Dear [enter the name you see on your lips, of the poster on your wall, the
face on the VHS cover, the girl you swore was just a friend as your mother
spins your baseball cap forward and smooths your hair],
When you [you, you, and you, too] all dipped your toes in the
sparkling pool of traditional femininity, we reluctantly
followed.
The Tomboy, my heroine. A dramatic arc, my mossy ruins.
In 1999, Cruel Intentions was released in theaters and every single one of us scrambled to find a friend with a parent who was irresponsible enough to accompany us to the box office and buy us tickets. Nothing prepared us for the scene: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair leaning into each other’s lips in broad daylight, the middle of Central Park. The universe slowed down and we—thirteen, fourteen years old, many of us never past hand holding yet in terms of sexual experience—whipped our necks back and forth to verify that all of us were in open-mouthed, awkward shock. We were witnessing two (supposedly) teen girls making out on a giant screen. Twice! Buffy Summers herself removed her sunglasses and said, Now I’m going to stick my tongue in your mouth, and time slowed as the lights dimmed in the theater, the camera zoomed in closer, and we watched the best supporting actor of the film make its debut: the single strand of spit exchanged from the two actresses’ mouths. Selma’s character wanting more as Sarah pours the champagne. Me, wanting more, not knowing what the fuck just happened.
It was the same pit-in-the-stomach burning I felt when I watched Ryan Phillipe finger Heather Graham with a Hershey’s Kiss in the backseat of his convertible, then go down on her and make her instantly climax, rise back from between her legs, his face smothered in melted chocolate, in Gregg Araki’s Nowhere. A scene I watched repeatedly, secretly, wondering how it would feel to let oneself release into their sexual fantasies like that. Scenes that made me feel as if I wasn’t supposed to be there, in that moment, like I walked in on some weird sex cult. But I was there, and I liked it. I wanted it. I’d dream of it. Coupled with my Evangelical upbringing, however, sex—especially the depravity of oral sex, of lesbian sex specifically—was shameful. And so, I tucked the fever dreams between my thighs and into a box of fetishization. I was some sexually depraved monster, being turned on by two girls kissing innocently, I told myself. They weren’t even gay.
The following summer, I powered on my white, bubble-edged TV/VCR combo, loaded it with a pre-labeled VHS tape, and hit record. The 2000 MTV Movie Awards would be filed beside my collection of MTV archive footage, a graveyard of pop culture. As I sat cross-legged in my closet-sized bedroom, slurping hot noodles of Top Ramen into my mouth, I watched Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair accept “Best Kiss” for their scene in Cruel Intentions. With golden popcorn trophies in hand, luminescent white smiles hiding chest-level giggles, Sarah Michelle Gellar (whose face had been plastered all over my school binder, cut from every magazine, posed in red leather pants as Buffy the Vampire Slayer the size of my goddamn hand) peck each other’s lips. Just… peck. It was a joke; recognition that the kiss they were awarded for was, in fact, just for show. The audience roared in response, Selma Blair recoiling just slightly, just awkwardly enough to confirm it was all a performance.
Real life Y2K-era high schools weren’t filled with twenty-something bombshells like our teen films implied, but the jokes were the same. Bring It On writers claim they used so many homophobic slurs in order to depict high school in that era realistically; they succeeded in that way. In the iconic scene when cheerleader Courtney says that the new girl, Missy looks like an uber-dyke, we held the insult in our chests. Eliza Dushku as an actress, with her narrow hips, unapologetic muscles, and badass persona, was already dismissed by the boys (and secretly revered by girls like me) for not bending to their gaze. But to call her a dyke?
When my best friend and I scrubbed that same slur from her locker in silence after her water polo practice, her intimidating broad shoulders and penchant for arm wrestling the senior football players into humiliation a landing pad for the insult, we understood. It was the worst possible thing you could call a girl. Worse than slut or whore, or what the senior boys liked to call me the most, a big-tittied hoe.
The hot-straight-girls-kissing trope would copy and paste itself from the most popular of porn searches into nearly every teen comedy of the late nineties to early aughts, hitting a pop culture fever pitch in 2003, with Britney and Madonna’s infamous on-stage kiss. There were socially acceptable rules when it came to kissing other girls. It was pretty simple: don’t be gay.
The scenes in those classic 90s coming-of-age films written the
same: a vanity mirror, a tube of lip gloss, a sharp maneuver of
your body in the reflection. Almost always, of course, in the
name of love (and in three too many cases, in the name of
Devon Sawa).
Visually assembled for our prepubescent consumption, I
watched you twist and turn through your narrative with my legs
crossed beneath my gangly body, a bologna sandwich stuffed
between my cheeks. A rite of passage. I cringed when you
thought you weren’t girl enough wearing a backwards hat or
throwing an intimidating right hook. God, I hated the word
tomboy. Was I not a girl in my Bermuda shorts, a Swiss army
knife clipped conspicuously into the front pocket?
