The lesbian community is constantly building and rebuilding itself. It can be so hard to find other people exactly like you, especially when you are young. Especially when you know so surely and plainly that you do not belong in the world the way you are told you should.So you look to your history. You look to what people like you did before. The LGBT community has a push and pull relationship with history, both glamourising our ancestors from the past and knowing that the world would be worse for us in most ways. Wanting to go back but not knowing if you would be strong enough to live the way they lived.
There are of course ways to connect yourself to lesbian culture and build into it. Learn your history and then act it out in the real world. But they are often boring and sad. It's not fair that I have to read a book about how to date and be in love and everyone else does it naturally. Men who read books to learn how to talk to women are pathetic and sad, Women who read books to learn how to talk to women are lesbians. It's like that joke on friends where Ross sees his ex wife’s bookshelf.
It’s not that they won’t let you. It’s that you’ll be fundamentally worse off and disconnected from your community. But then they invented a little thing called Tumblr, where you and the other lesbians your age could just make shit up. There was no longer a need for theory or stone butch blues or the L word. We had all read over a thousand posts. Who needs the past when we have the present at hand and the future to look forward to?
In the winter of 2015 we were given Carol. A lesbian christmas movie that was more than anything a fantasy of the past. Beautiful Women, Beautiful Houses, A cozy christmas setting peppered in with a dangerous road trip that was glamorous in how dingy it was. There are few lesbian movies that are normal and straight forward and have movie stars in them. Carol is by no means “Queer Cinema” in any artistic sense. It is the closest thing we have to a normal lesbian movie with a big budget that is enjoyable to watch. People cling to Carol because they want more things like it. They want to turn their brains off and watch the pretty ladies kiss on screen.
In building a culture the cultureless, or assumed cultureless, take what they can. I saw months and months of gifsets. Screenshots of the script. We talked about it for so long. It’s a Christmas classic among those in the know. The meme that came almost independent of the movie was a girl going to see the movie in the middle of the day and an old couple seeing the movie with them. The older woman turns to the man and says “Harold…. they’re lesbians” and it made us laugh. How could they not know… The film we spent months waiting for was just a movie they decided to go see. The meme was born from their ignorance. This woman’s eureka moment to her husband became a short hand for knowing.
There are things that you read that make you laugh and you repeat them in real life. Then you and all your friends repeat it for months and months, so on and so forth until it gets added to the dictionary three years later. Harold only gets repeated between those who already know. Explaining it to non lesbians requires them to latch onto something that is not immediately apparent. To them it's not the greatest thing they’ve ever heard.
The desire for a code, to be cool and speak in a way so that everyone who needs to know knows, and everyone who doesn’t is none the wiser. Being able to say “Harold... “ and have the other other lesbians know without outing the lesbian in question to the nonlesbians. It does not require any other divulging of information about someone other than “lesbian”. Its our attempt at a hanky code, or a secret password. The latest attempt at friend of dorothy. Harold was never about safety, it was an inside joke more than anything. An inside joke with echoes of the past.
“Harold”, unlike other memes, was about real life. We wanted to be able to say it in the world. Take the phrases we learned on the internet and then apply to the real world. We wanted it to have consequences, to affect change. We wanted to meet our girlfriends that way. To make lesbians friends. To move our online community of faceless urls irl. Harold was about potential. It was a fantasy. Where could we go and what could we achieve if we had a word that communicated so much of who we were to other people just like us.
It’s died out in recent years but at the time it felt good. It was fun. Now people would probably say it was cringe, as most things from the tumblr era were but I still have a fondness and appreciation for this one. I see what we wanted, what we were so desperately craving and trying to build. If there is no connection we must make it. It’s almost impossible to be a teenage lesbian and not be cringe. Let them have their fun.