Lesbian After Marriage

Deborah Abbott was somewhat happily married to a nice man with whom she’d created two adorable sons before she realized that the intense rapport with her best friend, Rachel, was the first step toward love and “unbelievably thrilling” sex with women. After separating from her husband, she’d often laugh at her dueling identities. “I would be at the PTA meeting and people would assume that I was heterosexual,” says Abbott. “And then I’d be dancing at a club and people would be shocked to learn I had an ex-husband and kids!”

Abbott can giggle now, but when she began looking for resources for “married lesbians” back in the early 1980s, she found nothing and felt lonely. So she started her own support group in Santa Cruz, Calif., called From Wedded Wife to Lesbian Life, which would also become the name of her 1995 book published by Crossing Press. “I have women who’ve come for years,” says Abbott, currently the director of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Resource Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We are a community.” And the newbies? “They look around the room and weep with relief,” she adds. “They say, ‘Everyone looks so normal!’ ”

Abbott’s group sees about 100 women a year who pretty much thought they were straight through years of marriage and child rearing, only to have a change of heart later in life. Call them LAMs -- or lesbians after marriage: These are the women who have tied the knot, procreated, and, once the children are out of the home or more independent, found love in the arms of a woman.

The first mom of my acquaintance to go on the LAM was my high school voice teacher, a fascinating and dramatic lady with three daughters and a husband who had taught me to sing “Macavity” at the top of my lungs. I admit I was shocked when I heard the rumor that she had left town and was involved with a lady musician. Then my college roommate told me that her mother (two kids, 20 years of heterosexual marriage) was getting hitched in Hawaii to a woman. More recently, my good friend’s 60-year-old mother phoned her to report she is in the midst of a white-hot lesbian affair, having never mentioned or acted on any sapphic attraction before in her life. Conversations and similar tallies with other friends confirmed the trend: LAMs are the new LUGs (lesbians until graduation).

LAM sounds like a joke, especially given the derision directed at LUGs -- the phenomenon of young women who never thought they were gay yet find themselves madly in love with a girl, usually while at college. In part because of their youth (and in part because of misogyny), it’s assumed that these young women’s actions are contrived, designed merely to better attract a Girls Gone Wild–consuming heterosexual male. LUGs are common and yet tragically misunderstood. According to writer (and LUG) Laura Eldridge, 29, coauthor of The No-nonsense Guide to Menopause, people usually identify college as the time when biology yields to social and cultural pressure, but it is probably more true that it’s the other way around. “The perception is that the college campus environment encourages straight girls to engage in lesbian behavior in the same way it might lead you to be an ardent communist for a couple years or get an ill-advised tattoo,” says Eldridge. “Then, the belief goes, you stop all these games, admit who you truly are, and find a man.”

That’s backward, says Eldridge. In fact, “social pressures on women to marry and have children really start to kick in during your 20s.” So in your coed days you’re free to fall for women if you have the inclination; as you get closer to the childbearing end date, that social freedom constricts. Eldridge thinks that many bisexual women start to focus on dating men “not because they were pretending same-sex desire before but because they are giving in to intense social expectations now.”