Becoming Lesbian

On identification

I became a lesbian in the the spring of 2012, my sophomore year at Oberlin College, due to sheer force of desire. But how?

Well, how does anyone?

Audre Lorde became a lesbian because it was in her maternal bloodline. In Zami, her “autobiomythography,” she writes that she knew from a young age that her mother was different than other women, that she had an ineffable power. “To this day I believe that there have always been Black dykes around - in the sense of powerful and women-oriented women - who would rather have died than used that name for themselves. And that includes my momma,” Lorde proclaims. Though her mother would have never understood it, Lorde’s lesbianism was her birthright.

Radclyffe Hall became a lesbian by an accident of birth. Really she wasn’t a lesbian, exactly, but a congenital invert; hers was a masculine soul born into a female body. Her most famous novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), depicts its tragic invert main character, Stephen Gordon, discovering a copy of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s sexological treatise Psychopathia Sexualis on her father’s desk and learning of the truth of her condition. Like the author who created her, Stephen Gordon is horse-loving, debonaire, and horny for women. Hall was sued for obscenity in England and America over the novel’s (rather tame) depiction of lesbian sexuality, but she was resolute in her righteousness: “I am proud indeed to have taken up my pen in defense of those who are utterly defenseless, who being from birth a people set apart in accordance with some hidden scheme of Nature, need all the help that society can give them,” she insisted.¹ By a “hidden scheme of Nature,” Hall was one such oddity.

Ann Weldy, pen name Ann Bannon, became a lesbian through reading and writing. She read Radclyffe Hall and the pulp novels of Vin Packer, and these books “completely obsessed [her] for the better part of two years.”² A young wife on the Philadelphia Main Line, she wrote to Packer, who invited her to New York to meet her editor who was making big bucks off of lesbian pulp novels. He read a manuscript she had written about young women in college, which included a side plot in which two sorority sisters fell in love. He told her to refocus the plot on their relationship, and this became her first novel, Odd Girl Out, followed by the Beebo Brinker series. This was 1957, and it took a long while for Weldy’s life to catch up. Her marriage was difficult but she stayed in it for 27 years, separating from her husband in the early 80s. Shortly after her divorce, an editor from the feminist publisher Naiad Press reached out to her about reprinting her novels, which had become foundational texts for a new generation of lesbian readers. Weldy was stunned. She’d had no idea.

Cynthia Nixon became a lesbian because she preferred it to being straight. In 2012, she gave a speech at a gay event where she announced, “I’ve been straight, and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” a statement for which she received massive backlash from straights, bisexuals, and gays alike. This was during the peak era of the marriage equality movement in the US, after all, and Nixon’s perspective was a threat to the narrative of homosexuality as immutable (and therefore protectable by law) identity championed by groups like the HRC. You know, born this way. Anyway, wasn’t Nixon really just looking for the word “bisexual?” In a profile in the New York Times soon after, she expounded: “For me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me…Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate?”³

The narratives I have just relayed are of course simplified. But what I hope they convey is that, much as our categories of gender and sexuality are historically contingent, constructed by and responding to a host of societal pressures in any given moment, our understandings of how and why we come to inhabit those categories are too always in flux.

In particular, there seems to be a cultural pendulum that swings back and forth between understandings of sexuality rooted in choice and understandings rooted in essentialism (biological or otherwise). In any given moment, a diversity of these narratives will exist, just as there exists a diversity of ways in which people categorize sexualities. But, at any particular time, there tends to be a narrative that is most hegemonic: that seems the most “natural,” needs the least explanation, is drawn on the most easily and readily by many different people. The overarching framework that undergirds these fluctuating narratives has, for the last three-quarters of a century, been one of identity and identification.

