This Pride month, we are celebrating travel’s capacity for discovery, renewal, and love through a lens of queerness—and its power to open up ourselves to seeing not just the world, but also who we are, in a new light.
“What’s your type?”
Rosetta and I were only a few drinks in, but I felt unsteady when I heard my friend offer the question. I suppose it wasn’t the question itself, but the way that she had asked it–hands gesturing to the crowd of swaying bodies in the club, as if presenting them all to me. Short women with boyish haircuts dressed in collared shirts, slacks, and suspenders. Taller women with flowing jet-black hair in short skirts that showed off their legs.
Club Ace was different from most of the other hundreds of clubs and bars in Hongdae, a district north of the Han River in Seoul known for its urban and indie arts culture, in that it lacked men entirely. Posted above bathroom mirrors, along the DJ booth, and on the walls were the words: WOMEN ONLY. NO FILM. NO PHOTOS.
These rules resonated in most, if not all, of the lesbian clubs–or L clubs–of Seoul. I suppose that was the root of my apprehension–not speaking about desire but specifically of my desire for women.
Rosetta didn’t mean anything by it. We had met at an event introducing queer women to each other to help them find friends to go with to the Seoul Queer Culture Festival—the city’s version of Pride. There she had introduced me to several of her queer friends that she had grown up with. She’s an out and proud lesbian, and she had no reason to expect that I would find her question uncomfortable at all.
Truthfully, my sexuality hadn’t been particularly important to me. I hadn’t taken dating very seriously and I had never had a serious relationship, so there had really been nothing to disclose to anyone about my sexuality. As a result, I inhabited a kind of liminality between being out and being closeted. While I still don’t really care to be either, most people still have expectations. People assume that if someone is anything other than cisgender heterosexual, they need to announce that in some way.
This was especially true growing up in the particular suburb of Toronto that I did. Outside of my queerness, which is fairly accepted there, there were very few East Asians. People were kind to me, but their kindness often didn’t compare to the alienation I felt. It wasn’t just about race, but it felt like everyone I knew had common threads of culture and experiences that I would never be part of. That I physically appeared different didn’t help. Even now, I don’t enjoy drawing attention to myself and I don’t like making any declarations. I would rather just exist and let people think what they want to think.
Before I moved to Seoul—following my graduation from university—I had never been to a lesbian club. I had long been aware of my sexuality so did not feel the need to reach out to a community for support, and while Toronto is ripe with queer spaces, I could never imagine myself as part of them.
