The QLP Questionnaire: Victoria Villaseñor
"My wife and I are both queer romance writers, and we work hard to show the messiness of love and relationships in our books."
Have you struggled to find love? Or maybe you had a difficult time making it work in a same-sex relationship or outside the typical heteronormative parameters that dominate our culture and have lessons to share? Since most LGBTQ+ people don't have many role models to help us learn what it means to put ourselves together, we invite you to take “The Queer Love Project Questionnaire” and share your distinctive experiences so that others might learn from them. Email us at QueerLoveProjectSub@gmail.com to find out how you can participate.
I’ve been an editor for nearly two decades and write LGBTQ+ speculative fiction under Brey Willows and LGBTQ+ romance under Ally McGuire. I love working with aspiring authors to create worlds readers can escape to. I’ve also won three GCLS awards as well as the Alice B. Toklas award for my body of work. You can find more of my work at my website.
Global Wordsmiths is a social enterprise and CIC (Community Interest Company) built around one core idea: Everyone has a story to tell, and we believe in the power of words to change lives. We want to help people get their stories told. We’re professional editors who are also writers and mentors. Essentially, if you have a dream, if you have a desire to write, learn, and grow, if you want to get your work out into the world, we know how to help. We’ve also been there ourselves, and we know how daunting and impossible the dream can feel. We also know how to make it happen anyway. Nicci Robinson and Victoria Villaseñor are part of the LGBTQ community and know the importance of having a supportive network to help you make your writing goals a reality. For more information, visit GlobalWords.co.uk
What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I’m 48, which constantly baffles me as I never thought I’d get this far. My wife and I live in Nottingham, England—though I’m a transplant from Los Angeles. I’ve been in the UK for 15 years, but I sound just as American as the day I arrived!
How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
I’m a femme Latina lesbian. The femme part is particularly important to me, as it’s always been part of my identity. Perhaps partly because my mom was also a femme lesbian, and she’s a powerhouse. Being a femme comes with its own issues, of course. I’ve been told I’m not welcome in queer spaces; I’ve been told I’m just pretending, that I’m not “really” a lesbian. I’ve also gone unnoticed by the women I tried to catch the eye of! The other side of that is that I pass—I get no trouble when I go into the ladies’s loo, no one gives me a double take on the street.
We all have pros and cons with our identity, I suppose. The queer community I grew up in with my mom helped me see a vast range of identities, and it helped me understand where I felt comfortable. That’s an enormous advantage. So few queer young people have access to that kind of community, and I encourage people to find their tribe so they don’t feel so isolated.
How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?Love is messy. It’s complicated. It can make you feel like you can take the world by the scruff of its neck and make it do what you want it to. It can make you feel like your lungs have been filled with tar, and you don’t know how to clear it without the love you thought you had. You can like people, and not love them. You can love them, but like them about as much as you like Brussels sprouts covered in chocolate.
The definition of love has changed for me through the years, and I think that’s in large part due to two things: maturity and healing. When I was young, I definitely had a vision of love that meant everything was amazing all the time. You never stopped having sex; you always supported each other; you never fought… God only knows where I got that idea, as I certainly didn’t live with it at home. My mom had many partners over the years, and that version of love was never one I saw. Maybe that’s why it was what I thought real love might be? I searched for it, but to be honest, I had an awful lot of self-loathing going on.
I started dealing with depression when I was only 13, and it’s really hard to believe that people will love you when you despise yourself. So I think sabotage can play a role in love and relationships until you start to deal with all your baggage and find a level of self-acceptance. My wife and I are both queer romance writers, and we work hard to show the messiness of love and relationships in our books. Perfect people and perfect characters aren’t nearly as interesting.
How do I define love now? I think it’s having each other’s backs but still being able to share your thoughts honestly and disagree without it being the end of the world. Love is accepting the person you’re with—warts and all. (Not to say you should be OK with bad behavior!) Love is wanting them to be happy and finding ways to make that happen. It’s thinking of them and their needs, sometimes before your own. It’s compromise and hard work to keep the romance going when life is busy and interferes with the time you spend together. It’s making decisions about your life together, and not being afraid to talk things through even when you’re worried it might look or sound “bad.’” It’s making an effort to really listen and hear, and acknowledge their feelings as valid even if you don’t understand or agree. It’s taking care of each other and knowing that things can get really rough, but you’ll be there for one another no matter how hard things get.
Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
For the first time in my life, I’m 100-percent myself with someone. In my previous relationships, I always held something back. I always felt like they’d leave at some point so I kept my guard up and never fully let them in. I even went so far as to figure out what I’d do when they left: I’d know where the affordable places were in the area, what job I might be able to get, and even what LGBTQ community might be in the area.
“When you’ve constantly got an escape plan/back-up plan, that relationship is going to be doomed because you’re not fully in it.”
Being with my wife has changed all that. We got married seven years ago, and we’ve been together for ten. When we first got together, I’d wake up before her and go put my make-up on, so she didn’t see my real face! Ten years later, she loves me exactly as I am. I’ve become (more) disabled in the time we’ve been together, and she’s been there holding my hand every step of the way. She’s wiped away my tears, made me laugh, and we work together to adjust my schedule as needed every week. Never, ever, does she make me feel guilty for not being able to do something or having to change plans.
We laugh a lot. And I think that’s an important element in a relationship. Find someone who makes you laugh.
We work together all day, we write together at night, and our weekends are spent adventuring. We’re quite literally together 24/7, and we still go searching for the other if we’re apart in the house too long. We're both writers (Nicci writes queer fiction under two pen names—Helena Harte and Robyn Nyx—as well), and we spur each other's creativity on as much as we can. We spend at least an hour in bed talking before we go to sleep. We know each other’s quirks and oddities, and we simply accept them as part of the person we love. I have no walls now—no guards. I tell her what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling, and we work through stuff that touches on old baggage.
It sounds silly, but she made me want to be a better person. I think maybe that’s the true definition of what love is: You want to be the best version of yourself for them, and it goes both ways. That’s what love is. It isn’t always romance. It isn’t flowers, chocolates, sex. It’s being there. It’s being yourself. It’s having someone to call; someone you can count on. It’s knowing you aren’t alone in the world. It doesn’t have to be grand gestures. Sometimes it’s just sending a sigh emoji to someone, and knowing they get it.
Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-sex or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
I was raised by a femme lesbian who came out at 17. It was the ’80s, and the scene in L.A. was a tight-knit community. My mom quickly developed her chosen family within that community. As a little runt from the barrio, I attended women’s rugby games, after parties, huge weekend parties fueled by alcohol and drugs, and simple weekend get-togethers. I was the lone child among a plethora of lesbians, and that right there is what showed me the importance of chosen family.
When I was learning to drive, a butch woman taught me how to drive a stick shift. Another taught me how to change a tire (which came in handy many, many times), and yet another taught me how to check/change my oil and take care of the car. When I broke down, one of them came to get me. When an unusual storm made it so I couldn’t drive home, I had chosen family to call, and I stayed at her place. When I began dating, I had a number of my butch parents giving my dates the side-eye. I have no doubt that it kept me safe on more than one occasion.
These weren’t people my age. They weren’t friends from high school. They were community, the people who mattered, the people who understood how we, as queer people, need to lean on each other and be there for each other. I’ve never, ever been alone in life because of that chosen family my mom was part of. Now, I’m half a world away from that family. But I understand the necessity of it, and so my wife and I have continued to try to build something like that here in the UK. We’re writers, so we use that platform to bring people together. And we’ve made some amazing friends through that community, who have become our chosen family. People we depend on. People we can call. People who check in on us when we go quiet.
“Being queer means we don’t always have bio family to depend on. And even when we do, having people who see us—who understand the challenges, who want to be there—is so incredibly special.”
Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships (this can be songs, TV shows, books, movies, etc.)
I’m a book lover. I’ll read anything and everything—and have since I was a child. But there was an epiphany moment when I was finishing my MA in California. My partner at the time was bored while I was studying and found some online fiction by a writer named Radclyffe. It was the usual fiction, but it featured queer main characters. Lesbians filled the screen, and then she found that there were books, too. And a publishing house that was having a book festival. So, off we went to Palm Springs, where we were surrounded by lesbians who wrote books with lesbian characters. I was stunned, and it was incredible.
