Book review

Sense and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation

Chapter 6, Sleeping with the Enemy: Ex-Lesbians

By Arlene Stein, published by University of California, Berkeley

In Chapter 6 of her book, Sleeping with the Enemy, feminist/lesbian author and sociology professor Arlene Stein tries to understand the phenomenon of former lesbians. She explores the question if ex-lesbians are “turncoats” (traitors) or “fakers” (never were lesbians to begin with). Stein admits that “individuals have always moved from heterosexuality to homosexuality and back again.” She explains that “[m]any women I spoke with, including some of the most politically engaged lesbian feminists, acknowledged that lesbians occasionally stray from homosexuality, and they felt this to be acceptable, as long as it didn’t happen so often as to threaten their lesbian identities.”

One lesbian from San Francisco explains:

“The women who were the biggest manhaters, the women who would have nothing to do with men for years – those where the women who went straight. It was true every single time. Nearly every single time. They were the ones that raised the biggest fuss about men. The harder they come, the harder they fall.”

Stein herself explains that “in the process of becoming lesbians, many women had earlier engaged in ‘identity work,’ becoming more masculinized, ‘butchier,’ modeling themselves on the way they believed the ‘typical’ lesbian looked. In a reversal of this process, in their transition to heterosexuality, many women refashioned themselves as more feminine.” For example, during the last few years of her lesbian relationship, now ex-lesbian Laura Stone began to dress differently – “I hadn’t worn a dress in eons. I began to get more comfortable with my femme identity, and when I did, I began to get more in touch with desire in general. I began to fantasize about men again.”

Laura “remembered that while she had ‘pretty good experiences with men compared to other lesbians,’ at the time she ‘didn’t treasure that knowledge,’ instead viewing it as evidence of the vestiges of her own internalized homophobia.”

Another former lesbian, Sharon Lieberman, “questions whether she would have chosen lesbianism had a movement not come along to make that choice easier and indeed, in some quarters, even desirable. For her, becoming a lesbian was a product of being young and open to new experiences. She attributed her lesbian past to the convergence of lesbian feminist politics and her stage of life.”

Stein feels that “[m]any women who came out through feminism believed that everyone was naturally bisexual in terms of their potential sexual attraction to both men and women, but that it was the political responsibility of women to channel their desires toward other women.”

The author concludes her chapter, Sleeping with the Enemy, with the remark that both homosexuals and heterosexuals impose “prohibitions against moving in and out of the lesbian category.”

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