The Well of Homeliness
What I want to know is, why are there so few attractive lesbians? It doesn’t seem much to ask that there should be, say, ten in the entire world. I am confident that I could overcome my essential lack of sexual interest in women if there were an increase in the amount of beautiful ones who might want to seduce me.
I am not going to go on tediously about how there are, and always have been, a lot of sexually attractive homosexual men. I don’t mean boring male-model Aryan types; I am yet to meet a really intelligent woman who gets aroused by the variety of stomach known as a ‘six pack’. I mean, for example, the sweetly vulnerable Montgomery Clift, and I mean Clift even after he was disfigured in a car accident. When I was about twelve, I was madly in love with Anthony Perkins as he appeared in the role of Norman Bates. He looked as though he never played sport and had sensitive-looking hands. If I wasn’t in love with known homosexuals, I was in love with actors, such as Andrew McCarthy, who might as well have been. I was mad for McCarthy in Pretty in Pink, as Blane McDonnagh, a weak-minded wreck who wears light-coloured suits to high school.
Frankly, discovering that man after man you are in love with is attracted to other men is demoralising and I would have felt a lot better if there had been a quantity of good-looking lesbians to whom I could have aspired. But the simple fact is that the only time you see an attractive woman in a movie or on television acting in the manner of a lesbian – for example, Catherine Deneuve as a hot vampire and Susan Sarandon as a hot specialist in ageing in The Hunger; Mena Suvari as a hot, if irritating, art student in Six Feet Under; Jennifer Beals as a hot, and successful, art expert in The L Word – she’s sure to be heterosexual in real life, and, what’s more, one of those actresses who is always making a huge deal about being a mother. When you see a genuine lesbian playing a lesbian, it’s guaranteed to be Ellen DeGeneres or kd lang.
Yes, there’s Jodie Foster (who, to my knowledge hasn’t ever played a lesbian), but I can’t stand the way she’s always acting in films that require her to speak entirely in French, and talking about how she was a ‘gifted’ child. Also, I’ve never really got over how, in an obvious attempt to seem less gay during her press junkets for Maverick, she claimed at least once to be attracted to Mel Gibson, perhaps the stupidest man in the world.
Of course, even if attractive lesbians were in greater supply, I’m utterly threatened by the concept of being with a woman who’s a lot better looking than I am. But why would I want to be with a woman who’s worse looking than I am? It’s most unfair. It seems that all I can do is hope for a world in which many more lesbians take the time to come up to scratch.
Avril Rolfe is a Melbourne-based writer.
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