In the scholarly literature on lesbianism, "coming out" processes have been of central interest. My use of "becoming" is somewhat different but is still a variation on the coming out theme. A sociological classic dealing with coming out, and with the relationship between secrecy and lesbian identity, is Barbara Ponse, Identities in the Lesbian World: The Social Construction of Self (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978). An important early collection of stories is Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope Stanley, eds., The Coming Out Stories (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1980); in a foreword to this volume, Adrienne Rich refers to coming out as "that first permission we give to ourselves to name our love for women as love, to say, I am a lesbian" (p. xiii). A more recent collection is Karen Barber and Sarah Holmes, eds., Testimonies: Lesbian Coming-Out Stories (Boston: Alyson, 1994).
Other significant recent accounts include: Terry Castle, "First Ed," in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 21-27, a story of a first love; Julia Creet, "Anxieties of Identity: Coming Out, Coming Undone," in Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke, eds., Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 179-200; Paula C. Rust, "'Coming Out' in the Age of Social Constructionism: Sexual Identity Formation among Lesbian and Bisexual Women," Gender and Society 7:1 (1993): 50-77; Valerie Jenness, "Coming Out: Lesbian Identities and the Categorization Problem," in Ken Plummer, ed., Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Lesbian and Gay Experience (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 65-74; and Shane Phelan, "(Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics," Signs 18:4 (1993): 765-90, also in her Getting Specific: Postmodern Lesbian Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Lesbian accounts often emphasize choice as characteristic of processes of coming out, or becoming a lesbian. Men, on the other hand, have tended to emphasize their gayness, or homosexuality, as a given nature, viewing it as something one knows about oneself, or eventually discovers. Jacqueline N. Zita comments on a gender difference between "cause and choice," in "Gay and Lesbian Studies: Yet Another Unhappy Marriage," in Linda Garber, ed., Tilting the Tower: Lesbians, Teaching, Queer Subjects (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 264; Claudia Card discusses becoming a lesbian as a process of "many choices," observing that the meaning of one's lesbianism may be discovered only after this choice has been made, in Lesbian Choices (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 47-50. Marilyn Frye turns the question around to focus on heterosexuality as a female choice, in "A Lesbian's Perspective on Women's Studies," in Willful Virgin: Feminist Essays, 1976-1992 (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1992), pp. 51-58. Joyce Trebilcott speaks of "taking responsibility for our sexual identities," and describes coming out as a process in which a woman "creates" a new lesbian self, in Dyke Ideas: Process, Politics, Daily Life (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 97-109.
Lesbian desire and sexuality have been explored in recent works. Most interesting to me are those studies that aim to distinguish what is unique to lesbian desire and sexuality, making it different from heterosexual, or gay male, experiences. The mothering basis of desire in lesbian relationships, which I touch on in this chapter, is further elaborated upon in theoretical terms in Teresa de Lauretis, "The Seductions of Lesbianism: Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory and the Maternal Imaginary," in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 149-202. De Lauretis speaks of the maternal female body as central to lesbian subjectivity and desire (p. 171), and of lesbian desire as a sexual and sociosymbolic search for an absent mother, rather than a nostalgic search for a memory of a past mother-daughter unity. She speaks of the mother's absence as producing in the daughter "a desire that is absolutely unrealizable, and hence must consist in the desiring itself" (p. 200).
In "The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian: The Fantasy of Castration and the Signification of Desire" (also in The Practice of Love, pp. 203-53), de Lauretis takes this thinking a step further in speaking of a woman's desire for another's female body as refigured in a desire for masculinity, or for the "fetish of masculinity" (p. 243). When a woman desires the love of another woman, she seeks "not a faulty woman," but "a woman embodied and self-possessed as a woman, as I would want to be and can become only with her love" (p. 249). Although de Lauretis' language is very different from mine in this story of my relationship with Fran, it seems to me the basic experiences reflected upon are similar.
See also Judith Roof, "'This Is Not for You': The Sexuality of Mothering," in A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 90-118, a work to which de Lauretis refers; and Sharon P. Holland, "To Touch the Mother's C(o)untry: Siting Audre Lorde's Erotics," in Karla Jay, ed., Lesbian Erotics (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 212-26. Lorde's imagery of her mother's body in Zami—"Her large soft breasts beneath the buttoned flannel of her nightgown, Below, the rounded swell of her stomach, silent and inviting touch"—reminded me of my own description in this chapter of Fran in the morning (Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name [Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1982], p. 33; also cited in Holland).
In her essay, "Lesbian 'Sex,'" Marilyn Frye suggests that "'sex' is an inappropriate term for what lesbians do," since our ideas of sex are male and phallocentric (in Willful Virgin, pp. 109-19). Frye suggests, instead, the creation of a new vocabulary and way of thinking more fitting to lesbian and female experiences—"Let it be an open, generous, commodious concept encompassing all the acts and activities by which we generate with each other pleasures and thrills, tenderness and ecstasy" (p. 117). Marny Hall explores Frye's suggestions further, speaking of "erotic connections" between women that are more difficult to describe than "sexual rapport," and of "patterns of intimacy" yet to be noticed and acknowledged that form "a new female framework of intimacy" (p. 45), in "'Why Limit Me to Ecstasy?' Toward a Positive Model of Genital Incidentalism among Friends and Other Lovers," in Esther D. Rothblum and Kathleen A. Brehony, eds., Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships among Contemporary Lesbians (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 43-62.
This chapter is taken from an autobiographical novel, "Jenny's World" (manuscript, 1985).