There was a woman who sat next to me on the bus everyday, as we rode to work. We would talk, little things, small acquaintance chit-chat... until we felt that we knew each other fairly well. One day, on learning of my recent divorce, she attempted to 'fix me up' with a man she thought I’d like. My response startled her..shocked her sense of reality, disintegrated any illusion that she knew who I was. With rounded eyes, she blurted, and sputtered, in obvious confusion,

But, you don’t LOOK like a lesbian!?!

And I couldn’t help but wonder to myself, as I shook my head at her dismay
what does a lesbian look like? I remember the first time I ever went into a gay bar. The woman who I met there, who tried to teach me how to play pool. She wore a man’s plaid lumberjack shirt, and she like to be called Fred. This was the image that must have risen in the mind’s eye of my bus-riding acquaintance: short hair, stocky build, no jewelry. Almost a lack of gender, a denial of womanhood in all of its stereotypical cues. Someone who almost seemed to want to become a man - as if that would sanctify her desire to love other women.

To think that there was only one way to be, because I was a lesbian. To be released from the jail-role of the heterosexual homemaker to yet another one-dimensional role in the mere utterance of a word. To have my entire identity hang upon that one aspect of myself - how confining. And to think that Fred, however comfortable she might have been with herself, would also be defined by this narrow view. Because people will not look past the image presented, to the person within.

Prejudice is a type of blindness. I liken it to a horse wearing blinkers - a narrowing of focus imposed by a narrowness of mind. Over many years I’ve deliberately played with the image I present of myself to the outside world - daring them to define me by the seen, and shaking their realities in the process. I constantly strive to redefine myself along the way. I’ve found that the appearance I am comfortable with can alter as slowly as decade to decade, or as quickly as day to day - without apparent rhyme or reason.

What does a lesbian look like? Anyone, anywhere, anytime. There are no clues that can be counted on, and there shouldn’t be. I love a woman. I love women. I love people - all genders (for I’ve found that the shades of gray between male and female are vaster than I’d been led to believe), all races, all creeds. What does a lesbian look like? For the moment, she looks like me.