By: Maria Ximena Cortés

From a very early age I understood that my capacity to love went beyond the boundaries that society imposed on me, that for me the horizon was much wider and this was always a blessing, but not for long.

I had already explored the security of being with a man, of feeling protected and happy, but one day I fell inevitably and madly in love with a woman, Carolina, and since then everything changed drastically, but not inside me, everything around me started to get complicated, why? Although my partner respected me and I rarely felt so happy, people looked at me differently, some men would throw disobliging compliments at us, letting us know that we were incomplete without them, that we were a waste for not being beings that could satisfy them and many other things, we came to feel in danger on several occasions because even in public places we felt stalked, something that never happened when my partner was a man.

It was really uncomfortable to express any kind of affection in public, it was almost always taken as a provocation. More than homophobia, we were more like "porn stars" who wanted to please the eye of the "machos" around us, who wanted to appear more irresistible in front of them, little by little we eliminated these behaviours to stop being the "show of the night".

Our relationship suffered, like all of them, the ups and downs of love and lack of love and finally ended for reasons totally unrelated to that situation, but I can definitely affirm that in a heterosexual environment you never experience the accelerated heartbeat, the nerves, the fear because someone tries to reach you to resolve fantasies that are alien to you.

It is as if being with another woman gives other people the possibility of having an opinion, of entering that place where only she and I are supposed to be but which ends up being public space, as if it were not a solid enough bond, in fact, when you decide to externalise a relationship between women to the world you simply lose credibility, they infantilise you, they find a union not serious enough if it is not with a man.

Recently I was talking to a gay friend who told me that homosexual men suffer discrimination and homophobia, but that nobody chases them in the street "claiming" that they are no longer an option for women, nor do they discuss a decision that in the eyes of others seems to be a forceful one. It is not possible to generalise this situation, but I ask myself, are we women still incapable of taking coherent decisions in the eyes of society?

Being a woman is definitely a political act that, at least in my case, I did not choose. Machismo in Colombian society still seeps out of the pores of the nation and ends up making people like me invisible, whose sin is to feel, to assume to be part of the non-normativity and to be proud of it. I know from close friends that many people live similar situations to this, verbal violence, symbolic violence and even economic violence, because you pay the consequences for not being "as you should", having a girlfriend is then an act of pure rebellion, but this is not the time to give up, no, it is now when we must be more visible than ever because we are not objects for the amusement of others, we are one more colour in the diverse palette that is love.

This article was produced as part of the Adelante Sexual Diversity project, funded by the European Union.