True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships

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This further marginalises those women who may identify as part of a sexual minority group. Not only are they excluded from fully participating in the mainstream, heterosexual world, they are excluded from a socially sanctioned performance of same-sex desire. The main history in Her Neighbor’s Wife ends in 1989, before the extraordinary advances in gay rights of the last few decades. In a brief epilogue, however, Gutterman comes to the present, and argues that for everything that has changed, the challenge of the “lesbian wife” has not wholly disappeared. Women who desire other women still marry men, and women who marry men still discover, after marriage, that they have desires for other women. I wasn’t expecting it,” said Gutterman. “What I expected was either women who went to lesbian bars, or women who felt entirely trapped and unable to act on their desires.” The journey through “lesbian chic” and “heteroflexibility” to the “girl crush” serves increasingly to strip lesbianism and bisexuality of their sexual or emotional desire. Instead, same-sex attraction is reconfigured within heterosexuality. Yet it also arguably serves to trivialise lesbianism as a functioning form of sexuality and legitimate sexual identity.

This perhaps underscores a lingering anxiety around women’s same-sex sexuality. It can even work as a form of veiled homophobia analogous to the use of the phrase “no homo” among young men wishing to distance themselves from homosexuality.What we’re perceiving now is that identity categories are affected by our life choices, and by circum- stances outside our control,” said Gutterman. “Consider Elizabeth Gilbert’s partner passing away. She points to a few high-pro- file recent examples, including Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert left her husband for the writer Rayya Elias, with whom she had been close friends for many years. The two were together until Elias died of cancer. Gilbert’s next publicly disclosed relationship

This eroticisation of women’s same-sex sexuality appears to have ebbed somewhat in contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan from 2013, replaced instead by the frequent use of the term “girl crush”. If complexity is the dominant melody of Gutterman’s book, its counterpoint is compassion. She writes compassionately of husbands and children who suffered when their wives and mothers left for other women, as well as of lovers who suffered when wives chose to stay in their marriages. There is compassion for lesbian feminists who were struggling to figure out how to exist and act in a transformed world. Above all, there is compassion for the struggles of married women with lesbian desire, torn between romance and obligation, committed to exploring their same-sex desire but not ready to wholly reject their more conventional families and communities. To go halfway, however, to explore lesbian desire while holding on to loyalties and identities that weren’t exclusively lesbian, was a unique kind of failure. Gutterman writes of Karen, for instance, a married mother of two living in rural North Carolina. She was “madly in love” with another woman in her neighborhood, and gradually coming to the conclusion that she was a lesbian. But when she brought her two kids along to a gathering of out lesbians in a nearby city, she got a frosty reception. “Karen was, as she put it, ‘a straight woman to them,’ and their treatment briefly convinced her that she was not a lesbian after all,” writes Gutterman.

Dyketactics (1974)

Recognizing these similarities, says Gutterman, can alter our perspective from both directions. It makes gay romance in post-war America seem more familiar than we may have imagined. At the same time, it destabilizes our stereotypes of post-war domesticity. “The big takeaway, in a nutshell, is the way in which Lauren queers the home,” says Janet Davis, professor of American studies at UT Austin. “She totally reframes these spaces in cold war America, like the suburbs, that we usually think of as the models of heteronormative behavior. She’s a really exciting thinker.” Ever since Director Sebastián Lelio's Disobedience premiered at TIFF in 2017, it's been the talk of the town among the five queer women who care about this kind of stuff. The film tells story of Orthodox Jewish lesbians in London: Esti (Rachel McAdams) caught in a loveless relationship with a Rabbi, and Ronit (Rachel Weisz) trapped in a series of meaningless heterosexual hookups. Understanding and generosity among husbands wasn’t the rule, says Gutterman, but nor was fury and spite, though that certainly existed as well. The rule was that it was complicated. The fact, too, was that women who desired women were hardly alone in the post-war period in not expecting marriage to meet all or even most of their emotional and romantic needs. Many gay men married women but found ways to participate in relationships or simply have sex with other men. Many straight men and women slept with people other than their spouses. Marital sex, particularly from the woman’s perspective, wasn’t expected to be very good. Husbands and wives often spent long stretches of time apart, because of work or complex family situations or simply because they couldn’t stand being around each other. The accommodations, deceits, and silences that women deployed to stay in their marriages while seeing other women weren’t always so different from the compromises their straight counterparts made to keep their heterosexual marriages in equilibrium. In the contemporary editions of Cleo and Cosmopolitan, the phrase is used in a way which suggests all women can participate in the “girl crush”. An interview with Zooey Deschanel in the July 2013 edition of Australian Cosmopolitan asks the actress to name the celebrity she has “a total girl crush on”.