After that, we went to the big Golden Crown Literary Conference in Atlanta, a huge festival for people who like LGBTQ fiction and writing. There were more than a thousand women there, and it was mind blowing. There was a whole community of people like me! At that conference, I spoke to an editor. After a long conversation, she offered me an internship with the company. Me? Working at a lesbian publishing house in New York? What an amazing experience it was. I was constantly surrounded by creative, powerful, intelligent, kind women who wanted to see queer characters in the books we read. I was with them for 15 years, and I’ve got many lifetime friends out of it.
Do you have a Chosen Family?
We set up a book stall at Pride each year, and we run Queer the Shelves, a big queer book festival, in Nottingham as well. It sold out last year, and the event was full of people laughing, sharing their favorite books, and most importantly, feeling seen. Friendships developed, and people were free to be who they were and let their guards down, as well as get books from every genre going where the main characters were queer of some sort. The power of that simply can’t be measured.
We love being part of the community and writing books that have queer characters. A couple came to us and browsed at Pride one year, and we got to talking. One of them had desperately wanted to come over for the previous two years but hadn’t had the confidence. Fast forward a few years, and we now go on holiday with them. One of them writes reviews and is an important part of the queer book community. She found her people. We found chosen family. As I said above, chosen family is an incredibly important part of our world.
Have you had a difficult time navigating the “roles” you should play in a relationship?
I wondered if I should answer this question, which means I should. I’m a femme, and I’ve always dated butch women. Previously, there was a lot to navigate in those roles. I think many butch women get treated like they don’t have a soft side, a romantic side, a side that might traditionally be related to “feminine” things. I think sometimes people forget they’re still women (if, of course, that’s how they identify, since I know plenty of butch people who aren’t comfortable with the “woman” label).
Knowing what my partner wants and how she wants to walk through the world is something I’ve had to learn, rather than putting actions with the label. I think there’s a more even division of labor in queer relationships in general, and some people like to do stuff others don’t. My wife likes to build things and she can fix damn near anything. She’s strong and has short hair and rides a motorcycle. She also wears women’s clothing and really likes her body, including all the female bits!
I think roles are fine if you choose them, and if you’re comfortable with them. The key is not to become so rigid or attached to them that there isn’t room for change. As people, we grow and our desires shift, and it’s important not to cage ourselves with labels and roles.
She’ll always hold the door for me, and I’ll always bake her the scones she loves. Those aspects of our roles work well for us, and I think that’s what it comes down to: Finding the aspects of the roles you enjoy and not allowing them to become difficult to navigate.
Any good/bad advice you received from a friend or queer elder?
To this day, I can picture the day an elder gave me advice I didn’t want to hear—and didn’t heed. And goodness knows, I should have! I was dating a butch woman who lived in Northern California. We met on Butch-Femme.com, a dating site that used to exist. I was in my early twenties and a total mess emotionally. She hit all the right buttons, and we began dating. She didn’t like the way I dressed, so I changed that. She wanted me to be more demure, receive less attention. So I lowered my eyes and stayed behind her. She came to pick me up at work one day and a queer elder I worked with watched us.
The next day, that queer elder took me outside. She said she knew it wasn’t any of her business, but she saw some huge red flags with the woman I was with, and she wanted me to see them too. She said she’d seen her type many times over the years and knew how destructive they could be. I didn’t take her advice, and that relationship most definitely was as destructive as she said it would be. But taking advice from elders isn’t what twenty-somethings do, is it?
We all think we’re in love and know what we want at that age. Our daughter is in a relationship that makes us worry (she’s also gay), but there’s no telling her anything. She has to work it out for herself, and we’ll be there when she needs us later.
Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
Love yourself first. I think that’s something we’re not told, and I think it’s pivotal to a healthy relationship and finding the right person for you. As a queer elder myself now (how on earth?), I think I can safely say I’ve been through the rollercoaster that is dating and relationships, and none of them worked until I began to work on myself. I’m not saying you should think you’re the best thing ever, but you should find a level of self-acceptance and understand that you’re worthy of love and respect. And you have to be active about it, too!
To find change, you have to actively work toward change. Your life has so much potential and beauty–it’s down to you to chase it, and never, ever accept someone who doesn’t make you feel like waking up every day is a gift.
BONUS
We all need more inspiration. Please recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.
Book: Above All, Honor by Radclyffe. The Devil Inside by Ali Vali.
TV Show: Schitt’s Creek
Movie: Bound and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love.
Play, Musical, Other Cultural artifact: The Greatest Showman.