ABSTRACT

Once upon a time, there was a standard lesbian coming-out story that went something like this: “I knew when I was five that I was a lesbian”; or, “I realized after 30 years of marriage that I was really a lesbian.” What was standard was that, although behaviors and identities could change, coming out involved recognizing one's true essence. No longer. As more and more research points to the lack of fit among desire, behavior and identity, and popular culture embraces the concept of sexual fluidity, certainty about sexual desires and identities is fast disappearing. What does this mean for the kind of intimacies young women in the USA are forging? We analyze the stories of diverse undergraduate college students who embrace the identity of “fluid” or “pansexual” or who refuse to adopt an identity at all on one campus, the University of California, Santa Barbara, in order to understand this new world of sexual fluidity and the kind of intimacies and identities that it fosters. The way these women describe their intimacies brings to mind the final comment of the bisexual narrator of John Irving's novel In One Person (Irving 2012: 425), echoing a line uttered by his first love, the transsexual Miss Frost: “… please don't put a label on me—don't make me a category before you get to know me!”