One day, a thirty-year-old woman who has been in a blissful relationship with a thirty-six-year-old man for the past three months wakes up in his double bed and decides that although she cares about this person very much, and although she loves his taste in films, books, and music, something is not right. She stares at his messy black hair and creamy skin as he sleeps. She wants to love him because he is a wonderful person, and she cares for him deeply. She wants to wake him up and be happy, but she just can’t. She isn’t sure of the reason why. In the pit of her belly, she feels the same hollow sensation that she has felt in each of her romantic relationships ever since a first French kiss with a boy when she was fourteen years old. She’d hoped she wouldn’t feel it with this boyfriend, but again, there it is. At a New Year’s Eve party in a Toronto warehouse a few weeks later, she cheats on him, and although she is ashamed, the kiss with another woman tells her what she needs to know. The next night, she breaks up with her boyfriend.
That story happens to be mine, but it is also a pretty generic arc when it comes to the phenomenon known as “the late-blooming lesbian.” It’s a common trajectory to go from being with a man to feeling something is wrong to having a eureka moment at the point of sexual contact with a woman. This narrative came to prominence in popular culture in the 2000s with a number of high-profile women coming out, including Meredith Baxter, Portia de Rossi, and Cynthia Nixon. It frequently crops up in lesbian literature and film, forming the backbone of offerings as diverse as Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and queer movies such as Ammonite and Carol.