My roommate freshman year of college was a self-proclaimed bad girl. I had been having sex regularly with the boyfriend I had since my senior year who was six years older than me; I was hardly a goodie-two-shoes. But besides going to hell for my sexual immorality, I was a good Christian girl. I had never partied, never had a single sip of booze, only kissed two boys in my life, both of whom I met at my youth group. My grandma deposited $50 in my bank account each month from her retirement fund because she was so happy that I was attending a Southern Baptist University with gender-segregated dorms, required monthly chapel attendance, and a strict no drugs or alcohol policy. My roommate Rachel’s upper-middle-class parents, in contrast, sent her to Charleston Southern University because the private school tuition was a better deal than all the rehabs and reform school programs she had failed out of throughout her teenage years.
She knew how to pick out the twenty-something from a crowd to get him to buy us alcohol, always had a Ziploc of shrooms in a ceramic stash box painted with the Sublime sun face on the top, smoked Salem Blacks behind the Waffle House on the edge of campus. She spoke in a thick, South Carolina Lowcountry accent, her over-highlighted blonde hair and D-cups combo mirroring mine. I still thought of myself as a good girl, but Rachel had me in a whirlwind. Within the first quarter, we were ditching our 8am classes after prowling downtown Charleston nearly every night together, hanging out on the edges of campus with our coffee cups filled to the brim with McCormick’s vodka and OJ until we earned a reputation in school for being those girls.
I’ve always had a best friend at my hip, my ride or die, someone to mold into and shape, our personas becoming one dynamic orb of chaos. Just like my best friend in high school, Rachel and I became inseparable, and everyone quickly recognized us as a single unit. We slept in one of our stiff dorm bunks together, spooning one another in our matching Victoria Secret push up bras and G-string sets, giggling until we snored in unison as one ethereal body. Until one day, her new boyfriend, a 5’4” stocky Italian with a cartoonish upstate New York accent, told her she couldn’t sleep in her bed with me anymore. It was inappropriate, he said. His girl shouldn’t be spooning anyone but him. Without explicitly calling me a dyke, I felt the hot tip of the accusation, the scarlet letter burning through my lapel, my face red with shame. Rachel stood behind him in agreement. But we were just friends, I countered. Two Hot Straight Girls—I knew the rules.
From then on, we had severed our bodies from each other: in our beds, at the cafeteria tables, the trips downtown with our suitemates, our spot beneath the gazebo on the far end of the swampy barrier empty. I was alone. Eventually, she transferred before the spring semester, and I never saw or spoke to her again.
I couldn’t understand what I did wrong. Or… I did. Her boyfriend was threatened, perhaps recognized something in me I didn’t quite understand yet. Something that would have me push her memory into that box of fetishization, pull from years later when I needed a fantasy to satisfy me outside of the mediocre men I was soullessly fucking, craving something deeper, something forbidden, something that felt more like love. Something that felt like a girl I let myself be in love with, make love to, in that dorm room a decade prior, wondering what would have happened if I wasn’t so paranoid and confused.
My scrawny child legs grew faster than the rest of me, mousy
brown hair and its constant charge of static electricity pushed
behind my ears as my training bra threatened mutiny. My
admiration evolved with each year. Soon, I wanted to be both:
beautiful and badass. Loved and feared. Effortlessly cool—a
tomboy, a real girl, somewhere in between.
That’s what they told me: I was indecisive. It was a phase. Kid
stuff. You’ll grow into being a woman, one day. Tiny shrapnel from
various explosions of self, pulled from my speckled skin of
indecisiveness. I didn’t know what I wanted, who I wanted,
what I was allowed to become. In this coming-of-age decade,
I was stalled between accepted and unaccepted desire. Of
deciphering what needed to be made-over.
You. Me. A baseball mitt. A tube of Lip Smackers. Duality has
always been doomed by the unimaginative.
By twenty-seven, I had embraced my wild, party girl reputation and wore it like a badge of honour. As a veteran dive bartender, I was used to the weaponization of a woman’s sexuality. I watched the sorority girls make out with each other for free drinks, was told by more than one boss to flirt with the male patrons, flirt with my coworkers, as if I’d do the same. I let the nightly derogatory and degrading comments slide off my skin and into the sky-high tip jar. I’d had enough of performing for men and finally began to claim something for myself out of protest.
