'NOT GAY ENOUGH': RUBY ROSE, GATEKEEPING, AND TOXIC FANDOM
https://t.co/ycd8yFnpB1
And what exactly, pray tell, were those "fans" angry about? Oh, lots of things. They claimed Rose wasn’t a good enough actress; that Rose was too femme; the fact that straight women love her means she’s too mainstream; and that Rose was bisexual and thus not queer enough (One: Rose is a lesbian and two: DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF? BECAUSE BISEXUAL PEOPLE CAN). One of Rose’s last tweets before abandoning Twitter expressed bafflement over being, essentially, called not gay enough to play Kate Kane.
Yeah, just let that one sink in for a moment. A high profile genderfluid lesbian actress, whose resumé covers both stealing women’s hearts (Orange is the New Black) and frenetic action (John Wick 2), was cast as one of the highest profile lesbian superheroes, whose resumé also covers both of those things. And she got chased off of social media by “fans” for not being gay enough.
Since time immemorial, there have been some in the LGBTQI community whose response to meeting a new member of the community is a sneering “Oh, so you’re gay, huh? Prove it!” There is perhaps no more iconic rhetoric for this garbage attitude than the idea of the “gold star lesbian”—a lesbian who has never had sex with a man. Valuing this particular kind of life experience over others is a huge problem, because it tells women loving women that their identity as a lesbian doesn’t count if it’s taken them years to figure it out, if they’ve dated men for any reason, or if their identity has shifted and evolved for any reason. Essentially, it punishes lesbians for not having had their whole situation figured out before they jumped into the pool, so to speak. It punishes us for being human.