“I’m a lesbian and proud of it” – 2024-04-18 11:19:44

Anu Kotilainen dares and wants to show her feelings to her loved one by kissing in public, although according to her experiences, it can arouse disapproving stares.

Kotilainen says he is an open lesbian. For her, public lesbianism is an essential form of activism.

– I feel it is my duty to do so. My privilege is that I can normalize and make lesbians visible.

He doesn’t mind if people hear or listen in an open cafe to what he tells about himself and his experiences in an interview.

Kotilainen’s comic novel Cabinet strategy (Sammakko) tells the story of what happens when the parent of a small child in a heterosexual relationship realizes that he is a lesbian.

The story has similarities to Kotilainen’s life, but it is nevertheless a fictional work.

Sliding sexuality

When a person notices that their sexual orientation has changed, they may want to find a community where they can feel accepted exactly as they are.

In Kotilainen’s book, at the beginning of his lesbian adventure, the main character gets to know many different categories of lesbians, from which he tries to find the one that suits him best. Kotilainen is familiar with the situation.

When she came out of the closet, she initially doubted whether she was enough or the right kind of lesbian.

The pressure of belonging to a category eased when Kotilainen realized that as a lesbian, she doesn’t have to look or be a certain way. Being yourself is enough.

Understanding the changeability and fluidity of sexual orientation was liberating.

According to Kotilainen, Lesbous still means something different and strange to many.

Since coming out of the closet, Kotilainen has been in a situation many times where a man who approached her sexually has been hurt or angry when she has told him that she is a lesbian.

“Can I come with?”

In one scene of the domestic comic novel, an eager man approaches a kissing lesbian couple and expresses his desire to join in as a third party. The same thing has happened to the householder. He can’t help but wonder about that.

– Would a man ask the same thing if there was a hetero couple hanging out? It’s as if kissing lesbians is an invitation for some men to come and comment!

According to the cis norm, all people experience the gender assigned to them at birth as their own and manifest it unambiguously.

The interview will take place in Turku, in a cafe near the Kupitta railway station. Helsinki and the rest of Finland can be very different from the perspective of queer people. According to Kotilainen, there should be more facilities for queer people in Turku.

Queer is a term used for representatives of gender and sexual minorities.

Domestically, lesbian bars and similar facilities for sexual minorities are needed, because in them you can feel safe without staring or, for example, threatening approaches.

Love

According to the resident, lesbians are very oversexualized.

– Lesbous is a form of sexual orientation just like heterosexuality.

– Some men assume that lesbous is a performance meant only for them, he smiles.

According to Kotilainen, one of the reasons for the oversexualization of lesbians is lesbian porn, which is still primarily produced by men and caters to their gaze.

Kotilainen has been very open about her lesbianism. The close circle has mostly accepted the information uncomplicatedly, but there has been more, even microaggression.

– Someone immediately said that yes, I’ve seen it before, Kotilainen gives an example.

For him, such a statement implies that sexual orientation can be deduced from external factors.

– In reality, it is not possible for anyone to define another’s sexual orientation on their behalf.

Proudly lesbian

Kotilainen is grateful to the queer community for all the support he has received. The community has reinforced the feeling that there is nothing wrong with him, on the contrary.

– I’m a lesbian and proud of it, she summarizes.

Kotilainen’s own life has a point of convergence with the book’s story in that, like the main character, Kotilainen divorced his child’s other parent when he realized that he was interested in vulval people.

Kotilainen talks and writes about vulvals, not women, because not all vulvals identify as women.

In the book, telling your partner is followed by disbelief, anger, and finally reconciliation. At home, the separation raised feelings of guilt, fear and uncertainty.

He had no model of how he should have acted in the situation. This was one of the reasons why he wanted to turn this topic into a book. He wanted to make a work that he himself would have wanted to read when he began to realize that his sexual orientation had changed.

Kotilainen hopes that the book will be found especially by young people and also by those who, as adults, have started to question their own sexual identity.

A curfew for groups

Kotilainen spent his childhood and youth in a small town where everything related to lesbianism or homosexuality was foreign and forbidden.

Thoughts related to his own sexual identity had to be banished, because according to the heteronorm he was supposed to like boys, not girls.

– There was no model for anything other than heterosexuality.

Even though there was direct lesbophobia in the environment of childhood and youth, Kotilainen finds himself as the most severe source of lesbophobia.

– Without realizing it, I had internalized the lesbophobic idea that there is something dirty, wrong and shameful about lesbianism.

– Letting go of these thoughts has required and still requires a lot of demolition work.

Is that news?

According to Kotilainen, the right to one’s own sexual and gender identity is a human rights issue.

– If someone says that lesbianism isn’t real and that it’s just a phase, he invalidates the existence of lesbians, he says.

In Kotilainen’s opinion, equality is not realized between different genders and sexual orientations.

– There are many examples of this. We live in a society where it is still news when a public figure comes out of the closet.

– Sexual orientation can also be an obstacle to, for example, getting a position, says Kotilainen.

Many members of the queer community are still afraid to walk hand in hand with their loved ones.

– Many members of the queer community experience minority stress, and it is not safe for them to tell their sexual orientation even to their family or other loved ones.

A person can experience prejudice and discrimination because of their sexual orientation, but Kotilainen wants to give hope for something better with his Kaapppistrategia comic novel.

– Everything will turn out for the better in the end, he believes.