You Can't Love Like A Sailor
Straight People & Queer Music
I came across a TikTok of a girl surprising her boyfriend in his college dorm, a widespread trend. It’s all cute and dandy but then I realized that the song used in the video was Sailor Song by Gigi Perez, a very queer song. Gigi is a lesbian woman who writes songs about sapphic love, it is obvious, and not once has she shied away from it. The song is very clearly about the religious trauma lesbians experience when growing up in a spiritual environment. The lyrics are explicitly queer and detail lesbian sex with lyrics like “and when you get a taste can you tell me what’s my flavor?” Gigi also uses the pronouns she/her throughout the song. You would have to be willfully ignorant to miss all of this.
The Tik Tok enraged me, I don’t personally know the couple from the Tik Tok but they represent how comfortably straight people take queer media and insert themselves in it. There are so many love songs that they could have used, an abundance of them and yet they used this one. You could use ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ for all I care about but just don’t use our songs. I am so mad I’ve only got one thing to say; fuck straight people.
Gigi has been vocal about how her religious trauma has sewn itself into her work as an artist so let me ask straight people a very fair question, when has religion had anything against your heterosexuality? You are straight, nobody in the Church is persecuting you. Nobody will ever damn you for who you love. Your sin is sleeping around, my sin is being alive. You have all of the songs, all romance songs are for you. You have Adele, you have Hozier, you have John Legend, everything is for you. But this one thing, this one thing is for me. For us.
I googled ‘cute romance songs’ and guess what? They were all straight. Not a single one of those songs was queer and you’re telling me you couldn’t take the extra second to find one yourself? What do you think ‘covered in your favor,’ means? It’s about eating pussy and yes men can do that too but don’t you dare tell me they can do it like lesbians. Can they do it like a lesbian? No! The answer is no, I can testify from personal experience.
I don’t understand this innate need that straight people have for consistently taking our media away. This need to change the lyrics to he/him, the need to say ‘this is how I feel about my man.’ Disrespectfully I do not give a shit how you feel about your man because this isn’t about you guys it’s about me and how I love women. It’s about the trauma we endure by simply existing, not believing in God but believing in her. It’s about the pretty girls, their smile and their scent, the arch of their back, the curve of their waist, their smile, the way they light up a room, the way they walk into your life and suddenly you can see in color. It’s about their hand in yours, about running away with her because nothing else matters as much as those eyes.
I didn’t have an Adele, I didn’t have a Katy Perry or a Tom Odell. For you to come into my space and try to take something that will never belong to you is something else. I’m sick of having to censor myself and skirt around the feelings of straight people when they have made it so abundantly clear they do not give a shit about how we feel, what we say, what we would like from them, what we think respect looks like. If you’re straight and you feel attacked by this then it’s probably because you’ve done something like this before. You’ve pushed your way into media and spaces that don’t welcome you, that aren’t built for you. You pride yourself in it, you flaunt your gay best friends and use lesbians as an experiment or porn scene to turn your boyfriend on. I cannot stand you. This world is built for you on our backs.
These songs, movies, and media, mean everything to me because I have lost so much of my life to time. I have lost my life to homophobia, to religion, to hiding myself away just so that I can be loved by people who are supposed to love me unconditionally. I have lost my life to rumors and murmurs, to being seen as a sin, broken. I have lost myself, who I am as a person, as a human being. I couldn’t live authentically, because people hate me, whether it be pure homophobia or religion.
Even when I came out I faced the consequences, I lost family and friends, and I have endured homophobic comments, stereotypes, hatred, and abandonment.
I got lucky. I am one of the lucky ones because I still have both my parents, my brother, friends, a roof over my head, and unconditional love, which is considered lucky. Some queer people don’t have any of that. Lesbians who don’t have a mother to gossip with about their crushes, will never get to bring their partner home to meet their dad, and won’t ever get to experience quality time with their sibling and the person they love. I’m one of the lucky ones because I get to have those experiences while you have never had to imagine a world in which those things weren’t possible. These things are given to you, they’re expected from you, it’s a goddamn right of passage.
