(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

Early on, when I first started my research, some of the women that I interviewed would say things like, “Oh, I never knew that I was really attracted to women until I became close friends with one particular woman, and I fell in love with her…” In my naïveté, I sort of discounted these stories as evidence of repression (which was pretty common at that time).

As the years went by and I would re-interview these women, and as I would talk to lesbian-identified women who would say things like, “Wow, I was never really attracted to men, but now I sort of feel sexually attracted to my best male friend!” I began to realize that there was something really profound going on within these relationships, and that deep emotional attachments had the power to really change one’s entire way of experiencing desire.

It took me a while to really come to grips with this, scientifically; I kept rereading the interview transcripts, trying to interpret them within the conventional models of sexuality that were available at that time, and it just didn’t work. I remember that there was a particular day… actually, I was on an airplane with a stack of transcripts, struggling to make sense of them, and I just put down my pen and said, “OK, I need to throw out everything I think I ‘know’ and just start again, and reread everything, from the beginning. And really listen this time.”

The hard truth is that life is a lot more complicated than scientific models present it as being.

- Dr. Lisa Diamond here.