Copyright 1995 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. Developmental Psychology 1995, Vol. 31, No. 1,95-104 Transitions From Heterosexuality to Lesbianism: The Discursive Production of Lesbian Identities Sue Wilkinson Celia Kitzinger Loughborough University University of Hull This article explored the discursive production of a major disjuncture in sexual identity in adult life: women's accounts of transitions to lesbianism after a substantial period of heterosexuality. Eighty semistructured interviews with self-identified lesbians, all with at least 10 years prior heterosexual experience (plus additional materials drawn from published autobiographical sources), were analyzed within a social constructionist framework. The article examined the creation of contexts in which sexual identity transitions become possible, explored how such transitions are defined and marked, identified the consequences, and detailed the continuing development of lesbian identity posttransition. In conclusion, the article reflected on the status and salience of such data in supporting the social constructionist position, particularly in the face of the continuing popularity of essentialist theories of sexual identity development. enced during childhood and adolescence; according to Money (1988, p. 124), "the most important formative years for homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality are those of late infancy and prepubertal childhood." Within this framework, identifying oneself as homosexual (which is referred to by the lesbian and gay community as coming out) is merely a process of learning to recognize and accept what one was all along: Indeed, the very expression coming out suggests that the lesbian has always been inside, awaiting debut (Hollander & Haber, 1992). This idea, that homosexuality and heterosexuality are fixed early on and persist relatively immutable to change, is reflected in the literature documenting the failure of conversion therapies (e.g., Halderman, 1991). It is frequently suggested that essentialism of such theories is a "straw man" erected by the social constructionists as a foil for their own perspective (cf. Stein, 1990, p. 326), but as has been argued elsewhere (C. Kitzinger, in press), such essentialist models of lesbianism and gay male identity development are, in fact, the norm, reflecting and perpetuating popular theories about homosexuality. Essentialist arguments of this type fail to address the experience of many women. Recent research on heterosexuals who become lesbian (Golden, 1987) and on lesbians who become heterosexual (Bart, 1993) emphasizes the "fluctuating," "fluid," and "dynamic" nature of sexuality for "protean" women (pp. 246-247). Women's sexual fluidity has long been apparent in the psychological and sexological literature, but it is often submerged in the data rather than explicitly theorized. Drawing on data from Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gebhard (1953), Mclntosh (1968/1992) pointed out that After more than two decades of social constructionist approaches to sexual identity (e.g., Gagnon & Simon, 1973; C. Kitzinger, 1987; Mclntosh, 1968/1992; Plummer, 1981, 1992; Weeks, 1977), biological models of lesbianism and male homosexuality are becoming increasingly popular, both in the scientific literature (e.g., Ellis & Ames, 1987; LeVay, 1991) and in the media. Although biological and early socialization models may present homosexuality as either a natural variation or an unnatural deviation from the "norm" of heterosexuality, "caused" variously by brain structure or function, genetic or hormonal influences, or early childhood experiences, they invariably assume heterosexuality as a natural, unproblematic category (see, e.g., Money, 1988, p. 11). Such an analysis fails to recognize that the category homosexual can only exist in relation to the category heterosexual (part of the social constructionist argument) and is in direct contradiction to those radical feminist analyses of heterosexuality that present it as neither natural nor normal, but rather as a coercive patriarchal institution (e.g., Adams, Lenskyj, Masters, & Randall, 1990; Rich, 1987; Wilkinson* Kitzinger, 1993). There is now a large body of work predicated on the assumption that lesbianism and male homosexuality are essences— core, fundamental ways of being that are determined prenatally or in early childhood. Key researchers in thefieldconcur on this point: According to Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith (1981), adult homosexuality stems from homosexual feelings experi- Celia Kitzinger, Social Sciences Department, Loughborough University, Loughborough, United Kingdom; Sue Wilkinson, Health Studies Research, Institute of Nursing Studies, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom. We thank Corinna Petre (Institute of Nursing Studies) for her sterling secretarial support. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sue Wilkinson, who is now at Social Sciences Department, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, United Kingdom. [I]t is interesting to notice that although at the age of 20 far more men than women have homosexual and bisexual patterns (27% as against 11 %), by the age of 35 thefiguresare both the same (13%). Women seem to broaden their sexual experience as they get older, whereas more men become narrower and more specialised, (p. 154) Most women who self-identify as lesbian do so only after an earlier period in their lives during which they identified as het95 96 CELIA KITZINGER AND SUE WILKINSON erosexual. Researchers typically find that at least a quarter of their lesbian samples have been married (25%: Saghir & Robins, 1973; 35%: Bell & Weinberg, 1978), and estimates of the number of lesbians with heterosexual sexual experience range from 58% (Kenyon, 1968) to 84% (Bell & Weinberg, 1978). Indeed, past heterosexual experience is taken for granted so much in lesbian circles that lesbians who have never been involved with men have complained of the oppressiveness of this assumption (Jo, Strega, & Ruston, 1990). Many self-identified lesbians report that they occasionally engage in heterosexual sex—46% in one survey (Bright, 1992, p. 136), a third of these with gay or bisexual men (suggesting that, even for men, essentialist models of sexual identity are seriously problematic)— while Kinsey et al. (1953) reported that 28% of all women in their U.S. sample have had sexual experience with another woman. The accounts such women (and men) present of their experience constitute inconvenient data from an essentialist perspective, which assumes an innate or fixed sexual identity