Coming into the Life

Entrance into Gay Sexuality for Black Women

COMING INTO THE LIFE VERSUS COMING OUT

Psychologists and psychotherapists have portrayed coming out of the closet, or acknowledging one's same-sex attractions, acting upon them, disclosing them to others, and accepting them as part of a sexual identity, as a developmental process that most homosexuals share. Variations on a core model describe six stages of this process. First, individuals have a subjective sense of feeling "different" from others of their same gender. Subsequently, they identify these feelings as homosexual, disclose the feelings to others, come to accept the feelings as part of an identity, and search for a community of like persons. They complete the transition when they become involved in a relationship with someone of the same sex. "Coming out" is understood as a process that ends in its subject's acceptance of a "modern" gay identity, in which the subject has merged her private self-understandings with the public self she reveals to others.

Several scholars of lesbian and bisexual identity have criticized this model for its failure to consider alternative, often nonlinear paths by which many gay women construct a sexual identity. Drawing on my fieldwork with Black lesbians in New York City, I have found that the linear five-stage model of coming out does not fully capture the complex ways in which individuals construct a personal and sexual identity based not just on sexual orientation and gender but on race and class as well. The development of women's sexual orientation follows diverse pathways shaped by multiple social and cultural influences.

To begin with, the concept of "coming out" does not accurately capture the experience of acting on same-sex attraction by entering and participating in Black gay social life. Instead, this experience, broadly understood, is best conceptualized as "coming into" a life and community with particular norms and expectations for its members. The phrase "coming into the life" not only better describes the experience of same-sex desire for Black people who learn how to "be" gay in Black social settings, it also captures the essence of how they learn to label that desire and reveal it to others. The concept of "coming into the life" more completely represents the experiences of my respondents, then, because it describes coming into an understanding of a particular subculture—of learning about and adjusting to the patterns of interaction expected in lesbian communities and in Black lesbian social environments specifically. "Coming into the life" also encompasses coming into a greater acknowledgment and acceptance of one's gay sexuality and beginning the process of negotiating and managing this identity status as it relates to race and to other established identities. The set of processes, range of possibilities, and spectrum of choices Black lesbians encounter as they come to recognize and become comfortable acting on their same-sex desire in Black communities and various Black American and West Indian social contexts are described in this chapter.

There are different ways of coming into the life (or not). To understand these processes, I drew from a variety of sources of data. During the in-depth interviews I asked my respondents questions about how they defined their sexuality (i.e., their relationship experiences with women and with men), and I asked them to tell me the story of how they came into "the life" (the exact wording of these questions can be found in Appendix C). I conducted a focus group on respondents' experiences in the gay social worlds of New York that raised questions about the contexts in which they came to understand their same-sex desires. The survey also contained questions that I used to identify patterns in the ways women came to take on a gay sexuality. I asked the extent to which respondents agreed or disagreed with the following two statements: "Being gay is something that is completely beyond one's control" and "Being gay is a conscious choice I have made." Responses ranged from strongly agree to strongly disagree, and no opinion. There were other survey questions that were analyzed to identify differences in women's pathways into a gay sexuality, including questions that asked the respondent to describe her sexuality now, at age 15, and at age 21. Possible choices were "Exclusively lesbian," "Predominantly lesbian, only slightly heterosexual," "Predominantly lesbian, but significantly heterosexual," "Equally lesbian and heterosexual," "Predominantly heterosexual, but significantly lesbian," "Predominantly heterosexual, only slightly lesbian," and "Exclusively heterosexual." I asked whether there was a term other than "lesbian" that better described their sexuality, what was the longest amount of time they have spent in committed relationships with men and with women, and what have been their experiences with heterosexual marriage.

Ultimately, all the women I studied came to recognize and act on their attraction to women. One group named it, acted on it, or both in their adolescent years, while a second group felt this attraction but conformed to societal gender norms in their early years, turning to a gay sexuality in adulthood. For a third group, same-sex desire did not emerge until adulthood, after which they confirmed a lesbian rather than a bisexuality. For a fourth group, there is a persistent and ongoing fluidity in their desire for women and men. I organize the analysis that follows around these four groups, each of whose members came into the life in a distinct way. In the process, I distinguish carefully between having a first experience of same-sex desire, acting on that desire, and claiming an identity based in a sexuality. In later chapters I suggest that the pathways women take in coming to terms with and openly practicing a gay sexuality have important associations with the types of women they partner with, the processes by which they enter motherhood, and the types of families they create.

As scholars of Black sexuality have shown, American- and Caribbean-born Black women often must negotiate a complex set of demands for gender "respectability" and racial uplift. Black lesbians, in order to live openly gay lives, must negotiate this terrain while...