#nancy is a lesbian!!!

[lisafrnkenstein]

Nancy Wheeler asks her mother what she’s supposed to look for in a relationship, because she doesn’t quite understand the appeal of the whole thing. Not when she looks at her parents together, and the way Karen will barely look at Ted, and her father will barely acknowledge any of the kids unless forced to.

“I suppose…” Karen trails off, thinking hard. “It’s about a trade off. You look for a partner who can support you, give you the things you want, like money or security, and you give back in return what you can offer. Like having kids or cooking meals. Compromise for the best life you can have.”

Nancy supposes it makes sense, and that it’s more realistic than the nebulous concept of “love” that’s always eluded her.

That’s why she agrees to date Steve Harrington. Surprisingly, he’s not without his charms, and he is nice to look at…but most of all, he’s got two things she needs most from a first boyfriend: experience and status. He shows her how these things are supposed to work, and gives her reputation a boost in school; in return she gives him sex and a pretty girl on his arm.

It works up until it doesn’t, when Steve can no longer offer her the support she needs. She’s grown bigger than the need for someone to show her how to have a relationship, or the meaningless status boost that only applies inside the high school; while Steve only seems to want more from her. Steve seems to think their relationship is built on mutual affection alone, and she doesn’t know how to accommodate a misconception like that. Is she supposed to sacrifice what matters to her for an impossible concept like love? It’s bullshit.

But Jonathan, he has other things to offer. Emotional support, in a way she hasn’t really thought to seek before. They’ve been through similar things, share trauma, and he has potential. Goals. The same desire to strike back at the people who hurt them. She can use his skills and drive to arrive at her own goal, and vice versa. They can give each other boosts, share support, and it’s a much more balanced thing than she thinks it ever was with Steve.

But distance grows between them like a chasm. Differences they never truly are able to reconcile, worldviews that clash, and Jonathan’s goals seem to peter out before she’s even started on her own. When the Byers depart to California, she gets a sinking feeling in her gut that things may not turn out well for them. Jonathan no longer meets her perfectly half way how he used to seem to.

When everything with Vecna goes down, her eye strays. Steve is there, and Jonathan is not; Steve is changed, strong and supportive and filled with more depth than he had been before, and Jonathan is changed too - distant and coping poorly through substances, and probably lying to her about something. It’s hard not to think that maybe Steve had been the smarter option after all, the one able to offer her more.

The trouble is? She never really wanted either of them, or the life they wanted to offer her.

Steve talks about his dream of six kids and a winnebago, and it rings hollow to her; it’s so entirely opposite of anything she ever pictured for herself, the dreaded entrapment of being tucked away at home and forced to become secondary to the lives of future children while her husband trudges through his career. Jonathan seems to have abandoned all plans of a future at all, in contrast to Steve’s clear goal - and that equally is unappealing.

She breaks up with Jonathan with the understanding that she’s gone about something very wrong, but it isn’t until Robin starts dating Vickie that she questions the entire foundation of what she thought relationships were all about. What Robin and Vickie have can’t possibly be the practical trade off her mother proposed - their lives are difficult, always in hiding, having to pretend and fake things in public. They could never get married and gain legal benefits, they could never have a family, and neither would have the support of a man in a world that chews up and spits out even the most self-sufficient and ambitious of women. It doesn’t make sense.

What also doesn’t make sense is the way it fills her with jealousy. The way she burns with envy when she sees the two of them, laughing and happy and in love, clearly feeling things Nancy never could picture herself feeling with either Steve or Jonathan, that she never once witnessed between her parents.

It doesn’t make sense how pleased she feels when Robin and Vickie break up, Vickie departing for college across the country, while Robin takes a year off to consider her options while trying to harass Steve into joining her.

It doesn’t make sense how, when she and Robin hang out, her heart beats fast and her mind races in curiosity about what it would be like if Robin leaned down and kissed her. It wouldn’t be transactional; not something she would be trading off, like it always had been for Steve and Jonathan - it’s just something she wants.

It doesn’t make sense right up until the very moment it happens, with Robin’s gangly form awkwardly wrapped around her, tentatively pressing their lips together. Nancy’s pulse races, her head feels hot, her stomach swoops; and it dawns on her, that this. This was what relationships were about, in the end. This feeling that hid itself behind what could be seen, an indescribable but tangible pull like gravity, that defied things like practicality. Robin’s mouth on hers made her see stars, made the pieces align and click together to form the full picture she never could see before.

Robin kisses her, and she kisses back, with a passion and an intensity that she experiences for the first time in her life, and she thinks to herself that maybe love is not such an impossible concept after all.

[vintagesapphics]

Photos of Nancy Valverde, a Chicana gender nonconforming lesbian who was routinely arrested for violating L.A.���s cross-dressing ban throughout the 50s and has been credited as helping overturn the ban. Valverde died at the age of 92 in March of 2024.

[lazylittledragon]

mombin pt 8, FINALLY!!!