and is, perhaps, why such data are undertheorized in the literature. Our research aims to explore the psychological processes involved for women in making transitions from heterosexuality to lesbianism without resorting to essentialist models of sexuality, according to which such women would finally be discovering their "real" selves after a long period of repression or denial; or, conversely, adopting an inauthentic lifestyle in opposition to their real orientation. Very little research to date has addressed the processes by which such women negotiate transitions to lesbianism (although, see Cassingham & O'Neil, 1993; Charbonneau & Lander, 1991; French, 1992). In seeking a theoretical model within which to conceptualize transitions to lesbianism after a substantial period of heterosexuality, we start from the assumption that adult women who make such transitions are no more driven by biology or subconscious urges than they are when, for instance, they change jobs; such choices could be viewed as influenced by a mixture of personal reevaluation, practical necessity, political values, chance, and opportunity. This might suggest that the transition process could then be conceptualized within the framework of the literatures on transitions as (a) stressful disjunctions in an individual's life or (b) markers of developmental stage or role change. However, the sexist and heterosexist assumptions underpinning the tradition of work on stressful life events (e.g., Fisher & Reason, 1988) would seem to render it largely unusable as a framework for examining transitions in sexual identity. Similarly, classic studies based on stage theories of life span development have been heavily criticized for their male bias and for cohort effects (e.g., Barnett & Baruch, 1978; Rossi, 1980). Moreover, in neither the life stress tradition nor the stage-role change tradition has the transition to lesbianism been addressed.' Models of homosexual identity development have also been based on stage theories (e.g., Coleman, 1981/1982; Troiden, 1979). Criticisms of these models have been directed against their male bias (with the notable exception of Cass [1979, 1984]), despite much evidence of fundamental differences between lesbian and male homosexual experience (e.g., DeMonteflores & Schultz, 1978; Hart & Richardson, 1981). Critics have also noted these models' reification of stages (Weinberg, 1984), their lack of acknowledgment of the situational determi- nants of identity (Omark, 1981, quoted in Troiden, 1984), and their insistence on a single linear developmental path in the face of the "dazzling idiosyncrasy" of sexual identity (Suppe, 1984 P. 17). Such models are reviewed by Minton and McDonald (1984), whose own three-stage version is typical of the genre: The first (egocentric) stage typically occurs in childhood or adolescence and entails genital contact, emotional attachment, and fantasies about a member of one's own sex; in the second (sociocentric) stage, conventional assumptions about homosexuality as deviant, sick, or sinful are internalized, leading to secrecy, guilt, and isolation; and in the final (universalistic) stage, the individual realizes that societal norms can be critically evaluated, is able to accept and develop a positive homosexual identity, and is able to integrate this identity with all other aspects of self. Faderman (1985) pointed out that women who come to lesbianism through radical feminism appear to go through Minton and McDonald's stages in reverse order. This not only contributes to the critique of stage theories as rigidly sequential, but it is also a salient critique for the present study, given that such women constitute a subgroup of those who make transitions from heterosexuality to lesbianism. The key criticism of such models, however, is their essentialism. They assume the existence of homosexuality as an innate, or early acquired, sexual orientation. The development of a homosexual identity, in this view, simply entails a gradually developing awareness and acceptance of one's real self. Sexual identity development is conceptualized either as a process of natural unfolding, albeit dependent on environmental interactions, much like any other process of development, or as a voyage of discovery. For example, Coleman (1981/1982) explicitly supported a biological basis for sexual preference, whereas Minton and McDonald (1984) stated that "the initial phase of homosexual identity formation appears to emerge in childhood or adolescence," although they left open the question of whether homosexuality "can be traced to early social learning or biological predisposition" (p. 97). Not surprisingly, then, the literature on homosexual identity development focuses almost exclusively on adolescence (e.g., Gonsiorek & Rudolph, 1991). This focus on adolescence is a consequence of an essentialism that assumes a dormant, true lesbian self waiting to be discovered or revealed at puberty or shortly thereafter. This kind of model has important implications for women who change their sexual identity from heterosexual to homosexual after a substantial period of heterosexuality. Such women tend to be conceptualized in one of two ways: Either (a) they were "really" lesbians all along but were repressing or denying it—this argument includes the concept of the latent homosexual (e.g., Socarides, 1965)—or (b) they are "not really" lesbians now—Bergler (1954), for example, identified 12 varieties of spurious homosexuality. The label pseudo homosexual is also used to discredit women who present their lesbianism in political terms and who are seen as distorting their natural sexual inclinations in the service of ideology (Defries, 1976). The process of coming out in adulthood has been almost en1 A single exception is Penelope (1993), who offered a tongue-incheek analysis of how the transition to lesbianism might occur at each stage of the female life span. SPECIAL ISSUE: TRANSITIONS TO LESBIANISM tirely neglected, and, as Gonsiorek and Weinrich (1991) noted: "There is essentially no research on the longitudinal stability of sexual orientation over the adult life span" (p. 8; see also C. Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993a). The present study was designed to redress this dearth of information by focusing on disjunctures in sexual identity in adult life, specifically transitions to lesbianism after a substantial period of heterosexuality, and by seeking to explore the psychological processes entailed in such transitions. The approach adopted here was a metalevel perspective regarding both biological and early socialization models as particular rhetorical constructions, used for specific purposes. In so doing, we drew on the sociology of knowledge (e.g., Knorr-Cetina & Mulkay, 1983; Simons, 1989) and on a social constructionist perspective (e.g., Gergen, 1985; Stein, 1990), especially work on the construction of self and identity (e.g., Shotter & Gergen, 1989). For a detailed discussion of this approach to research on homosexuality, see C. Kitzinger (1987, chapters 1 and 2). It must be emphasized that in social constructionist, discourse analytic research, the focus is on participants' accounts as primary data, rather than on the compilation of accurate and reliable facts about lesbian transitions. The aim is not to reveal the real histories, motives, and life events of the participants but to understand how they construct, negotiate, and interpret their experience. A more extended rationale for eliciting and assessing lesbian accounts is given by C. Kitzinger (1987, chapter 3). An introduction to the principles and practice of discourse analysis is provided by Potter and Wetherell (1987). Method Participants Criteria for inclusion in this study were that participants should report having a minimum of 10 years active heterosexual behavior, including coitus; no sense of uncertainty or doubt about being heterosexual during this period; and a current identity as unequivocally lesbian (with or without sexual experience with women). Participants were recruited by using friendship pyramiding (Vetere, 1972). Twenty women were interviewed specifically about the psychological processes of transition from heterosexuality to lesbianism; 60 others who satisfied the criteria for inclusion were drawn from a larger project on lesbian identities, of which transition processes were only one aspect (C. Kitzinger, 1987). Because the focus of this study is on the development of lesbian identity, only women who, at the time of interview, identified as lesbian were included. The question as to why some women, with otherwise similar sexual and emotional profiles, instead identify as bisexual, heterosexual, or refuse any label is beyond the scope of the present project (but see Hutchins & Kaahumanu, 1991). Similarly, because the focus was on the development of lesbian identities, we decided not to exclude those without same-sex sexual experience, although in fact only one such woman volunteered for this study. This study, then, is based on interviews with 80 lesbians, 68% of whom had been married. The average participant began to have heterosexual sexual relations at age 18, identified herself as lesbian at age 34, and took part in the interviews at age 36. All of the participants were White; the majority (87%) were in professional or skilled occupations, with only 20% identifying themselves as working class.2 Because the aim of this study was to explore commonalities in accounts of transitions, it was not considered appropriate to subdivide and analyze our sample by 97 demographic variables. In recognition of the fact that this study was limited mainly to a sample of White, middle-class lesbians, we also drew on published accounts by lesbians about their coming out experiences that reflect a broad range of ethnic and class backgrounds. We used all such accounts available to us at the time of conducting the research. Materials and Procedure All of the participants were interviewed by C.K. in their own homes. With the exception of 3 women, who were available only for telephone interviews, all of the participants were interviewed face-to-face. Interviews lasted an average of 1.5 hr. The interview schedule for the larger project on lesbian identities (60 interviews) was developed to elicit discourses of lesbian identity in an open-ended andflexibleway. All 23 questions are quoted in full in C. Kitzinger (1987, pp. 74-75). For the purposes of the present research, the key questions were as follows (with probes in parentheses): Question 5: How did you first find out about lesbianism? (Feelings about it?) Question 6: When did you first begin to think that maybe that was what you were? (Was there something particular that happened that made you think you might be lesbian?) Question 7: What did you do about it? (Seek out other gay people? Seek out counseling? Information in books? Feelings about it?) Question 8: Had you had sex with men before you decided you were a lesbian? (Why or why not? Did you like it? Sex with men now, or in the future? Sexual feelings for men?) Question 9: Have you had sex with a woman? (Why not?) Tell me about your first lover: How did you meet her? How did you become sexually involved? How did you feel about it? What happened to that relationship? All of the women included as participants in the specific project on the transition from heterosexuality to lesbianism (20 interviews) satisfied the criteria specified earlier (determined in a preinterview telephone screening check). The key question in this project was, "Tell me about the time when you first began to think of yourself as a lesbian." Subsidiary questions were, How old were you then? How did you feel about it? What did you do about it? Was sex an important part of your decision making? What things helped you during this time? What things made it harder for you during this time? Do you remember a specific point at which you said "Yes, I am a lesbian"? How do you think your life is different because you have become a lesbian? Additional material was collected from each participant concerning date of birth, place of birth, marital status, ethnicity, social class, and employment. All interviews were tape-recorded with the consent of participants and were transcribed and coded by C.K. The coded data were then subjected to a number of phases of discourse analysis, including the determination of patterns in the data (variability and consistency of discourse use) and examination of the functions and effects of specific discourses or types of discourse use. These procedures follow the 10 stages in the analysis of discourse outlined by Potter and Wetherell (1987, pp. 160-176). Results and Discussion Our presentation of women's accounts of transitions from heterosexuality to lesbianism is organized under three broad headings. First, the section Getting There examines accounts of the preparatory "work" that has to be done to create a context in which a transition in sexual identity is possible and looks at 2 This does not add up to 100% because several women in professional or skilled occupations identified themselves as working class. 