I WISH SHE WAS A LESBIAN: A Review of I Wish I Was a Lesbian: Women’s Lives Beyond Heterosexuality 

The scariest film of the summer was a compulsory heterosexuality horror story. A kind of bland, kind of lame but not aggressively horrendous twenty-something man is infatuated with his friend, an attractive woman. We don’t hate this guy. His personality is altogether too much the hue and texture of a damp paper towel dissolving into institutional linoleum for him to be likeable, per se, but he’s quiet, shy, smiles nervously, cries when his cat dies. He gets a Nice Guy badge with an extra smiley-face sticker because we’re feeling sorry for him. The guy is nice, sure, but spineless: he chickens out of telling his pretty female friend how he feels and instead casts a spell on her, albeit unwittingly, by using a magic shop novelty to wish for her love. Lo and behold, his wish comes true. One instant the woman is walking away, the next she falls in love with him. Madly in love, violently in love. She is no longer herself and the man knows it; he knows she loves him only because of the power he exerts over her, because he has contrived a situation in which she has no choice but to love him—yet how uncomfortable, how inconvenient to confront these facts, so he ignores them, lies to himself, or maybe he just doesn’t care. Doesn’t care that he is exploiting the abrogation of her autonomy. Doesn’t care that she, the person he ostensibly liked, is gone, as long as the walking//talking//doting//fawning suitably fuckable female body goes on “loving” him. He is gratified to possess her as Girlfriend, to have sex with her and revel in her starry-eyed attention and puff up proud to be seen with her in public—until the intensity of her adoration ratchets up to disturbing extremes. The man wields a mysterious occult power to repeal the woman’s will, which he uses to extort sexual//romantic access to her, which he calls “love,” but then she loves him too much. Then she’s scaring him. We watch the woman bleeding, screaming, desperate to be loved in return, as our Nice Guy backs away. 

In Obsession, the woman’s out-of-control, self-destructive, self-abandoning love for the man is dark magick: a curse. So too runs the heteropessimist assessment of the current state of heterosexual affairs. Lately women have taken to the Internet en masse to broadcast their disillusionment with men and the indignities of dating them, living and parenting with them. Women regularly voice their aversion to the male-devised male-dictated hookup culture and dating apps that leave them feeling like appetizers at a medieval banquet for “ethically nonmonogamous” lowlifes; they report being repelled (and frightened) by the deepening sadism of men’s porn-sick sexuality, and exhausted by their emotional incompetence, lack of rudimentary communication skills, and near total incapacity to share in household tasks. As boyfriends and husbands and co-parents, men make enormous demands on women’s time//energy//attention, with minimal reciprocation, and women, increasingly aware of how they’re being parasitized, are losing interest. Also increasingly aware of how much men hate them, of how many men consider strangling a woman to unconsciousness the height of romance, women are less willing than ever to risk dipping into the toxic dating pool. Recognition of ubiquitous male violence is no longer the preserve of the pilloried radical feminist minority. To quote a very normal young woman in a clip the algorithm coughed up for me recently, in heterosexuality, “you’re not just avoiding a few bad men, you’re actually playing a lottery, and the stakes are your life…why would you ever, ever play that game?” 

But, according to the heteropessimist view, the universe has preordained that most women want to be with men, meaning they can either set their standards and expectations lower than dirt, and eat the embarrassment of lugging around some underwhelming boyfriend; or they can give up on love and go “boysober,” perhaps partaking in the Lysistrata variation on South Korea’s 4B movement championed by many U.S. women after the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump, restored to the Rapist in Chief throne by a majority of white male voters. 

You’ll never catch me throwing shade at women clambering out from the hellmouth of contemporary heterosexuality and diverting their energies from the pursuit and maintenance of boyfriends. When a woman announces that she is “re-centering [her] values around basically everything other than dating men,” I am delighted to hear it. Good for her! But, as valid and as valuable a detox strategy as the boysober route may be, it is essentially an elimination diet. Heteropessimism’s premise doesn’t budge: women are doomed to love their oppressors or die alone. (Dying alone may be embraced as the preferable option, but the sad fact of the lonely death remains.) What goes unsaid in the pop-culture pseudofeminist chatter du jour is that love might be found outside of heterosexuality, not for a tiny minority of women, but for all of us. 

In Obsession, when the curse is broken the woman wakes up screaming, terrified, in a dim room full of corpses. But what if she had been eased out tenderly in the arms of women? No one can tell me it wouldn’t be a happier ending. 

