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I am a 36-year-old cisgendered gold star lesbian from Texas. My 30-year-old girlfriend of a little more than a year does not label herself as easily as I do. She broke all my rules and I still dated (and fell) for her. She is a single mom, divorced from a man and relatively “new” to the lez life. I am only the second woman she has slept with and the first she has dated seriously.

I know, I know...

When we met she ID'd herself as a lesbian; not bi or pan or fluid. A lesbian. Over the course of the last year she has revealed that she was involved with, fucking, or on dating sites looking for hetero love right up until we met. This confused me but I know not everyone is as clear on their labels as I am so we pressed on. She also at one point left me at her house to watch her kid (I agreed) so she could celebrate a male friend's birthday at the movies. She was gone until 2 am and went to his house, smoked weed, drank, and then took him to the movies and paid—just the two of them. He apparently even told her it was the “best date he had since his divorce." We talked about it and how I felt uncomfortable with his comments and her actions and we pressed on...

Last night, I am at her place and we are chatting about a mutual trans friend. She is giving me all the cues that she is attracted to him. So I ask: Would you date a trans man? She says, “Yeah, sure.” I say, "Really? How about a cisgender male?" She says, “I would probably be lying if I said no. I cant help who I have chemistry with.” We kinda dropped it there.

Today, I am quite clearly not ok with this new information—after all her protests about what a “true, blue lesbian” she was I am really pissed about this revelation. I feel like presenting/convincing others (ME) that you are a lesbian while still being open to dating men is bullshit. If that was her story from the beginning that would be one thing. I have a very strong urge to cut ties and move on. I like stability and predictability in what I consider fundamental things—like who gets your rocks off! I feel like she revealed this because she either just realized it or finally felt like being honest about it. Either way, it's making me wanna cut and run. Am I being an asshole?

Possibly A Single Star

I'm sitting here wondering if your girlfriend cheated on you with that dude—drunk and "at the movies" until 2 am?—but I'm an unnaturally suspicious person and I should be ashamed of myself for thinking such a thing and straight men and their lesbian/bi/pan women can be friends and go to the movies and get drunk and hang out until 2 am without diddling each other.

Now let's press on to other issues...

The week began with a discussion of gay men and their gold and/or platinum stars, we paused on Thursday to consider whether there's something deeply, creepily, problematically misogynist about gay men and their gold and/or platinum stars (yes, said a reader; no, said a me), and we're closing out the week talking about lesbians and their gold stars. So, yeah, like I said on Thursday: this star business isn't limited to gay men. Lesbians have their own stars—their stars even have their own Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia entries. There's even a debate about whether "Gold Star Lesbian" is offensively problematic or problematically offensive ("...some people believe it not only shames women who have a sexual history with men, but it is also cissexist and transmisogynist.")

Anyway, PASS: here's the thing: you're allowed to like what you like—we're all allowed to like what we like—and you're free to have preferences and seek out people who meet your criteria, however arbitrary and nonsensical or reasonable and sensible. In the bedroom, in our intimate lives, we're free to discriminate. You should bear in mind—we should all bear in mind—that romantic and sexual "preferences" are often shaped by cultural biases. So it's always a good idea to examine and interrogate our preferences 1. to make sure they're actually our preferences and 2. to prevent them from destroying relationships that could've been contenders.

Anyway, PASS, if you absolutely, positively cannot fuck or date or babysit for a woman who could fuck or date or babymake with a man—a woman like your current girlfriend—then you're free to dump her and seek out a gold-star lesbian or a done-with-dudes lesbian. They're out there. But your current girlfriend isn't one of them so she was either lying to you when she told you she was a “true, blue lesbian” or she has a more elastic/bendable/fluid definition of “true, blue lesbian." Why would she lie? Well, sometimes people who tell the truth about being bi or fluid or pan get dumped again and again for telling that particular truth. No one likes rejection, PASS, and someone who's been rejected repeatedly for telling a particular truth may stop telling that particular truth in order to avoid rejection.

So your girlfriend told you what she thought she had to in order to get into your pants. She should've told the truth, IMHO—not to spare you the grief of dating a woman who could maybe see herself sitting on a dick again at some point, PASS, but because lying only delayed the rejection she feared.


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