What Is a Gold Star Lesbian?

Since Y'all Want to Erase This Too Without Any Perspective; Another Lesbian Word Being Redefined in Realtime

I’ve been online, and I’m never sure if conversations are only online or if they’re actually happening in real life. This is one of those conversations that feels like it only exists online, but I don’t want online conversations to become reality, so I want to address it.

I’m so tired of seeing “gold star,” a lesbian cultural term, being compared to heterosexual purity.

I don’t even understand the reach.

Honestly, what should be talked about more is why lesbians even need a term for only being with the people they’re attracted to.

There is no “gold star” for straight men.

There is no “gold star” for straight women.

They’re simply attracted to the people they’re attracted to, and no one questions that.

So why do lesbians need a special term just for never having been with men?

For me, it’s frustrating because I feel like people forget the context.

Women are coerced, forced, and pushed toward reproductive sex.

That’s the only avenue women are socialized toward.

Men are too, and I’m sure gay men have their own experiences with that, but I’ll let them speak for themselves.

I’m talking about women.

I’m talking about the group that is socialized to sit there and wait to be chosen.

The group that is told it doesn’t matter how much you don’t like it, you just haven’t found the right man yet.

That’s the group people are telling shouldn’t have pride in calling themselves gold stars if they were able to resist that from the very beginning.

I am not a gold star lesbian.

But I am a lesbian.

Before I understood my lesbianism, all of my sexual experiences were traumatic.

That’s one of the reasons why now my community is mostly gay, lesbian, and trans people.

They understand the nuance in a way that straight people often don’t.

No matter how many times I told my straight women friends that my body wasn’t reactive, that my pussy wasn’t reactive, and that I felt violated, they ignored the word “violated.”

No one cared.

They just kept telling me to try again.

Try another man.

Try harder.

Because I had a pussy, they believed I was supposed to be doing this.

Only after I realized I was a lesbian did I start going exclusively to lesbian spaces.

Back then, lesbian spaces weren’t as diluted as they are now.

Nobody introduced themselves as gold stars.

It’s not something people walked around announcing.

It was simply something other lesbians knew.

What I remember most is that they constantly brought conversations back to women.

They opened my mind to all the possibilities the world had taken away from me because I had been socialized under patriarchy.

Since they were young, they had already been resisting that system.

They were never forced to sleep with, or continue sleeping with, people they weren’t attracted to.

They chose women.

They waited for women.

They experienced relationships the way any healthy person would want to experience attraction: by actually being attracted.

Being around them completely changed the way I saw myself.

It brought me back to what felt primal.

I learned something that sounds simple now, but completely changed my life:

If I don’t like it, I don’t do it.

I threw women’s socialization out the window.

If I don’t like it, I don’t do it.

If I want to wear something, I wear it.

If I don’t want to do something, I don’t do it.

Their world had always been lesbian-centered and woman-centered.

Being around them helped me build my own world the same way.

So I don’t understand how that could ever be seen as a problem.

There’s no hierarchy in describing your experience.

I’ve also heard people argue that gold stars are disgusted by bisexual women who sleep with men.

So?

That they think men are disgusting.

So?

I also don’t like meat.

It makes me gag, especially when it’s sizzling.

Why does nobody have a problem with that, but the moment a lesbian says she doesn’t like something, it’s immediately policed?

Isn’t that compulsory heterosexuality right there?

When I look around, women across every sexuality constantly complain about men.

There are NYT articles about it.

Women constantly say they don’t like how men treat them.

What’s wrong with a lesbian thinking she’s pure because she never had to deal with patriarchy?

I also think I’m pure because I don’t eat meat.

Other cultures think they’re pure because they do eat meat.

What’s the fucking difference?

It represents someone who has lived outside of patriarchy from the very beginning.

Someone who was socialized as a woman but never accepted that her life had to revolve around men.

That’s what I think people are missing.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that many lesbian cultural terms are slowly being diluted, reconstructed, or erased altogether.

Stud.

Lesbian.

AG.

Dyke.

Gold star.

These are simply cultural terms.

Words that reflected our lived experiences.

Every community develops language to describe itself.

Every culture has words that help people recognize shared experiences.

Lesbians are no different.

But I’ve watched our language slowly become controversial.

These words are being redefined and are now offensive simply for existing.

No different than how I sometimes feel walking around.

I’ve personally been told that simply calling myself a lesbian is automatically transphobic.

Now I’m watching people compare “gold star” to heterosexual purity culture.

I don’t understand that comparison.

The term was created to say you can be pure without men, not for men.

Why don’t y’all see that?

That’s a big difference.

To me, “gold star” means someone who never questioned her attraction to women and never experienced compulsory heterosexuality.

That’s it.

I also think heterosexual people misunderstand the term because they hear “gold star” and immediately think “virgin.”

But a gold star lesbian isn’t saying she’s never had sex; she’s not a virgin.

She’s saying she’s never been with men as a definition. It’s a shorter way to say it.

Those are completely different things.

The comparison to purity culture doesn’t make sense to me because purity culture is about avoiding sex altogether for one man.

A gold star lesbian isn’t avoiding sex.

She’s describing who she’s always been attracted to.

Being around gold star lesbians changed the way I thought.

Not because they told me I should become like them.

Because they modeled another way of existing.

They saw through socialization in ways I hadn’t yet.

They reminded me that I didn’t have to do things simply because society expected me to.

I also noticed that many of them didn’t carry the same suspicion toward women that I had been taught growing up.

They were often kinder to women.

Softer with women.

They didn’t seem to have that same divide-and-conquer relationship with women that patriarchy had taught me.

They were always safe.

That changed me.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether the phrase “gold star lesbian” would even exist if patriarchy didn’t exist.

I don’t think it would.

Because if women were never socially pushed toward men, there would be nothing unusual about a woman only ever dating women.

There would be no reason to create a special term for it.

Maybe that’s why I find it so strange when people compare it to purity culture.

It’s describing a person without the trauma that a lot of lesbians have.

We deserve that.

And we are bringing the word back.