I often let the liquor loosen me up enough to graze a girl’s fingertips, try and telepathically send some secret morse code, hands on her waist on the dance floor, her arm across my chest against the back wall sharing a cigarette. Some flash of intimacy, something terrifying bubbling in my ribcage, waiting to erupt. It happened enough times that I started to become paranoid around my straight friends, becoming the girl who always makes out with other girls when she’s drunk. One night, I served some guy a drink, overhearing a typical conversation between two horny drunk dudes. I said I was sexually attracted to girls, but romantically attracted to men. He elbowed my boyfriend at the time, who was sitting beside them. “Yeah,” my boyfriend said. “I’m cool with it… girls don’t count.” I wasn’t ashamed then, hadn’t ever heard the phrase internalized homophobia yet. He was probably right. Two Hot Straight Girls, remember? And so, I shamelessly took the green light.
The first time we kissed, it was her birthday. I had always been an affectionate person—my friends and I held hands, dressed in front of each other, pecked each other on the lips goodbye like sophisticated European women. So, when her and I took our shots and I told her Happy birthday, babe, our lips had already been familiarized on several occasions. But this time, with the sweet burn of Fireball in our mouths, our lips parted, and tongues grazed the droplets of liquor left in each other’s throats. Her hand found the side of my face, mine raised to pull her in closer, harder. When we separated, our eyes opened and locked. It wasn’t the moment that usually follows, the Hot Straight Girl yelling “Woo!” and laughing it off as I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and pretend along with her. Instead, we smiled, she said Thank you, and making out with each other just became something we did. She didn’t count, after all, my boyfriend made clear.
The truth is, just as the adults safely assumed, I really did want
to be you and all your complication. Angry, unapologetic
different-ness. But there was more, bubbling beneath the
surface of innocent adoration. A Gemini twin, daring to
embrace its dichotomy. Entranced with the iconic 90s,
nostalgia-sick. My toes still warm and dry.
Long before girl-crushes coined themselves in movies and
magazines, they just felt like…crushes. Crushes stringently
defined: barely teenaged boys with sleek, center-parted hair,
their cloned faces pasted across friends’ bedroom walls. On my
own. Teen Beat didn’t need to distinguish boy from crush—the
implication was clear. Our boy-crush teen idols and innocent
preteen fawning belonged. Anything else was dissent. Like you,
I made myself a neon collage of magazine cutouts to display
my membership to acceptance. Built a box to climb into.
A city of boxes. A cardboard world of fantasy.
During a renowned bender following a messy, heart-crushing breakup, I wanted to fuck as many people as I could, check every box I hadn’t yet. Nothing got me off more than using sex for revenge.
In famously conservative, rich Orange County, I went out for drinks with a friend from grad school and got absolutely sloshed. I flirted with a cute, nameless waitress at a beachside bar in Laguna, the alcohol in me emboldening my need for conquest. My friend gave me a nod of approval, encouragement. This wasn’t a sorority girl performance nod, or a look of shame. You can bring her back to the apartment, she offered, playing the part of wingman. And so, I did.
It was the first time—and only time—I ever fully fucked a woman. Without pretense, without any framing of heterosexuality or men in general. Men didn’t exist that night. There was power in that one-night stand, in me reducing women to sexual conquests, just like I had been doing to men since my body became theirs to sexualize, to claim—now I was claiming hers. I don’t think it was right. The way I ghosted her, took months to consider her part of my body count, a safe distance between what I desired, and what I’d allow myself to feel. I don’t even remember her first name. And yet—
Finally, I thought, smiling wide on my long drive back to the desert that morning after, the taste of her still in my throat as I ashed my cigarette out the window. I knew what it felt like to give in.
I imagined myself as the hand that zipped up your antique
wedding dress, Kat Harvey. As human-Casper-Devon-Sawa
whisked you away, I was a nameless face in the crowd of kids
envious of your romantic dance, that innocent kiss—one of
the first I’d ever witnessed on screen between someone like
you and a boy like that. The reward we were promised at the
end of our stories.
I saw my body split the water of the pond, diving in headfirst
as brave as you, Roberta Martin. With me, you wouldn’t have
had to fake your own death to prove your worth. The others
don’t understand us, do they? We exist in the strange grey
space of wanting to be wanted and wanting to be left alone. Of
loss and grief, our bodies on display for consumption. A
chaotic mass of internal rage. I could have been your cool
water, your ride-or-die.
I was right beside you, Becky O’Shea, when that troglodyte
Spike barked derogatorily, But aren’t you a girl? There, when the
others restrained you, clocking that motherfucker in the face
to prove my love, my strength, my worth. I felt burning red
hot in the pit of my stomach as you fell for the blonde jock
(goddammit, Sawa), clenched my fists when you put on that
cheerleader’s skirt and bounced up and down on the sidelines,
nearly costing us the game. Don’t you see how powerful you
are uncostumed? How powerful we’d have been together,
fighting side by side?
