Heuston, we have a problem. It’s a doozy, too.

For years, I have been watching lesbian television, and making fun of it because it is (arguably) stupid.
I have been calling it stupid because I have been thinking “nobody would ever act like lesbians on TV do, ever. Maybe one in a hundred lesbians can relate to these people, and that one person is probably someone’s shitty ex-girlfriend, anyway. Who listens to that idiot?”.

Image from sho.com/sho/the-l-word

You guys, what if that impression is wrong? What if we, as a community, have been making fun of L Word characters, when all this time, lesbians everywhere are relating to Shane? What if TV lesbianism is what lesbianism is like everywhere else in the world, and Ireland has been Doing It Wrong all this time?

With that in mind, I have compiled my Top Five Differences between being gay here, and literally anywhere else in the world, according to my television. Feel free to add to it yourself, and perhaps together we can get the Irish gay lady scene back on track, and can start mooching around in heels and beanies to our hearts content.

Dare To Dream.

5: Femmes Are Goddamn Everywhere
Every single show featuring a lesbian that I have ever seen is full of incredibly feminine women. Not even ‘I will happily go out in a t- shirt and jeans because it’s a fucking Wednesday’ women. My experience (and eyesight) have always lead me to believe that a True Femme is like a rare pokemon you stumble across by accident- you gotta make sure you don’t scare it away with your swag/ charizard. But on TV, they are all over the place!

They outnumber all other lesbians by a ratio of about 50,000:1, and I just don’t know where they are sourcing all these incredibly soft looking women from.

Conclusion: We are gonna have to get better at Ellen- dancing in heels, or never emigrate, you guys. Our habit of wearing a witty t- shirt and a beanie to a club will only stand in our way once we leave here and enter the real, fashionable [and bizarrely tall] world of Lesbianity. God help us.

4: Drinking Shots Means You Have Deep Emotional Problems
In Ireland, saying ‘shots o’clock’ to a girl is kind of like saying ‘Hello’. Tequila is a fun way of getting to know somebody, via the medium of finding out how funny they look when they eat a lemon. But on TV, it’s a thing that you drink by yourself, moodily staring at a barman, thinking about your Feels. Instead of a way to scrunch your face up in friendship, drinking shots as a TV lesbian probably means that you are Messed Up.

So messed up, you turn into a grumpy-bum, sitting at the bar by yourself, and you never appear to pay for anything. You’re too emotional for currency.

Conclusion: This habit of never appearing to pay for drinks is telling, my guess is that club promoters in Ireland are tricking us into thinking that doing shots is a fun experience, in order to trick us into paying for them. Maybe if shots were free, we’d start crying by ourselves on barstools like normal lesbians.

3: Gay Men Only Exist If You’re Having Their Babies
Gay men and lesbians go together like Cagney and Lacey, except without the sexual tension. We support each other, and by support, I mean ‘make fun of each other until one of us has a breakdown and we can go dancing’. On TV, lesbians only hang out with gay men for one of two reasons: 1] It’s a show about gay guys and the lesbians are having a baby for them, or 2] someone is moving, and the casting director wanted someone who could carry something and judge it at the same time.

Lesbians in fiction live in a world without friends showing them pictures of some guys dick on Grindr, and I just don’t understand it at all.

Conclusion: OK, here’s the thing; I’ve been to Women Only nights, and they were wonderful, but also once everyone got a girlfriend they stopped going. What up with that? I vote we keep gay men, or at least visit them on weekends. Everyone’s gotta dance sometime, amiright?

Totally butch lesbian (Image from kaboodle.com)

2: Wearing A Hat Sometimes = Butch
OK, so I know I just said that there are never any butches on TV, but let’s be fair – that isn’t strictly true. Sometimes there are incredibly feminine girls in stupid hats, and that means they’re butch. Look at that girl, subverting gender norms with her beanie, you go girlfriend!
In Ireland, putting a hat on a lesbian doesn’t make her butch, it just makes her ‘a lesbian’.

Conclusion: This might actually solve our earlier butch problem, we just have to emigrate without our millinery. Which basically means ‘We may as well lay down and die’.

1: Lesbians Ordering Salad In Restaurants
Yes, that’s right, I went there. The number one difference between my queer lifestyle and the one I see on TV is Calories. All TV lesbians order green tea with a side of green salad, and bore each other to tears with Feelings. The closest thing I have ever seen to an Irish lesbian ordering salad in a restaurant was when a friend of mine ordered a bean salad in Boojum, and we all know that’s just a burrito without the wrapping.

Conclusion: Can you put milk in green tea? No? Then I Weep.