Shadow and Light

On the heterosexual gaze and lesbian visibility.

The writer's experience in her girlfriend's photography class became a microcosm of how lesbian identity is distorted and eroticized through the male gaze. Her essay examines the tension between visibility and voyeurism, and the cultural forces that turn queer women’s intimacy into something consumable.

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I never thought about what being a lesbian meant until I was standing in the back of my girlfriend’s photography class with my heart lodged in my throat and flames licking my  face. An intimate black and white image of us was projected up in front of the entire class, and she had no idea. She was focused on the computer’s printer settings, eager to get the photo printed for critique later that week. At a glance, I noticed every man in the room had stopped what they were doing, their eyes fixed on the screen. It wasn’t the photo itself that caused my cheeks to flush— it was realizing how swiftly art and love became a spectacle when queer: two cisgender girls with their lips perfectly aligned, yet not touching. A black abyss marked the center, a gap outsiders eagerly interpreted as a kiss. That was the moment when I realized that in art and life, lesbian women are visible but not entirely understood. My girlfriend and I were exposed in the most beautiful light yet found ourselves filtered through the heterosexual male gaze.

I heard a gasp. Clustered together in the far corner of the room were three young men. “Look,” One with glasses said, “They’re kissing.” His eyes were deadlocked on the photo. I had studied the male gaze before, in a few film courses I took throughout my undergraduate career. But living in it was something else. 

Shannon Watson wrote in an article on sludge.online that “[society is] being forced to watch lesbian love stories dwindle into softcore porn. Films about lesbians are usually: overly sexualised, partial to killing off said lesbians and ridiculously dull or overwhelmingly silly…[all] because heterosexual men are in control from start to finish…” If the foundation of a film was its visual appeal, then I believed that my girlfriend’s photograph was in the exact position as Call Me By Your Name and Love Lies Bleeding were in 2017 and 2024. We were sexual subjects without even trying.

Growing up, I quickly learned that Heteronormativity had no identifier, no flag above its head, nor a little nametag—it was invisible until understood, in any capacity it came out as. It was a concept more normal than anything else, a conditioning from our society. But queerness was another story.   And that day, in my girlfriend’s photography class,  with that black and white image of us projected on screen made me feel like we were a new species from another planet, or zoo animals on display.

I thought about the time when we went to San Francisco Pride, where our relationship immediately became sexualized through men’s eyes, magnetized to our intertwined fingers.

“Show us a kiss, ladies.” 

Whether we spoke up or passed by silently, the visibility alone allowed immediate access for lesbianism to be readily available to men. In her article for Engender Blog, Denisha Killoh mentions that on certain adult entertainment websites, “‘lesbian’ is the most commonly searched topic in deep red states which have constantly condemned and opposed the LGBT+ community.  This unequivocally shows that lesbians are viewed as no more than an erotic fixation for men to gawk over with little consideration for the genuine love within our relationships or our fundamental rights.”

“Who is the man in the relationship?”

 We were PJ and Hazel in Bottoms, without the butch/femme codes. In our world, my girlfriend and I were equal. But others still projected a heteronormative hierarchy onto us, as if they couldn’t  imagine a relationship without one.  The legitimacy of our love never felt grounded in acceptance; it ebbed and flowed along with the desires, fantasies, and projections of the people watching us. 

I glanced up at the front to see my girlfriend still invested in the computer. My face burned. I felt embarrassed, more so about the photo’s sincerity than its content. It was supposed to be about the interaction between shadow and light in photo editing. Instead, I was naked. Too visible. Too seen. One concept—black and white—stripped down into its bareness, with two women who loved each other, defined by their sexuality. I got up and walked over to my girlfriend, who had just finished hitting the “print” button.

“Those guys back there were staring at the photo.” 

“What photo?” 

“The one projected in front of the entire class.” 

She looked up and froze. Her eyes slowly moved from the image to my lips as I told her about the guys in the back. She seemed mortified. 

“I didn’t know it was connected to the projector.” 

“It’s ok,” I said. “People just can’t seem to admire art in silence.” 

My girlfriend and I didn’t expect visibility to be loud, yet we didn’t want to become invisible either. Sara Duell wrote for WMN that “...even though you might encounter more gay and queer art today than before, I find that it’s harder to just come by lesbian art…” Even when lesbian art surfaces, from Nan Goldin’s photography to The Watermelon Woman, it’s treated as niche and eventually left to fade into obscurity. And when lesbian love stories are centered in the mainstream they are often hypersexualized or exploited in films like Blue Is the Warmest Color—a movie celebrated as progressive while relying on long, voyeuristic sex scenes crafted through a heterosexual male gaze. 

My girlfriend and I’s subtle love had turned into voyeurism. I found myself wondering what, exactly, made lesbians so compelling within the heterosexual male gaze. I scoured the internet for answers. In a reddit thread, one comment stood out: that straight men and lesbians supposedly “want the same thing,” and that lesbians are attractive because they don’t center men at all. That dynamic—our autonomy, our indifference—creates a paradox: we become desirable precisely because of our inaccessibility, and our unwillingness to perform traditional femininity.

My embarrassment turned to rage, as I thought of how the image was misconstrued, and how on a daily basis we had to explain and defend our love to morbidly curious onlookers.  Instead of seeing my girlfriend’s intention, this group of men had seen a reflection of their own fantasies, a sexually charged image that existed for their consumption. 

They had missed the most important part–the  conversation between light and dark, between tenderness and restraint, between two women who loved each other quietly, defiantly, unapologetically.

The photo—and the story behind it—is ours. And I refuse to allow others to rewrite it.