I was pregnant with my second daughter, bartending at a popular night club for the summer, hiding my early pregnancy belly as best I could so I could still collect Hot Straight Girl tips. One night, a girl came in, fresh faced and unassuming, shuffled right up to the bar, her tiny frame parting the 20-person-deep mob waiting for drinks as if she was the only patron there.
It was the first time a woman, a total stranger at a bar, hit me with that one-two magic gut punch, my whole life slowing and falling at her feet. I’ve felt the crush of spontaneous attraction to many men this way—ended up marrying one of those men, after all—but a girl? With her blonde surfer hair falling effortlessly across her cheekbones, mysteriously salted hundreds of miles from the ocean, all sun-kissed and smiling, what I’d eventually understand as a pattern for my type. I smiled coyly, just like I would have at a male conquest, narrowed my eyes in strategic, sultry confidence and told her that her drinks were on me. She smiled back, and I knew, somehow, she wasn’t another drunk straight girl. My first wordless exchange with a queer girl, validated, and I was breathless with exhilaration, the deep bass of the DJ beating in sync with my pounding pulse.
The girl would return to the bar almost every Saturday night that summer, each time with a different girl that she’d make out with on the dance floor, then tip me a twenty for their free shots I always slid to her in the same sly, flirtatious way. I’d fantasize about younger-bartender-me, before marriage and kids, keeping her around until bar close, going home to her apartment. Getting her number, waiting for her to text me back in that drug-like suspense of newness. Taking her out to dinner, kissing her hard in public, fighting over something stupid, fall into a steamy make up session, until we’d grow exhausted of the whirlwind and burn our paths in different directions. The entire relationship montage playing out as I counted my tips. A simple fantasy, one I had never allowed myself to have. I’d return home to my family, as clearcut-heteronormative as could be acknowledged by the general gaze of society, confident in myself as a bisexual woman with nothing left to prove.
It was as if the loop had closed, even though nothing more would ever happen between us than those lavender glances, her essentially using me for free shots. I took it, happily. My sexuality was finally, shamelessly, publicly, in the most normal of ways, acknowledged.
It’s true, I still longed to bag a Centre-Part Boy just to say I
won. It’s true, I often conflated admiration with love. Stepped
on the sharp edges, those glimmers of desire, picked them
from the pads of my feet and discarded them as dangerous.
Hung up the CD-insert of the Titanic Soundtrack and posed
beside baby-faced Leo for a photo my mother took of me to
commemorate my first middle school dance. Non-decisions
that would become forced decisions. I longed to become you
in a world that wouldn’t let me love you.
Now, at thirty-seven, I pair my combat boots with nearly everything. Don a red lip and a pair of oversized Dickies pants. Build my lats out wide, coils of muscled shoulders spanning miles of claimed space in every room I step into. It took me time, but I’ve unmade this body, this self, at last. Sometimes I wonder who I’d have become if I was born twenty years later, post-homophobic-pop-culture, in a world where I could have found myself sooner. But it doesn’t matter, really. I don’t need to go back and date a bunch of women to claim my sexuality. On the solid ground of my identity, I am a better wife, a better mother, a woman in her complete and full power, all the points on that trajectory sharp in memory. I’m blazing a million different directions for my daughters to gaze freely, every goddamn box in my house broken down before we toss the bland cardboard into the recycling.
Are you proud of me? Do you see your lost years in me?
It was more than a childhood phase to outgrow. It was an evolution of unknowing, to knowing self all the same. The hard & tough, the soft & beautiful.
And, so: death to the girl crush. To cauterizing our love for women, reducing ourselves into tight little man-made boxes. For every secret bisexual awakening under the glowing light of a television screen, there’s a girl figuring out who the fuck she is.
……………………………………..To the morphing Alex Macks &
……………………………………..precocious Al Lamberts,
……………………………………..the rollerblading Gabriellas.
……………………………………..To the rebellious Mary-Kates,
……………………………………..the defiant Michelle Rodriguezes.
……………………………………..(And to every single character played by Christina Ricci.)
……………………………………..To the stoner-cool Tai Fraisers who gave in,
……………………………………..toppled the patriarchy from the inside and still bagged the boy
……………………………………..with centre-parted hair.
………………………………………To my 90s tomboy femme dream girl: fuck that cherry lip gloss.
………………………………………SK8 or die. I love you, forever.
Erica Hoffmeister is an educator, independent scholar, and multi-genre writer, with three hybrid collections of poetry published. She writes about nostalgia, sexuality, religious trauma, and the horror genre, and her recent research, “Out of the Tomb: Bisexual Awakenings and the Role of Nostalgia in Queering The Mummy (1999)” is forthcoming from UP Mississippi (2026). Learn more at: http://www.ericahoffmeister.com/
