[Vol. 14] Can't We Just Hold Hands?
Queer people deserve the right to love and be loved for it.
Oops … a little late today. As paradoxical as it sounds since I basically exist in just three rooms these days (with the cold + pandemic), life’s been feeling busy lately. Or maybe I’m just used to having so little to do during the pandemic that suddenly a little more feels like a lot. Who’s to say.
Anyways, I’ll use this little late announcement to also announce that we’re at 94 subscribers babyyy!! Very, very exciting to watch my little gay newsletter grow and to hear back from so many of you in return. Feeling the love, for real.
If you’re into what I’m writing here, give it a share on social media/tell a friend about it/write the link on a piece of paper, fold it up into a paper airplane, and throw it out your window – I don’t know, you do whatever feels right. Let’s break into the triple digits 😎
When I was in my senior year of High School, already out of the closet for the better part of a year, I went on a date with a Tinder match in New York City (we’ll call him NYC boy from here on out).
I told my parents I was going to meet a friend. It was all very Romeo and Juliet – albeit not forbidden at all, and definitely not true love … so, not really at all like Romeo and Juliet, but whatever, let me have my moment here.
This was the first real date I’d ever gone on … sort of.
See, I typed that sentence out only to realize that I’m totally blanking on my “straight” years – you know, those early years of High School where I was “totally straight” and went out on a few dates with girls from school. After the memories of those supremely awkward, closeted-era dates forcibly pushed their way back into my head, I couldn’t help but compare them to my future dates with boys. They were so different.
On those few dates that I went on with girls, I knew I was supposed to hold her hand and kiss her goodnight in public – that was the expectation of going on a date. The entirety of the world around us seemed completely content with us drawing closer and closer throughout the night; in fact, they encouraged it. There was never anything standing between us.
On my date with NYC boy, on the other hand, it felt like there was a big, huge plexiglass barrier just slammed in between us.
It felt like a Covid date before Covid was even a conceivable concept.
No, we didn’t stay 6 feet apart (oh, those were the days), but there was no hand-holding and definitely no kissing. Unlike on those awkward dates with girls, PDA didn’t feel like it was encouraged on this awkward date with a boy. Instead, it felt risky. If either one of us made a move for the other’s hand, I could feel my heart beat faster – partly out of excitement, sure, but also out of fear.
Could there be someone just around the corner that would be pushed over the edge by the sight of two guys holding hands? Was that man looking at us funny or was that just my imagination? Did we look like we were on a date, or just two friends hanging out?
I hadn’t realized dating as a gay person would look and feel so different. I wondered, couldn’t we just hold hands?
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Yesterday, when I was thinking about possible topics for today’s newsletter and the memory of my date with NYC boy just invited itself right back into the forefront of my mind (how rude), I wanted to know how other queer people felt about dating in public.
So, as I’m sure you know by now I’m so fond of saying, I did some research.
Holding hands is intimate – and exposing.
At first, I thought this topic might be a little dated. I’ve been living in my little NYC bubble for a while now, and it no longer feels like the big, foreign city it was when I was 17 and on my first gay date. Instead, it feels like a little gay island paradise – not perfect, as the word “paradise” might imply, but probably the best place I could have chosen to live out my 20-something gay dating life.
Although I can’t say I’ve held a date’s hand anytime recently, I’ve kissed in public and flirted (heavily) in public in the past, and, for the most part, haven’t felt any real or perceived threat to my safety. You know, other than the usual quick 360 scan before kissing in public (something I know most queer people know all too well).
Still though, I started wondering how I would feel specifically holding a guy’s hand out on the busy sidewalk. For some reason, that idea feels a lot more intimate to me than kissing in a secluded corner of a park or flirting in a crowded bar. It feels like the kind of prolonged, public act that can really draw some attention. In a weird way – in a way that shouldn’t be true – holding hands in public as a gay person feels like a statement.
As it turns out, hand-holding is a queer phobia across the board – even today.
And this time, we can’t blame it on commitment phobias.
According to a mass survey conducted by the European Union, consisting of 140,000 interviews with LGBTQ+ individuals, 6 in 10 LGBTQ+ people reported avoiding holding their partner’s hand in public for fear of discrimination.
That’s a lot of queer people missing out on the simple pleasure of holding hands – something straight/cisgender people do mindlessly, I imagine – for the fear of getting harassed, or worse. And, if you wondered whether our fears are valid, it looks like they are.
Every LBGTQ+ survey after survey I read continues to spotlight the fact that queer people are still struggling to live in peace.
In Volume 11 of this newsletter, Queer Kids Need You, I highlighted recent statistics collected by the Trevor Project from queer youth respondents in the U.S. that made this struggle clear.
