“What is it with you and these straight girls?” my Queer Life Mentor, Zu, asks me one day while I’m in the middle of regaling them with stories about my not-dates. We’re watching an early round playoff soccer game that’s streaming illegally on the laptop in front of us.
“I don’t know,” I say. “They’re just drawn to me, I guess.” “Are they drawn to you or are you drawn to them?” they ask gently, mercifully sparing me eye contact by keeping their gaze on the game.
The directness of the question causes my body to flush with uncomfortable recognition. I shrug and keep my eyes trained on the game, but all I can see now are the faces of my unrequited crushes on unattainable women over the years. My economics teacher in high school. My friend’s mom, who was helping me with my applications to grad school. A Zionist, whom I was collaborating with on a project at work, who wanted to argue about Palestine whenever we were done looking at data. One of the cocaptains of my soccer team in college, who was dating the cocaptain of the men’s soccer team. My occupational therapist, as she walked me through exercises for my broken finger. They were all straight women, all femmes, all into banter and flattered by the attention I gave them. I flirted with them and they flirted back, partly—if not entirely—because I wasn’t a guy, because nothing would happen, because they weren’t interested in me like that. So they would platonically cuddle with me, call me crying about their trash boyfriends, sleep curled up next to me in my bed, text me when they were drunk to tell me I’m better than a boyfriend, and if only I were a guy they would date me.
I’ve told Zu a lot of these stories and it’s annoying that they remember them so well.
“Lamya, a lot of people go through phases with straight girls,” they say. “But if we’re counting high school you’re on, what, your second decade? It might be worth thinking through where this is coming from.”
I had courted Zu as my Queer Life Mentor precisely because they’re so perceptive and astute and don’t hold back saying exactly what they think. Now, though, these qualities are annoying. I choose not to respond, hoping the game will distract them and the conversation will end there.
But Zu takes their mentoring duties very seriously, and as the game winds down, they push me to think through the underlying issues, asking what stops me from crushing on, asking out, going on dates with queer women who would be interested in dating me. Like the soccer players on the screen, I answer mostly in grunts and vague head movements.
“You know I struggled with internalized homophobia for a long time,” Zu says. “It’s hard not to absorb the fucked-up shit we grew up hearing about queerness. Could it be that?” “That must be it,” I say, ready for this conversation to be over, ready to go back to the six kinds of chips on the table and the last few minutes of this game. Besides, they’re right; of course I’m scared that dating queer women will make my gayness real in ways it isn’t when I’m crushing on straight girls. And there are so many people to hide from: my Muslim community in New York, my grandma, who has now moved in with my uncle four hours away, my parents across the ocean. Rejection from straight girls is so much easier than rejection from my entire family and religion. It doesn’t help that I am totally, absolutely, definitely intimidated by all the badass queer femmes I know.
But then, a few months later, a woman who I know for a fact is gay tells me she likes me, and suddenly I’m not so sure that my hesitance is the result of internalized homophobia alone. She’s a sweetheart, this woman: we meet at a queer Muslim retreat, where we attend workshops together and hang out talking a few times on the porch. I find her adorable. Surprisingly, she finds me adorable, too. I discover this because on day three of the retreat, she tells her friend, who tells my friend, who tells me, and just like that, I stop finding her adorable. Now that she knows that I know she thinks I’m adorable, I have to deal with it—and I deal with it by being angry. That what could have been a fun, flirty friendship is now over. And on top of that, we’re stuck at a retreat together with a dozen mutual friends who know about our mutual finding each other adorable. I’m angry that I now have to contend with the messiness and fallout of what we are or aren’t going to do with our feelings. I’m angry that I have to continue to be in community with her. My anger comes on so quickly and strongly that it surprises me. I feel nauseous and spend the last day of the retreat hiding in my room, sick with a “stomach bug.”
I do a lot of thinking while I’m hiding, and eventually realize why I like crushing on straight girls. They’re easy, they’re predictable. Their rejection is preordained: so familiar that it makes the uncomfortable comfortable, normal, expected—even safe. With straight girls, I get to choose being rejected, I get to reject myself. But having feelings for another queer person makes the situation feel entirely out of my control; I wouldn’t know if or when or why they’d reject me, and what’s scarier is that I don’t know what I’d do if they didn’t reject me. I’m too afraid to find out.
Excerpted from Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H. Copyright © 2023 by Lamya H. Published by Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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