists, DJs, journalists, bartenders, designers, woodworkers, and so on, etcetera? Dykes, all of them.
I would never argue that wealthy, upwardly mobile, overwhelmingly white urban lesbians are anything but privileged outside of the very present dangers of navigating life as queer people. I don’t think we need more representation or visibility; on the contrary, many of us are protective of our community’s insularity, as if the “best kept secrecy” of itself was part of the value.
But I’m curious. If we’re the ones creating culture, why are we so invisible within it?
Bette and Tina, Jenna and Racquel
In her article “Born This Way: Lesbian Style Since the 1980s” (2013) (1)Viki Karaminas argues that, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rise in representation of lesbians as fashionable consumers served both a normative and transgressive function. On one hand, lesbians were seen as “new, apolitical, post-feminist consumers” rendered palatable and even heterosexualized for mainstream tastes. Characters like Bette and Tina on The L Word represent “confident upward mobility and material success,” as expressed largely through designer dress.
Conversely, Karaminas also suggests that such representations are “daring because of their normalcy.” She cites queer scholar Eva Sedgwick: “(The L Word represents) a visible world in which lesbians exist in forms beyond the solitary and the couple, such an obvious and modest representational need that it should not be a novelty when it is met.”
Karaminas attributes such a rise in representation, however limited, to the social mobility of lesbians over the past four decades. This led to a growing interest on the part of marketers, including major fashion houses like Calvin Klein and Prada, to tap an emergent demographic. Thus lesbian chic as a stylistic phenomenon is “a category defined by class, not sexuality” and characterized by “media-hyped stylistic codes that correspond to lesbian subculture, while simultaneously reaching out to a dominant heterosexual market.”
While Karaminas focuses on an aesthetic courant specific to the 1990s, it’s interesting to revisit in the lens of Biden-era media like the short-lived Real Housewives of New York reboot, which brought on former J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons and art world mainstay Racquel Chevremont.
RHONY 2 differed from its predecessor in taking great care to portray its cast as “self-made,” distancing itself from the implicit sexual politics of the franchise’s title. Its decision to include Lyons and Chevremont is the ultimate subversion of the “housewife” trope; the primitive state of on-screen representation requires that, to be “legibile” as lesbians, they must by definition exist separately from men.
As in Sedwick’s reading of The L Word, RHONY 2 was transgressive in its normalcy. Even as their plotlines center on “coming out” stories and family rejections, Lyons and Chevremont are characterized with the same vibrant, playful intensity as the other women on the series.
They are fully included in the glamorous trips, personal dramas, and lunchtime gossip endemic to the Housewives franchise. Lyons is teased for wearing thousands of dollars of diamonds to brunch and refusing to fly coach; Chevremont is introduced as a High Femme art collector whose partner - a neuropsychology PhD - is portrayed as the “blue collar” butch. In other words, the lesbians of RHONY 2 are lauded as the same expert consumers as anyone else.
Notably absent, however, is any inkling of “lesbian culture” or queer complicity between Lyons and Chevremont. There’s a sort of “Bechdel Test” that the show doesn’t quite seem to pass, a “straightwashing” that asks us to pretend that, by privilege of their social class, Lyons and Chevremont might exclusively adopt the same tastes, behaviors, and cultural references as the rest of the cast.
What’s more - and perhaps most egregiously - where RHONY 2 succeeds in acknowledging the marketable power of lesbians as cultural consumers, it fails miserably to acknowledge their impact as cultural producers. The show may not hide its gay characters, but its normalization contributes to a sidestepping of their queerness entirely. Thus, we’re not meant to fully connect the dots that a lesbian is responsible for defining the fundamental silhouette of the Obama years (Lyons). Lyons’ partner, renowned fashion photographer Cass Bird, is reduced to “Jenna’s girlfriend.” Chevremont’s contributions as a curator and a collector are overshadowed by her previous relationship with artist Mickalene Thomas.
What do we lose when we ignore the contributions of lesbians to the shaping of contemporary culture itself? Not only visibility, but power. We uphold a decades-old stereotype that characterizes women and femmes as passive consumers; we discount the legitimacy of lesbian voices in participating in cultural discourse. We render ourselves more susceptible to accusations of “identity politics” by creating a context of silence that makes any work by lesbians a “lesbian work” - rather than work emerging from a person who happens to be engaged in a very real socio-cultural ecosystem.
Perhaps Tar was, after all, deeply progressive in portraying a flawed lesbian whose weakness was not only her sexual transgressions, but ultimately, her destruction by the very blind egotism that led her to success in her profession. At the very least, we got to read her Wikipedia.
Hedi Twinks Forever
The other day, I posted the roots of this piece as a story on Instagram. This all began because I started rewatching The L Word for the first time since I came out, back in 2019 - 2020. Back then, I’d found the costuming unbearably early 2000s, but fashion’s come full circle enough that Shane’s wardrobe has me coveting ripped skinny jeans and tight leather jackets. A little research led me to discover that Shane wears mostly Hedi Slimane-era Dior Homme, the silhouette that shifted fashion away from the baggy minimalism of the 1990s and, famously, forced Karl Lagerfeld to crash diet.
Much has been made recently about the return of the “Hedi Boy” as a trendy silhouette - or even subculture - in menswear. Skintight flairs, pointed boots, and shaggy hair belong to Mick Jagger, to Hedi’s Dior, Saint Laurent, and Celine, but they also belong to Shane McCutcheon. Shane’s a Hedi Girl in and of herself: a sexually promiscuous bad boy with a heart of gold, and an evil twink if there ever was one.
I’m finding myself asking, yet again, why Shane’s look is treated as a derivation, not an archetype; why the discourse around lesbian fashion remains limited to a handful of broad, mostly outdated typologies (‘power,’ ‘lipstick,’ etc.); why the contributions of dykes themselves in creating the silhouettes, images, and language that compose the fashion system are still so hidden.
“It’s never been so cool to dress like a lesbian,” we love to complain amongst ourselves; we rely more and more on sharing The Look to know whether the girl with boots and a strong gaze and a powerful walk is part of the family or not. It would be easy to attribute this coolness to a sort of reemergence of “lesbian chic” or an intentional marketing strategy to target us. I’m not sure, particularly in this political landscape, that that’s the case.
Maybe that’s the real risk of invisibility. The lesbian gaze - that female homoeroticism - is hiding in plain sight behind so much of the cultural output that characterizes contemporary fashion today. Our presence is such an open secret, our credit is so limited, that the contributions of lesbians as producers isn’t recognized as anything but Fashion, itself. We stand behind a curtain of insularity that we hope will protect us from the outside world; ultimately, we hide ourselves.
(1) Expert from A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk (2013), edited by Valerie Steele