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One huge thing I learned from reading The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward (recommended by a fellow FDS-er!) is how the gay movement was really just the voice of gay men 💡 It wasn't necessarily reflective of lesbian women.
I'm curious to hear what gay male propaganda you know that isn't reflective of a lesbian women's experience. OR something that affects lesbian women, but not gay men, so it's something we never hear about.
I really think that feminism did more for lesbians than the gay rights movement did. Especially now that lesbians are being treated with disdain by the LGBT for not wanting to date trans women. Even the efforts to establish separate LGB communities really only took off because gay men got on board (once the 🚂s started coming after them, too). There was Get The L Out, but they never really had much outside support.
I'm a regular straight girl, but my education in biology has helped me notice that lesbians are rarely counted. If studies do look at sexual orientation, they tend to get lumped in with gay men, or with "gender diverse" populations. The recent monkeypox outbreak was a good example. It's impossible to find anything that looks at the risks lesbians face because they never actually counted how many homosexual females contracted the virus. The only study I read that even mentioned lesbians lumped them in with EVERYONE who was GNC, so it said 2 lesbians had contracted the virus, but it very well could have been 3 male "lesbians" by their own classifications.
I am bi, so when I was still on reddit I sometimes hung around the lesbian subreddits. The one thing I found very disturbing was how they were sometimes using 'top' and 'bottom' to describe their sexual encounters. I think that's such a stupid thing to adopt from gay men, it completely disregards that female sexuality is so much more complex and works differently.
Of course, now when I think about it, it was on Reddit, so might have just been scrotes writing that crap and pretending to be women.
what about the fact that gay couples now have their own "good" TV shows and lesbians are still made to be a "sexy" joke?
Gay men are not your friends. Gay men don’t have your back. Our issues are not their issues. Our needs are not their needs. Why would they care? This academic paper really opened my eyes to the fact the gay community is very misogynistic and not really female inclusive or a safe place for bi and lesbian women. It backed up a lot of my feelings and experiences and how constantly disappointed I am in gay men’s behaviour and lack of solidarity with queer women and women in general.
“Lesbian History and Gay Studies: Keeping a Feminist Perspective”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029200200006
What’s disappointed me the most in women’s queer spaces is the obvious influence of toxic masculinity in wlw relationships—lesbians acting like f*ckboys and being straight up abusive. Everything being hypersexualized to match men’s supposed sex drives and perversions. Poly entering queer women’s spaces, ugh. I even struggle to enjoy tv and movies focusing on gay men —the female characters are so often presented as desperate man-chasing wh*res or have no personality or their own story and solely exist for the gay men to talk about their many, many, many, many, many sexual exploits.
Women in TV shows become bisexual after they were written as hetero because somebody realised they didn't meet the diversity quotient or something. Or to keep make viewers entertained. Bisexual men tend to be written from the start. Off the top of my head there's Willow from Buffy, Rosa from B99...