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Menage - a - trois? The woman - identified woman messing around with both butch and femme? Indeed, such an encounter might seem unimaginable. And yet for those of us who came out during lesbian/feminism and who are also thriving pleasurably through the current butch/femme moment, its more than imaginable. Once more, what's even more curious than the menage - a - trois itself are the ways these seemingly opposable identity - formation narratives mirror each other.
Jean: My first coming out reads something like this: It begins with a story about reading and occurs in the mid - 1970s, in an otherwise unremarkable, although primarily white and middle - class high school in southern Ontario, where I, a white working - class teenager, read my first "lesbian" book, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's book Lesbian/Woman. I had searched the school library for books that might help me come to terms with, or find a name for that elusive difference that seemed so obvious but escaped definition. What I might call this difference continued to escape me, until I found the Martin and Lyon text. I don't remember how I found the book, but I am quite certain I did not find it in my high school library. Published in 1972, two years after the appearance of the Radicalesbians' wonderful manifesto "The Woman - Identified Woman," and ten years before Adrienne Rich's enormously influential "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Lesbian/Woman was marketed as "the most complete and revealing book ever written about women who love other women" (front cover), and gave me just about everything I had been searching for. Lesbian/Woman, and other texts like Sappho Was a Right - On Woman (Abbott and Love) marked the birth of a kind of collective subjectivity, the core truth of who "we" were wrestled back from psychoanalytic, medical, heterosexual feminist, and gay liberatory discourses so that, supposedly, any lesbian could speak itself using the "I" as it was now represented. The "I's" of these numerous discourses were now one entity, one identity, and spoke as that, empowered by a form of (white) nationalism, or so the story goes, that came to be known as the "lesbian nation." I found that identity and took it to heart. Those...