98 CELIA KITZINGER AND SUE WILKINSON strategies used to avoid confronting the possibility of a lesbian identity. Second, the section Making and Describing the Transition to Lesbian Identity includes accounts of the transitions themselves: how they are denned and marked; how such experiences are described; and their consequences, costs, and benefits. Finally, the section Going On considers the accounts of the new lesbian after transition: the continuing development of her identity and her reflections on the past and future. In reporting the results, we follow the discourse analytic convention of illustrating our analytic categories with substantial extracts from the interview transcripts. Where appropriate, we give some indication of the frequency with which particular discursive strategies and accounts are used.3 Getting There: Barriers and Resistances to Identifying as Lesbian Compulsory heterosexuality. In becoming lesbians, women are assuming an identity they were taught to avoid. Most women, as girls, are encouraged to conform to norms of femininity and heterosexuality (S. Kitzinger & Kitzinger, 1991, pp. 264-279). Lesbianism was described by the vast majority of participants as shrouded in silence and invisibility, or was rendered perverse and abnormal: ism," racism, anti-Semitism, and ageism (Browne, Connors, & Stern, 1985; Macdonald & Rich, 1983; Smith, 1983). A substantial minority (« = 17) of lesbians in our sample reported other oppressions being used to negate their attempts to claim a lesbian identity: Discovering I had MS [multiple sclerosis] at the same time that I feel in love with Sarah made everything much more complicated— partly because of what it meant for us, of course, but also because Mike [husband] and Jim [marriage counsellor] both came up with the idea I wasn't really a lesbian—I wanted tofieSarah, as someone younger and healthy. Other—ageist—examples are given in the subsection, "It's just a phase." Blocking it out. About a quarter (n = 19) of the participants who became lesbians after a substantial period of heterosexuality described how they had earlier in their lives refused to allow themselves even to address the question,-" Am I a lesbian?" Asking oneself the question admits the possibility of the answer "yes," and that answer often felt too dangerous. The following 2 womenfinallyidentified as lesbian in their 40s: The first time I fell in love with a woman I was 25 and pregnant with my second child. I thought, "What's this? Are you bisexual or what?" And then I pushed it to the back of my mind. There was no way I could deal with it because I had these children, and a husband, and no way of supporting myself. So I just didn't think about it. My concept of Lesbian—although I didn't really know the word until late adolescence—was formed by my unconsciously responding to the gaps, the silences and hesitations . . . Women related to men or TH—blank—there was nothingness. Nothingness was loaded with dread, the fear of the unknown. (Anne, 1990, p. 38) I had a growing feeling that I wanted . . . well, I didn't know what I did w a n t . . . I blocked it out; I never finished that sentence even in my own mind. Looking back, it's obvious that I wanted to know women closely and, clearly, sexually, but I couldn't and didn't believe it. It seemed too extraordinary, too way out, too unlike my life, which was a secure middle-class life with a husband and two children. There wasn't any room for my fantasies—I tucked them away and hid them even from myself. Acknowledging my lesbianism was a very slow process—partly because of not knowing other lesbians, partly because of the fear I felt.. . . People beat up lesbians. People exclude lesbians. People say we're not normal. My whole life was heterosexual and it felt like my whole life was under threat.4 Despite feminist analyses of heterosexuality as an institution that has to be "managed, organised, propagandised, and maintained by force" (Rich, 1987, p. 50), the assumption often remains that most women are either innately heterosexual or have "freely chosen" a heterosexual identity (C. Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1993b). It is little wonder that women who violate this assumption by asserting a lesbian identity are subject to rejection, hostility, and violence (e.g., Herek & Berill, 1992) and that most women express their awareness of this state of affairs. Multiple oppressions. For women already oppressed for their ethnicity, age, social class, or disability, claiming a lesbian identity is at once exhilarating and threatening to self and society. Beck (1982) described the disbelief and veiled hostility she encountered on telling people she was working on a book about Jewish lesbians: [M]y answer was met with startled laughter and unmasked surprise bordering on disbelief, "Are there man/!"—as if the juxtaposition Jewish/lesbian were just too much.. . . [I]f you tried to claim both identities—publicly and politically—you were exceeding the limits of what was permitted to the marginal. You were in danger of being perceived as ridiculous—and threatening, (p. xiii) Lesbians with disabilities, Black lesbians, and women who became lesbians in their 60s or 70s have all written of the obstacles put in their paths not just by antilesbianism but also by "able- In refusing to address the question, in pushing it to the back of their minds or blocking it out, these women seemed to be buying time. On a smaller scale, some women on the verge of coming out as lesbian succeeded in postponing their moment of self-labeling until after some event in their lives that would be disrupted by their lesbianism: a much wanted exotic holiday with their husband ("I couldn't face the decision until after the holiday—I needed it so badly, I was so exhausted and run down") or their parents' golden wedding anniversary ("There was going to be this really big family party. How could I ruin it?"). Others bargained with themselves, saying that they will think about whether or not they might be lesbian "If I don't get pregnant in the next 6 months," "When the children start school," "When my husband gets a promotion," or "When the children are all married." When women in this sample didfinallyaddress the question "Am I a lesbian?," they recalled having used various strategies used to avoid the answer "yes": 3 The frequencies given are based on the spontaneous emergence of themes in our participants' discourse: These are likely to be gross underestimates when compared with the percentages of women reporting such experiences in response to a survey questionnaire. 