Identity, as a paradigm, is so omnipresent that it seems difficult to isolate as an object of study. However, like our other paradigms for understanding the self, identity is a historically-situated construct whose path through the culture can be traced. Our modern conception of identity (as opposed to other paradigms that might describe selfhood, such as character or personality) dates back to midcentury European and American scholarship in the social sciences. The German Jewish Freudian psychoanalyst Erik Erikson was a key author in this field via his theory of the eight stages of human psychosocial development.⁴ One of these stages is “identity crisis,” a period during adolescence when one ideates on the self and experiments with different perspectives, ways of being, and social roles. You know, teen stuff. In 1956, Erikson published an article titled “The Problem of Ego Identity,” which went on to become extremely influential in the field. According to sociologist Andrew Weigert, Erikson’s article “emphasizes that ego identity must be both a functioning psychological achievement of individuals and limited by, as well as fitted to, the socio-historical moment in which the individual lives.”⁵ While Erikson categorized identity crisis as a part of the adolescent stage of development, he also described modern society as creating conditions similar to “the changing, ambivalent, uncertain environment of the adolescent,” thereby rendering us all as in some ways adolescent; “thus identity crisis becomes the typical historical crisis of the modern person.”⁶

Writings on identity exploded throughout the social sciences in the 1950s and 60s, elaborating sociological and psychological theories of the self and society using the identity paradigm. Gay and trans people became crucibles for the study of identity, as they (we) represented meaningful divergences from normative sexual and gender identity which thereby illuminated the workings of identity more broadly. The terms “gender role” and “sexual orientation” were coined during this era by the sexologist John Money, a co-founder of the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins.⁷ These terms, along with "gender identity,” became key tools for the disaggregation of the social and psychological experience of the sexed and gendered self from the mere physical facts of the sexed body.⁸ By the early 1970s, Weigert writes, identity was “sufficiently formulated and accepted as both a technical and folk category” that those writing about it across many different scholarly fields could “use the term without challenge and with easily shared assumptions about its legitimacy and importance.”⁹

One legacy of this history is that identification, as a paradigm, maps more readily onto non-normative genders and sexualities than it does onto hegemonic ones. It seems much more natural to say “I identify as gay” or “I identify as trans” than “I identify as straight” or “I identify as cis.” The latter statements are not incorrect, and they are certainly things that people sometimes say, but they bring to mind a person self-consciously and perhaps awkwardly performing awareness of their social position rather than naturally expressing an understanding of selfhood.¹⁰ In the realms of gender and sexuality, identity has become socially coded as something that explains non-normative ways of being to a greater extent than hegemonic ones.¹¹ This may be in part because the act of identification is one that many people are really only forced to explicitly engage in when they are seeking out a self-description or life that departs from the hegemonic.¹²

Though the intellectual lineage I’ve just traced is heavily social constructionist, the way that the model of gender/sexual identity operates today slips freely back and forth between essentialism and social constructionism, somehow managing to fully inhabit both. We often employ identity categories as if they are in fact merely descriptive of pre-existing, essential facts of the self, but indeed our existing categories also act upon our understandings of self, both describing what is socially constructed and taking part in the process of social construction.¹³ I identify as “lesbian” because it it maps onto desires and affiliations that I experience in a bodily and primal way. But through calling myself lesbian, allowing myself to be socially shaped by lesbians, renouncing or minimizing my heterosexuality, reading lesbian writings, and saying “I’m like these people, and not like those people,” those very desires (which feel so primal, so pure, so immutable!) have evolved radically since I was my Oberlin sophomore self. Identification follows desire, but it also leads it.

I think that the queer community tends to over-identify with identification, if you will, but I also recognize that this is the main model we have at hand for understanding our gendered and sexual selves. Still, I think it’s worth remembering that it’s not the only possible model. It’s a framework that is traceable to a very particular set of European and American men in the social sciences during the mid-twentieth century; their purposes in creating this model may not always align with ours in using it. Returning to Lorde and Weldy and Nixon, we might remember that even within the framework of identity, we can trace lots of different paths to the selves we wish to be. Like Nixon’s haters, we (broadly speaking) can tend to lash out against narratives of self-fashioning that feel alien or strike us as not politically expedient, but we do so at our own peril. There are as many ways to become lesbian as there are ways to be lesbian.

