On friendship, platonic love and acceptance: a defence of 'Gal Pals'
This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.
As a queer creator and a femslash fan as well, I’ve been around Tumblr quite a lot and I’ve been involved in more than a few fandoms. Throughout the time I’ve spent lurking around the net, looking for good content I’ve noticed delight an increasing tendency of including bisexual, pansexual, asexual, transsexual girls and even non-binary sapphic people within the femslash community. Nothing could make me more delighted to see so many people and so many lovely fellow fans and creators being so open minded and actively promoting their opinion with their posts. Basking in this loving acceptance has been an important starting point for me personally to discover and get more accustomed to the various reaches of the sexuality and gender spectrum, most of which I have never even been aware of before creating a Tumblr profile. The variety of representation the femslash universe has introduced me to will never fail to amaze and delight me: women of ever shape, colour and size from every ethnicity conceivable, both from our world and from fictitious ones, great interpretations of existing characters as well as compelling original characters… You name it, we have it. And if we don’t, you share it and we’ll love it.
There’s one thing that still seems to carry a heavy stigma in the community (at least, as far as my experience goes), and that thing is platonic relationships. Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the frustration derived from lack or queer representation in the media and the need to fill in the void ourselves. And I’m totally on board with that (in fact, it’s something I’ve been doing myself for quite a long time now). However, I have come across some genuine words of frustration and intolerance about friendship between two women (queer or not) not being worthy of being called ‘femslash’. I’m not going to delve into discussions about labels, what I want to discuss is why platonic love shouldn’t be treated with such disdain. I will try to explain my point through my personal experience.
The first femslash experience (and my ‘rite of passage’ into the world of femslash, if you will) happened when I was 15, long before coming to terms with my own sexuality and coming to the conclusion that I did indeed liked girls. I had read ‘The Count of Montecristo’ (which I highly recommend if you’re into stories of injustice and revenge served cold, by the way) and, on the spot, being focused on the main plot, hadn’t realized the ongoing romance between Eugenie Danglas and Louise D’Armilly (yes, it has canon lesbians too, go read it!!) which I had only considered to be simply really good friends. I only noticed afterwards, when someone made me notice a reference to Sappho that had somehow eluded me at the first read. I remember finding myself quite intrigued and rather troubled by the thought of the two being together in a romantic way for reasons that are quite clear now but were very confused back then. I felt so uneasy about this discovery that I actually decided to cope with my feelings by writing about it. I feel like I should explain my decision. I have always felt a great connection with written words and often felt the need to deal with things by writing them down, finding that getting into someone else’s head and seeing things though their prospective I could understand different points of views other than my own. So I decided to understand the freaky (in my perception) duo by writing from their point of view. What I wrote ended up being my first femslash fanfiction and one of the few pieces from my teen age I can still say to be quite proud of. That fan fiction has an important emotional value for me, since it was only through it that I could overcome the sting of internalised homophobia that was starting to bubble up inside me and destroy it at its root. After writing it I felt like I’d understood and accepted a kind of relationship I had never really stopped to think about. But I was only able to get around to accept it because I started my journey to understanding from a feeling I could already relate to: platonic love.
As I said before, I had only seen Eugenia and Louise as really close friends, just as close and me and my best friend are with each other, which is why suddenly seeing our surrogate selves’ relationship shift so radically had shocked me so. On the other hand, it was only by approaching the thought of a homoerotic relationship between the two characters as a friendship that went the ‘extra mile’ that I could get around the idea of them being queer. I know it sounds weird to say, but that’s actually how it happened for me. I saw differences and similarities between real friendship and romantic relationship and came to one answer to explain both, though in different ways: love.
I have asked myself multiple questions about my relationship with my friends as I was coming to terms with my sexuality and how I actually felt about them, especially about my relationship with my best friend: was I in love with her? Did I want her in a different way? And after a while, I just came to the peaceful conclusion that I simply love her in a way that’s different from the way I’d love a sister and different from the way I’d love a girlfriend. Do I think highly of her, do I think she’d deserving of someone who’d love her just as much as I do? Do I think of ourselves together at different stages in life, in different places, in different situations, together for as long as our time on Earth will permit us? Yes. Am I just in ‘the friendzone’? Absolutely not! There’s nothing one-sided about this. I love her and she loves me back in the same way. We just don’t have sex, but that’s about it. ’It’s just platonic’: so what? Does that mean it’s not love? Absolutely not. We’re just two girls in love, in our own way. Love is never ‘just platonic’, love is never ‘just’ anything: it’s just love.
You can think of it as a sort of peculiar asexual, poly-amorous relationship, if it helps accepting it as a legitimate emotional bond between two girls. It’s a romance of hearts and minds, not of bodies. It shouldn’t be stigmatized as ‘just platonic’, as if it’s anything less than any other kind of love.
Furthermore, friendship it’s an experience that more people can relate to. It’s easier to get to understand homoerotic relationships for people who haven’t experienced starting from friendship. Of course, it can be uncomfortable to think about at first, if one compares an homoerotic relationship to their friendship. But what if we do this comparison the other way round, comparing a homoerotic relationship to a real, intimate friendship. It’s so much easier to realise the only difference between the two is just sex. It’s the best way to see love shine through something unknown and help ourselves relate with each other, whatever gender, inclination or sexuality we feel it’s our own.
Love is always the key.
BornFreak
About the Author: 20 years old, originally from Italy, currently living abroad, proudly queer since 2014
