A room of their own: White lesbian coming outs and second wave feminism

Abstract

While the concept of “coming out” is relatively well-critiqued, few of these critiques trouble the way a near exclusive focus on disclosure positions sexuality as an essential identity. Based on life history interviews with 18 lesbian, pansexual, and queer women elders (ages 65+), I find coming out did not describe disclosing or even acknowledging same-gender desire, but, rather, choosing to act on it. For participants, coming out is the process of forming desire into a coherent identity (lesbian woman), a process that required continued interactions with lesbian existence; contrary to essentialist understandings, desire alone did not enable participants to become lesbians. In this article, I describe the two paths participants followed while becoming lesbians and consider how the historical context in which participants came out, specifically the second wave feminist movement, uniquely facilitated coming out for white women. Ultimately, I argue lesbian sexuality is a richly constructed social identity formed in community and defined by resistance to compulsory heterosexuality. By viewing sexual identity as based on shared political commitments formed in community, this article both corrects an essentializing tendency in the coming out literature and offers a potential point of repair between older and younger generations of lesbians.