But if you needed another reminder, as I often do, the same survey conducted by the EU that asked LGBTQ+ people about their stance on hand-holding also found that 43% of the 140,000 respondents had been discriminated against in some form in the past year. What’s most disturbing to me is that that statistic shows an increase of 6% since 2012, when the last version of this same study was conducted.
TL;DR LGBTQ+ discrimination isn’t just bad, it looks like it’s been getting worse.
Something that left me as shook then as it does now is the infamous news story of two Lesbian women getting beaten on a bus in London by a group of men after refusing to kiss for them.
*I have to warn you, pictures of the two women directly after the incident happened, which are included in the news story I linked, are pretty disturbing.
“We must have kissed or hugged or something like that, because right away they saw that we were together, so they came after us,” Melania Geymonat, one of the women, recounted for BBC Radio 4. “They surrounded us and started saying, like, really aggressive stuff, things about sexual positions, lesbians and claiming that we should kiss so they could watch us.”
When the couple didn’t do what the men asked, the men ganged up on them, punched them several times in the face, and stole their belongings.
What happened to these women is the greatest fear of queer people holding hands.
It’s the very same fear that ANZ Banking, a bank local to Australia and New Zealand, captured so beautifully in their #HoldTight campaign video for pride month in 2017. Although it’s not as easy for LGBTQ+ couples to just “hold tight” as the ad makes it seem, it’s still a beautiful watch (Gotta admit I shed a tear).
Ads like these capture our almost instinctive need to hide ourselves in order to protect ourselves – a need that queer people, coupled or not, feel all too often (sometimes, on daily basis).
During my *research* (ok, I promise I’ll get over that someday soon) I found another really beautiful article via the New York Times highlighting 6 LGBTQ+ people’s first times – no, not having sex, but holding hands with a partner (again, something straight/cisgender people probably don’t consider very significant).
The right to hold hands in public safely matters.
I linked that article because I want to make it clear that getting violently discriminated against isn’t the sole issue here. Yes, queerphobia is at the root of the problem, but it’s a lot more nuanced than that.
Queer people should have the undeniable right to feel safe to love their partners and express that love openly. It may sound thankless to some, but I’m not ok with the way LGBTQ+ people have to move through the world today. It’s not enough – not in the world, not in the U.S., and not even on this gay paradise of an island we call Manhattan.
Queer people deserve more.
Queer people deserve more than the right to marry and have children and not be booted from their jobs for expressing their identities.
We deserve more than to just survive.
We deserve more than our self-expression, our love, being tolerated. It needs to be celebrated, just as straight/cisgender expression and love were celebrated on every straight-era date I went on, and every goddamn day since then.
We deserve to love and be loved for it. And no, I don’t think that’s asking for too much.
Can't we just hold hands?
Today’s discussion Q:
Should queer people be expected to #HoldTight, putting themselves at possible risk for the sake of representation (something which is much needed)? Who’s responsibility is it to normalize queer love and self-expression?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below! As always, I’ll be reading/responding to all.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 14. See you in Volume 15, folks!
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Holding hands is such an interesting form of PDA because, despite it being a more 'conservative' form of affection, it is also usually a prolonged act, as you point out. I think we probably feel more conscious about holding hands than perhaps kissing because the length of the act usually translates to a larger aggregate audience, and the more people that see us, the higher the risk that one of them won't like what they see.
The #holdtight question is one that has troubled me for some time. We know from what progress has been made over the years that visibility is a vital component of furthering acceptance. Visibility, however, carries with it significant and very real risks. We put ourselves in potentially mortal danger when we are publicly visible, and that is more than should be expected of us. We are soldiers in a war we never wanted to fight.
The thing is, people can't be visible for us. Even the most wonderful, committed LGBTQ+ ally cannot live a queer experience on our behalf. They can help normalize queerdom in other ways, no doubt, by creating queer characters in their art and being a friend to the community, but in the end I don't think ultimate equality can be achieved without queer people taking the risk of visibility themselves.
Should it be our responsibility to normalise our existence? Hell no.
Will anyone else do it for us? Can they? I really don't think so.
Normalisation, however, is a long and arduous process. It's important to note that queer identities shouldn't have to be universally normalised for our legislators and law enforcement agencies to become better at punishing hate crimes. Before we get to the point where queer PDA is normalised and accepted, we need to get to the point where it is safe. People can still not like it, but it needs to be understood that the law will rain down upon those who act on their prejudices. Currently, the law is severely lacking in this regard. If we were safe, we could be more open and more effective in our visibility, which in turn might lead to more normalisation.
Just writing these words has made me realise yet again just how much work there still is to do. The question of whether to try and convince the law first or the public of our right to love and live is not one any group of people should have to ask. It goes to show how important newsletters like this are. Unity is the only way forward.
Great article Till, looking forward to the next one!