4 All otherwise unattributed quotations are taken from the interviews in this study. SPECIAL ISSUE: TRANSITIONS TO LESBIANISM "We're just good friends." One woman described how she was "in love with a woman and even though I did everything that is classic in the situation of being in love, I didn't think of it as being in love because you could only be in love with a man." Another told how she met another woman when they were students in 1954: Unable even to "notice" let alone express their love for each other, both married and lived hundreds of miles apart until, after 20 years of friendship expressed through frequent phonecalls and letters, and infrequent visits, both became involved in feminism: All that Corky and I never said began to unravel . . . We talked about our lives and the women we had become, and began to talk about the nature of a woman's love for other women. Corky reached for my hand and took it. We continued walking, holding on to one another. Later I wondered how it could have happened that we waited twenty years to clasp hands. (Poor, 1982) Many lesbians' coming out stories (almost half of our sample: n = 38) reiterated this story of passionate feeling, never named as passion. Several (n = 9) acknowledged the role of the women's liberation movement as providing a catalyst for reexamination of such feelings and a context in which they could be named (Charbonneau & Lander, 1991). "It's just sex—/ was only experimenting, and anyway I'm sexually attracted to men too." The notion that no real lesbian ever feels any sexual attraction for men also prevented some women's self-identification. Some lesbians in our sample did report feeling sexually attracted to men. One woman told us: "I always enjoyed heterosexual sex—it was fine, an enjoyable sport, a means to an end, a way of achieving an orgasm." Another felt differently: "Sex with men was always a nightmare." Whether a woman has had or enjoyed sex with men was not a reliable guide to whether she became a lesbian. Some women did, however, report clinging to their sexual attraction for men as a way of avoiding the lesbian label: After Judy and I made love for thefirsttime I got very scared that this meant I was a lesbian. I withdrew right away. I said, "This doesn't mean I'm a lesbian. I just wanted to try it, and it was nice, but I don't want to do it again." And then I went out and got myself screwed by four orfivemen in order to prove I wasn't a lesbian. In 61% of first same-sex sexual experiences, neither woman identifies herself as a lesbian (Vetere, 1972); furthermore, a heterosexual woman who has a sexual experience with a woman has only about a 50% chance of developing a lesbian identity (DeMonteflores & Schultz, 1978). "It's just a phase." In retrospect, this argument was often used by women in mid-life as a justification for not coming out when they were younger: "After I came out as lesbian at the age of 42, I remembered the passionate affair I'd had for 2 years with another girl at school. We told ourselves that it didn't mean anything; we were just practicing for the real thing"; or "I kept telling myself it was just a delayed adolescent phase. I was waiting to grow out of it." Looking at their current lives, they described their feelings as being caused by postnatal depression, empty-nest syndrome, or menopause. Others in their lives also used such developmental causes to dismiss their experience: My husband said it was the menopause. He actually got textbooks out of the library with cases of women who thought they were les- 99 bian during the menopause and who subsequently turned out not to be, after they'd totally wrecked their lives. "I'm in love with a person who happens to be a woman." This form of resistance to naming oneself as lesbian is welldocumented in lesbian coming out stories and psychological research alike (Cass, 1979; C. Kitzinger, 1987). Women have said, for example: We loved each other as "people who just happen to be female.". . . I was not a Lesbian. I just happened to be head over heels in love with another woman who was not a Lesbian either. (Dobkin, 1990, p. 3) I got involved in a sexual relationship with another woman and it was herfirstsexual relationship too, so that meant the transition to becoming lesbian was quite slow. I spent four orfivemonths saying "I am in love with this woman," but not thinking that made me a lesbian. An account of lesbianism in terms of romantic love enables the woman to present her supposedly deviant experience as conforming to the dominant heterosexual culture, and hence as morally unimpeachable. In one study of lesbian identity development, 45% of respondents did not see themselves as lesbian as a result of their first relationship (DeMonteflores & Schultz, 1978); this was also the case for over half (« = 49) of the women in our sample. "/ can't be a lesbian because I. . . have children/enjoy cooking/have long hair/can't fix my own car." Direct recourse to lesbian stereotypes was another very common strategy, reported by nearly three quarters (« = 57) of our sample: I read The Well ofLoneliness [Hall, 1928/1981 ] and some psychology textbooks. They told me that lesbians were aggressive, jealous, doomed, masculine, perverted, and sick. I was tremendously reassured. I knew that I couldn't possibly be one of those! It seems hard to believe, but in the early part of our relationship we didn't use the word "lesbian" for the powerful feelings we were experiencing. . . . After the first giddiness had passed, I began to try on the word lesbian: me? No! I would look funny in a crew cut. Certainly I could never learn to smoke cigars! My own stereotypes interfered with the unfolding of my new identity. Lesbians aren't mothers, I thought to myself; they probably don't like to cook or weave or do any of the things I like. (Spencer, 1989,p. 106) "She's the lesbian, not me." Yet another way of avoiding claiming the lesbian label is to attribute it to the other. One researcher described how "two of the women in my sample were heterosexually married, but were involved in an intense affair with each other. Both maintained that they were heterosexuals. However, both attributed lesbianism to the other" (Ponse, 1978, p. 192). A lesbian in our sample remembered her first coming out in the following way: It was about five months into my relationship with Elaine and we were sitting talking and I actually sort of said, "yow lesbians. . .," and Elaine said, "What!?" You know, it was just too difficult to say "us lesbians." It was so hard to say, "Yes, I am a lesbian, a lesbianV And Elaine said, "What are you then?," and I said, " I . . . a m . . . a . . . lesbian." It was an extraordinary moment. When someone challenges a woman's heterosexual identity, as Elaine challenged her lover in the extract above, she may still not accept the label lesbian. A quarter (n = 21) of the lesbians in our sample told painful