That women can choose to be lesbians is the assertion resounding through the essays and artworks collected in I Wish I Was a Lesbian, published in May by Spinifex Press. The notion that lesbian life and love is available to all women as a revolutionary alternative to heterosexuality, understood as an institution of male power, integral to pinning women down one by one under masters-of-the-house and enforced within patriarchal society as the norm and default by means ranging from systemic female impoverishment to violence to media propagandization, is known as political lesbianism. And as anthology editor Angela C. Wild and other contributors lament, it is not very popular. In fact, the idea elicits such vitriol that women who promote it can expect retaliation—and not from the usual-suspects slew of embittered men, left and right, but from other lesbians and feminists. Wild describes in her introduction the “silencing, deplatforming, demonisation, attempts to make [her] lose [her] livelihood, harassment, character” she has experienced as a consequence of her support for political lesbianism. Fearing similar backlash, several women agreed to contribute to the anthology only if they could use pseudonyms.  

Those who oppose political lesbianism argue that it is insensitive to “real” lesbians, in that it fails to take seriously the homophobia they suffer, which they might prefer to avoid via heterosexuality but unfortunately for them they can’t get out of it, because they’re really – unalterably, constitutionally – lesbians. A related argument is that political lesbianism legitimizes conversion therapy, by implying that because lesbians choose their sexuality they could therefore be induced to choose otherwise (and so be “cured”); or that it functions itself as a form of conversion therapy, goading straight women to turn sapphic against their will and against their nature. Some lesbian opponents of political lesbianism decry it as an appropriation of lesbianism, akin to men’s transgenderist takeover of womanhood. Women who consciously elect to be lesbians in order to live more woman-centered lives are “fake” lesbians, as are women who become lesbians in adulthood, with heterosexual histories behind them. At best, the “real” lesbians argue, these women are bisexual—but whatever they are, they will be held at arm’s length, on indefinite probation. Some feminist opponents of political lesbianism discount it as individualistic, a disengagement from collective resistance to the male power system. Yet another popular argument holds that political lesbianism is deficient in sexiness, its emphasis on feminist values and analysis a damper on the eroticism that defines “real” lesbianism. 

Each of these objections is met with thoughtful, rigorous response in I Wish I Was a Lesbian. Yet, to speak candidly, the case against political lesbianism mystifies me, for the simple reason that I am forever thinking, “I wish she was a lesbian.” When I see a beautiful woman paired off with some video game dungeon potato, his aura soured by chronic porn consumption and cheeseburgers: “I wish she was a lesbian.” When a woman’s brilliant eyes wander while the man at her side monologues unrelentingly over everything she might say so she lapses into silence: “I wish she was a lesbian.” When my friend is gutted because a guy miles beneath her doesn’t call: “I wish she was a lesbian.” When a 13-year-old girl excitedly announces to me that she has acquired her first boyfriend, some kid in a beanie: “I wish she was a lesbian.” 

But if the arguments against political lesbianism seem flimsy, failing to outweigh its potential advantages for every female I know, it is perhaps because they do not arise from genuine conviction or critical analysis, but are instead expedient rationalizations emanating from a more fundamental friction. Today the dominant thinking on sexuality is that it is innate, fixed, biological in origin. Hence, a girl exits the womb a lesbian or straight or bisexual. She has no say in it, because it’s genetic. It’s glandular. It’s neurochemical. This “born this way” theory of sexuality is the hurdle one must jump before political lesbian becomes conceivable, and unfortunately most people trip on the approach. As with all dominant ideologies, “born this way” is absorbed as a presupposition, and then anything else just sounds wrong to most ears. The malestream gay rights movement has long relied on “born this way” in courting social acceptance, casting lesbians and gays as victims of their biology deserving of pitying tolerance, with the result that assuming a biological basis for sexuality has been conflated with respecting sexual self-determination. Paradoxically, the implication that a person can choose their sexuality thus comes to sting like an invalidation. But, as Ananda Castaño writes in “An Approach to the Myth of Sexual Orientation,” it is biological determinism that not only disrespects but negates self-determination, erasing “the possibility of agency over our sexual desires and practices,” which, she adds, are “highly influenced by the patriarchy.” The dominant idea is not the dominant idea for nothing: superficially progressive in its legitimization of homosexuality (as an unavoidable accident of nature), its real task is to obscure how human sexuality, women’s and men’s, has been distorted by male dominion. Only if sexuality is biologically coded can it be argued that women in general are fated for the status-quo straight and narrow. 

