WHEN Lisa Diamond’s book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Harvard University Press, 2008) was published last year, it was poised to become a fresh, new psychological study about women’s sexuality today. But Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, didn’t expect it to become a controversial catalyst for mainstream discussions about same-sex desire on a national scale. Soon after its release, the author was interviewed by news organizations around the country and appeared on talk shows and in newspapers, journals, and magazines. She even discussed the book on Oprah. (It was reviewed by Cassandra Langer in this journal’s September-October 2008 issue.)
One year later, Diamond discusses the repercussions of the study, which followed more than a hundred women for a decade, charting revelations about lesbianism and bisexuality among mostly heterosexual-identified females. Based on this study—combined with recent brain research that seeks to understand erotic attraction and romantic affection on the neurochemical level—Diamond concludes that female sexual response is much more complex than a simple dichotomy between “gay” and “straight,” and that it’s often subject to change over the course of a lifetime. While Christian groups have used the book to suggest same-sex desire is a choice, GLBT activists have embraced the work as a testament to the complex nature of sexual identity and the need for a broad tolerance of all sexual and affectional permutations.
Currently Lisa Diamond is preparing to embark upon a second study, this time on the impact of estrogen on sexual attraction. Diamond, who’s openly gay herself, spoke with this interviewer by phone from the Salt Lake City campus where she teaches.
Natalie Hope McDonald: You’ve spent more than a year talking about this book after ten years researching it. What inspired you to study women’s sexuality in the first place? NHM: What did you discover about women’s sexuality that was different from that of men? NHM: So you spent a decade interviewing more than a hundred women in upstate New York, chronicling their relationships, feelings, and fantasies. You reveal essentially that women who identify as heterosexual may sometimes experience same-sex desire throughout their lives. While some women in the study have physical relationships with other women, others merely admit to fantasies about it. Why do you think this surprised so many people? I expected there would be this variability of experience, but what I didn’t expect was how common it would be. I thought there would be a subset of women with these common experiences. But I thought in the back of my mind that these women would be in stable relationships. But as life goes on, it gets more complicated. It isn’t that [same-sex desire] existed, it’s that it fluctuated. NHM: You ended up discussing your book on Oprah. What was that experience like for you personally? I’ve gotten so many e-mails, phone calls, and letters from women who saw the show and read the book. They tell me, “I hear myself in these stories.” That is incredibly gratifying. For better or worse, that visibility ended up getting these ideas in the hands of women who needed them. It reached an audience that would never ordinarily read this book. NHM: A few Christian organizations have used your book to suggest gay and lesbian people choose their sexual orientation. On the other hand, many GLBT activists, particularly lesbians, have embraced the book for its honest account of same-sex desire among women. Has much else come from your study? NHM: Being gay yourself, did you worry that your research could be used against gays and lesbians? NHM: The notion of sexual fluidity can sometimes cause a stir even in the gay community, especially among people who may have long identified as gay or lesbian and who are less accepting of bisexuality and bi-curiosity. Have you received a generally positive reaction from the gay community? NHM: What’s your next study about? Most women have no idea when they ovulate, so there was no way women were biasing their report. Most of the time interpersonal factors play a bigger role, of course, but that’s why we have to treat women’s sexuality differently from men. Men don’t have the cyclical nature [of menstruation]that women do. Natalie Hope McDonald is a freelance writer and editor based in Philadelphia. She maintains a website at nataliehopemcdonald.com.
Lisa Diamond: In the early 1990’s, when I started graduate school, I was especially interested in gay and lesbian youth. It was obvious to me early on that all of the studies being done were on gay male youth. There was a smattering of studies on lesbian teenagers, but women were just not in the picture. The feminist side of me thought this was crazy, this was so unscientific. Women were really missing from any of the studies.
LD: The project made it clear to me that love rather than gender was such a fundamentally important force. In many ways, the entire field of research on sexual orientation has taken a male model and assumed women operated in the same way, that they are two sides of the same coin, and that it was basically the same phenomenon. Part of what I started to realize was that female sexual orientation might be so different from male orientation. And you can’t do a study of men’s same-sex sexuality and apply the findings to women. Once you reach the point of saying these are not the same things, you have to start at square one. You have to go back to the beginning to describe the phenomenon.
LD: People had long acknowledged that women and men are pretty different. But I’m not sure why it took so long to discover that women and men experience these things differently. The popular understanding of sexual orientation did not reassure women about same-sex desire. Even their own community was making them feel different and weird. The notion that you can have experiences that live in some area between bisexuality and homosexuality—that entire phenomenon many people find unbelievably threatening. No matter how certain you feel about what you want or who you are and what you’re attracted to, that feeling is an illusion. You may think you’re straight but you may meet someone tomorrow who turns your world around. It’s not predictable. And people want the future to be predictable, certain, and clean.
LD: It’s sort of like an out-of-body experience. Over the years, it must have been hard for my parents to have a daughter that studied sexuality. When you meet someone on a plane, and they’d say, “My daughter is studying sex.” It was a running joke in my family that I had to be on Oprah. “You need to be on Oprah,” they would say. It didn’t matter that I had tenure—that would be the one thing that would satisfy them. And when it finally happened, it was too bizarre and too crazy.
LD: I was gratified that just recently the American Psychological Association (APA) released a new task force report about “reparative therapy,” concluding that it does not have any empirically observable effects. Over time, the truth wins out, but when you’re studying sex this is a hot-button issue. It comes with the territory.
LD: It’s a mixed bag. I think I always knew I was doing work that had the potential for misunderstanding. All I can really do is be as clear as possible about what my findings do and do not mean. Unfortunately, if someone wants to misuse your work they can misuse your work.
LD: Absolutely. The response I’ve gotten has been incredibly affirming. I understand why there are certain political aims suggesting we were “born this way.” But not all of our friends have the same experiences or have lovers with the same experiences. You can have fluidity and diversity, but that doesn’t mean that the anti-gay folks should suggest that we “chose” this lifestyle. I think a lot of people were waiting for a way to say we chose this. But you shouldn’t have to meet some sort of criterion. We need the same long-term studies on men. We need to find the diversity of male sexuality. I know those men are out there and need the same research.
LD: I do more research on relationship processes now, including some of the hormonal influences on attraction. I’m about to start a study on attraction in which the subjects give me estrogen samples through saliva. Among the women in my first study, I did a study a year and a half ago about their attraction to men and women. I was finding that women who consistently identified as lesbian experience this sexual motivation toward women on the date they ovulated. Among the bisexual women, they also experienced a shift toward women, but not as large. And the other [heterosexual]experiences show a decline toward women.
