The Rideshare Chronicles: Gender Roles in Queer Relationships

With his jolly demeanor, bulky build, scruffy face, and plaid shirt, Ruben* immediately reminds me of a Santa Claus logger hybrid. The smell of warm fudge fills the car when he gets in outside Guerneville’s the Rainbow Cattle Company.

His maroon bag opens slightly to reveal black swim trunks, a purple towel, and a deflated unicorn when Ruben sets it down on the middle seat. He explains to me that he’d bought the fudge earlier from the local sweet shop, to take home to his boyfriend.

“It’s nice and warm. Not ‘fresh from the oven’ warm but ‘sitting under the sun for a couple hours’ warm,” Ruben says while scratching his beard.

 His boyfriend doesn’t need to be made aware of that distinction, though.

“Warm fudge is warm fudge, right?” he laughs.

We drive past a voluminous tree that looms above a cozy-looking wooden cafe. Red and crimson leaves speckle its otherwise dark green foliage. An image of a lumbering Sesame Street character whose fur has been tinged with puddles of ketchup and mayo comes to mind. Its personality, were it to have one, I sense, would be well-meaning but clumsy.

Though I don’t remember exactly how—maybe it’s a lyric in the song we’re listening to, or maybe it’s the rainbow sticker in my dashboard—Ruben and I get to talking about gender roles within queer relationships.

Ruben, who met his boyfriend on the dating app Scruff, shares that they both present as more masculine “alpha-type” bears. He says that even amongst other gay men, he often fields questions about his relationship that feel heteronormative to him.

“Why can’t we both be switches?” he wonders aloud. “It’s so binary.”

Gender Roles in LGBTQ History

After Ruben expresses his general support for a relaxation of roles, I think about kikis. Back in the 1950s, this was the word (often used derisively) for women who switched between roles within the lesbian community.

Outhistory.org states that kikis “were viewed with suspicion by other working-class lesbians. This was often due to a belief that a woman who did not dress or speak appropriately was assumed to be undercover police.”

After choosing either a butch or femme identity, each faced pressure to adhere to a code. At bars, the butch was to approach the femme, while the femme was to wait for the butch. Many bars even had separate bathrooms, labeled “Butch” or “Femme.”

These roles were originally designed to help the LGBTQ community. They granted queer women opportunities that were otherwise unavailable to them in a homophobic society. Still, lesbians became somewhat rigid in their imposition of them.  

I share with Ruben that those who breached this code typically faced ostracism from the community. Femmes most often became active with a more “knowledgeable, experienced butch.” It was taboo for butches to be attracted to one another, or for femmes to date femmes. I recall a book on lesbian history which stated the “guidelines for attraction ran very deep.”

Ruben chuckles at this phrasing. “Guidelines for attraction,” he repeats, shaking his head. Later on, he asks me if I’ve ever come up against lingering traces of those biases in my own dating experiences.

Nowadays these roles, are nowhere near enforced the way they once were. Still, I tell Ruben that years ago, I did date a femme whose friend called the two of us together “a waste of two femmes.”

“At the time I just sort of laughed it off,” I explain. “But years later, thinking back on it I saw it as an example of an LGBTQ person like, basically reproducing the same limiting roles that the patriarchal hetero puts onto us.”

Looking Beyond the Binary

Even though I identify as femme, and society reads me as such, like many humans, a mix of masculine and feminine traits embody me.

In elementary school, I enjoyed reading Little House on the Prairie, but also Goosebumps. Boy friends and I often brought our Star Wars toys to recess to play with. One was a plastic Death Star when folded up. Folded out, it became a scene from the planet of Tatoonie (much like a Polly Pocket). Another was a briefcase in the shape of C3PO’s head that carried an arsenal of miniature plastic Star Wars figurines.

My parents didn’t hold strictly to gendered socialization. They bought me Hot Wheels when I asked, as well as airplane pajamas that some of my girl classmates commented were “boyish.” They never pushed pink on me, nor Barbie dolls. My mom herself decided on a somewhat gender-neutral haircut for both my sister and me. They willingly signed me up for soccer, basketball, softball, and robot camp. When I wore a wig once and introduced myself as Eli, they laughed and told me I looked handsome.

And yet, like the vast majority of us do, I’ve merely chosen and settled on the gender I identify most closely with.

We do this—rather than relish in our full expression of interests, tendencies, and proclivities—because of the system that’s imposed on us. Binary is the air we breathe. Gender in our society is organized into a black and white structure that leaves little space for categorical blending.

Sandra Bem was the first to pioneer an idea that stood contrary to this. In 1974, she developed a test that determines a person’s gender on a scale rather than assigning it an absolute value.

“People of either sex can be rated as being mostly feminine or masculine, or having equal traits of both sex roles, or not identifying strongly with either role,” writes betterhelp.com’s description of her work.

Bem’s ideas still have yet to be embraced by mainstream society.

I explain to Ruben that even having decided that “woman” best fits my gender identity, this doesn’t mean that subscribing to all its accompanying roles feels authentic to who I am. I believe many other people—beyond just those who are genderqueer, agender, or gender nonbinary—share similar feelings.

We both agree that the strict imposition of gender roles harms all of us. Genderqueer and nonbinary individuals often feel alienated and highly misunderstood within heteronormative spaces.

Feminine women are regarded as women first, thinkers and innovators perhaps second (if they’re lucky). Seen as antithetical to gay, my perceived femininity has elicited countless ignorant comments from strangers. It’s given men permission to ogle and make inappropriate remarks to my partner and me in public.

Many cis men admit to feeling like they lack close confidants. In my mind, this is largely because men are discouraged from showing the vulnerability that makes close relationships possible. Ruben says that prior to coming out, most of his close friendships were with women. He found his friendships with cis, straight men to be more surface-level.

Final Leg of the Journey

After coiling through more woodsy streets, I brake when I spot three deer. Two of them finish crossing the street, while the third remains behind, waiting for me to maneuver around him, perhaps. I gesture for it to go ahead. It does.

“I meant to say this earlier,” Ruben adds as we near the final block. We’ve just driven past a bed and breakfast. It reminds me of a Swiss Family Robinson village, with hanging bridges connecting separate wooden lodgings. “But thank you for the luxurious amount of leg room.”

He’s referring to how I keep my seat pulled up extremely close to the steering wheel. This allows ample space for the person seated behind me.

“No problem!” I tell him. I explain that both my short stature and fear of losing vehicular control are the reasons for it.

“We’re a compatible driver-passenger pair,” he says in response. He lets out a chuckle that’s sturdy like a logger and comforting like Santa. If his laugh were an inanimate object, it’d definitely be one you could lean back into and take a nap inside.

Readers, how do you notice gender roles showing up in your own relationship(s), if at all? Do you feel like you are able to embody your full range of masculine and feminine traits.?

Personally, I’m in full support of a reclamation of the kiki.

*Names and certain details changed for confidentiality