Queer people asserting political authority often make a rhetorical gesture to the tune of “we’ve always been here.” There is a certain truth to this: people whose self-conception or behavior defies the gendered and sexualized norms of their societies have indeed always existed so far as we know, and also societies have existed (and currently exist) that include normative genders and sexualities that go beyond Western cisgender and heterosexual roles. But I think that the “we’ve always been here” gesture obscures something important too: the truth that we fundamentally exist always and only in the unending present. We would seem quite strange indeed to many people of the past who we mark today as queer, and vice versa. It bears noting that modern heterosexual cis people’s genders and sexualities would also seem strange to their many, diverse past analogs, and vice versa. Our gendered and sexual ways of being are marked by the moment as they mark the moment; in that sense, none of us have “always been here.” Insofar as this rhetorical move can buy us political power, sure, let’s use it, but I’m not sure it gets us too far. Those determined to see us as strange or perverted will continue to do so. Our power won’t come from a half-truthful logic of naturalness, but from establishing our shared material stakes in a common struggle with a wide swath of working people.¹⁴

I’ll end by elaborating a little more on my own lesbian origin story. I became a lesbian in the spring of 2012 after a rapid series of passionate and ultimately disastrous dating escapades with men (some of whom later turned out not to be men after all). I was burned out on heterosexual dating, and interested in exploring the side of myself that had always had obsessive crushes on girls. Up until this point I had called myself bi, a label which described me accurately at that time. I signed up for a queer theory seminar (shout out to Queer Positions) which was stacked almost exclusively with Oberlin’s coolest, hottest upperclassman dykes. In some ways, it really was this simple: I wanted to be like them, and I made it so. Desire led my identity in that moment, then, but not only sexual and romantic desire. It was a desire for who exactly I wanted to be, and it was through the process of following it that a new self was born.

1. Quoted by Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 182.

2. “Queen of Lesbian Pulp Novels Ann Bannon: An Interview by William Dean,” archived here.

3. Alex Witchel, “Life After ‘Sex,’” The New York Times Magazine, January 19, 2012.

4. I apologize now to any readers who have studied psychoanalysis if I’m butchering this, haha.

5. Andrew Weigert, “Identity: Its Emergence within Sociological Psychology,” Symbolic Interaction 6, no. 2 (1983): 186. This article is a very detailed history of the concept of identity within sociology and psychology and helped me immensely in understanding the origins of our concept of identity.

6. Weigert, 186.

7. Money has a complicated legacy to say the least. The Johns Hopkins Clinic provided the first legal access to gender affirming surgery in the U.S, and it also crafted many of the medical gate-keeping practices that continue to make it difficult to access transition resources today. John Money oversaw the sex reassignment of David Reimer, who as an infant was left without a penis after a botched circumcision. Money convinced Reimer’s parents to have their baby’s testicles surgically removed and to raise him as a girl. Horrifically, as part of Reimer’s “treatment,” Money showed him and his twin brother pornography when they were small children and forced them to mimic sex acts. As a teen, Reimer learned of the surgery and his gender history and transitioned to male. He died by suicide in 2004.

8. Queer theorists like Judith Butler would later assert that biological sex is just as constructed as gender; our physical forms exist, but sex is produced through cultural meaning-making.

9. Weigert, 196.

10. I recognize that my use of “natural/naturally” is a little loaded here. I hope it’s clear that I mean “natural” as a feeling, not as an objective marker.

11. I think that this operates within the realms of race and ethnicity too, but somewhat differently. “I identify as Black” or “I identify as Asian” sound more natural than “I identify as white,” but to my ear the chasm is smaller than it is between gay/straight and trans/cis. I’m not totally sure why this is, but it would be interesting to explore further.

12. Thanks to Clover for talking this point out with me.

13. You may recognize this is what first J. L. Austin called a performative speech act, whose terminology was later taken up by Judith Butler to describe gender as constituted through performance more broadly.

14. Jules Gill-Peterson has written and spoken a lot on this point, particularly pointing out that one of the biggest blows to access to medical transition in the last decade was Biden’s “post Covid” rollback of Medicaid expansion. I really like this conversation between her and Beatrice Adler-Bolton in The New Inquiry from 2022, which touches on this, among other topics.