Last Friday, on tumblr, I shared a story about late-blooming lesbians by lisala @ That Gay Blog. Among other things, she wrote about the work of researcher Lisa Diamond, whose book Sexual Fluidity was instrumental in my own process of finding language to communicate the nature of my of sexual attractions. Although I don’t tend to think about myself as a “late-blooming” lesbian so much as I do a late bloomer in the relational sexuality department (I entered my first sexual relationship at age twenty-eight), I do think my sexual desires needed the catalyst of a specific person in order to really catch fire. And sans that particular person, I felt like my evidence for same-sex desire was weak. (My evidence for opposite-sex desire was similarly weak, but our culture doesn’t demand proof of heterosexuality in the same way that it demands proof of queer sexuality.) This catalyst concept was what the quote I shared on tumblr was all about:
Diamond notes often “women who may have always thought that other women were beautiful and attractive would, at some point later in life, actually fall in love with a woman, and that experience vaulted those attractions from something minor to something hugely significant.” Professor Diamond adds that “it wasn’t that they’d been repressing their true selves before; it was that without the context of an actual relationship, the little glimmers of occasional fantasies or feelings just weren’t that significant.”
Emphasis mine. Again, you can read the whole post over at That Gay Blog.
One of the lovely things about tumblr blogging, I’m finding, is that people are more likely to share (reblog) and comment upon the quotes I post there than they are (generally speaking) to come and comment on this blog. It’s fun to see, via the “like” and “reblog” options, where the stories and ideas that are meaningful to me travel through social network of tumblr followers + their followers + their followers and so on down the line.
On this post, some of the bloggers who re-blogged the Diamond quote added their own two cents:
this is kind of how i feel right now.
This quote just informed me I will become a lesbian later in life.
It’s a fascinating medium, to see all of the ever-so-slightly-different reactions passed along, amended, and added to.
Everyone have a great Sunday and best wishes for the week ahead.
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