(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)

[dwobbitfromtheshire]

Robin: Okay, I have to make this fair. I want to date your ex, but I have to make this even. . .

Steve: Okay, little scared, where are you going with this?

Robin: Eddie! Will you go on a date with me?!

Eddie: What?! No!

Robin: Why not?

Eddie: I make it a point not to date lesbians.

Robin: Hm, sounds kind of phobic of you.

Eddie: Fucking. . .how??? Lesbians don't like men??

Robin: Well, we like men. They just don't get it up for us. Look, so you won't date me. . .not even platonically?

Eddie: Well, that's different. Of course, I'll date you platonically.

Robin: So, what you're saying is that you'll be my platonic boyfriend?

Eddie: Yes? Steve, what the hell is going on here?

Steve: I gave up asking questions a long time ago.

Robin looked at her watch with an intense look on her face.

Robin: Ok! I'm sorry to have to tell you this but Eddie, I'm going to have to break up with you. I just feel like we're in two different places. Sorry.

Eddie: That's okay? I don't know what the fuck is going on here, anyway.

Robin: Longest relationship of my life. My first relationship with a man. . .I think it went well. Okay, now if you ever wanted to date my ex-boyfriend, then I'm okay with that.

Steve: What?! Is that what this was about? This was about Nancy?! Robin, you didn't have to do that! I'm a big boy!

Robin: It wasn't just about respecting your feelings. . .it was also about balance.

Steve: Balance?

Robin: Remember that day I lost my shoe and I felt uneven for the rest of the day. I don't want to be uneven, Steven. I have enough balance issues as it is.

Nancy walks in. . .

Nancy: Robin. . .you want to go on a date with me?

Robin: Yeah, I'm single now. I just broke up with Eddie.

Nancy: Aren't you a lesbian?

Robin: I don't know why people keep pointing that out.

[silverliing]

“If byler were both girls nobody wou-“ yes they would! as someone who grew up sapphic I would love them even more!

@rainyydazze Ty for putting this in my brain

[starenflugart]

[ronancecore]

This is the most lesbianism pose I ever seen in my entire life

[1very1fancy1doilies1]

lesbian posting for lesbian week :)

[moonfruito]

el and nancy's experiences of girlhood being dichotomised in season one kills me. el looks at the pretty girl and the pretty pink bedroom and this life she's crafted that she parades in pictures and she craves it, so deeply, that she spends the whole season wearing nancy's old dress, this hyper-feminine pink thing, peter pan collars and frills. it sits on her so jarringly, resolutely at odds with her shaved head and death stare and face permanently stained with dirt and blood and tears, and mike's crumpled blue jacket doesn't match, doesn't fit, and she looks so small, but she wants to be the girl in the picture. she wants back the innocence that she never got to have, scrounges off the scraps of nancy's girlhood where she can find it, while nancy loses it at the exact same time. she loses her virginity and her childhood best friend and she ties her hair back and learns to shoot a gun and she learns, through the pain and violence, that her life as a small-town good girl behind a picket fence was lost with everything else that went that day, died with barb. she's a slut and a monster hunter and a woman at sixteen and now she's looking at the girl in the picture and craving her life too. she left her girlhood by the poolside, torn and bloodied and ripped fresh from her chest, and el picks it up, dusts it off, and wears it like armour.

[willbyerssupremacist]

so true

[ssaronance]

ronance x tweets pt. ??

[carrionofamurderprey]

i miss my girls today. so bad. who up thinking about ronance arc

[strawberrysodaslut]

good luck babe but it’s them

[human-being-on-earth]

Why are soooo many people reblogging and liking my Ronance post??

Do people just REALLY like Ronance?

In that case...

One more i swear-

:)

Ok I lied-

But Nancy seems 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 happy to be Robin's friend.

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

Off topic..

But I just learned how to color my post text

[viciouslyrobotic]

Seeing people Ik know better falling into the practice of implying masculinity as suffering and the transition to femininity as the only route to healing is so. Ugh.

Like its proto-terf ideology to imply Masculinity as suffering/violent/wrong and Femininity as healing/good/correct. It's the foundation of treating bi identity as traitorous which is covered in Sharon Dale Stone's "Bisexual Women and the "Threat" To Lesbian Space: Or What If All The Lesbians Leave?" That lead to the same transphobia that caused Sandy Stone to lose her job with Olivia Records, that threatened her life, that harmed Nancy Jean Burkholder at the 1991 Michigan's Women's Musical Festival, continues to harm trans women to this day and trans men who are frequently left out or entirely forgotten about in these discussions just like nonbinary people who are forced into a binary.

Like Idk think for two seconds how that implication paints trans mascs because we're choosing the identity that is being described as suffering, freakish and wrong rather than remaining feminine which is described as liberating and good. Its one thing to celebrate femininity and another to re-enforce the very narrative that harms all trans, gnc and nonbinary people.

[starenflugart]

Some soft Ronance