Love In All Its Forms
Celebrating Queerness This Valentine's Day
By Sophia Goetz with art by Natalie Williams
Once again, it's that time of year when we all swoon, celebrate our relationships, and feel either overwhelmed or repulsed by love. Valentine's Day is fast-approaching, which means you'll soon be inundated with offers on chocolates, balloons in the shape of hearts, and pictures of heterosexual couples. Despite increasing cultural acceptance of LGBTIA+ couples, Valentine's Day is still not a holiday specifically created for those who identify as queer identifying individuals and their partners. We encourage you to refute that idea this year.
Of course historically, Valentine's Day wasn't even about heterosexual couples, much less same-sex or LGBTQIA+ couples. A liturgical commemoration of Christian martyrs gave rise to the holiday, and originally, Valentine's Day was celebrated by commemorating the execution of a priest, St. Valentine. We may significantly alter this day into anything we desire, as evidenced by the fact that it changed from being a day of beheading to beetrothing. And transform we did.
Whether it's the Savage X Fenty Valentine's Day lingerie collection or the profusion of Hallmark greeting cards and films, our capitalist society has found a way to cash in on this holiday and encourage participation, whether or not you're single. For individuals who don't find themselves reflected in the depiction of this day, this makes it very difficult. Often, only heterosexual couples are depicted in jewelry advertisements, items are designed for "His & Hers," and Hallmark only produces 11 Valentine's Day cards for same-sex relationships compared to 764 for heterosexual ones.
The celebration of Valentine’s Day itself is predicated on the idea that everyone in a romantic relationship has the right to freely celebrate their love in the public sphere, which furthers the corporate manipulation of Valentine's Day by excluding the LGBTIA+ population from the narrative. When queer couples choose to engage in romantic activities in public, they frequently have to worry about receiving verbal, physical, or emotional harassment from other members of society. In the world of queer Valentine's Day, these realities include the awkward—but frequently necessary—conversation explaining to the waitress that you are not just two best friends and will be paying on one ticket, the possibility that a florist or restaurant will turn down your requests due to your sexual orientation or gender identity, or the lack of representation that you feel invalidates your love. It's not fun for queer people, but it can't possibly be fun for anyone, including straight couples who don't want to get married, polyamorous couples who face discrimination when they go out to eat, aromantic couples who are tired of hearing that their relationships must always be "romantic," and single people who are pressured to feel bad for not being in a relationship of some kind. Today, our perspective on love and relationships is so limited and, in fact, really unhealthy. It is useless to promote the heteronormative, nuclear ideal.
Queer couples are certainly excluded from Valentine's Day, but additionally, the idea that anyone can feel bad about not being included in it is the most irritating part. It's time to do away with this antiquated, consumerist, and exclusionary method of celebrating love.
In an anonymous survey, The Wake asked queer-identifying students at the University of Minnesota whether they felt they saw themselves represented adequately in Valentine’s Day marketing. The majority of the answers resounded negatively with a simple “no” or “not well enough.” However, a few stipulated specifics, exclaiming, “Generally, I do not feel identified as asexual on Valentine’s Day” and “No, and even in the rare cases where queer couples are seen in marketing, it doesn’t feel realistically queer.”
When asked why they thought queer-identifying individuals faced egregious lack of representation in these marketing campaigns, one student claimed “Because marketing is typically driven by what the majority find ‘normal’. Also likely from the fear of being canceled.” Another student cited this harmful norm as being driven largely by homophobia and overall traditional biases that exalt the heteronormative “His and Hers” couple over all others, exclaiming, “Historical homophobia, capitalistic organizations not wanting to lose their homophobic customers by presenting queer-friendly ads.”
While a few responses claimed that this sort of marketing that caters to binary representations of romantic couples was merely in the interest of profit and did not bother them, the majority pointed out that the lack of representation and celebration of queer expressions of love comes from the societal refusal to decenter hetero and cisgender relationships from the norm.
Since many are already familiar with the farsed “rainbow capitalism” attempts on the part of large corporations to appeal to queer-identifying individuals, we then asked students what ways corporations could be more inclusive beyond just rainbow hearts. One student suggested implementing more gender-neutral products and “doing away with prioritizing marketing of ‘His & Hers’ products.” Another stated, “Employing queer people and allowing them to create marketing campaigns that show queerness in a natural way (not displaying it just to ‘be inclusive’). It would feel wrong for an entirely heterosexual marketing team to create advertisements that display queerness.”
Lastly, our survey posed a question about queerness beyond February 14th celebrations: “What are some ways we should reform our intrinsic biases about what the traditional and ideal Valentine's Day couple looks like?” While there were many terrific and thoughtful replies, some of the most notable highlighted that celebrations of queerness need to do more than just inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake. One student remarked that the concept of love should be lauded for all its dimensions, not just sexual. “We should keep in mind that love doesn’t necessarily indicate it's sexual or romantic. Second, love can occur between anyone as long as you care about that individual.” Another asked that love not only be considered as happening exclusively between couples but also within poly and asexual relationships. “There’s such a ridiculous emphasis on couples in the U.S. Asexual people exist too; why not have a ‘single and happy’ day? So much so that we’ve made a whole day to make single individuals feel more alienated.”
In the end, Valentine's Day only accomplishes two things. First, it makes sales pitches for goods like chocolates, roses, movies, and vacations. It manipulates us into making purchases out of "showing that we care" by using our relationships and emotions as leverage. We shouldn't need retailers to remind us to show people that we care about them. On Valentine's Day, a bunch of roses doesn't exactly demonstrate much thought.
The second is that it promotes the stereotype of how heterosexual, monogamous, sexual, and romantic relationships "should" be. In the eyes of a culture that forces us all, inexorably, toward the nuclear family ideal, if you don't have this—whether it's because you don't want to or you really don't—you are failing. When sexual and romantic connections are prioritized above all else and heralded as the goal that we should all be working towards; that is the natural result. Then comes marriage, our own home with a garden, and, naturally, 2.5 children.
Currently Valentine's Day serves as a painful reminder that despite how far we may seem to have progressed from the antiquated ideals of previous centuries. While capitalist representation is certainly not the be-all-end-all, we might all be a little happier on February 14th when Hallmark starts making those kitschy cards for queer couples and entertainment media stops producing love stories with the same Nicholas Sparks, romantic subplots.
We must keep practicing and celebrating love for everyone up until that time, not simply those who have the greatest alternatives for romantic presents. As one student put it the most aptly, “Love is love. Valentine’s Day is stupid.”