Leaving the Gold Star State

The lesbian who sleeps with men is an unmentionable of the LGBT community. Logical fallacy that she seems to be, she is also known or misrecognised as bisexual, label-less, pansexual, queer, byke, person-specific, and, of course, 'confused'. Who is she, and why doesn't she just call herself bisexual?

She's probably never going to have her own Pride march, or even a banner, as "it's complicated" isn't much of a rallying cry. Her tendency to sleep with men, however many or in whatever pattern, is often a disappointment to her fellow lesbians, a sigh of relief to traumatised parents (at last!), and, most significantly, a source of drama and trauma to herself. All that coming out only to end up, like the vast majority of the female population, sleeping with a bloke!

Lesbians would likely be less defensive if same-sex relationships weren't characterised as 'less than' (not 'quite' marriage, not 'quite' model parents). The 'all she needs is a good man' bromide makes it difficult to 'surrender' any member of the pussy posse. At my undergraduate university, for example, the term 'four year lesbian' was used to slag off anybody whose commitment to her lesbian identity seemed convenient rather than permanent. Conversely, a 'gold star', or so The L Word would have us believe, is American lesbian culture's term for a lesbian who has never slept with a man.

Homophobia makes us defensive and reluctant to address fluctuations in identity or desire. But reluctance to identify as bisexual, or as someone in a straight relationship, also comes from our associations with those terms. Sexist ideas about gender roles influence not only how others view your relationship but, more insidiously, how you and your partner view it. I'm ashamed to admit that I automatically expect more from a female partner – I think she'll pick up her own socks, and make my tea as often as I make hers, whereas I'm still a bit surprised if a man does the same. I try to challenge this, but it doesn't come from out of the blue – and it fits with most of the straight relationships I know, where women do the majority of the housework and childcare. This makes me less willing to think of myself as a woman who could, potentially, end up with a man – because for me, identifying as a lesbian also says something about the kind of egalitarian relationship I want.

Of course, the biggest problem is that all these categories ('lesbian'; 'straight relationship') are, essentially, crap. They limit possibility; they try to make static something that will never, ever stand still. They fail to account for things like personal history, cultural context, and the ebb and flow of identity.

When I moved to Britain several years ago I found myself increasingly drawn to men as well as women. This could be for various reasons. I am further in distance and in time from my Catholic upbringing and feel less embattled, more willing to admit ambiguity. My 'type' in women is culturally specific. Perhaps I have been lucky enough to meet some very nice men here. When I return home, I'm struck by the strength of my desire for other women – it overwhelms any attraction I may feel towards men. My old sense of my sexuality emerges, leaving me identifying as domestically lesbian but internationally bisexual. Had I never moved to the UK, perhaps I would never have realised this. The fundamental problem here is one of language, and how inadequate and yet totally foundational it is. We want words to describe how we feel and how we think of ourselves, but language inevitably defines by excluding what isn't as well as what is. The word 'lesbian' feels right - except when it means that other people interpret it as never, ever having any interest in a man, rather than having a general preference for women.

But language is still creative, endlessly generative, as much as it is a trap. We cannot escape categorisation because we cannot escape language, but if Judith Butler, queer theorist and author of Gender Trouble, is to be believed, we can tweak it, pull at its corners, perform it differently. We can pick our words, and we can insist on their fitting us. We can 'mean', as it were, differently. It isn't an easy proposition, but we can learn from the trans community on this one. A 'man' doesn't have to have a penis to be a man, and a 'woman' doesn't have to be able to give birth to be a woman. And maybe a lesbian doesn't have to be a gold star, either.