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Over the twenty-three years since it was written, I probably became more critical of my essay than any other possible reader. I stopped giving permission for its inclusion in anthologies and college readers because I felt it flawed, outdated, and in certain important ways no longer representative of my thinking and the thinking I respected. It also seemed to me that the ensuing years produced more grounded scholarship, more refined critical thinking, and, simply, more witnesses than were available to me in 1979-1980 when I was writing it. "Compulsory Heterosexuality" was an effort of the 1970s explosion of lesbian and feminist consciousness in the United States, revolutionary in its activism and spirit, still groping for historical, intellectual, and analytic tools.
It was also part of the writing catalyzed by newly emerging feminist publishing venues: newspapers, magazines, presses, pamphlets, some cranked out on workplace mimeograph machines, some financed by individual women's personal or collective assets, some funded by academic institutions. Of the latter, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, was the most institutional, first established as a publication of the University of Chicago, then transferred regularly to different universities under different editors.1
I undertook "Compulsory Heterosexuality" at Signs' invitation to contribute to an issue on sexuality, from any perspective I chose. I thought I was writing an exploratory piece, an essay in the literal sense of "attempt": a turning the picture-the presumption of female heterosexuality-around to view it from different angles, a hazarding of unasked questions. That it should be read as a manifesto or doctrine never occurred to me. When it began to be reprinted as a pamphlet by small lesbian-feminist presses here and abroad, I was agreeably surprised. When I began to hear that it was being claimed by some separatist lesbians as an argument against heterosexual intercourse altogether, I began to feel acutely...