To turn around and take things that are made by queer people for queer people in the year of 2024, it is borderline homophobic. It’s disgusting and I’m tired of it. I am exhausted from having to sugarcoat these things for you, of having to take the back seat, expected to be the bigger person, and turn a blind eye to your blatant disrespect. I am done. I do not want to keep giving the benefit of the doubt to people who will abuse it. If I am cordial to you it is because you have earned it. You have proven that there is mutual respect, that you have looked inward and reflected on the systems of oppression that suffocate our world.
I am no longer explaining to you why having the ability to write a song about queer love is so beautiful, those songs have been written on the back of hundreds of queer people. Expression of love is a privilege that has never been taken from you. It isn’t just a song, it’s history, it’s love and liberation, it’s her and I lying in bed on a Sunday morning, Friday BBQs, and movie nights. It’s love persevering through decades of oppression.
dare i make a controversial statement here 🧐 i dont think the way about it is to try to gate keep these things as sacred or "only for queer people". ofc there's a beauty in it for the original context of its creation and that needs to be respected however i don't think that straight people engaging with queer media is indicative that they don't care or want to erase it in some way. i think that this frustration should rather be more emphasised at the fact that there's a lack of music for queer people in the first place. how hard it is for these artists to build a platform. you've touched on it obv, thankfully times are slowly changing and there's more media out there. i can sympathise from personal experience in other facets of my identity with how i wish people can truly "get" how something isn't "just a cute song" to me but at the same time, i try to embrace the fact that they are also engaging with it in the first place.
idek what i'm getting at lol. i see your views as very valid but kinda curious if you get where i'm coming from too or if i might be missing something. 🩵
such a good article! the part where you touched on the imbalance between straight and lesbian art is so important. bc when they get criticized for it, the response is always like: 1.) presumption that we're both equal in this situation when hegemony exists and 2.) directly comparing straight art that we queer, to queer art they straighten, like "you lesbians do it too!". both of those are infuriating because it's just such a casual way to step on the feelings of others and silently get to ignore how we're suppressed in society. seeing you break that into little pieces by talking about cultural and religious powers already favoring straights was perfect. that thing they do can really escalate and I've seen examples of straight ppl saying variations of "if it's ok to write a story where a woman stops dating men to find her true happiness in women, then it's fair to write one where a former lesbian decides to date men". they don't even respect the imbalance between those two things. the first is liberating and the other is a perversion. everything in our lives is a voice telling us to stay away from loving women and march toward men, and that equivocation is one more voice. queer art has a voice shouting to us, trying to wake up our soul, see past the straight voices into our inner truth. for those of us who know ourselves, it's a drink of water in a desert. but whether it's anti-lesbian song lyrics to the anti-lesbian fiction there's a droplet of that straight voice, watering down the queer voice in the art.
my problem isn't when straight ppl engage with lesbian art in good faith. it's that they don't carry lesbians and lesbianism or anything queer with them in their hearts while engaging. they're not earnest in recognizing it for what is, who it's for, what messages it really speaks. it's that they don't have any queer guidance or queer heart in those moments, so everything is filtered back into a "corrected" straight lens. when the tik tok girl you mentioned changed those lyrics, she did it because she thought she was expressing the same things as the original piece, just with the genders swapped. they treat swapping genders like nothing of significance has changed, like men and women are easily fungible when even straight hegemony says the opposite under penalty of violence. but it does matter if you change the genders. queer art expresses fundamentally QUEER FEELINGS. by straightening it out, they have also changed the content of the feelings but still present it in the form of the original queer art as though it's fine, as though nothing is fundamentally different. it's very close to something like lying. they're being inauthentic people with the way they engage queer art. their bad faith makes my inner lesbian voice small
when queer people queer straight art, it adds a depth of humanity for us to relate with. we're not powerful enough for our narrative to take over and replace the straight one anyway. when straight people straighten queer art, it guts the revolutionary and liberating spirit out of it. they have the numbers and systemic backing to water down the things that light a fire in us.
long comment cause this article lit a fire in my heart