Growing up in the Midwest in a homogonous heterosexual culture it never occurred to me to think of the couple’s living in our community in terms of their sexuality. My attention centered on awareness of their children and families, their farms and crops and their religious affiliations.
I remember being "put off" when my girlfriends began to flirt and date boys. I thought something must be wrong with me. (I knew something was wrong with them!) To fit in I "dated" (or more honestly, became close friends with) a boy. He was the only one in my high school of 100 students who had any interest in psychology, feelings, and esoteric spirituality.
I knew our "relationship" was only a friendship and how it looked to other people was different than it actually was. The safe part of the sham was that it was not sexual. It was the perfect arrangement for me by making me feel like a participant while keeping myself intact.
Then I muddled through the heterosexual mind field trying to find positive feelings for men in my relationships. It was no use. My identity as a lesbian couldn't contain itself any longer. Looking back on my first 30 years I can see that I always loved women. I liked their way of relating, the connectedness I felt, the emotional intimacy our friendships offered. I admired women’s strength and their beauty (inner and outer).
Realizing this made me take a different perspective on the women in my life at that time. They were all identified as heterosexual and had varying relationships with men. But I felt deep love for each of them in my heart. I never thought of our relationships as sexual, because there was no biological element to our connectedness.
I began to want to meet other lesbians to see what my feelings would reveal. I found the same warmth, inclusion and emotionally intimacy in them that I had with straight women. My sexual liaisons grew out of friendship and had a highly charged biological element to them. Still, that was only a part of these relationships. In fact, being sexual sometimes jeopardized friendship. I lost more than one “friend” after the sexual element was introduced.
I was very open with my friends and the world about my love for women and never once got a negative reaction for my choice. Everyone accepted it as a natural expression of my being. I still didn't think of myself as a lesbian, although I was definitely woman-identified gender oriented. I was simply being my true self.
It was a shock to me when I started my psychotherapy practice to find many lesbians who felt people, both straight and gay, thought of their lifestyle only in sexual terms. This was unsettling to me because of my distaste for myopic thinking and labeling. Once people have you pigeonholed, they won’t let you change your mind.
I felt it was a shame they had to divide people up, divide love and friendship into sexual and non-sexual. How could they let such an intimate, personal and spiritual choice be reduced to biology? How did it happen that homosexual desires were taken out of the realm of the ‘ordinary’ to be perceived as existing only in people who are classed as ‘other’ and ‘different’ from the rest of the population? Had our culture’s fear overtaken their perspective?
I began to do some research on this matter and found out the first use of the word ‘homosexual’ was around 1869 and the fifty years that followed was brought under the jurisdiction of the legal and medical professions, and pathologised. The first sexologists tried to explore homosexuality from what they believed to be a humanitarian perspective. They were seeking to find out the ‘truth’ about what makes a homosexual.
Sexologists and reformers from the 1890s onwards tried actively to reform both laws and public opinion. Through links they made with the medical profession they were able to translate into medical terms what had been thought to be a social problem.
This information explained the idea of thinking of lesbians only in terms of biology instead of an integral part of the culture in which we live. I kept on looking for answers and discovered there were many attempts in the late 1800s to criminalize lesbianism. This failed because there were strong feelings of not wanting the matter to be brought to the attention of women who had never heard of such a thing. Thank you Patriarchy!
By this time it was the mid-80s and we had the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 70s shoulders to stand on. The 70s had seen the beginnings of a public unapologic and fun face of homosexuality. Within a mood of great optimism, those involved in gay liberation began for the first time to define themselves, rather than being defined by others.
Still, society tried to control people’s sexuality by boxing them into categories of acceptable or unacceptable, the same or other. Even today, mainstream society often views homosexuals in terms of sex. They see “other” gender choices from their own as either ‘wrong’ or as sad victims that cannot help their sexual orientation, and therefore deserve compassion and understanding.
I have the understanding of same-sex relationships based on many more levels than simply sexual. I know that the experience of being with women brings with it friendship, companionship, equality in love and partnership and the experience of being understood. Sexuality is only a small part of a healthy lesbian relationship. Not to minimize the importance of a good sexual component in a lesbian relationship, it is only a fraction of a mature partnership.
Maybe that is what was modeled to me when I was growing up. I saw partnerships that were mature and weathered the good times and the bad. I have known the rollercoaster ride of serial lesbian relationships based on lust and eventually not much else. Now, in my more mature years, my identity as a lesbian isn't fooled anymore by sex. I am much more focused on how I work together with my partner, how we respect our differences and similarities and the flow of our friendship and relationship.
I refuse, as a lesbian, to be identified by sexuality alone. Our culture needs to be educated about gender and the many varieties of relationships and choices there are. Perhaps through knowledge and having the experience of knowing people who have made a “different” choice from them, there will be less fear and more real understanding.