Yet there is scant evidence to support the “born this way” theory, and abundant evidence that heterosexuality is “imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force,”  as Adrienne Rich asserts in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980), a political lesbianism core text, cited reverently and often in I Wish I Was a Lesbian. Further cause for rethinking biological determinism is supplied by women’s accounts of the utter misery they endured in their heterosexual lives. We know that women and girls are beaten, and raped, and prostituted, and killed by men, most often by their boyfriends and husbands, but heterosexuality also entails countless more mundane degradations daily eroding the dignity, integrity, and self-hood of its female detainees. I Wish I Was a Lesbian is rife with devastating examples. Charlie May (“Gender Dysphoria: A New Manifestation of Compulsory Heterosexuality in Modern Years”) writes of being a teenager with an adult boyfriend, at whose encouragement she came to believe she was a boy, while he, fantasizing himself girlish, “photoshop[ped] his face onto nude photos of [her] teenage body.” Tabata Spinster (“Reject Performance, Start Be-ing”) recounts marrying a man nearly a quarter century her senior, then discovering the trove of pornography he’d been secretly creating of his wives, herself included.  Michelle Kerwin (“A Return to Lesbianism: This Time It’s Political”) recaps her experience sampling heterosexuality’s delights: “I was being fucked by men I worked with and men I met online, all of whom treated me as a masturbatory aid. To reenact the violent porn they were consuming, they would strangle me, spit on me, degrade me verbally. All the while I was telling myself it was what I wanted.” And Yana (“The Door Behind the Wallpaper”) likens dating a man to “having an alien from Alien hatching in my chest. It feels like having soul cancer. It feels like rotting from inside.” 

Would opponents of political lesbianism insist that we tell these women that, though being exploited and objectified and demeaned and abused within relationships soaked through with overt power imbalance may not be their hearts’ desire, they cannot choose lesbianism as an alternative, because choice is the mark of fraud? So sorry, sisters, but you’re hopelessly hetero? To deny that a woman can decide for herself to be a lesbian, and to exacerbate the difficulty of her choice by making it one “fraught with exclusion, hierarchy, and suspicion,” as the WDI USA Lesbian Caucus writes in “Is Lesbian Political Potential Impacted by the Doctrine of Born-That-Way? A Structural Analysis,” is to rig up yet another barrier between the woman and her pursuit of a happier life. 

For the joy that women discover in lesbian existence – of the chosen, and yes, political variety – is as amply documented in I Wish I Was a Lesbian as the ravages of heterosexual relations. Renate Klein (“The Joy of Choosing to Become a Lesbian”) describes the excitement of connecting with fascinating, brilliant, artistic women: “Never a dull moment in our lives. Such a positive change from my rather boring relationships with (good) men.” Castaño writes how much “freer” she has felt in her relationships with women, while Jesika Gonzalez (“Choosing Women: A Working Vision for Political Lesbianism”) underscores the greater egalitarianism enjoyed by women in lesbian partnerships, tending as they do to “prioritize cooperation” and a “heightened awareness of fairness and mutual respect.” Above all, women express wonder at finally feeling, in love with women, that they are loved as themselves, for the beings they are, rather than used as objects//instruments//servants by men socialized out of the ability to recognize women as real, full, individual persons. And in being loved as persons, women’s sense of their own personhood, so viciously undermined by male rule, can be restored. Elizabeth Vigo reflects poignantly on this in her poem “Choosing Life, Six Acts”: “…for the very first time, / I could see myself / not as something to be consumed / but as someone who belonged to herself.” 