stories about women lovers who fled 100 CELIA KITZINGER AND SUE WILKINSON from a lesbian identity: "She told me she was sexually attracted to me, and the next day she showed up with an engagement ring"; "she got married two months after we first slept together"; "We were involved for nearly two years. She kept saying she was going to leave her husband and she said she wasn't sleeping with him. As time went by it was obvious that she wasn't going to leave, and then she told me she was pregnant." The fear and horror invested in the single word lesbian is such that women who are passionately involved with other women sometimes continue to construct accounts that maintain their heterosexual identity. Psychologists and psychiatrists collude with this process when they attempt to reassure women that they are probably "not lesbians really" or when they construct rigid definitions of lesbianism such that the majority of lesbians are excluded (e.g., Defries, 1976; Shively, Jones, & DeCecco, 1984). Making and Describing the Transition to Lesbian Identity It is certainly not the case that a woman has to experience sex with other women to identify as lesbian; she may even specifically decide not to do so: I decided I was a lesbian without sleeping with a woman. I didn't feel that my sense of identity was dependent on immediate sexual activity. I certainly don't think heterosexual women should have sex with lesbians as a way of deciding whether they're lesbians— because then some other poor woman has an experiment conducted on her. For those who have already decided they are lesbians, sex may be no more than a confirmation, or simply a consequence, of that decision: It wasn't particularly significant thefirsttime I slept with a woman. When it happened, I suddenly realized I'd done all the important stuff before that. Sex with a woman marked the end of the transition, not the beginning. How do women describe the experience of transition to lesbianism? Poet Adrienne Rich first identified as lesbian at the age of 47, after marriage and three children: The woman who makes a transition to lesbianism, then, has already come a long way to reach the point in which claiming a lesbian identity is possible. How then does she make—and describe—the transition itself? Over three quarters (n = 71) of the women in our sample described having sex with, or falling in love with, a woman as the marker of their transition to lesbianism: Within two days of meeting Barbara it became clear to me that I was a lesbian. I remember I was standing on a train platform and I came to the conclusion that / must be a lesbian, because I fancied her something rotten, and I couldn't possibly deny that, so I must be a lesbian, and please please God, could she feel the same way. Loving and making love with Ruth was the most amazing thing in my whole life ever: How could I not be a lesbian after that! Insofar as sex with, or love for, other women is part of the commonsense definition of lesbianism, citing these important events in their own lives as moments of revelation is, for the women in our sample, to make sense of their personal histories in these terms. However, what is obscured in the telling of these stories is the ordinariness of the experiences described: Many women love other women or have sex with them, but this alone does not make them lesbians. To make a transition to lesbianism, it is necessary for a woman to acknowledge a passion for another woman, to claim a lesbian identity as one's own. This may entail piecing together fragmented experience and remembering and naming such fragments to form a coherent whole: I only started thinking that I was a lesbian last year. I did have a relationship with a woman about four years ago, after my marriage broke up, but I was convinced that I wasn't a lesbian at the time. I just knew I wasn't a lesbian. I was always so sure that I was a normal heterosexual woman, and the fact that I was in a sexual relationship with a woman didn't do anything to change my identity.. . . And then last year I joined a CR [consciousness raising] group and there were three lesbians in it, and I was quite fascinated by them. What did they dot I wondered what the difference between me and them was, these women who were so sure they were lesbians. And then, more recently, I was affected by the political lesbianism paper, the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Paper,5 and now I know I'm a lesbian and will never have a relationship with a man again. Nothing really happened except my consciousness getting raised. I have an indestructible memory of walking along a particular block in New York City, the hour after I had acknowledged to myself that I loved a woman, feeling invincible. For the first time in my life I experienced sexuality as clarifying my mind instead of hazing it over; that passion, once named, flung a long, imperative beam of light into my future. I knew my life was decisively and forever different. (Rich, 1979, p. 12) This account has several typical features. There is often what one woman described as an "essential awakening," a moment of recognition, of first naming her lesbianism to herself: It was a really special moment. I was going out with this man and I was bored out of my head but I was lying to myself, trying to talk myself into liking him, into believing he was potentially quite a nice bloke. And my friend Karen said, "but Pauline, you don't even sound as if you like him." And we'd talked before about how maybe I could be a lesbian, and she just looked at me and said, "You arel" and I said "I am\" and we celebrated it, and I knew there was no going back. A specific moment of naming oneself as lesbian was identified by a third (n = 26) of our sample. A sense of self-discovery came through vividly in some women's accounts: They talked exuberantly of being reborn, of becoming alive or awake for the first time, of seeing the world anew. That moment of first naming was described as "an explosion of aliveness," "like waking up having been half asleep all my life," "like a conversion experience," and "like emerging from a chrysalis." One woman who became lesbian at the age of 52 said: It was as if, all those years before, I'd been starving for something and didn't even know it. And now I grabbed for it, rolled in it, sucked it in ravenously, devouring an essence of life I never even knew existed before. (Sally, in Lewis, 1979, p. 66) Far from the liberal notion that becoming lesbian is an insignificant shift, such a transition was experienced by the majority of women in our sample as a very dramatic change: "a quantum 5 This paper is reprinted in Onlywomen Press (1981). SPECIAL ISSUE: TRANSITIONS TO LESBIANISM leap," "it completely changed my life," and "my world was suddenly fundamentally and radically different." One woman (a psychologist) told us: "The moment I said I was lesbian, everything was both the same and utterly different: It was like the alternating cube, or the crone and the young girl drawing— something switches inside your head and the world never looks the same again." Seeking to articulate the enormity of the change they are experiencing, a substantial number of women described it in terms of altered perceptions: "It was like seeing everything in color after only having seen black and white all my life," "life suddenly became three-dimensional," and "the world swung into focus instead of being a confusing blur." Few women, however, were able to face thefirstacknowledgement of their lesbianism without conflicting reactions. The split was generally described as being one between their relief, happiness, and sense of wholeness or Tightness about their lesbianism and their fear of its implications in a society in which the predominant view of lesbianism is still a very negative one. I was looking at myself in the mirror, and I thought "that woman is a lesbian," and then I allowed myself to notice that it was me I was talking about. And when that happened, I felt whole for the first time, and also absolutely terrified. I had a dream one night, and I woke up after the dream and I remembered it immediately, and in the dream I was making love with Jillian, and it was lovely. It was a lovely, beautiful dream—one of the nicest I've had for years! And when I woke up, I had two thoughts simultaneously which were "Wow! How lovely!" and "Oh no, I'm not that." Becoming a lesbian involves taking a leap into the unknown, claiming an outlaw identity. Material costs, particularly of leaving a marital relationship, can include the loss of insurance and pension benefits, possibly home and possessions, and perhaps even children or a job (Kirkpatrick, 1989/1993): He made over the pension lump sum to his father, and asked [his Company] to take my name off the health insurance scheme. It even turned out that what I thought was 'my' car—I'd paid for it!— was registered in his name. The move into a new world is accompanied by a move out of the old one. Social circles in which these women once moved freely and unquestioningly—to which heterosexuality provides an easy passport—were now seen as closed to them, and the women in our sample often described a painful sense of being outsiders to the world in which they once may have felt perfectly at home (see, e.g., Wilton, 1993). A substantial number of women in our sample talked about their sense of loss, of grieving for the old familiar world left behind—grief for the loss of relationships with a husband or boyfriend, grief for the pain caused to parents, and often the loss of those relationships too (Thompson, 1992). Despite this, only 2 or 3 of the women in our sample expressed major regrets about having made the transition to lesbianism. In a similar vein, Cassingham and O'Neil (1993) also reported that none of their sample of 36 previously married women regretted the decision to change her sexual identity. Some women also described a sense of loss for the person they once knew themselves to be. One woman described how, 2 weeks after first saying to herself (and her husband of 15 years) "I am a lesbian," she sat for hours staring at the family pho- 101 tograph albums "trying to work out which one was me." Shortly after moving out of the matrimonial home, another woman described how she stood in the aisle of a supermarket with an empty trolley, staring at the shelves in total bafflement "because I was a lesbian now, and I didn't know what kind of groceries lesbians bought." These are vivid examples of common themes: dislocation from the past, the experience of autobiographical rupture, and an apparent need for total self-reconstruction. Going On: Posttransition Completing a transition from a heterosexual to a lesbian identity does not mean the achievement of a static identity—a sort of terminal lesbianism. Once a woman has said to herself "I am a lesbian," she continues to discover what being a lesbian will mean for her, how she wants to live her life as a lesbian, and what kind of lesbian she wants to be. In an important sense, she becomes lesbian, and then yet more lesbian. (Although none of our interviewees saw heterosexuality or bisexuality as possible future identities, these are, of course, posttransition possibilities, cf. Bart [1993]. Here, however, we focus on the continuing posttransition construction of a lesbian identity.) Key aspects of developing and maintaining a lesbian self appear to be retrospective accounting ("How did I get to be here?") and future planning ("Where am I going now?"). The reconstruction of a past that offers a sense of continuity with the present meant that early experiences with women, probably shared by heterosexual and lesbian alike, often assumed an enormous importance for most (n = 66) women in our sample. Previously unrecognized feelings or forgotten experiences were brought to light. A 52-year-old woman, married for 22 years, described how she began to remember her lesbianism when she first became involved in feminist consciousnessraising groups: When that happened, I got in touch with my own background. And remembered that I had had these kinds of thoughts as a high-school kid, that I had crushes on women, that not only that, that I had had two small sexual experiences with women, and both were cases where I had touched their breasts. And that there was a period in my all-girls high school where I had worn men's shirts, (quoted in Ponse, 1978, p. 162) One woman in our sample who came out as lesbian at the age of 27 said: In fact I did have a brief holiday relationship with a girl when I was 14, but I'd completely forgotten about it. I'd pushed it to the back of my mind as not being significant. In fact, it was very significant, but until recently that experience seemed very separate from my adult life. It can seem, from stories like these, as though a woman's whole life was an unconscious acting-out of her lesbian destiny, only now apprehended as such. But same-sex erotic relationships are part of many women's experience (Bell & Weinberg, 1978). Many women who later identify themselves as heterosexual have learned to forget these feelings, to dismiss them as unimportant compared with their feelings for men, or to think of them as mere adolescent preparations for adult heterosexuality—and they are supported in this by the rigid definitions and misleading