Wayward Wonderland
by Victoria
Hi :) This week I reflect on a year-old video project of mine, Sex Doll and it's implications of my internalized racism and insecurities. Head to the Hot Literati youtube channel to watch the vid. Enjoy
P.S....Submit to the WW form!
Sex Doll?
The majority of my adolescent schooling was populated with white people. I have long struggled with feeling unidentified as a Black person or latina and despite the Black and latine people around me calling me white, I certainly did not identify with whiteness either. It took me some time to locate my queerness because this racial identity debacle paralyzed my mind along with the deep depression that manifested in sexual and romantic disinterest. When the pandemic began and I was launched into a rehabilitation of my spirit, I started dreaming of a sapphic world.
My first love came to me in three dreams, the first being in a grocery store. We wandered the same aisle and locked eyes. I woke up tingling, butterflies swimming through my entire body. Two weeks later I met her again in a luscious, green meadow. She was brighter this time and shined like glitter. She fed me berries and spun ‘till she was dizzy. I laid hypnotized on the picnic blanket. The last time I met her was months later in an old, dim school building. She was in the classroom with the piano and our classmates. She did not speak to me but she looked me in the eyes, played piano, and danced. As if she and I existed only in our shared mind, our classmates did not bat an eye.
“I’m not straight” is what I wrote when I came out to the confidantes of my Snapchat private story weeks later.
My first love was a white girl with light eyes. She loves the color green and she loves to be outside. She finds joy in grocery shopping and going to school. She is so beautiful that she is too difficult to describe.
It was hard enough to accept that I didn’t want to sleep with men that I was then incapable of questioning whether she was truly my first lesbian love or a projection of what I wanted most for myself; beautiful whiteness.
When I made Sex Doll it was for a ‘personal history’ assignment. While shooting with Eleanor for it, I began to uncover the possible truths of what these dreams and this girl really meant to me.
I used to straighten my hair every week, as I know a lot of us did, and my favorite Snapchat filters were the ones that lightened my skin. Canonical and forgiven, I know, though it is still painful to remember the feeling of the reasons why. I figured my life would be easier if my hair growth showed in length rather than volume, my curls flattened, my skin and eyes lighter and my waist skinnier. I was right of course, but I am also right when I say easier does not mean better or realer or more me, but that is an essay for another day.
Much of my experience in middle and high school consisted of soothing the pain of Black girls around me who were unloved by Black and white boys. Though supportive, I did not fully grasp the pain of not being romantically loved by who you want to love, nor could I understand how one could struggle to romantically love someone of a shared identity. And then I fell in love with a white girl.
I am in no way trying to say here that I’m against interracial love or multicultural love or whatever you want to call it, nor am I saying that loving a white person means you can’t love a Black person (or whoever is ‘your people’). I love Black women – but that, too, is an essay for another day. What I am saying is that although love is love, some love originates in self-discrimination rather than the pureness of our hearts. Maybe if I love a white girl I’ll be in closer proximity to white girlness. Slowly but surely I will make my way there. And maybe if I love a Black woman I am doomed to the pain and suffering of Black womanness – something I am already in painstakingly close proximity to. Do I want to be just a girl or do I want to be a Woman? Do I want to be just white or do I want to stay Black? If I follow the white girl into the meadow will I finally meet the Goddess of beauty and will she finally give me light eyes?
Am I only gay because I want to be a white girl? Could I be the Sex Doll?
There is a particularly weighted heaviness that comes with everything I do as a Black lesbian. I question my love, I examine it – a process through which I often find very scary things.
In the pilot episode of this column I defined the white rabbit as “A person who is not yet publicly (and/or privately) comfortable as their queerselves.” Now I find myself wondering about the Black rabbit. Perhaps they are the person who may or may not be comfortable with their queerselves but cannot escape its complexity publicly or privately. Perhaps it is the oversexualized non-sexual Black person who has not yet thought about their sexuality but is already being told what label they are and aren’t. They are a sex doll, but in the real world rather than a safe dream. They are not The Sex Doll because they are sexy, not beautiful. They are gay or lesbian or bisexual because identifying as queer only isolates them further in their own home. They wandered into the rabbit hole and they made the rabbit hole and they built the wonderland. I wonder if the Black rabbit and the white rabbit will fall in love down there.
You are a Sex Doll. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Not once did I dream of having sex with my first love. I did not imagine her naked or even long to touch her or she me. I just wanted to look at her while she looked at me. I did not think about what she saw when she stared back, whether she was smiling at the color of my skin or the love in my eyes. She was a Sex Doll that transcended sex and promiscuity. She was a dream, that is all she was.