Good luck!: On Comp Het

The first time I heard "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan, I was sobbing by the first chorus. And every time it plays, a shiver goes through me and my sight blurs with tears.

It might seem strange, that a song written by a lesbian about her closeted lover hits me so hard. Though I am, blissfully, in a relationship with a girl, she is my first girlfriend and I do not identify as a lesbian. Before I dated her, I had only ever been with cishet men.

With one exception. And it's thoughts of him that flood my mind by the first three lines of Chappell's song.

I had a lover of five years, who I'll call R. I was 15 when we met, he was a year younger. Our circle of friends barely intersected, so we were only passing acquaintances until we were housed in the same dormitory in college. I was surprised at how glad I was at the prospect of seeing him daily, even more so by how much I looked forward to running into him in the stairwell after dorm meetings, where I'd drag out conversations with him as long as I could. He was studying classical literature and philosophy, spoke Latin fluently, and had a natural aptitude for math. He had sable hair and eyes the color of withered leaves in autumn. Within a few months I knew I wanted to sleep with him. It wasn't long until I got what I wanted. The morning after he knocked on my door, and he didn't go back to his room for the rest of the school year.

It sounds romantic. It was. I was the happiest I had ever been. But we agreed that it wouldn't last. He intended to transfer the next year. I had a boyfriend back home and he wanted a monogamous relationship with kids. So the last night we spent together we promised each other it was over.

But it wasn't. We couldn't keep away from each other. For the next five years I'd make my way to the city where he lived. Every time we'd promise it would be the last. And every time it wasn't. He dated people, I dated people, it didn't matter. We couldn't quit each other.

But something changed in him. When he used to be so passionate about his interests and intellectually curious, he became detached and somber. I attributed it to the pressure of school, to the kind of girls he was dating, to his drinking. And I'm sure that was partly true. But I started to notice how he'd act around his best friend. He became particularly animated around him. He'd joke about us all having a threesome. He looked at him with an expression that was very familiar to me.

Long story short, I came to realize that I was sleeping with a bisexual in absurd denial of his true self.

How did this even happen?

Many AFAB lesbians, as they venture out of the closet, come across the term, "compulsory heterosexuality," or "comp het." The term was coined by Adrienne Rich in her essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience," published in 1980. Rich, who identified as a political lesbian, came out late in life after having children and becoming widowed. In a nutshell, compulsory heterosexuality describes the way that AFAB people are socialized into assuming that they are heterosexual because they are never made aware of alternative options. Society teaches them that the very idea of being a woman is inextricably linked with being heterosexual. So they unquestioningly enter heterosexual relationships, where they submit to the subjugation that a male-dominated society places upon them, and ignore or resist intimate relationships with women. As Rich puts it:

"Women learn to accept the inevitability of this 'drive' because they receive it as dogma."

She states that compulsory heterosexuality is enacted by men exercising power over women, by commanding and exploiting their labor, stifling their creativity, withholding education and culture, denying their sexuality, and forcing sexuality upon them. She also explores the intersection of compulsory heterosexuality with capitalism, in that women are indoctrinated into heterosexuality because of their economic disenfranchisement at the hands of men. She writes about how women participate in their own subjugation by identifying with male values and points of view, which perceive women as lesser.

I was aware of the idea of compulsory heterosexuality, as I am an AFAB queer person who has spent most of their life in relationships with cishet men. But faced with a closeted AMAB lover, I found my understanding glaringly limited because of how much Rich's concept of the term centers on the lesbian experience. In her essay, Rich was concerned about two things: one, how and why women's choice to be intimate with other women has been "crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise;" and two, how erasing the existence of lesbians theoretically and politically holds back feminism.

I was faced with the question: what does compulsory heterosexuality look like for AMABs? Society does not perpetrate subjugation of men at the hands of women. Women generally do not have power over men. So how are AMABs socialized to assume that they are straight, pressured to have straight relationships, and taught to reject same-sex intimacy? And how can they free themselves?

I don't know the answer to this question. I have my own ideas. I could try to psychoanalyze R. Was it because of his Latine culture's emphasis on a kind of masculinity that demands heterosexuality? Was it because he internalized our society's homophobic lesson that happy and stable same-sex relationships aren't possible? Was it because he hated his father? None of those answers satisfy me.

But I do know how compulsory heterosexuality hurts you. Rich did too. She describes:

"The doublethink many women engage in and from which no woman is permanently and utterly free... indoctrination in male credibility and status can still create synapses of thought, denials of feeling, wishful thinking, a profound sexual and intellectual confusion."

I could see clearly all of those effects on him, in the jokes, the regretted hook-ups, the drinking, the serial cheating. I remember one afternoon in Paris, we were chain-smoking on the balcony of a beautiful flat his girlfriend's parents owned, and between the second and third cigarette he turns to me and says:

"Sometimes I dream about sucking cock."

What could I say? I say:

"I know, babe."

Yeah, good luck with that.

R and I don't talk anymore. Last I heard he converted to Catholicism, changed his name, became a lawyer, and got engaged to a girl he met at his parish.

It is sad to me that we could have supported each other, each grappling with comp het in our own ways. We could have been a good match, with me being both a girl and a boy, depending on how you look at it. But how could I expect him to shake off comp het feelings when we know so little about how queer men are hurting, let alone how they can heal? I don't have any answers.

But I wish him all the best in the world.

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, by Adrienne Rich