ABSTRACT
I conducted fieldwork in a rural Muslim Minangkabau village in West Sumatra, Indonesia.1 I went there in 1989 to study social change, gender and power, but I was also interested in exploring the gender identity of lesbians in West Sumatra.2 I was fortunate to meet several lesbians, and in the process fall in love with one of them. An already challenging field experience then became more complicated as I shifted between the professional, straight identity I maintained in my research village, and the closeted, lesbian identity I possessed with my lover in her village. The instability of my identity and the necessity to reconstruct it in relation to the people with whom I interacted forced a recognition of the differences and similarities between us.