stereotypes of lesbianism identified earlier. For 102 CELIA KITZINGER AND SUE WILKINSON women in our sample, becoming a lesbian often meant reinterpreting these experiences within a different framework. Almost all of the women in our sample (« = 72) reported that one of thefirstthings they became aware of as new lesbians was the oppression to which they are likely to be subjected. Even though they may have had an intellectual understanding of antilesbianism, most said that they were unprepared for how it feels to be unable to touch lovers in public for fear of assault, or to be unable to talk freely about weekend activities with colleagues at work for fear of reprisals. One woman said: "Now that I was excluded from them, I became acutely conscious of all the goodies you get by being heterosexual." Creating a lesbian future involved, for many women in our sample, discovering and becoming involved in lesbian communities. New lesbians described becoming part of a world in which taken-for-granted truths are questioned and in which there is the possibility, in community with other lesbians, of developing a different culture and different values. However, some new lesbians (« = 11) described disillusionment when their idealistic expectations of warm acceptance into a Utopian sisterhood came up against reality: Anyone who identified as a dyke I put up on a pedestal. I didn't know anything about what being a lesbian meant, and I allowed them to define it all for me. I used to think that all lesbians were wonderful. Now I think we all have the potential to be wonderful, but lots of us aren't. The initial processes of coming out as lesbian were described by most women in our sample as a mixed experience: of pain (and perhaps fear) as the old world offers rejection and oppression, but also of joy and excitement as a new world opens up and its possibilities are glimpsed: I had no idea how difficult it was going to be. Not just the mess surrounding leaving my husband, losing one of my children, financial insecurity, loss of privilege, safety, and status, but what it means and continues to mean to be a lesbian in this world—the weight and force of being "wrong," "bad," "wicked," "perverted," outside and ultimately apart from the codes and concepts of everyone else—vulnerable in the extreme. I had no idea how good it was going to be. Not only the warmth, the feeling of being on the same side, the sensuality, friendship, renewed energy, but the freedom to begin to think and act in new ways. (Mohin, 1981, pp. 59-60) Conclusion This study documents the existence of women who have made a transition to lesbianism after a substantial period of commitment to heterosexuality, and we have illustrated the discursive strategies and accounting mechanisms through which such an identity change is accomplished and sustained. This evidence of the discursive production of lesbian identities does not fit easily into an essentialist framework within which lesbianism is conceptualized as an innate or intrinsic characteristic of the individual, to be acknowledged or discovered, or to be denied or repressed. The emphasis on the constitutive nature of discourse in enabling the construction of identity accounts is characteristic of the social constructionist perspective; as such, our work contributes to the elucidation of processes involved in the construction of self and identity (cf. Shotter & Gergen, 1989). When a woman makes a transition to lesbianism, the appro- priate question (from a social constructionist perspective) is not: "Am I a lesbian?"—with concomitant attempts to match actual experience against some assumed template of "real" prototypical lesbian experience. The question is, rather, "Do I want to be a lesbian?," meaning "Do I want to construct my experience in that way?" From our perspective, there is no essential lesbian self, no set of uniquely lesbian experiences that can be discovered through introspection. What may feel like self-discovery—and that, not surprisingly (given the prominence of discovery accounting) was a frequently used discourse in our data and that of Charbonneau and Lander (1991)—is better considered as self-reconstruction: "True insight" is the application of socially derived intelligibility systems, conditions of "genuine self-knowledge" are a formalisation of our common rules for interpreting or describing social action. . . . Breakthroughs in self understanding are primarily breakthroughs in one's capacity to master an intelligibility system as it applies to one's own behaviour. Self-knowledge is not thereby increased; it is only reconstructed anew. (Gergen, 1977, p. 32) Within such a social constructionist framework, we have offered an account of the ways in which women in transition construct and interpret their changing identities in relation to their constructions of the category lesbian. This has included the rootedness of such accounts in popular and scientific views of lesbianism, and the functions apparently served by particular types of accounting. Our account, of course, is also a construction based on the availability of a particular range of discourses, and our own assessments of these discourses. Just as proponents of essentialism produce, as evidence for their theories, the stories of lesbians and gay men who "remember feeling different" or who were sexually attracted to the same sex from an early age, so we, as social constructionists, have produced the stories of women who reported constructing their lesbian identities. It is not our intent, however, to use our participants' reported experience of transition from heterosexuality to lesbianism to support a social constructionist explanation of sexual identity in a manner paralleling the essentialists' use of the personal testimonies of those who "always knew they were gay." In part, this is because, just as social constructionists discount "born that way" (and similar) participant accounts as rooted in popular and scientific ways of explaining the world (rather than as transparent accounts revealing truths about experience), so essentialists, as mentioned earlier, can (and do) dismiss accounts using the language of choice as self-serving justifications and post hoc rationalizations for a predetermined sexual orientation only now revealed to conscious awareness. At issue here is far more than a technical problem of interview methodology. Rather, in laying claim to the right to accept some participants' versions as true while discrediting others, social scientists are engaged in "a politics of experience" (C. Kitzinger& Perkins, 1993; Pollner, 1975, p. 427). 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