Do you like your lesbianism open or closed? Do you think that you need to present certain signifiers in order to claim the label of lesbian? Perhaps les bians can only be cis women, or women who have never had sex or any kind of romantic relationship with cis men, or women who have committed their lives to lesbian feminism. Or maybe lesbian can include trans people, or people who have sexual and romantic relationships with different-gender people, or people of a certain sensibility. Where do you stand? The evergreen lesbian debate-slash-perpetual-war rages on, and recent comments by Joan Nestle have prompted a surge in hostilities.
Some background: Joan is a 1950s femme, or fem, an elder, activist, writer, and founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. She is greatly admired, and rightly so, for her work in developing working class butch-femme visibility and her visionary politics of inclusion. She is heroic and if you’ve never heard of her then you should dash to the nearest library and order her books right now.