All of this strikes me as self-evidently good. It seems self-evident, too, that the more women who defy compulsory heterosexuality, defecting from serving men as “partners” and serving male dominion as compliant subordinates in the “society of two” formed by the heteronormative couple, and who commit themselves to women instead, the better. This is of course the politics of political lesbianism. First, women cease to permit their energies to be “extracted…via heterosexual norms,” as Hazel Holloway (“Late-blooming ‘Privilege’”) writes. Women refusing men’s “right” to female bodies and female life-force poses a serious threat to male power. In Wild’s words, “When women decide we have had enough of being drained of our energy, killed, raped, sold, commodified, impregnated, robbed of our labour, love, and emotional and practical support – the patriarchy loses its fuel. Its power is denied; its slaves withdraw.” The energy, labor, love, emotional and practical support that women have liberated from heterosexual vampirism can then be reinvested in the women themselves, in other women, and in the women’s movement to end male dominion. “By investing in ourselves and one another, we can create a future where women’s labor, love, and loyalty are no longer exploited for male benefit but instead serve to uplift and liberate women as a class,” Gonzalez explains. In the process, each woman choosing lesbianism asserts her own integrity and disproves the patriarchal definition of woman as existing for Man, a means to men’s ends. She ascends as “living proof that patriarchy doesn’t define us, but that we define ourselves” (WDI USA Lesbian Caucus). For these reasons it is not an overstatement to call political lesbianism, as Wild does, a “powerful, explosive challenge to men’s rule.”  

Because I do not want any woman to suffer unnecessarily in unhappy, exploitative, potentially violent relationships with men, and because I’d far rather see women devoting their love and care into alliances with other women, I wish she was a lesbian, and should she choose to be, I will celebrate her choice. As a lesbian, she will be less pressured to participate in the eroticization of female subjection, so integral to heterosexual romance; she will be supported in emerging from playing a secondary role in her own life, selfhood subsumed by the man to whom she attaches herself. She will be safer from rape and femicide. Yet although any woman can be a lesbian – Ann E. Menasche (“Born That Way”) remarks, “I was born female. That’s all the physical attributes one needs to be a lesbian” – not all women will be. And here is where proponents of political lesbianism can sometimes falter, overstepping into insensitivity. The rhetoric of “sleeping with the enemy” provocatively underlines the reality that all men are members of the male master class, so all men have a part in, and are beneficiaries of, the oppression of women, no matter how nice or gentle or progressive or even “pro-feminist” they may be. It is necessary that feminists who identify as heterosexual confront this reality. But challenging women to reckon with the political implications of heterosexuality and the compromises they make in their relationships with men is one thing; it is quite another to cast these women as traitors, and to establish a hierarchy within feminism, placing politically consistent lesbians above unprincipled, shilly-shallying straight women. Women who have not parted ways with heterosexuality are right to resent the latter, and to the extent that they sense themselves looked down upon – perceived as inferior, with less to contribute to the women’s movement – advocates for political lesbianism have botched it. Much to Wild’s credit as an editor, and to the writers’ credit as serious feminists, there is little of the “lesbian superiority” tone to I Wish I Was a Lesbian, but on the few pages where it seeped in, I flinched, reminded of what a bane it is to solidarity. We may wish all women were lesbians, but those who are not are no less our sisters. 

Political lesbianism is “an invitation, not a diktat,” Holloway writes. It is not a cudgel, not a criterion, not yet another dividing line—but an invitation, a hand extended. Exactly such a much-needed hand is offered by I Wish I Was a Lesbian, its contributors diverse in age and background and country//culture of origin but unified by the same impassioned zeal for breaking women out of heterosexual house arrest. The collection is an enlivening remedy to the bleakness of heteropessimism, proof positive that there is more than peaceful but lonesome solitude on the other side of male-cenetred living and loving. Beyond heterosexuality await vibrant new possibilities for connection, closeness, and ardor in community with women. I Wish I Was a Lesbian is also a vigorous repudiation of the “born this way” biological determinist and identity-centric depoliticization of lesbian existence. Apparently “real” lesbians are content to reside on desert islands while the women they’ve left behind on the mainland (man-land?) get chewed up in the teeth of their heterosexual doom. In which case, leave the outreach to those lesbians lacking pureblood pedigrees: the political lesbians, the lesbian feminists, woman-loving fraudsters that they are. Because sisterhood, as I understand it, means prying doors open for women and holding them open – or breaking them down, better yet – not standing sentry at the gates, checking credentials and turning women away. 

Thank you to Spinifex for kindly providing a copy of I Wish I Was a Lesbian: Women’s Lives Beyond Heterosexuality for this review. 

This summer, WLRN hosted a two-part live round table discussion series featuring women on both sides of the political feminism debate. Recordings of those discussions are available on WLRN’s YouTube channel, or you can find them linked here. And to hear more from I Wish I Was a Lesbian editor Angela C. Wild, check out this interview she did with WLRN’s own Thistle Pettersen. 

Aurora linnea is a radical (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North American colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth. She is the author of Man Against Being: Body Horror & the Death of Life published by Spinifex Press.