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.”